I am a staunch believer in communism and socialism, and I have been for a long time. I read Marx and Engels like scripture. I believed in Lenin’s voice and in the urgency of Che Guevara’s dreams, and I believed revolution was necessary, even sacred. For years I carried one line of Marx’s like a banner: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” I still remember reading Walking with the Comrades by Arundhati Roy, how heavy it felt, how clear and brave it was. Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun came to me as a gift, and it slowly changed how I saw my own country’s blood-stained borders. Those books reminded me of lives that were erased and lives that resisted. When people tell me communism and socialism have failed everywhere they were tried, I think they could have worked. In my view, oligarchs took them away from the common people they were meant for.
Then I moved to the United States. My family had enough money, and my parents gave me only a little of it, never more than I needed. So when I arrived here, capitalism looked like ease: clean stores, scented candles, the iPhone I bought, the sunglasses, the perfume. For a moment they made me feel like I belonged. The happiness never lasted, and that was the trap. Lenin wrote, “Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: freedom for slave owners.” Capitalism is also a feeling. It’s a hunger, a voice in your ear saying you could finally be enough if you just had this one thing. Now even love is for sale. Tinder and Hinge sell the idea of connection. Pay for premium, and maybe this time you’ll find the one. Swipe left on loneliness, swipe right on validation. Dating has turned into a way to make money from people’s vulnerability. I talk about something, and an ad for it shows up on Instagram or Facebook. Capitalism now runs on prediction, and our emotions have become a market. We are the product and the data. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Are we free, really? We barely know how to talk to each other without a screen in between. Our parties have turned into silent scrolling. We curate our emotions for stories. Even grief has become an aesthetic, and even intimacy has a filter.
I’ll be honest about my part in this. Sometimes I give in to small indulgences that make me happy. Living here gave me access to education, tools, and opportunities I would never have had back home. It gave me Amazon packages when I needed winter boots, and warm Dunkin coffee when I was most homesick. I want to be gentle with the girl who thought a good perfume could patch something or a phone could close a distance that felt too far. My beliefs have stayed the same through all of it. I want to build something slower and more real. I want to resist with softness, with withdrawal, with a quiet no. No, I don’t need more. No, I don’t want a premium plan. No, I don’t want to be tracked, sold, or fixed. I just want to be. Che Guevara is often quoted as saying, “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.” Maybe the first fall has to happen inside me.
