Under an Endless Night: Wealth and Power

It’s common knowledge that the wealthy are running society. We take it as a given that not much will be done in this country if it does not serve the interests of corporations and the superrich, and it’s become a tired cliché that our schools, subways, and healthcare will continue to struggle with a lack of funding, while billions are spent on wars that enrich weapons manufacturers and private contractors.

Today, when private spending on politics has had all restrictions removed and the president is blatantly crooked and self-serving, many of us have little faith that our government is anything but a puppet of the upper class. We feel hopeless, like we are living at the end of history, under an endless night. The rich get richer.

You’ve heard all of this before. It’s obvious. And you know just as well that there is no chance of ever becoming one of these superrich. Most of us spend our entire lives in debt, one serious illness, lost job, or car failure away from disaster.

Given that wealth currently equates to power in this country, it’s crucial that we ask ourselves how it is that the ruling class becomes and stays rich to begin with. Because they do it by drinking your blood.

Stick with us here- there’s a lot of ground to cover, and we’re going to try and do it quickly and simply. It might seem like an odd subject to focus on at first, but once you understand the origins of wealth, you’ll understand the ruling class’ true nature as vampires- why it is that they work you to exhaustion, why they make such effort to hide what they are, why they display such excessive, unreasonable greed, and why they’ll never let you live.

They Drink Your Blood: The Process of Valorization

Most of the upper class were born rich, but not all of them inherit their money. Besides, eventually that money would run out, if more wasn’t being made all the time. So being born rich can’t explain where wealth comes from.

A select few among the ruling class gain their wealth by having a good idea, and marketing that idea. But the Steve Jobs of the world make up an incredibly small portion of the already miniscule ruling elite, and besides that, most of them began with enough wealth to take a massive risk, and often fail many times before striking gold. The elite like to hold these “self-made” billionaires up as proof that the American system rewards hard work and ingenuity, but this can’t explain the source of most wealth.

We also know that many of the rich make a lot of money by investing. Investing is basically an indirect way of owning a company: a person buys stock in a company, giving them ownership of a portion of that business, and they receive their cut of the profits in that company when they choose to sell those stocks, hopefully at a higher price than they paid for them originally.

Playing the stock market is just a more flexible method of owning businesses. By buying stocks, a person can own partial portions of many different companies instead of risking everything by tying themselves to the success or failure of one business.

In the end, to make money, you typically must sell something. That something might be pickup trucks, or coffee, or something less obvious, like the data produced by a search engine. But of course, the superrich don’t make their money by going into the office or the shop floor and making products themselves. They make their money by owning the means by which those products are made.

The process looks like this:

Money > Product > Money(+)

An individual starts out with some amount of money. This may have come from inheritance, or (this is unrealistic, when we’re talking about corporations, but let’s explore every possibility) from one’s own hard work and savings. Historically, this wealth often originally came from the violent conquest of colonized peoples.

The individual uses this money to hire employees, as well as to buy the tools and materials needed to create a product. Then, they sell this product, ideally for more money than they started out with. The difference between the money they first invested and the money they end up with is what we call profit. This is the basic plan by which most every business in the world operates.

Price and value

Let’s pause for a moment here to consider how an item gets its price. We’re familiar with the idea that business owners make their money by “buying low and selling high,” having an insider knowledge of a market that lets them find deals and then sell things at a markup later. But does this idea hold up, when you think about it?

We must consider that we are always talking about a global marketplace, about millions of transactions going on every second, across the world, involving massive corporations. While occasional circumstances, like a certain clothing label becoming trendy, can cause temporary changes in an item’s price, almost all products have a set value that is generally stable.

Think of it like this: if you’re a nationwide grocery store that sells millions of apples per year, then you know exactly what an apple is worth, and you’re not going to pay more than that. If your apple merchant was overcharging, then another farm would gladly undercut their price and take your business from them.

Even if all the farms in the world fixed their prices to charge more for an apple than it was worth, then eventually, you would get fed up with them. It would not be worth the cost to buy their apples, when your company could just buy a farm, cut the apple sellers out of the deal, and grow your own apples.

