🪓M in Zomato stands for...
Communist Manifesto. Not just a guidebook, it’s a far distant dream.
A dream of group of people that sit in a bucket their whole life. Waiting for someone to climb out of the bucket, and when they do. They latch onto that soul, thinking they shall escape the hell hole called “Capitalism”. But eventually dragging everyone down with them in the filth they call home, Socialism.
Marx stood for a dream. Just a dream. Dream that has never materialized anywhere without catastrophic human cost. Dream that Indian trollers invoke whenever they see successful business that dares to exist without their approval. Dream that substitutes moral posturing for economic literacy.
And with the recent fiasco with gig workers economy, delivery partner strike and Zomato’s founder dealing with the heat,
I wonder: what does M in Zomato truly stands for?
M can have a lot of forms, function, creed and despair.
Does it stand for M for Marxists dream? Or M stands for the manifesto that deludes you of reality? Or above all M stands for Money?
Let’s order some new perspectives:
M for Marxist Dreams That Never Materialize
Let me be clear: every armchair revolutionary screaming about exploitation of gig workers has never created single job. Never built business. Never faced choice between paying employees and keeping lights on. Never understood that capital is not evil abstraction but accumulated effort, risk, sacrifice. They sit in comfort provided by capitalism while fantasizing about revolution that would destroy the very system enabling their comfortable critique.
They are the biggest jokers in this entire discourse.
Marx imagined world where workers own means of production. Beautiful theory. Catastrophic practice. Soviet Union tried it. Seventy years of tyranny, stagnation, mass starvation. China tried it. Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions. Mao’s revolution ate its children. Every attempt to implement Marxist economics has produced identical outcome: concentration of power in party elite, poverty for masses, and corpses. Lots of corpses.
And when you start operating on a principle which bears no consequence of their action, as all they want to is to taste the fruit, not cultivate its creation. They are nothing but mere parasites. Cut them out.
But Indian trollers do not study history. They study Twitter.
They see delivery partner working and immediately conclude: exploitation. They see company making profit and immediately conclude: theft. They see inequality and immediately conclude: injustice requiring state intervention.
You call this critique? Analysis? F*ck off if you do.
This is nothing but tantrums; nothing but automated outrage running on Marxist programming from university professors who themselves never worked real job. Get out and touch some grass for once.
People are not equal in ability, effort, discipline, intelligence, risk tolerance. They will never produce equal outcomes. Gig economy reveals this brutally. Some delivery partners work 250+ days, earn substantially. Others work 38 days, earn proportionally. This is exploitation. Do you all even read yourself while writing verbal diarrheic bs commentaries?
This is differential effort producing differential results. But equality of outcome is Marxist religion. So they demand everyone earn same regardless of effort. This is not justice. This is theft from productive to subsidize unproductive.
Look beyond, and you shall realise what kind of parasitic behaviour this breeds.
State management is infinitely worse than market because state has monopoly on violence. Bad employer in capitalism? Quit. Start business. Compete. Bad state in communism? Gulag. Execution. Reeducation camp. This is why every Marxist experiment ends in tyranny. Because eliminating private property requires eliminating freedom. And eliminating freedom requires eliminating those who resist.
M for Manifesto That Ignores Reality
Marx wrote manifesto based on specific historical conditions: industrial capitalism with no labor laws, children in coal mines, sixteen-hour workdays, no safety regulations. His critique of that system had validity. His solution of abolishing private property, workers seize means of production, was catastrophic fiction. (Was he drunk while writing this debauchery?).
Indian trollers apply Marxist analysis to gig economy as if nothing changed in 150 years. As if Zomato is Manchester factory from 1850. As if delivery partners are Victorian child laborers.
I call this is intellectual laziness.
Gig economy is fundamentally different from industrial capitalism that Marx critiqued.
How?
First: voluntary participation. Nobody is forced to work for Zomato. Partners choose to log in. Choose to accept orders. Choose to log out. Average partner works 38 days per year, 7 hours per day. Still feeling exploited? This is exactly what gig model promises: flexible, part-time income on demand. If this was exploitative, why would people keep choosing it?
Second: multiple income sources. Most gig workers have primary income elsewhere. Gig work is supplementary. This is why demanding PF, ESI, guaranteed salary for gig roles is absurd. You are demanding full-time employee benefits for part-time voluntary participation. This makes gig model economically unviable. Which is exactly what Marxists want. They do not want to improve gig work. They want to destroy it.
Third: earnings data.
Deepinder Goyal recent tweet storms
highlighted some crucial and slammed every mouthpiece that was planting hatred toward India’s most successful startup. Deepinder provided actual numbers. ₹102 per hour in 2025, up from ₹92 in 2024. 10.9% year-on-year increase. Partner working 10 hours/day, 26 days/month earns ₹26,500 gross, ₹21,000 net after fuel and maintenance. Plus tips. Plus insurance worth ₹100 crore annually borne by company. Plus accident coverage, medical coverage, maternity benefits, period rest days, tax filing support, pension scheme access.
