Two Classes: Us and Them
The high capitalists are coming for you, don’t get distracted.
For generations, the ruling class were made up of three kinds of people: the nobility, who took power through the accident of birth; the priestly castes, who whispered sky-god nonsense in the ears of the fearful; and the warlords, who drew their authority by violence and the loyalty of killers.
In the last few centuries another breed emerged: the high capitalists. The high capitalists are money people. They just own things. They own their things and somehow they also own your things. They buy more and more things and they strip and sell them and buy more things. The more things they buy the more money they have and all of their power comes from having all the money. They control more and more money, washing it back and forth, faster and faster and faster until somehow it’s all theirs in the end.
Money, money, money, money. The new rulers are made entirely of money.
And so today those who rule by wealth no longer contend with the other three. They own all power. The priests beg them for donations. The warlords kneel so they can pay their armies. Even nobility means nothing unless the bloodline is gilded with money. For the truth is plain: the men and women who are made of money were born of money and will bear children of money. Their nobility is money itself, and without it their names would be nothing.
The modern corrosively capitalist ruling class is more dominant than perhaps any ruling class in all of human history. Humanity lives, more than ever, at the mercy of the high capitalist thirst for more and more and more.
Yet the high capitalists are anything but united. They do not conspire in some perfect, hidden harmony — if they did, their grip would be unshakable.
The people who are made of money are restless and vicious and petty and weird. They seethe in rival factions, a backbiting lounge of narcissists on yachts, gnawing at one another’s throats. They have no loyalty, they have no morality, they have no history or philosophy. They only have their insane lust for more money.
If only they could collect themselves and be satisfied with how much they have, our species might be spared the coming troubles. If only they could see past their money and realize how hard they are making life for the rest of humanity; perhaps then they might slow down their attack on life on this planet.
But they cannot.
Their rule is less design than compulsion, less wisdom than the blind spasms of appetites. The high capitalists are fueld by the most nihilistic narcissism humanity has ever encountered.
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It is the most dangerous ruling class we have ever seen.
For centuries, rulers have deflected the anger of the ruled by turning them against one another. Peasants marched into war on behalf of noblemen who despised them, slaughtering their neighbors for banners they would never inherit.
Today is no different. Workers the world over, especially in the United States, bleed and brawl in the name of hollow ideologies, in the name of political myths, in the name of imaginary sky-gods. The ruling class laughs and laughs, playing the same terrible games they’ve always played.
But it is time that we remembered.
It does not matter which sky god you pray to, to which imaginary national boundary you pledge allegiance or which political team you root for. There is only one question that matters: Do you wield $100,000,000 or more?
Or are you with us, bound together by our lives and our labor and our human connection?
There are only two kinds of people on this earth. The high capitalists and then the rest of us.
All else, sky-gods, flags, parties, and tribes, is a pageant to keep the bulk of humanity under the control of the most awful few.
We need to be focused on the fight. The money people are trying to kill us all.
And look at you, out there fighting the delusional working class Trump supporter. Fighting your neighbor who is silly enough to devote themselves to Biden or Harris. These are not our enemies, however mistaken they may be. They are dupes, marks in a carnival conjured by the ruling class.
Our quarrel is not with the worker deceived, but with the architects of this nefarious political system.
Our fight is not with the Republicans who punch a clock, but with the Republican kingmakers who drink from the chalice of capital. Our fight is not with liberals who still cling, with schoolchild faith, to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris as saviors. Our fight is with Biden and Harris themselves, who stand as protectors and enforcers for their $100,000,000 value bosses.
As long as we are convinced that the white-supremacist worker is more dangerous than the white-supremacist CEO who bankrolls entire movements, we will never direct our fury where it belongs. To waste energy on the neighbor waving a MAGA flag is folly. Certainly his adopted creed is selfishness, greed, ignorance, fear. But those vices are not the engine of planetary ruin. The true menace, the existential threat to the human species, is the high capitalist ruling class itself.
Do not waste your breath on the zealot across the street. Do not squander your strength in petty skirmishes with the pawns. On this Labor Day, remember the only battle that matters: the eternal struggle of workers against the high capitalist ruling class, a clutch of narcissists that even now prepares to devour the world entirely.