That’s the key. You’re never really paying for the apple. Those grow out of the ground for free. What you’re paying for is the work that the farmer puts into growing the apple: tending the orchard, watering the trees, picking the fruit, etc.

It’s the work involved in bringing a product to market that gives that item value, not the expense of materials involved in making it, or rarity, or anything else- in the end, you can get most anything in the world yourself for free, provided you’re willing to put in the (potentially huge) amount of work involved in gathering the materials, educating yourself on making the product, and constructing the item. This is unrealistic for most goods, so we pay someone else to do it.

Keeping this in mind, let’s return to our business owner, who invests in the production of an item in the hope of turning a profit. They turn their investment money into things like factory space, plastics, machines, and employees.

The price of their product is determined by the cost of the materials that go into making the item, plus the value of the work it takes to create it. If the seller were to charge more than that price, then eventually a competitor would undercut their prices, or the buyer would start making the product for themselves.

If this is all true, then the upper class doesn’t make their money by “buying low and selling high.” Something else is going on. We need to figure out where profit comes from, if we accept that nobody willingly gives money away.

Labor and value

It bears repeating: everything has a value, and that value is equal to the cost involved in bringing that thing to market. This includes you. It takes material and labor to create you as a worker: the food, shelter, transportation, health care, education or training and so on that allow you to show up for work and do your job.

When you go to work, your employer is buying you, as a worker. They might do this little by little, through an hourly wage, or on a contract, or via a yearly salary, but in any case, they are indirectly paying for you to “make a living,” buying those things that make you able to work.

You are a special kind of market good for a few reasons. The most important of these is that, while you are bought at the value that it takes to bring you to market, you are the only market item that has the capability to do work, and in doing so, create more value than you cost.

Let’s say, for a simple example, that it takes 50 dollars a day to pay your basic living expenses. Let’s also imagine that the minimum wage is 10 dollars an hour. Papa John’s can get five hours of work out of you, during which time you make fifty pizzas.

Then, a conservative governor takes office and campaigns on a platform of making the state more “welcoming to business” by lowering the minimum wage to 5 dollars an hour. Papa John’s still must pay your cost (because if you can’t feed yourself or don’t have a place to sleep, you’ll probably stop working,) but now they’re getting ten hours of work out of you, and during those ten hours, you’re doing enough labor to make a hundred pizzas, and still only earning the fifty dollars you need to scrape by.

The difference between what Papa John’s must pay to buy you and the money they can make by selling the products you create is where profit comes from. They can’t cheat the price of tomatoes, cheese, or ovens- the costs of these items are fixed on the market. But there are all kinds of things they can do to change how much you must work to earn your cost.

They may pressure you to work at an inhumane pace, and intimidate you by making you compete with a hugely unemployed population. They may use politics to slash public school budgets and block healthcare reform, making you accept a lower quality of life and driving down your cost as a worker. They might outsource your job overseas, to a country where the standard of living is lower and labor costs less, allowing them to lower the price of their goods and undercut their competition.

A more recent trend is the birth of the so-called “gig economy,” like Uber and other businesses of that style, where workers are encouraged to take on multiple freelance jobs, giving them less influence in their workplace and making them more disposable. In these sorts of jobs, where you are “your own boss,” the company practically doesn’t exist at all- they just take the money from the work you do.

Whatever the tactic, the goal of the ruling class is to give you as little as possible while working you as hard as they can. The elite contribute nothing to society. All they do is own things; by entering the market with money and owning the land, owning the materials, owning the company, they place you into a position where you are forced to work for them. You’re the one giving up money for nothing, because you’ve been strong-armed into it.

This vampire class does no labor, produces nothing, and drains our communities of the value that we make together with our hard work. They drink your blood.

Life in the Vampire Castle: Exploitation and Oppression

You might be thinking to yourself that this is just the inevitable outcome of the economy in a free market. Even if it works out badly for most people, it’s only natural that business owners would take the profit from their industries, gaining more control over time as they increased in wealth. And if you had the ambition and the right idea, maybe it’s possible that you could take some of that profit for yourself. That’s the beauty of the free market.

