The Disposable Majority

In my childhood, Telugu movies were the grand opera of the ordinary. Cheap tickets, dusty floors, flickering reels, and yet a doorway into color. There were heroes, heroines, villains, and comedians. But there was also a nameless crowd — men and women who filled the background, who danced when told, cried when told, ran when told, and disappeared when the camera stopped rolling. They were called “extras.” That word was not an insult; it was an economic classification. They existed only to decorate the illusion of importance created by others.

The hierarchy was clear. The hero and heroine earned fortunes; the character actors earned comfort; the extras earned survival. They were the flesh that gave volume to the story but no one remembered their faces. They did not get names in the credits, and they could be replaced tomorrow without notice or regret. Their invisibility was the condition of the spectacle itself. Without them, there was no realism. But realism never belonged to them.

Years later, I realized that American capitalism operates on the same principle. It too is a movie — a relentless production, full of self-congratulating stars, breathless press releases, and patriotic background music. The CEOs are the heroes, the senators are the heroines, the billionaires are the producers, and the talking heads are the character actors. The rest — minorities, migrants, the working poor — are the extras. They appear when needed, they fill the labor scenes, they give credibility to the script of diversity and democracy, and then they vanish when the shooting is over.

This is not an emotional exaggeration. In both systems, the extras are essential yet disposable. The economy requires their hands, their patience, their obedience — but not their humanity. They must appear in just the right amount to make the scene believable. Too few, and the illusion of prosperity collapses; too many, and the camera cannot focus on the hero. They are included only as statistics, excluded as individuals.

In every Hollywood election cycle, minorities are paraded like the chorus of democracy. They are told that their votes matter, that their dreams matter, that they are “the backbone of the nation.” But once the lights dim and the votes are counted, the real actors return to their studios, and the extras return to their rented rooms, their unlit kitchens, their endless double shifts. The capitalist camera pans away. The extras are out of frame again.

The comparison to cinema is not superficial; it is structural. Both industries produce fantasy by converting people into props. A society that spends more time filming itself than reforming itself inevitably begins to act for the camera. The poor become the audience for their own exploitation, applauding the very system that edits them out. Like the unpaid dancers in the background of a song sequence, they move in rhythm with someone else’s music, and when the director yells “Cut!” they are cut first.

And like any long-running movie franchise, capitalism depends on typecasting. Some are permanently cast as villains — immigrants, Muslims, Blacks, or whoever can absorb the national anxiety of the moment. Others are the comic relief — the working-class white, the gun owner, the redneck caricature who distracts from the plutocrats who write the script. The hero, always, is Capital itself — the invisible protagonist who never ages, never dies, never answers to anyone.

The greatest irony is that both systems sell hope as spectacle. The Telugu movie told every village boy that he too could become a hero one day. The American Dream tells every worker the same lie. In reality, the roles are fixed long before the audition. The son of a producer is more likely to become a hero; the child of an extra will inherit exhaustion. Capitalism sells lottery tickets disguised as meritocracy. The winners are proof that the game works; the losers are blamed for not playing hard enough.

When minorities and workers demand justice, they are accused of spoiling the movie. “Why bring politics into entertainment?” say the comfortable. “Why bring class into capitalism?” say the rich. Both questions mean the same thing: “Don’t disturb the illusion.” Every empire protects its narrative by making rebellion look like bad taste.

And yet, history is filled with scenes the director did not plan. Extras have walked off the set. They have stopped dancing. They have formed unions, movements, revolutions. They have refused to die quietly in the background. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Civil Rights Movement — all were uprisings of the extras against the lead roles written by history’s producers. But capitalism, with its genius for rebranding, turned even revolt into another franchise. Protest became content; dissent became an aesthetic; revolution became a product.

In America today, the extras still move the camera. They drive the trucks, clean the offices, build the roads, cook the meals, and serve the drinks. But they are taught to believe they are lucky to be there at all. The system praises their “hard work” precisely because it never intends to reward it. The word “essential worker” was the capitalist synonym for “expendable.” They were applauded during the pandemic and abandoned right after. The studio issued statements of gratitude but refused to share the profits.

Meanwhile, the stars of the capitalist movie live in gated estates, protected by the same extras whose families they underpay. They own private jets but preach sustainability, hire speechwriters but sell authenticity, quote Martin Luther King but fund anti-union campaigns. The hypocrisy is not incidental — it is the plot.

And minorities? They remain the extras of democracy. They are summoned to prove that America is diverse, then dismissed when they ask for equality. They are paraded on stage during election seasons, then left outside the studio when the real deals are made. They are not citizens in the narrative sense — only necessary props for the myth of inclusion. Capitalism, like cinema, does not fear minorities; it commodifies them.

This is why both systems look modern but behave feudal. The extras may have smartphones, but they do not own the network. They may have votes, but they do not own the candidates. They may appear on screen, but they do not control the camera. Ownership, not participation, determines power. The hero of capitalism is whoever controls the editing room.

There is a final cruelty here. When an extra grows old, or ill, or politically inconvenient, they are erased — not just from the movie but from memory. Their names are not in the credits of history. They disappear into the footnotes of GDP. Their labor remains, but their lives vanish. It is as if they were never there.

And yet, all great art — and all great change — begins when the extras refuse to be extras. When they stop accepting the script written for them, the whole illusion trembles. The day the crowd realizes that it is the real protagonist, capitalism loses its camera. Then the movie ends, and history begins.

Citations:

Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (1867).
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967).
Bourdieu, Distinction (1979).
bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000).