A Class War Everyone Can Fight In

From Days of War Nights of Love

The poverty against which man has been struggling throughout history is not merely the poverty of material goods; the ennui and disorientation experienced by the members of the middle and upper classes in today's wealthy industrial nations have revealed the poverty of Western existench itself.

The problems that we face today cannot be traced to class conflict alone. It is not merely a question of the ruling class profiting at the expense of the proletariat, for we have seen that the profit that those with capital do make does not make their lives any more fulfilling. It does not matter whether a woman is buried alive in a prison, in a reform school, in a sweatshop, in a ghetto, in a prestigious university, in a condominium bought on credit, or in a mansion with a private swimming pool and tennis courts, so long as she is buried alive. Everyone suffers from today's status quo, albeit differently; but whether a man is starving on his minimum wage salary, exhausted by his repetitive responsibilities at the office, or befuddled by the feeling of emptiness that accompanies the undirected acquisition of material wealth, he has a stake in fighting for change. So we all, rich and poor, must band together to transform our situation.

This also means that there is no mythical "They". Innumerable radical movements and social critics have relied upon this concept to motivate people by stirring up hatred for the "evil orchestrators" of human suffering, the enemies who conspire against us. But this kind of thinking only serves to divide us against one another, and whether we are divided on class lines, on color lines, or according to other categories, we are distracted from the important issues and impeded in our progress. Our true "enemy" is the social forces and patterns at work between us, and it is these forces we must come to understand and to struggle against.

This is not to say that there are individuals whose behavior is particularly dangerous to their fellow human beings, insofar as it perpetuates and intensifies our present state of emergency. But even if these individuals do have negative intentions towards others, it is still unlikely that they possess a clear understanding of the extremely complicated conditions to which they are contributing. Our social and economic relations are snarled and harmful in such a way that no secret society of evil geniuses could ever have arranged this fate for us.

And let no one say these individuals are benefiting at the expense of the rest of us. It gaining material wealth and status in a murderous society really is benefiting, then we should just let things stay as they are and put our energy into fighting each against all to get to the top of the dungheap. If these people's lives are not as impoverished as our own, our whole value system is bankrupt. It's understandable that some of us are jealous of their disproportionate control over the resources of our society . . . but it's not having stuff that makes life good, is it?