OMNI RULING CLASS ANTHOLOGY #1 OCTOBER 27, 2026

 

OMNI

RULING CLASS ANTHOLOGY #1

OCTOBER 27, 2026

Compiled by Dick Bennett

Https://omnicenter.org/donate  

 

 

 

 

What’s at Stake:   We must recognize that the US capitalist system has been designed for the benefit of the ruling class, while the rest of us are facing ever worsening conditions – unless we fight back.  Kundnani.

 

CONTENTS

Arun Kundnani.  “Behind the Affordability Crisis.”  (Rev. of Grand Theft Capitalism by John Bellamy Foster.)
Chris Hedges.  “Epstein, the Russian Mob, and Maxwell.”
Michael Bayly.  “Marx and Class Struggle—Then and Now.”
John Bellamy Foster.  “The U.S. Ruling Class  and the Trump Regime.”
Helena Sheehan.  “Marxism and Class.”
Caitlin Johnstone.  “Capitalism Is a Giant Scam.”
Mark Steven.  “The Global Class War in Five Novels.”  (Discusses his new book
   Class War: A Literary History.)
Caitlin Johnstone.   “You’re Not Deficient, You’re Just Ruled by Assholes.”

TEXTS

“Behind the Affordability Crisis.”   Monthly Review Press October 2026 Newsletter.    Monthly Review admin@monthlyreview.org   Oct 26, 2026.

Dear friends,

“3 Charts That Explain the Economy as Voters Head to the Polls,” ran a New York Times headline last week. The first graph showed consumer prices increasing last month at their fastest rate since May, while wage growth slowed. Trump’s tariffs and the US war on Iran were blamed for causing an “affordability challenge” of rising prices.

The second graph presented a “solid, but stagnant” labor market with unemployment low but few new jobs.

The third graph indicated the growing proportion of overall business investment tied to the AI boom – which, the Times argued, has helped to push the stock market to new highs but also introduced the risk that a collapse of confidence in AI’s future profitability could send the whole economy into recession.

The impression given is that, over the medium term, a rosy future is possible for working-class Americans if technological innovation continues to generate new growth opportunities; and that the current crisis of affordability is a short-term problem of the last year or so, largely caused by Trump's policies.

Yet as Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster point out in their new book Grand Theft Capital: What Workers Should Know About the Affordability Crisis, “The problem of working people being unable to afford a decent existence is not a new one. It also didn’t happen overnight or by accident. It developed over decades as a result of the considerable efforts of the wealthy and corporations to become even wealthier – to accumulate ever more capital.”

 

 

 

 

That story – of how the US ruling class has, since the 1970s, succeeded in taking an increasing share of the country’s wealth, with all the consequent misery of impoverishment and deprivation for millions of workers – rarely appears in the New York Times but is told precisely and succinctly in Magdoff and Foster’s new book, published by Monthly Review Press.

As the authors note, for decades, many on the US left, let alone more centrist liberals, “abandoned the concept of a ruling class, dismissing it as dogmatic or simplistic.” But to accurately explain the affordability crisis requires recognizing that its main cause has been the ruling class acting as a class.

To illustrate the point, Grand Theft Capital can offer its own three graphs, as an alternative to the New York Times’s. Together, these make visible the class war we have been living through: a capitalist offensive on workers, waged through the withering of environmental and labor protections, the gutting of publicly funded services, the buying of elected officials, the erosion of the tax burden on corporations and the super-rich, and every attempt to suppress organized labor – all of which is the actual source of the affordability crisis.

 

 

 

 

The first graph, showing how many times greater CEO compensation is compared to workers in the same companies, gives us an instant picture of the scandalous increase in class inequality since the 1970s. As Magdoff and Foster write: “In the 1980s it was considered that an income ratio of 10 or 12 to 1 for CEO compared to the average income in the company seemed ‘about right’ to economists.” Now that ratio is estimated to average 344 to 1. Elon Musk’s $45 billion pay package approved by Tesla stockholders in 2024 represents a 415,000 to 1 CEO-to-worker income ratio. “Capital’s war for a larger piece of the economic pie has been spectacularly successful.”

 

 

 

 

Not only have CEOs wildly increased their compensation, their class has also used its political power to reduce their tax burden, as the second graph, above, illustrates. Their lobbying for tax law changes has resulted in the richest four hundred households now paying lower rates of taxes than those in the poorest half. For the super-wealthy, the fair-taxation principle – that the rich should pay a larger proportion of their income in tax – no longer applies.

 

 

 

 

Finally, the third graph depicts in a single line the long-term story of affordability. "Production and Non-Supervisory Workers" – a category that represents over 80 per cent of all workers – have seen their earnings, as a percentage of GDP, drop from around 30 per cent in the 1960s to around 20 per cent today – a loss of a third. “What is clear beyond dispute is that there has been a massive redistribution – money that would previously have gone to workers is now captured by those who are already affluent,” write Magdoff and Foster. Indeed, if the relative shares of various income levels had remained as they were in the early 1970s, the US working class would have received an estimated $47 trillion of extra income from then to 2018, funds which could have helped pay for food, housing, utilities, healthcare, transportation, connectivity, and education, while staying out of debt.

 

Watch a short video on the book

 

 

Order Now – Use Code MRP45K for 20% off

 

 

This month, people around the world have been on the streets to protest against a system that denies the majority any possibility of living in dignity. In Spain, the attempt to evict an 87-year-old woman from the Madrid apartment where she had lived since 1953 brought tens of thousands to the streets demanding constraints on landlords. In India, many thousands of supporters of the Cockroach Janata Party have marched in protest at rigged education and voting systems. In France, close to a million people, led by high school students, have taken to the streets to oppose cuts to public services; 8,000 people — 89 percent of them children — were  arrested in a little over two weeks.

