Apparently, I am not allowed to be anti-capitalist

Sri City: Dispatches from the comfortable side of disparity, on privilege, contradiction, and the politics of comfort. 

I study and live in a university where my bedroom and washroom are cleaned for me on alternate days. The akkas that clean, call me ‘madam’ and apologise if they wake me up even at 12 pm. This university was almost certainly built on land violently grabbed from the villagers that lived there for centuries. I live in a city which is one of the biggest contributors to the 4,00,000+ daily orders from quick commerce apps and gig economy platforms like Blinkit and Zepto. Their drivers work arduous hours under the pressure of 10-minute deliveries, for abysmal pay, and ever so often, we hear news of some of their deaths owing to the urgency with which they are forced to drive. These quick commerce platforms are points of pride for my upper-caste, upper class family members. They marvel at this technology that home-delivers all their needs in the matter of minutes. The fact that they get to compensate for their weaponized lethargy by using and abusing cheap labour, is their fantasy of a great technological advancement, an indicator of India’s development. My country practices manual scavenging. My shit is cleaned by a Dalit man who is forced to get into septic tanks with no semblance of protective gear. He could die there, and no one would bat an eye, except to maybe comment on how sad his line of work is. My “4^th largest economy” country, still has Adivasi communities living on rotis and onions for every day meals, working menial jobs to earn some 30 rupees a day, because my government labeled their very existence on their own forestlands as illegal.

Source : Adobe Stock

All this, while my peers and I can complain about how the AC in our room is not working. The dal, sabzi, rice, chapati, sweet and beverage that we get 3 times a day in our canteen is too boring, too bland. The 60-acre resort that I stayed in, did not have a spa. Part of the Indian consciousness, I believe, is to internalize this stark divide to terrifyingly normalized levels. How is it, that in a country where 90% of the population earns less than 25,000 rupees a month (Ravikant Kisana, Meet The Savarnas: Indian Millenians Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything, Pg.63), one man was able to host wedding festivities worth 5000 crore rupees? The absurd flamboyance of the event was highlighted enough and more, sure, but the dystopic nature of it got swept under the towering mountains of memes and satire. To notice the gap, it is not necessary to even go as far as the richest man of the country. A metropolitan “upper-middle class” daily routine will do. Cars departing from gated communities, engines already revving in the driveways, will weave through tight streets bordered by men and women sweeping up dust that isn't theirs to breathe. The milkman, the driver, the security guard, the BlinkIt delivery person, all part of a system of invisible labour that we call efficiency. Uncles will comment that their daughter in the USA does not even have a househelp! How comfortable his life back here at home is. Who is to tell uncle that his comfort is powered in entirety by his wife’s silent domestic struggle, and a systemic creation of generations of pervasively available cheap labour?

And yet, when I say I’m not particularly fond of capitalism, that I find it exploitative, unsustainable, dehumanizing, even, the reaction is often ridicule. “How can you be anti-capitalist?” people ask, half-mocking, half-genuinely confused. “You use an iPhone. You study at a private university. You have an amazon subscription.” The insinuation is that critique is only authentic when spoken from poverty, as though awareness must first prove deprivation. While it’s true that the oppressed should always have the right over the foremost platforms for their resistance, to directly discard the validity of any other critique, seems lazy. But what such scorn disguises is a deeper discomfort. Acknowledging that capitalism works precisely because people like me can afford to critique it from within. My dissent is part of the same ecosystem that pays for my education, my food, my convenience. I cannot seem to accept that this makes my discomfort with capitalism invalid, though. If anything, being cushioned by this comfort should make my critique sharper, not quieter. The privilege that benefits from exploitation has no right to stay comfortable with it. I can’t step outside this capitalist echo chamber just yet, but I can still refuse to romanticise the alienation and exploitation that keep it running. Because by the counter-logic, no man can be a feminist, no Savarna can critique the caste system and we must all live and rot within the same filter bubble of exploitative privilege that have constructed our lives. Yet, of course, there are layers to critiquing capitalism. There is a very thin, traversable line between genuine critique and elitist ego-stroking. A line that I think is worth discussing. 