But the free market is anything but free. A person not born into money has little choice to do anything but work for the ruling class, in some fashion. When getting a decent job means having a college degree and access to a car, this is made worse by the need to take on thousands of dollars in loans just to start earning a living- in effect, making a promise to the ultra-rich, backed by debt to their banks, that you will spend your life in their employ.

Our society is dominated by giant corporations that use the power of their organization and resources to generate tremendous wealth. But the workers who make up these corporations, who spend their lives within their walls and create the products that make their profits, are not free to choose who they associate with. When workers try to unionize, to use their combined power and make demands to their company, their bosses and the government work together to crack down and disband them, sometimes with deadly force. Only the rich have the freedom to organize, and the workers can’t compete.

When other countries, such as Cuba and Vietnam, have decided to opt out of systems of government that hand power to the business owners, the United States has used its military and the CIA to ravage their nations. This is a blatant show of disrespect to their rights as free countries to decide how their states should be run.

The reason that the police, the army, the CIA and other government forces have fought wars and killed American citizens to prevent them from organizing against the ruling class is that there is nothing “natural” or “inevitable” about this system. It was first born out of violent revolutions fought by the merchant class against governments run by kings. Since then, it has required constant suppression by armed forces and political manipulators to remain functioning.

Without this constant policing, people simply would not tolerate being robbed and extorted by the small portion of the population that is the ultra-rich. The people would quickly take control and claim the fruits of their labor from this parasite class. The rich know this, and it is their greatest fear. This is why they use the media to slander those that oppose them and convince the people that they do not want public healthcare, unions, or higher taxes on the rich. This is why they promote a racist and sexist culture that divides the people against themselves. This is why they endorse a drug war that keeps the unemployed, those people most able to take decisive action against the rich, in prison or under police watch on parole. They want us to feel isolated, to believe we are powerless, and to hate ourselves for what we are.

Fearless Vampire Killers: Resistance and Revolution

There is no way to reform this system. It is based from the ground up on the forceful robbery of the working class to funnel wealth to business owners. Tax reforms, changes to the law, and the development of public welfare programs, while potentially beneficial to the working class, will not change the nature of our society. So long as our society is based on a system where workers hand the fruits of their labor over to the business-owning class, that business-owning class will continue to bend society to more efficiently rob and oppress us.

The system must be done away with and replaced with one that places the industry and business of our country under the control and ownership of the working class.

Elections will never produce this revolutionary change. Our political system is set up to provide us with only those leaders selected by the ultra-wealthy to represent their interests. You cannot use a system designed by the ruling class to ask them to unseat themselves.

We’re not asking you to go out and get yourself killed trying to bring down the state tomorrow. That would be irresponsible, immoral, and wasteful. Rather, we’re suggesting that you begin the process of revolution today by recognizing how powerful you are, and working to develop that power. Real power rests with the people, and makes its effects felt in the real world.

Increase your ability to control your own life and environment. Form networks with the people that you trust and start teaching yourselves how to carry out your goals. Try to gain influence in the workplace. Learn to defend yourself and your community, whether that be by taking up a martial art, carrying a firearm, starting an information network, or some other means that works for you.

Fight against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, nativism, and other ideals that target sections of the community for discrimination. Rather than allowing these identities to divide us, we have a responsibility to organize around these members of the working class who are under the most direct attack, and to be allies in their struggle for the freedom and security that we all seek.

In this system, we are commodities, and our price is set by the quality of life that we accept. Effective resistance within this system means disrupting the flow of money to the ultra-rich and redirecting it towards the working class. We can increase the value of our lives by struggling together to increase wages, demand healthcare, and win other victories that improve the lives of the working class.

But these reforms are only one front in the war against the vampires. A revolutionary change can enable us to become more than commodities, to control our workplaces and run our own lives, rather than be bought and paid for.

This fight must begin in the United States, because it is we that use our military might to stomp out any revolutionary change elsewhere in the world. It will not come overnight. But by continuing to educate, empower, and organize ourselves, we can work towards a different future than the eternal night we have been offered. Down with the landlord, the banker, and the vampire class! We will drive them out!