Critics ignored all this data. Why?
Because data contradicts narrative. Narrative says gig workers are exploited. Data says gig workers are earning more year-on-year with increasing benefits and complete flexibility. So critics ignore data and continue with narrative because narrative serves ideological purpose: attacking capitalism regardless of facts.
Fourth: the speed myth. Critics claim 10-minute delivery promise creates pressure on delivery partners to drive unsafely. Goyal explained: delivery partners are not shown customer-facing timer. They see no countdown. Ten-minute delivery is achieved through proximity of dark stores to customers (average 2.03 km on Blinkit), not through high-speed driving. Average speed on Blinkit: 16 km/h. On Zomato: 21 km/h. These are not unsafe speeds. These are slower than average city traffic.
But critics do not care about facts. They have moral narrative: fast delivery = exploitation. Wake up keyboard warriors!
When shown data proving otherwise, they ignore it and continue narrative. This is not argument in good faith. This is ideological commitment immune to evidence.
Marx’s fundamental error was believing that surplus value extracted by capitalist is theft. It is not. It is return on capital invested, risk taken, innovation created.
Zomato built platform.
Zomato bears technology costs, marketing costs, customer acquisition costs, regulatory costs.
Zomato took risk when model could have failed. Delivery partners bear none of this. They show up, deliver orders, earn per delivery. This is fair exchange. Partner provides labor.
Zomato provides platform, customers, payment infrastructure, insurance, support systems. Both benefit. This is not exploitation. This is cooperation.
But Marxist analysis cannot comprehend cooperation. It sees only class warfare. Capitalist vs worker. Exploiter vs exploited. This binary is intellectually primitive. Reality is complex.
Gig economy creates value for multiple stakeholders: customers get convenience, delivery partners get flexible income, platform gets revenue, restaurants get orders. Everyone benefits or they would not participate. This is positive-sum game.
Marxist analysis assumes zero-sum: capitalist profit = worker loss. This is false and easily disproven by observing that gig economy grows because all participants benefit.
M for Money, And Why Marxists Fear It
Here is what Indian trollers cannot accept: money is not evil. Profit is not theft. Wealth creation is not exploitation.
These are Marxist myths that survive because they are emotionally satisfying to those who have not created wealth.
Money is crystallized effort. Someone worked, created value, exchanged value for money. Money is not taken. It is earned. Zomato earns money by solving problem: connecting hungry customers with restaurants and providing delivery. This creates value. Customers pay for value. Restaurants pay for access to customers. Delivery partners earn for providing delivery service. Everyone in transaction benefits or they exit. This is how markets work.
Profit is signal. It tells entrepreneur: you are creating value, continue. Loss is signal: you are destroying value, stop. Marxists want to eliminate profit motive. Replace it with what? Central planning? That’s tried, tested and failed miserably. Grow some balls ffs.
Critics demand Zomato sacrifice profit to increase delivery partner earnings. To what level? They never specify. Because specifying would require economic analysis they are incapable of performing. They just know intuitively that profit is bad and workers should earn more. This is not economics. This is emotion.
Let’s understand the economic reality: if you force Zomato to increase delivery partner earnings beyond what economics of platform supports, three things happen. First: Zomato raises prices. Customers order less. Demand falls. Fewer orders mean fewer delivery partners needed. Second: Zomato exits unprofitable markets. Delivery partners in those markets lose all income. Third: competitors who are more efficient take market share. Zomato shrinks or dies. All delivery partners lose jobs.
This is not theory. This is what happens every time government imposes price controls, wage mandates, benefit requirements that exceed what market supports. You do not help workers. You destroy jobs. But Marxists do not understand economics. They understand morality plays where capitalist is villain and worker is victim requiring rescue by enlightened intellectuals who have never created job.
Delivery partner’s labor is valuable. But without Zomato’s platform, what is partner delivering? Nothing. Platform connects demand and supply. Platform provides payment infrastructure. Platform provides insurance. Platform provides customer support. Platform bears technology costs. All this requires capital. Capital requires return. Return is profit. Eliminate profit and capital goes elsewhere. Platform shuts down. Delivery partners earn zero.
This is what happened in Venezuela. Chavez nationalized industries. Seized private property. Redistributed wealth. Result: economy collapsed. Hyperinflation. Starvation. Mass exodus. But Indian Marxists ignore Venezuela because acknowledging failure of socialism threatens their entire worldview. So they continue demanding policies that have failed everywhere they have been tried while attacking policies: free markets, private property, profit motive, that have lifted billions out of poverty.
