(1600 words, part 7 of 7)

This is the final piece in the American Fascism series. Ideally you’d read all seven in order. They’re most helpful that way. Here’s a link to the first piece.

In solidarity,

Brandon

“The ‘middle-class’ is a faux class. It never really existed. If you have a boss, and earn wages or salary, (then) you are a worker, and should be proud to be in the working class.

The term ‘middle class’ isolates more privileged workers for the benefit of the powerful so that anyone outside of elite circles will be divided and fighting against each other instead of fighting institutions and the power structure.” – David Graeber

All war is class war, the old adage goes. If our soldier fires a modern rocket, that rocket costs about $80,000. The person firing it doesn’t make that in a year, and the person they’re firing it at doesn’t make that in a lifetime. This should radicalize you. If you make $20 or $50 an hour, and you’re defending someone who makes $100,000 an hour by doing culture war against someone who makes $10 an hour, then you have been duped about who your enemy is.

Marx’s biggest innovation was “dialectical materialism,” which in short says that the mountains of money the rich are accumulating didn’t come out of nowhere. It had to come from somewhere, and where it came from is money you made but didn’t get paid. The billions the rich are hoarding are the hours you and I could have spent not working. Days, months, and years stolen from us. A recent online poster said, “The promise of civilization is leisure, and the upper class have monopolized it.”

Don’t be confused by the fact that billionaires’ (or hundred-millionaires’) wealth is not in cash but rather in the value of shares they hold. Those shares are only worth money because the investor class has evaluated the business’ deftness at exploiting humans. The better the exploitation, the more the company is worth. Generally.

The combined net worth of the wealthiest 0.1% has grown by $4.4 trillion in the past two years, more than the combined net worth of the bottom 50%. In other words, without the .1%, your wealth would have doubled. When we say we live in a dictatorship of capital, this is what we mean. According to storied research firm RAND Corporation (which is not especially liberal, let alone leftist), in the last 50 years, $79 trillion—with a “T”—has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.

It’s grift all the way down with these people. The median American pays $36 in taxes each year to fund food stamps. You probably didn’t realize, given how often this program is attacked, that that same American pays $670 in taxes each year for corporate subsidies. That’s right: *gifts* for the outfits that are fighting among themselves about who’s devised the best system with which to exploit labor.

The Trump administration is poised to allow giant grocers like Kroger to charge different rates on the same item to different customers, based on what they know about the customer from the data they’ve gathered on them. Including data purchased from data brokers. They plan to identify each customer using facial recognition, come up with the maximum they believe *you* will pay for that item, and change the price on the digital tag to that, in real time.

When someone accuses you of waging class war, just respond that you didn’t start it. You’re just defending yourself and your family/friends against the war waged on *you*.

If after plenty of explanation (or allegedly reading this series), people you know seem unable to understand that we live under fascism… it’s likely because they are a member of the class that benefits from fascism. Either that or they’ve been effectively brainwashed into believing they can and should become a member of the class that benefits. Let me be the first to say: it’s not worth it. The price of entry is no less than your humanity.

If fascism is something of the opposite of democracy, it should be mentioned that the U.S. hasn’t resembled a democracy for quite some time; perhaps the entire 39 years I’ve been alive. These are just the first steps of dozens that would need taken to create actual democracy here:

• abolish the electoral college;
• ranked choice voting in every state to help foster new and better parties;
• eliminate districts to avoid redistricting/gerrymandering battles;
• no more corporate, PAC, or otherwise collective money in politics—the only contributions to political candidates allowed would be from *individual* voters, with a maximum of a few hundred dollars;
• public election funding which will, among other things, allow people of all walks of life to run;
• drastically change the Senate to something holding equal votes to a state’s population, and consider simply choosing citizens at random to serve in it;
• an expanded and elected Supreme Court with term limits and a strict and enforceable ethics policy;
• mandated open primaries, not fixed by parties;
• no more giant omnibus bills combining different subject matter, so the public can know where their reps stand on things;
• eliminate the filibuster and reforming other internal rules of Congress to be pro-democracy;
• mandate election day as a paid holiday

The effect of money on politics can’t be overstated. Unfortunately, not many people realize what a billion dollars is. If you made $100/hour and worked 50 hours/week ($240K/year), it would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars. Most Democrats today are defending the right of someone to accumulate this, with their recent “abundance” messaging. The party allows Bernie and AOC to present a counter-message to this only because they have ensured the Bernie/AOC wing has no real power.

