There’s a wave of attacks on the ruling class

People have reached a breaking point. American consumer sentiment is terrible, registering at the lowest level ever recorded this week. Gas prices just jumped more in March than they have in any month since 1967. The Iran War was historically unpopular from the beginning, and now the massive economic ripple effects are starting to hit home. 

And this is just the beginning. The Strait of Hormuz still isn’t open, despite a range of Trump administration lies to the contrary. That means 20-30% of the world’s oil simply isn’t moving. Fertilizer shortages will take months to hit, but they’re likely to hit upwards of 40% of U.S. farmers. Plastics, aluminum, tech components – massive disruptions are already in the supply chain, and they’re coming down the pike. Things are bad right now for the working class around the globe, and they’re about to get worse.

And people feel it, we’ve been feeling it. Even before various countries declared fuel shortage measures, and even before U.S. workers saw the number at the gas station go up and up and up, people noticed and felt that something was fundamentally wrong with our economy. For a lot of people it’s as simple as rent doubling over the course of a decade, for the exact same apartment. For other people it was the vague sense of despair and exhaustion at the end of a long day at work at a job that feels pointless. And for still others it’s been childcare costing as much or more than their mortgage.

Now people are breaking. In the past week alone folks have shot at the home of a city councilor who voted for a data center, thrown a molotov at the residence of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and burned down a warehouse that contained $500 million worth of toilet paper, reportedly. Multiple other warehouse and industrial fires have taken place over the last few days. What not long ago seemed like an exceedingly rare act, the isolated, class-motivated attack, symbolized for the last year by Luigi Mangione, suddenly appears much more common.

I’m sure the people who conducted these various attacks don’t all have the same politics. As with most people in America, including Luigi, they probably have a jumbled set of political beliefs. But there is very clear evidence that at least one of these acts, the $500 million fire at the California warehouse, was an act very directly motivated by class antagonism. The man who set that fire posted video of his actions to Facebook, and in them he says, “You know, if you’re not going to pay us enough ... to afford to live, at least pay us enough not to do this,” while he lights a roll of toilet paper on fire.

This line has caught widespread attention. Countless social media posts have circulated in just a few days, graffiti has popped up, videos of people talking about the cost of living have been made – all because of this man’s brief speech about not being paid enough to live, and the fire he set. The temptation, in many circles, is to discuss whether what he did was right, or wrong. I won’t do that here. What I will talk about is how what he did was inevitable.

Martin Luther King famously described riots as “the language of the unheard” and I think the spree of individual acts of working-class violence is fundamentally in that category. People come out to city council meetings and unanimously oppose data centers – then the councils pass them anyway. People desperately need good jobs, but the capitalists are now following decades of neoliberalism by investing trillions in job-taking technology. The working class is disorganized, and while a revolution overthrowing the system and building something new and better would be ideal, that capacity doesn’t quite exist, yet. And, so, desperate people will lash out. That is inevitable.

Of course the ruling class will now demonize each and every person who engages in any act of violence against them and their institutions. That, too, is inevitable. But what those with wealth and power will never do is examine the underlying causes of people lashing out against them. Just as fascists scapegoat migrants while trying to ensure that you never consider why people are migrating here from Latin America, every working-class act of violence must be labeled terrorism, and you must accept that word that is intended in large part to prevent you from thinking about the underlying causes.

The vital truth the ruling class is terrified of you knowing is that they broke the social contract. Here we have another term that’s bandied about a lot, often with people saying that since the pandemic Americans have forgotten the social contract, i.e. people act ruder in public and have forgotten social norms. But that’s superficial, a failure to look below the surface. There was a specific social contract in the U.S. and the West writ-large for the past several decades. And it went something like “the ruling class can do whatever it wants as long as it ensures a decent quality of life for the majority of the population, and white folks in particular.” This was the contract from about the 1950s on – but the ruling class in their boundless greed has wrecked it.

Now this particular social contract wasn’t all that good. It screwed over the entire global south, and the marginalized within our country too. It was a negotiated capitalism, with unions and policy in place to support a large and prosperous middle class, and it was fundamentally flawed. But it was a lot better for a lot more people than the rapacious, unfettered capitalism introduced by Reagan and the neoliberal era. Over the past forty years or so the middle class the contract has steady been eroded to the point of collapse, it's been hollowed out so completely that the majority now live a precarious existence, one emergency away from bankruptcy.

Despite the efforts to get people to deny the reality of their lives, most people are well aware that the future is bleak, that the economy and the political system don’t work for them, and that the rich are determined to keep getting ricker at any cost. As a 2024 survey revealed, a plurality of young people in the U.S. think we live in a “A dying empire led by bad people.” And since then outlooks have only gotten worse, due to causes ranging from AI to Trump to the War on Iran.

What’s happening right now is that a vague sense of dissatisfaction, a simmering anger at a declining quality of life, is morphing into class politics for millions of Americans. Big Tech and Donald Trump are providing people with clear enemies, clarifying raw anger and dissatisfaction into a clearer picture of a ruling class that is out to exploit us and which must be defeated. A broad cross-section of the disaffected have been pushed to a breaking point, and while a few are lashing out with acts of violence, millions more are ready for revolutionary change.

And we should be very clear that the ruling class created this moment, this readiness people now have for revolt. Leftist agitation helps, and much more organizing and education is needed, of course, but the super-rich and their greed have primed the pumps. The ruling class right now is seeing their profits reach record highs, as people struggle to afford gas and groceries:

The price gauging needed to hit all-time profits even as the world faces major supply chain disruptions is not going unnoticed. Endless spending on war is less popular than it's ever been, and the Iran War in particular is highlighting for the angry masses how our government spends money on bombs, but not on our own people. The U.S. government has spent tens of trillions on war in my lifetime, while schools crumble and hospitals close here at home. Now the war on Iran is also killing the economy around the world, and the effects are starting to be felt by the working class in America

If the Great Depression provides a lesson here, it’s that a coalition will now try to save capitalism from itself, as Robert Reich says. The problem there is that we’ve done this all before. During the Depression we saw massive social programs and policy changes implemented to save capitalism from its own greed and excess. But a smaller version of that came in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, most prominently some regulation of the big banks. And in each case reforms were eventually followed by capitalism and the ruling class managing to undo what was done. Each time regulations were walked back as profit motive and greed and the ruling class reassert themselves.

Now the rich and powerful are bringing destruction upon themselves and upon all of us once again. Tech oligarchs and billionaires lined up behind Trump precisely because they wanted deregulation, they wanted to be able to exploit us without repercussions. But it turned out they brought repercussions down on themselves, both because their fascist buffoon decided to attack Iran alongside Israel and wreck the global economy, and because their endless profit seeking now has the masses so angry that people are throwing molotovs and burning down warehouses.

This is the world the ruling class have brought upon themselves. As Aaron Bushnell said, “I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” He then lit himself on fire in protest of genocide.

This is what the ruling class has decided will be normal. They have shaped this world, bringing themselves endless profit – so much money that it’s only outstripped by their endless greed. What we need is a revolution, and the class consciousness that is vital to that revolution is building rapidly. But now we need to organize and educate and fight and build. We need to build power and new systems and ultimately a new society that isn’t based on profit and oppression. The ruling class may have created the contours of our society, but we need to create the world that comes next. - JP