The uncomfortable truth that Deepinder Goyal articulated brilliantly: critics are not uncomfortable with exploitation. They are uncomfortable with visibility of inequality. For centuries, class divides kept labor of poor invisible to rich. Factory workers behind walls. Farmers in distant fields. Domestic help in backrooms. Rich consumed fruits of labor without seeing faces or fatigue.
Gig economy shattered that invisibility at unprecedented scale. Suddenly poor are not hidden. They are at your doorstep. You see delivery partner in rain, heat, traffic. You see exhaustion. You see polite smile masking frustration with life. You see that your ₹800 order might equal their day’s earnings. This face-to-face interaction creates discomfort.
This is first time in history at this scale that working class and consuming class interact face-to-face, transaction after transaction. And that discomfort with our own selves is why we are uncomfortable about gig economy. We want these people to look our part so guilt we feel while taking orders from them feels less.
Pre-gig era, rich could enjoy luxury without moral discomfort. Labor was out of sight. Now every doorbell ring is reminder of systemic inequality. That is why debates explode. It is not just policy. It is emotional reckoning. Some defend system. Others demand change. But here is uncomfortable twist: unsaid ask of clumsy ‘solutions’ is not dignity. It is return to invisibility.
Ban gig work and you do not solve inequality. You remove livelihoods. These jobs do not magically reappear as formal protected employment. They disappear or get pushed back into informal economy where there are even fewer protections and even less accountability. Over-regulate until model breaks and you achieve same outcome: work evaporates, prices rise, demand collapses, people we claim to protect are first to lose income.
And then what happens? Rich get their old comfort back. Convenience returns without faces. Guilt dissolves. We go back to clean abstractions and moral posturing from distance. Poor do not become safer. They become invisible again. Back in cash economies. Back in backrooms. Back in shadows where regulation rarely reaches and dignity is not even debated.
Now, I again ask: what does M in Zomato stands for?
M in Zomato stands for Market. Free market where people make choices based on their assessment of value. Delivery partner chooses to work because value of flexibility + earnings exceeds value of alternative employment options available to them. Customer chooses to order because value of convenience exceeds cost. Restaurant chooses to partner because value of customer access exceeds commission. Zomato earns profit by creating platform that enables all these value exchanges. It’s called civilization. This is how billions of humans coordinate economic activity without central planner.
M in Zomato stands for Meritocracy. Those who work more earn more. Those who provide better service get better ratings, more orders, higher earnings. Those who work smart: choosing right locations, right times, right orders, earn more than those who work carelessly. This is fair. This rewards effort and intelligence. But meritocracy produces inequality. Marxists cannot tolerate inequality so they attack meritocracy as exploitation.
M in Zomato stands for Modernity. Old employment model: fixed job, fixed hours, fixed location, fixed salary, no flexibility. New model: choose when to work, where to work, how long to work, how much to earn based on effort. Old model suited industrial age. New model suits information age where people want autonomy over time and income. But Marxists are stuck in industrial age thinking. They want to impose industrial age regulations on information age businesses. This kills innovation.
M in Zomato stands for Money earned honestly through value creation. Not stolen through exploitation. Not extracted through coercion. Earned through consensual exchange where all parties benefit. This is moral foundation of capitalism that Marxists refuse to acknowledge.
And finally, M in Zomato stands for reality that Marxist Manifesto ignores: humans are not identical economic units. They have different abilities, different preferences, different risk tolerances, different effort levels. They will never produce equal outcomes. Forcing equal outcomes requires totalitarian state.
Gig economy just exposed reality of inequality to people who previously had luxury of not seeing it. Doorbell is not problem. Question is what we do after opening door. Visibility is price of progress. We can either use this discomfort to build something better, which Zomato keeps doing continuously as delivery partners are their backbone, or we can ban and over-regulate our way back into ignorance. One of those choices improves lives. Other simply helps consuming class feel virtuous in dark.
The doorbell is ringing. Open it or hide.
But if you hide, admit you are hiding not to protect delivery partner but to protect yourself from confronting inequality you benefit from. That honesty would be refreshing change from moral posturing disguised as worker advocacy. But honesty is scarce in age of ideology. So debate continues. Trollers troll. Marxists moralize.
And delivery partners keep working, keep earning, keep choosing gig economy despite critics insisting they are too stupid to know they are exploited. That condescension alone reveals who actually respects workers and who just uses them as props in ideological warfare.
Nothing human is perfect. But now whether gig economy is better than alternatives. Data says yes. Millions of voluntary participants say yes.
Only armchair Marxists say no. And they have been wrong about everything economic for 150 years. Why start believing them now?
Socialism is the fabric of mediocrity only the hollow swallows.