BY WALEED MAJID

Here’s a fact: Billionaires of the world are vile leeches. They do not work for their wealth, but rather, they enslave others by threatening them with poverty, homelessness and starvation while dangling the false hope that they too can strike gold, that they too will be the billionaires of the future. 

With that being the reality, it is also the case that the concepts of ‘hard work’ and ‘climbing the ladder’ don’t apply to everyone, especially those whose material conditions are not well suited for success in the first place. 

These ethereal aspirations are extremely difficult to attain because capitalists exploit the working people by stealing the fruits of their labor. They give them only the means to live a life of meager subsistence or just enough for them to have the illusion of living a meaningful life. When the actual purpose of these wages is to give the working class barely enough to propagate the human race in order for these greedy pigs to gain more laborers, and by proxy, more capital. 

This is the horrid reality — the unnerving truth — of worker/owner relations in our modern world.

Now, upon hearing such statements, the average Westerner would most definitely react idealistically in order to not only reaffirm the  fairytale values that encompass his liberal worldview, but also to (perhaps indirectly and unknowingly) guard the status quo as a beacon of hope for all of humanity. He’ll say things such as, “The billionaires took risks to get to where they are,” or “You just say that because you are jealous of their wealth,” or the all-famous, “Stop being lazy. You just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” 

If you are one of these people, I’d like to say something to you: Facts don’t care about your feelings and our material world doesn’t care about your idealism. 

 The facts have been clear to social scientists for decades: Deplorable material conditions are the cause of poverty, not moral failings. Accept the reality: Some made up ethereal notion of meritocracy will not save the working class in our struggle for freedom. 

You are being fed propaganda that is meant to skew your vision from the truth of the sociologically uncontested reality that when people have been raped and brutalized by their oppressors, it is self-evident that their living conditions will not be generally comfortable or even suitable for success. 

Their conditions will also be dangerous in all facets of being because of many variables that correlate with poverty, including inaccessibility to healthy food (or food at all), clean water, widespread drug use/distribution (due to governments actively pumping them into lower-income communities), alcoholism, domestic abuse and countless other socioeconomic factors. Now, who would you blame on causing all of these social ills and making them widespread?       

I implore the reactionaries in the audience to question themselves in order for their individualistic worldview to be challenged. Is it wrong for the masses to truly live and fully experience all the beauty that God has to offer us without the haunting fear of homelessness? Are the people truly living happy lives when the majority of them are poor and must sell their own property and labor to the parasites that own their residences and consciousnesses? Is it right for the people to spend all of their hard-earned resources to pay their debt while barely finding anything they can to keep themselves alive, especially during a pandemic and a recession? Is it morally right to rebuke the masses for their supposed sloth and suggest it is the reason for their poverty? 

Is it really wrong to raise the minimum wage to a livable one? To defund the police budget and focus more on community development? To treat drug addiction as a medical issue instead of a criminal one? To not displace homeless camps and to abolish the installation of hostile architecture? To implement these progressive social policies which are proven to not only be effective in bettering the socio-economic conditions of the disenfranchised but also in preventing such circumstances from arising in the first place? 

What straps do I have to pull when I can’t afford to buy boots? Am I to blame for my misery? Is your rotten  “brain” (if you can even call it that) so devoid of compassion and mercy that you would suggest the poor and disenfranchised are solely responsible for the difficulty attached to surviving in this world? If so, then congratulations, for you have acted as a reputable representative of the followers of your cancerous ideology quite well, quite well indeed.  

I will not express regret or remorse for the brashness of my language. Such benevolence shouldn’t be shown to fascists and those who bend to the will of and propagate false emotional jargon and reactionary rhetoric over irrefutable science and factual evidence. Humanity has sanctity over all tangible existence. We can’t prove that with science, but we can prove that the solutions it takes to better the quality of human life is absolutely founded on concrete analysis and decades of research and experimentation. 

We can prove that the kindred spirits of men don’t harm anyone but the oppressors who seek to divide them. We can prove that kindness and brotherhood are not weaknesses, but rather utilities that allow us to prosper and be at peace with one another. Tell me, isn’t that a fact enough for you?