Now that you know what a billion is, understand that a trillion is 1,000 times that, and understand that this year won’t be the first trillion dollar defense budget. We’ve had those for about 25 years when you consider the various military expenses outside the DOD budget. Consider now what is being stolen from us to accomplish this. Enter “the origins of the Eisenhower quote” into a search engine and read the excerpt of his speech that comes up. We may never again have a president who speaks against this theft.

Which brings us to the genocide we’re funding. “The root of Zionism is capitalism,” said online poster Rathbone. “Zionism is profitable for capitalists and that is why it is pursued. A moral right (self-defense) cannot be derived from an illegal wrong (occupation). ‘Ex injuria jus non oritur.’ Even the ancient Greeks were anti-Zionist.”

Here’s a simple question: what if it was your kids under the rubble?

As Saul Williams said, “The government of the United States has united to condone rather than condemn genocide. They have united to enforce draconian immigration laws, to build larger prisons, to criminalize poverty, to militarize the police, and to surveil all who dissent. They are united against us.”

In a word, Fascism.

We’re at a crucial point right now. Trump signed his budget bill, and hidden inside the 1,100-page document is a provision that would block federal courts from enforcing contempt charges against officials who violate court orders. This will effectively neuter the power of the judiciary. Expect to see a lot more force being leveraged by fascists against the working class. The budget bill also drastically increases border/immigration funding, setting the stage for an expanding network of concentration camps, and for our streets to be flooded with agents totally lacking accountability. Remember that Germany’s most notorious concentration camps were not in Germany itself but in places to which they deported their residents.

Have you read about the neutering of contempt charges? If you aren’t being informed, then find another source of news. NPR and the BBC still frame what’s happening in Gaza as a “famine.” As if it’s natural.

Sources like the following are more reputable: Drop Site News, The Intercept, Democracy Now!, Ken Klippenstein, The Lever, The Markup, In These Times, Upstream Podcast, Hampton Institute, and Truthout. Sometimes Current Affairs, The Nation, and/or Jacobin. Also follow Adam Johnson, Caitlin Johnstone, Chris Hedges, Alec Karakatsanis, Cory Doctorow, Jason Hickel. For the historical context “news” outlets often miss, you can’t go wrong with the unstoppable Working Class History. 

Remember: The interests of the ruling class and your interests are diametrically opposed. The U.S. government has been working to sabotage and overthrow socialism/communism around the globe as its primary purpose for 100 years. My beloved reader: think about what this means. The U.S. doesn’t devote such effort and resources to this because socialism/communism doesn’t work. They do it because if they don’t, it *will* work. Everywhere. And once it does, humanity will never go back to what we’re living under.

(An aside: Don’t let anyone tell you communism killed more people than any other system, because it’s not true. British capitalism killed 1.8 billion Indian people from 1757-1947. The U.K. alone killed more people than all the socialist countries combined, before we even count how many people the U.S. has killed.)

If you’re concerned about the rage of the far left, remember that the rage of the far right got us fascism. The rage of the far left got us weekends, a minimum wage, workplace safety, and child labor laws. These are not remotely the same.

My friends, don’t let your rage burn out. Don’t despair; network. Brainstorm.

Don’t (only) stand with others because the fascists might come for you next. Stand with others because the fascists are coming for them now.

The working class has a right to defend itself.

Congratulations, you’re now an anti-fascist.

Brandon Smith has been an elected town official and the youngest winner of the only award for independent journalism. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and In These Times.