Liminal Hustle: Liminal Spaces and the Precariat
By Peter Coffin
There’s something haunting about liminal spaces—the eerie in-betweenness of places that feel like they shouldn’t exist (if you’re unfamiliar, read this). These spaces unsettle us because they feel transitional, undefined. They exist between one state and another, never fully anchored in either.
The gig economy operates on a similar logic, one that thrives in the liminal spaces of labor. Gig workers live in an in-between state where they are functionally unemployed but are performing the work of employment. They exist in a perpetual hustle, always moving but never arriving, performing labor while being denied the recognition, security, and stability of a job.
Just as the fascination with liminal spaces has grown in recent years, so too has the ideological framing of gig work as “aspirational.” Gig platforms like Uber, DoorDash, and TaskRabbit market their labor model as the future: a world of independence, flexibility, and freedom. This narrative recasts unemployment as entrepreneurial opportunity.
But this liminal hustle is not a small business opportunity. It is a means for big business to employ people without employing them. The fascination with liminal spaces, I think, has a lot to do with an era of work that’s not quite part of the workforce—a life of uncertainty.
Myth in the Gig Economy
Gig platforms like Uber, DoorDash, and TaskRabbit thrive on a fiction of employment, legally and ideologically reframing labor as something other than work. These platforms label their workers as independent contractors or small business owners, positioning them outside the traditional employer-employee relationship.
Legally, this is true (if you’re interested in some talk of why some things are legally but not necessarily true, watch my most recent video on scams). But functionally, this designation allows companies to, materially speaking, have employees while sidestepping the obligations of employment. Workers perform labor essential to the platforms’ operations, yet they are denied the benefits, rights, and stability of employment.
This fiction is also a carefully constructed narrative. These companies brand gig work as an opportunity for independence, and in doing so, obscure the reality that gig workers are unemployed in every meaningful sense. They have no contracts that bind their employers to provide regular wages, benefits, or workplace protections. Instead, they navigate a precarious existence where their income is unpredictable, their access to work is mediated by opaque algorithms, and their status as workers is constantly undermined.
To survive, gig workers must embrace the hustle. This means short-term, task-based work that often requires more unpaid effort than it pays out in earnings. Drivers for Uber-like platforms, for example, must cover the costs of maintaining their vehicles, paying for gas, insurance, and repairs, all while competing for limited opportunities to earn. Food delivery workers (Doordash or Uber Eats) spend unpaid hours waiting for orders or traveling. The platforms bear none of these costs, transferring the financial and emotional burdens of work onto the worker.
Far from being a choice, gig work is a necessity for those excluded from stable employment. It reframes unemployment as a form of self-employment, encouraging workers to see their precarity as entrepreneurial freedom. But this rhetoric masks the structural reality: gig workers have no meaningful autonomy. Their labor is dictated by the platforms that set rates, assign tasks, and enforce performance metrics. Failure to meet arbitrary benchmarks can result in deactivation—a euphemism for being fired without recourse.
The gig economy positions itself as innovative and empowering, but it is merely a reinvention of old forms of exploitation. It allows companies to extract labor without offering the security of employment. Gig workers are the reserve army of labor repackaged, perpetually on call but never fully absorbed into the workforce. Platforms deny responsibility for their workers while profiting from their labor, creating a system where the hustle is endless, but the rewards are few.
This legal and ideological framing not only exploits workers but also reshapes how society understands labor itself. It normalizes instability, suggesting that the gig economy’s precarious hustle is a modern ideal rather than a symptom of systemic failure. By redefining what it means to work, the gig economy deepens the liminal space that gig workers occupy—a space where they are constantly laboring yet structurally unemployed, always hustling but never secure.
The Reserve Army of Labor
The Marxist concept of the “reserve army of labor” (actually a creation of Friedrich Engels) describes a means to weaponize the unemployed against the employed. Marx and Engels argued that capitalism requires a surplus population of workers who are either unemployed or underemployed, existing as a latent labor force ready to be called upon as needed. This reserve army serves several purposes. It suppresses wages by creating competition among workers, disciplines the workforce by threatening their job security, and provides flexibility for capitalists to expand or contract production without maintaining a stable workforce. In short, the reserve army is capitalism’s buffer, ensuring that labor remains cheap, plentiful, and obedient.
The reserve army’s composition changes depending on economic conditions and needs of capital. During periods of expansion, some workers are drawn out of the reserve and employed. During downturns, some are cast back into it.
