On April 7, a man filmed himself setting fire to a 1.2 million square-foot warehouse in Ontario, California. As he takes the lighter to a case of toilet paper, flames creeping upward, he says: “All you had to do was pay us enough to live. All you had to do was pay us enough to fucking live.”
Chamel Abdulkarim, the suspect, makes $18 an hour. A one-bedroom apartment in Ontario, California costs $2,265 a month. That is a situation familiar to millions of workers around the world.
After the warehouse burned down, Abdulkarim allegedly told his friend: “I think a lot of people are gonna understand this,” just like they did when “Luigi popped that motherfucker.” And he was right. Hundreds of social media comments say something to the effect of: “I wouldn’t do this, but I’ve thought about it.”
The ruling class seems completely unable to comprehend this anger, with mainstream media helplessly lamenting the trend of “political violence.” But no one is more out of touch than prosecutor Bill Essayli, who stated at a recent press conference:
This act of violence, apparently, was driven by his hostility to capitalism and corporations […] Look, America is founded on free enterprise and capitalism… Anyone who attacks our values, our way of life, our system, which provides the best goods and services to the most people, we’re gonna come after aggressively.
To demonstrate the hypocrisy of this deranged statement, we only need to quote the alleged words of Abdulkarim himself: “The one per cent are a fucking joke […] ‘pedophiles out here fucking children, profiting off fucking wars.” Meanwhile, we can’t afford to live.
So long as that is the case, working class people will only get angrier. More will be pushed to the brink. And when it happens again, the one per cent will have only themselves to blame.
We are building the RCP because this anger needs to be channelled against the capitalist system as a whole. Warehouses can be rebuilt. Losses can be written off. Individual actors can be jailed. To build a world in which we all have enough to live, we need a revolution against the billionaire class.
