It begins with hope. The kind of hope that folds neatly into a carry-on suitcase, stuffed between passport stamps and addresses of friends, cousins and relatives on your WhatsApp who promised a sofa bed and maybe, if lucky, a job. Many South Asian migrants arrived in Aotearoa, or across the West, with little more than borrowed courage. They worked double shifts, juggled visas like hot stones, and built small footholds in someone else’s economy cleaning, cooking, guarding, driving, delivering.

But slowly, some climbed. They bought bottle stores, vape shops, grocery stores, takeaway joints and restaurants. A few turned realtors and even landlords. And somewhere along the way, something changed. Not just the bank balance but the outlook too. Many, not all, began to speak like small capitalists. Started shaking their heads at those on welfare. “Nobody gave me anything,” they would say, the same way they were once told “go back to where you came from.” They forgot or chose not to remember the hands they once reached for in desperation.

In almost every major town, stories bubble up: international students underpaid by their own community members; work visas including pathway to residency dangled like lottery tickets; tenants charged exploitative rent by landlords who speak the same language and pray at the same temple. The knife turns sharper when held by someone who knows exactly where to cut.

What explains this class forgetfulness? This rush to mimic those who once stood at the other end of power.

This is where Karl Marx, for all his flaws, still earns a reluctant nod. He was wrong about many things like capitalism’s demise, the purity of the working class, the utopia to follow. But no one described how people change when their class position changes quite like him. Marx recognised that a small business owner is not just someone with a shop, they carry the anxiety of slipping back into precarity and the ambition of rising higher. That dual tension creates a politics of self-defence: admire the rich, resent the poor.

The term is petite bourgeoisie explained as the “small property-owning” class. It is not a slur. It is a description. These are people who do not control large capital but want to protect what little they have built. And in doing so, they sometimes punch sideways but mostly downwards.

Even Adam Smith, so often misquoted as the prophet of free markets, warned that unchecked self-interest without moral grounding erodes the social fabric. He believed in enterprise but also in empathy, duty, and the unseen threads that bind communities. The problem arises when our pursuit of individual gain blinds us to the conditions that made our climb possible and dulls our sense of responsibility to those still standing at the bottom of the ladder.

Today, economist Dr Mariana Mazzucato reminds us that value is not created by private hustle alone but co-produced by public effort, shared infrastructure, and collective imagination. The roads we drive on, the education our children receive, the healthcare we sometimes forget to acknowledge, all of it is part of a larger story. When we erase these contributions, we not only rewrite our past, we impoverish the very idea of community.

At social gatherings, you sometimes hear a new gospel being whispered among small traders: the American system of tipping. “You pay less in wages, the worker makes up the rest in tips — good for business!” they say, with a sparkle in the eye that comes from confusing exploitation with efficiency. But what kind of business survives only if the customer finishes the job of the employer? If the worker must hustle not just for dignity but for dinner? Maybe it is time to ask: is a business still a business if its very model depends on dodging the responsibility to pay a living wage?

As economist Dr Ganesh Nana recently reflected, during a quiet community discussion on this very kind of economic thinking:
“Is that even a business model? Should such a business even exist?”
Not so much a question as a provocation, one that lingers after the room has moved on.

To be clear, ambition is not the crime. Forgetfulness is.

It is easy to become the person who shuts the door behind them and harder to be the one who remembers what it was like to knock. But perhaps we need to hold up the mirror now and then, even if the reflection stings.