The gig economy intensifies and expands this dynamic. Platforms like Uber and DoorDash have found a way to keep the reserve army permanently active, turning it into a visible and dynamic force within the economy. Gig workers, who might once have been considered part of the unemployed surplus population, are now integrated into a system that mobilizes their labor on demand. But this mobilization doesn’t lift them out of the reserve army; it traps them within it. They are never fully absorbed into stable employment–in fact, they remain structurally unemployed, hustling to complete tasks in an arrangement that thrives on their precarity.
Traditional labor reserve armies exert downward pressure on wages through their mere existence—the threat of being replaced is often enough to keep workers compliant. The gig economy goes further, forcing workers to actively compete against one another for access to pseudo-employment. Platforms deliberately oversaturate their labor pools, ensuring that there are always more workers than jobs. This creates a race to the bottom, where workers must constantly prove their worth to algorithms looking to maximize ROI for a company.
By mobilizing surplus labor into a perpetual hustle, platforms turn structural unemployment into a source of profit. Workers who would otherwise be idle are drawn into a system where they perform tasks that are disposable and intermittent, generating revenue for platforms while remaining excluded from the protections and benefits of traditional employment—and thus engage in labor for less. The reserve army, once a latent force, has been transformed into an active engine of exploitation, driving the gig economy’s growth at the expense of its workers.
The effects of this transformation ripple outward, extending beyond the gig economy itself. By normalizing competition for precarious, task-based work, the gig economy undermines labor protections and suppresses wages across the broader workforce. It sets a precedent in which all workers, not just gig workers, are expected to hustle for their livelihoods, eroding the stability of traditional jobs and deepening the insecurity of the working class as a whole. The reserve army of labor, once an invisible threat, is now a visible and active force, reshaped by the gig economy into a perpetual hustle that serves the interests of capital while trapping workers in a state of permanent precarity.
The precariat—a term popularized by thinkers such as Guy Standing and Nelson Peery—describes workers who exist in a state of chronic instability, lacking the protections, security, and continuity traditionally associated with employment. These individuals are caught in a cycle of precarious work, where short-term contracts, gig jobs, and task-based labor dominate, often accompanied by a lack of benefits and protections. Some argue that the precariat represents a distinct new class, marked by its unique experiences and vulnerabilities within modern capitalism. This perspective emphasizes the precariat’s fragmentation, its alienation from traditional working-class solidarity, and its entrapment in systemic precarity.
I think their analysis is on-point, but I assert the precariat is better understood as a stratum of the proletariat, one that has been permanently relegated to the labor reserve army (and there are others who are more hostile than I towards the concept). While the conditions faced by precarious workers may differ from those of traditional wage laborers, their fundamental relationship to capital—selling their labor power to survive while remaining alienated from the means of production—remains unchanged. Rather than constituting a new class, the precariat reflects capitalism's capacity to intensify and expand the exploitation of labor, creating divisions within the proletariat to suppress wages and fragment solidarity.
That said, one could (and, in my opinion, should) see “the precariat” as a transitional entity—a class-in-the-making (as it has been described by some). It is a set of contexts emerging as a world of workers transforms to one of automation. If workers ultimately lose their relationship to the means of production—no longer selling (or potentially selling) their labor power to survive—they would cease to be workers altogether.
In such a scenario, the proletariat—and thus the precariat—would cease to exist, giving rise to something entirely new. In that case, the precariat represents transition as capitalism undergoes changes driven by automation.
“Small Business Owners”
The gig economy thrives on structural exploitation justified by an ideological framework that redefines precarity as opportunity and hustle as empowerment and entrepreneurship. In this paradigm, workers see their struggles as personal challenges rather than the result of systemic inequality. Central to this narrative is the legal classification of gig workers as independent contractors—a status that contends they are small business owners, members of the petit bourgeoisie, rather than precarious laborers.
By labeling gig workers as independent contractors, platforms like Uber and DoorDash claim that workers are running their own businesses. This legal status places them outside the traditional employer-employee relationship, allowing platforms to evade labor laws and deny workers access to benefits, protections, and rights. But the idea that gig workers are small business owners is a fiction designed to obscure their true class position. Unlike members of the petit bourgeoisie, gig workers do not own productive assets, control their working conditions, or have the ability to set their own prices. Further, they do not socialize labor (have employees), which is part of the central contradiction of capitalism (the socializing of production while retaining the individual mode of appropriation, as per Engels).
