Preparing For When We Overthrow The Billionaire Class

On this Tuesday, May 1st, I urge people to participate in the General Strike. Stock up on food so that you can go without buying anything for some time. Refuse to come to work if you can. Attach these actions to concrete demands by posting the policies we want enacted on social media, and hopefully by marching for them in the streets. Policies I’d suggest for this are breaking up the banks, amending Citizens United, and ending America’s illegal wars.

If this strike is big enough, it will disrupt the economic system so much that the ruling class trembles. Whatever size it is though, we’ll need to organize more and bigger strikes after it. Along with more protests against the war state and corporate power, more involvement in organizing groups, and more spreading of dissenting information in the online alternative media.

If we keep growing the popular movements that have appeared in the last few years, the establishment will be overwhelmed. Corporate power works the same as the communist, theocratic, and fascist ideologies that have made up other totalitarian regimes. With all of them, rulers have wrapped their tyranny in the guise of upholding a pseudo-noble ideology. What can redeem societies that have come under the hold of despots are those who acknowledge the injustice they’re seeing in front of them, whatever the ruling ideology says.

The ruling elite use the neoliberal worldview, an extension of Ayn Rand and Social Darwinism, to rationalize their plunder of the lower classes as a legitimate outcome of economic competition. The result, as a 2014 Russell Sage Foundation poll of those in the top 1% of the income scale found, is a general attitude of disregard for people outside their circle of power. Most millionaires and billionaires support cutting basic social services; most think that the minimum wage should not be raised to give all workers a living income; most don’t think the government should guarantee each person food, clothing and shelter.

As these elites go through lives of incredible luxury and power, they attack anyone who challenges them, and are suspicious of whatever represents broader forms of humanity. “Oligarchs look at regulations to protect the environment or the safety of workers as impediments to profit and abolish them,” writes Chris Hedges in The Deadly Rule of the Oligarchs. “Oligarchs move industries to Mexico or China to increase their wealth while impoverishing American workers and leaving U.S. cities in ruins. Oligarchs are philistines. They are deaf, dumb and blind to great works of art, reveling in tawdry spectacles, patriotic kitsch and mindless entertainment. They despise artists and intellectuals who promote virtues and self-criticism that conflict with the lust for power, celebrity and wealth.”

The paradise of the rich, as Victor Hugo said, is built on the hell of the poor. And as the rich increasingly separate those two realities around the world, with the “Green Zone” communities of the secure being bordered off from the “Red Zone” areas of the destitute, a dystopia of inequality is forming. We need to mobilize all opponents of corporate power, whether they’re progressives, libertarians, or conservatives, towards upsetting the forces of plutocracy.