Nandita Das’s Zwigato is not merely a film about a delivery worker; it is a quiet ethnography of late-stage capitalism in its most intimate and humiliating form. The gig worker it portrays is not an aberration or a transitional figure, but the logical culmination of a historical process Karl Marx once described: the transformation of labour into a commodity stripped of security, dignity and collective power.The protagonist, Manas, is formally “free.” He is not owned by a master, nor shackled to a factory gate, yet this freedom is deeply illusory. Having lost his previous employment, he enters the platform economy not as a choice but as a compulsion. He sells not merely his labour-power but his time, his body, his attentiveness, his patience, his smile, and even his silence. Official poster of Zwigato. Photo: IMDBThe platform does not command him through the overseer’s whip; it governs him through ratings, incentives, penalties and the constant threat of deactivation. This is domination without a visible master – capital in its most advanced, spectral form.In Zwigato, the app becomes the new factory and algorithms replace foremen, notifications substitute for whistles, and customer ratings operate as a dispersed system of surveillance. What appears as technological neutrality is in fact a sophisticated mechanism of extraction. The worker bears all the risks such as fuel costs, accidents, illness, exhaustion, lost time, while capital enjoys profits without responsibility. This is surplus value production refined for the digital age: maximum extraction with minimal obligation.Crucially, the film exposes the ideological fiction that sustains this arrangement. Manas is repeatedly reminded, explicitly and implicitly, that he is an “entrepreneur,” a “partner,” a man working for himself. Yet, Zwigato patiently dismantles this claim without rhetorical excess. Manas owns neither the platform nor the data nor the conditions of his work. He cannot set prices, refuse unreasonable demands, or bargain collectively. His supposed autonomy amounts to little more than the freedom to starve at one’s own pace.The humiliation Manas endures is not incidental; it is structural. He must apologise for delays he did not cause, smile through disrespect, and submit to opaque metrics he cannot question. Capital here does not merely exploit labour; it colonises subjectivity. Besides, the worker internalises discipline, blames himself for systemic failures, and performs gratitude for survival. This is alienation in its most complete sense: alienation from the product of labour, from the labour process, from fellow workers and ultimately, from oneself.Zwigato is careful not to reduce exploitation to economics alone. It shows how class relations seep into domestic life. Manas’s wife, Pratima, enters wage labour, not as emancipation, but as a necessity. Her precarious work mirrors his own, reminding us that capitalism reproduces itself through households as much as through markets. The family becomes a shock absorber for economic cruelty. Emotional labour, unpaid care and quiet endurance compensate for wages that no longer sustain life with dignity.A still from Zwigato.One of the film’s most striking features is the near absence of collective resistance. Workers appear atomised; sharing grievances, occasionally commiserating, but rarely organising. This absence is not a narrative weakness. Platform capitalism thrives on fragmentation. It does so by isolating workers spatially and competitively, actively preventing the emergence of class consciousness. Each rider races against the other, mistaking fellow workers for rivals rather than comrades. The film’s silence on organised struggle thus becomes an indictment of a system that has learned how to suppress solidarity without overt repression.Beneath its narrative restraint, Zwigato foregrounds a central contradiction of contemporary capitalism: the system’s growing dependence on labour it simultaneously devalues and renders disposable. Platform capitalism promises dignity through work, autonomy through flexibility, and inclusion through technological mediation, while systematically eroding the material conditions of dignified labour. As Marx argued, such contradictions are not contingent failures or policy lapses; they are structural features of capitalist accumulation, incapable of resolution within the system’s own logic.A still from Zwigato.Seen through Marx’s theory of alienation, Zwigato speaks not only about income loss or job insecurity, but about a quieter estrangement that accompanies contemporary work. The gig worker is alienated from the product of his labour, which disappears into a system he neither owns nor understands; from the labour process, governed by opaque algorithms and arbitrary ratings; from fellow workers, encountered more as competitors than as companions; and finally, from himself, as self-worth is recalibrated to efficiency scores and customer moods. What the film captures with remarkable restraint is how this alienation is lived not as an abstract injustice but as a slow, daily erosion of confidence, recognition and dignity.Importantly, Zwigato does not dramatise resistance or offer the reassurance of heroic endurance. It refuses the comfort of redemption arcs and instead, it lingers on ordinary moments where work ceases to provide social belonging and becomes merely a means of survival. In doing so, it suggests that platform capitalism has not transcended older forms of exploitation so much as refined them; replacing overt coercion with internalised discipline and moralised precarity.A still from Zwigato.If there is a quiet optimism in the film, it lies not in narratives of individual resilience but in the exposure of truth. When exploitation becomes normal, the act of naming acquires political significance. Zwigato names what polite economics disguises and that is, beneath the sleek interface of the platform economy persists the old antagonism between labour and capital, updated in form but unchanged in essence.The film should therefore not be judged by whether it entertains or consoles, it should be judged by whether it reveals. And in revealing the everyday violence embedded in the language of “flexibility,” “efficiency,” and “choice,” Zwigato offers a modest yet honest contribution to the critique of political economy rendered not in theory, but in human lives. It does not offer solutions, but it offers something more necessary; an invitation to see. And in seeing, to begin asking what it might mean, once again, for work to be human.Manoj Kumar Jha is a Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) with Rashtriya Janata Dal.