Class Warfare

Believe it or not, a world war is raging. It’s a war between those who’ve laid claim to the earth’s resources and the right to use them as they see fit and the billions of us who provide them the brains and muscles to achieve their goals—not ours. This ruling class sets the priorities, dictates the pace and place of work and decides on their own how much or how little they will pay us from the wealth our labor has created. When they don’t need us, they discard us. 

In America, we’ve been taught to shrink from the term “class warfare.” It’s “abrasive, we’re told, or “confrontational” or “reeks of the 1930s.” But it’s the truth. You can call a tiger a gerbil, but good luck trying to clean its cage. The right wing particularly hates the term because it lays bare the reality of things, which, if fully comprehended by the downtrodden would instantly imperil the right’s power and property (actually, property is power). The left wing rejects the term because it still believes it can convince the powerful to be fair with a kind word and a good argument. Again, we invoke the tiger.

“When a few assert economic control over the many, a state of class warfare exists.”

People who have the power that the wealth we’ve created gives them will not surrender it gladly. But we have the numbers on our side. First, though, we have to rid ourselves of the myth that the rich are rich because they deserve to be—that they work harder or smarter or risk more than we do. How can that be true when we risk our very lives to get and hold a job? How can any rich person possibly risk more than that? There would not be a single millionaire in existence if it weren’t for the labors of dozens or hundreds or thousands of others. So why should one or a few people at the top take so much of our commonly created wealth and leave us so little? Do we deserve less than the speculating investor or the boss’s wife or children? We sure as hell get less—a lot less. As long as we meekly tolerate such inequity, it will continue and get worse.

Rich people control politicians who, in turn, make the laws that enable the rich to get richer. They set minimum wage, working conditions, grounds for hiring and firing and the standards by which we can take our complaints about working condition to court. Politicians use our tax money to build infrastructure and give companies huge tax breaks to bring their factories to where labor is the cheapest and least organized. And then they ask us to dance with joy when these companies “give” us a few jobs. It amounts to cheering our own evisceration.

So which side are you on? And what do you think we should do about it?