This faux-classification is more than a legal technicality. By framing gig workers as entrepreneurs, platforms shift the costs and risks of employment onto the worker while reaping the rewards of their labor. Gig workers must cover their own expenses, from vehicle maintenance and insurance to unpaid downtime between tasks. They bear all the financial risks of their labor, while platforms collect profits without responsibility. The entrepreneurial narrative isolates workers, encouraging them to see themselves as independent and self-reliant rather than as part of a broader class of exploited laborers.
This framing ideologically aligns gig workers with the petit bourgeoisie, creating widespread misunderstandings about their true class position (a “false consiousness,” another phenomenon termed by Engels).
Many leftists, for example, buy into this framing and critique gig workers as petit because they appear to have no bosses. These critiques argue that gig workers, like other small business owners, are primarily concerned with preserving their independence and resisting labor solidarity. But this perspective is rooted in the legal fiction of gig work, not its material reality. Gig workers do have bosses: the platforms that dictate their labor, control their earnings, and discipline their performance through opaque algorithms. They are not small capitalists; they are proletarians who lack control over their conditions and means of production.
This misunderstanding has significant consequences for political analysis and solidarity.
Consider the framing of recent trucker strikes. Many truckers are owner-operators, workers who own their trucks but contract with larger companies or platforms to gain work (perhaps some of the earliest formalized “gig work”). Critics have dismissed these workers’ grievences as representing "petit greed," arguing that their struggles are rooted in small business interests rather than broader class issues.
But this analysis is flawed. An owner-operator is a gig worker unless they own a fleet and socialize labor by employing others. Without the ability to socialize labor, they do not gain class mobility in any material sense and are subjected to the same exploitation and precarity as other workers in the gig economy. Mischaracterizing their struggles as petit bourgeois obscures their shared interests with the broader working class (though, the petit are all on a precarious road to proletarianization as monopolies are further cemented and should at least try to recognize that is where their interests ultimately lie).
The myth of entrepreneurial freedom doesn’t just isolate workers—it reframes structural unemployment as an individual shortcoming. If a worker fails to earn enough to survive, the problem is framed as a personal failure—a lack of hustle, bad time management, or insufficient effort—rather than a systemic condition. This narrative shifts blame away from the platforms and onto the workers themselves, undermining solidarity and making collective resistance more difficult.
But even more devastating, this paradigm renders unions ineffective as a vector for advancing workers’ interests. By framing gig workers as independent contractors, platforms legally exclude them from protections under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and deny them the right to form unions that platforms must recognize. This legal loophole allows platforms to sidestep collective bargaining entirely, refusing to negotiate with unions or honor their declarations.
Even if workers attempt to organize, platforms could retaliate without legal consequence. Gig companies are not obligated to respect unions and can legally identify and ban union members from their apps or platforms, effectively firing them with no recourse. This is not a hypothetical scenario—it is a provable, direct consequence of the model.
The legal status of gig workers as small business owners and the ideological framing of gig work as entrepreneurial freedom combine to create a powerful narrative that legitimizes the current arrangement(s) of power. This narrative doesn’t just affect gig workers; it reshapes perceptions of labor across the economy.
By normalizing the idea that workers should constantly compete for tasks and bear all the risks of their labor, the gig economy erodes traditional labor protections and sets a precedent for other industries. The hustle becomes a universal expectation, where all workers are expected to endure precarity and instability as the new normal.
Conclusion
It is in no way strange an aesthetic that embodies this is has become “of interest” in people of working age.
The gig economy thrives in the liminal spaces of labor, transforming structural unemployment into an endless hustle. It masks the conditions of workers through the seductive narrative of entrepreneurial freedom, reframing precarity as an individual opportunity.
The ideological framework of the hustle does more than obscure the plight of gig workers; it undermines the traditional mechanisms of worker resistance. Unions, which have historically been a powerful tool for advancing class interests, are rendered largely ineffective in the gig economy. The classification of gig workers as non-employees excludes them from legal protections, allowing platforms to ignore union demands and retaliate against organizers without consequence. Combined with the narrative that workers are competitors and the structural isolation inherent in gig work, the result is a workforce disarmed before it can resist.
Escaping the liminal hustle means fighting for a world where labor is not a grind but purely an expression of human creativity. The automation that forces workers into precarity in our current economic arrangement will be what enables the new arrangement: abundance and the freedom to create (as The Center of Political Innovation fights for; join today). But first, we must become conscious of the obstacles and how they work.
The hustle is not freedom—it’s a trap, and the only way out is together.