Like I said, there are layers to this. Layers of class arrogance, elite liberalism, and a blatant ignorance masquerading as pragmatism. In elite academic circles like ours (private universities), “liberalism” is really just theoretical jargon and selective politics. Feminism that avoids critiquing domestic labor, environmentalism that fails to address overconsumption, and anti-caste arguments that are limited to classroom debates. It is a convenient progressivism that speaks the language of rights and equality, but dissolves when its comfort is threatened. Along with this, there is the ‘Savarna gaze’. What Ravikant Kisana calls the invisible lens through which privilege perceives itself as neutral.  We speak of “the working class” as though it exists somewhere far away, not right outside our gates, cleaning our rooms, washing our plates, driving our food to our doors. The disparity is not always visible. It's sanitised, air-conditioned and typed in PDFs. Capitalism in India, gives us, Savarna elites, the illusion of being “just” consumers. When in truth, consumption is our most political act, and being neutral, our most violent. 

Of course, I am no saint myself. My Karl Marx memes-filled for you page does not make me better than everyone else. I say ‘late-stage’ capitalism while sipping on a diet coke. I critique the gig-economy and order in McDonalds for lunch. I tell myself, “Hey, at least I’m aware”, as if awareness is absolution, because it’s easy to be politically aware, if that awareness costs you nothing. Sometimes I wonder if the real trap of elite liberalism is not ignorance but the luxury of guilt. The ability to feel bad without consequence. We are fluent in the language of oppression; we quote Ambedkar and Gramsci, attend talks on social justice, and write essays on inequality, all while sitting in spaces sustained by unseen labour. Our unease becomes a kind of performance, a posture we assume between our privilege and moral highground. 

But beyond personal hypocrisy, the real problem lies in what capitalism rewards and sustains. The issue is not merely that individuals like me live comfortably, but that such comfort exists alongside staggering deprivation. The presence of billionaires, the glorification of excessive consumption, and the acceptance of staggering wealth disparities are not byproducts of capitalism. They are its core essence. The system relies on these extremes to operate, transforming inequality into its engine and success model. 

Perhaps the goal is not to seek purity. There is no practical way to remain untouched by capitalism or caste, for instance. Their offspring privileges are far too pervasive to even just pick out. There is however the possibility of acknowledgement. To begin with, at least. To examine the world that enables our existence and, rather than turning away in unease, to engage with it, to let the hypocrisy sting a little - it’s the least we can do. To keep speaking about it even when it sounds contradictory. Because silence, after all, is the most convenient privilege. Maybe that’s why we must still continue to speak. Even if our critique sounds contradictory, even if it is born out of sheer privilege. Discourse alone won’t dismantle structures, but it can unsettle them. It can create the cracks through which recognition seeps in. In the classroom, in conversation, in the quiet after we realise who changes our dustbin covers and who eats last in the canteen. There is always the solace that comfortable dissent will always be less harmful than silent acceptance.

What follows the talking matters as well. Small, deliberate refusals. Paying fairly, listening without getting defensive, avoiding quick commerce, consuming consciously and responsibly.  To stop romanticising hard work when what we really have is underpaid labour. To recognise that not every act of change has to look revolutionary; sometimes it’s as simple as refusing to look away. These are not grand gestures. They won’t dismantle capitalism or caste overnight. But they are small interruptions in our otherwise seamless routines, that keep the idea of justice alive in a world that consistently profits off of forgetting. 

So, apparently, I am not allowed to be anti-capitalist. Maybe that’s because anti-capitalism is bad for business, and worse for dinner table peace. It demands for our complicity to be seen not as guilt to be absolved, but a responsibility to be acted upon. It calls for discomfort, for the kind that doesn’t fade after an Instagram infographic or a campus debate. It insists on looking at the world without the filters that make it bearable. I began with the irony of my own settings. My city, my university, my routine, are microcosms of structures I claim to resist.I keep returning to it, because that’s where the contradiction lives. The displacement that built our lecture halls rarely makes it into our lectures. We speak about equality in air-conditioned classrooms, never noticing how the very ground beneath us is proof of its absence. To question that feels inconvenient, almost inappropriate. As though gratitude for privilege should replace the need to examine it. But silence, I’ve realised, only completes the circle of erasure. So I speak, not because I exist outside the problem, but because I find myself within its most manicured version.  And perhaps there’s some use in the contradiction after all? It may not change the world overnight, but it keeps me from mistaking my own convenience for progress. To live in conflict with the system that sustains you may be contradictory, but it is still better than living comfortably with the injustice that defines it. And that to me, is one place to start.