From Conviction to Commodity: The Dhandhewala Subject in Neoliberal Social Justice

In the contemporary neoliberal social justice economy, one is not simply encouraged but structurally compelled to become a dhandhewala, a figure who must continuously convert life into livelihood in order to remain visible, legitimate, and materially afloat. This is not merely a cultural tendency but a transformation in the conditions of existence themselves, where, as Michel Foucault suggests, the subject is reconstituted as an “entrepreneur of the self,” tasked with treating their own experiences, affects, and identities as forms of capital to be cultivated and optimized. Within this regime, nothing is permitted to remain merely lived: experience must be translated into content, conviction into brand identity, solidarity into network, and dissent into a monetizable niche. What appears as the moral language of justice is increasingly subsumed under what Wendy Brown identifies as the economization of all spheres of life, wherein even ethical and political practices are reorganized according to market rationalities. The demand to monetize is inseparable from the parallel pressure to credentialize, such that one must not only speak but speak with institutionally or algorithmically sanctioned authority, accumulating forms of cultural and symbolic capital in the sense elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu. In this conjuncture, marginality itself risks becoming a form of convertible capital—but only when properly narrated, authenticated, and circulated within recognized circuits of value—producing a paradox in which refusal to commodify oneself leads to invisibility, while participation invites charges of opportunism, both positions being structurally generated rather than individually chosen. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello argue, capitalism no longer simply suppresses critique but metabolizes it, transforming resistance into a resource that fuels new markets, professions, and forms of labor, a process that renders the social justice economy itself a site of managed dissent. At the level of lived experience, this produces a condition of relentless self-extraction, where individuals must mine their own biographies—trauma, caste location, gendered experience, political insight—and render them communicable and consumable within economies of visibility structured by digital platforms, a dynamic that resonates with Mark Fisher’s diagnosis of “capitalist realism,” wherein alternatives to this system become nearly unthinkable. The intensification of this condition through platform infrastructures, as analyzed by Shoshana Zuboff, ensures that visibility itself becomes labor and subjectivity itself becomes a site of continuous production and extraction. What emerges, then, is not a failure of individual ethics but a structural compulsion: the dhandhewala is no longer a marginal or pejorative figure but the universal subject of late capitalism, spanning the academic, the activist, the artist, and the influencer alike, each compelled to render themselves legible within circuits of value they do not control. In such a world, what is celebrated as empowerment—the ability to make a career out of one’s politics or identity—often conceals a more intimate and totalizing form of domination, where even resistance must justify itself in the language of returns, and where the refusal to participate risks not moral purity but social and material erasure.