The immediate causes in each case are varied but there is a common denominator to these upsurges of protest: the recognition that the system has been designed for the benefit of the ruling class, while the rest of us are facing ever worsening conditions – unless we fight back.

As Magdoff and Foster conclude: “One thing is certain: only a great uprising from below … is capable of producing greater worker power to create a much fairer and more equitable society.” We need to begin by constructing “some counterweight to the nearly unlimited power of capital” before “transcending the entire inequitable and destructive system of capitalism.”

Sincerely, Arun Kundnani, Editorial Director
Monthly Review Press

 

 

Ruling Class Corruption and Corporate Media Complicity.

Chris Hedges Report.  “Epstein, the Russian Mob, & Maxwell.”  6-9-26.

Investigative reporter Moe Tkacik’s dive into the Epstein Files exposes the liberal media’s complicity in hiding the money-laundering, Ponzi schemes, and intelligence crimes of the ruling class and federal law enforcement’s disinterest in holding the powerful to account. Read here...

 

 “Marx and Class Struggle – Then and Now,”  March 16, 2026 by Michael Bayly.    (More by Marx and Class Struggle – Then and Now) (Posted Mar 21, 2026).   Ideology, Marxism, Philosophy, SocialismGlobalNewswire.

. . . if you strip away all the Cold War propaganda and the cartoon versions people argue about online, what Marx actually did was pretty simple. He looked at capitalism and asked a question that polite society tries very hard not to ask.

Who is doing the work . . . and who is taking the money?

Marx spent years studying factories, wages, production, and economic crises. What he noticed was something workers had already felt in their bones for generations. The people producing the wealth were not the people controlling it.   Workers built the railroads. Workers mined the coal. Workers ran the machines. Workers produced the goods.   But the profits accumulated somewhere else.

Marx called this exploitation, not as an insult, but as a mechanical description of how the system worked. If a worker produces $200 worth of value in a day but is paid $80 in wages, the remaining value does not disappear. It flows upward to owners, investors, and shareholders. That difference is what Marx called surplus value.

And once you see that dynamic, you start noticing something else Marx talked about constantly: class struggle. Not the cartoon version where people run around waving red flags. The real one. The quiet daily struggle over wages, rent, healthcare, working hours, unions, and who gets to control the wealth society produces.

You can see it today just as clearly as Marx saw it in the 1800s.   Workers told there is no money for healthcare, but there is always money for war. Teachers told budgets are tight while corporations receive tax breaks. Communities told to tighten their belts while billionaires accumulate more wealth than entire countries. . . .

In the early 1900s, members of the Industrial Workers of the World fought a series of free speech battles in Missoula, Montana. At the time, local authorities and business interests were trying to shut down labor organizing by banning public speaking on street corners. Workers responded by deliberately violating the bans. One by one they stood on soapboxes and spoke about wages, exploitation, and labor rights.   Police arrested them by the dozens.   When the jails filled up, more workers arrived.   Some were beaten. Some were thrown in overcrowded cells. But the arrests only drew more attention to the cause, and eventually the city backed down. The workers won the right to speak publicly again.   It was one of the earliest free speech fights in the American West, and it came directly out of the labor movement.   That was class struggle playing out in Montana.

For decades the Anaconda Copper Mining Company had so much control over Montana’s politics that people joked the company owned “everything but the cemeteries.” Newspapers, legislators, and policy often moved in directions that protected corporate power while workers fought for unions, wages, and safer conditions.

Fast forward to today and the pattern still looks familiar. You see it in housing struggles in places like Missoula, Montana where working people face rising rents while housing increasingly becomes an investment vehicle for distant investors. You see it in fights over wages, healthcare, and public services. You see it when politicians promise tax cuts for the wealthy while teachers, nurses, and working families are told there just is not enough money for the things communities need.   Different century. Same conflict.

Marx did not invent those contradictions. He simply pointed at them.   And that is why more than a century after his death people still argue about him. Because Marx taught ordinary people to ask a dangerous question.

Who actually benefits from the way society is organized?

Once people start asking that question, the conversation changes. And that question has been haunting the powerful ever since.

 

“The U.S. Ruling Class and the Trump Regime”

John Bellamy Foster (April 2, 2025)

John Bellamy Foster revisits and critiques the contention that the U.S. capitalist class is not a “governing” class, or indeed a class-conscious bloc in any sense. However, he writes, the fact that the ruling-class oligarchy is now openly wielding power on the national and international stages as part of the Trump regime shows that the overwhelming political influence of the capitalist class is no longer in dispute as this alignment pushes the country deeper into neofascism. | more…    Source

“Marxism & Class” by Helena Sheehan.  Mronline.org (9-22-23). 

The working class makes the world go round. The working class should not be positioned as the most vulnerable in need of help, but as those who labour and deserve a just distribution of the fruits of their labour.
By Helena Sheehan (Posted Sep 21, 2023).  MarxismCommentaryFeatured.

This is the text of a talk at the conference of the Irish Labour History Society on September 17, 2023.

What does Marxism bring to a conference on visions of labour and class?   For me, this is connected to what Marxism brings to everything: context, clarity, coherence, comprehensiveness.

 

“Capitalism is a Giant Scam” by Caitlin A. Johnstone (Posted Sep 21, 2023). (Listen to Johnstone read her article) .      

Originally published: Caitlin A Johnstone Blog on July 17, 2023 (more by Caitlin A Johnstone Blog).   Capitalism, InequalityGlobalNewswire.

… I  could see that these guys and people like them were going to turn consumer ecological responsibility into this trendy elite thing priced way out of range for normal people, and that’s exactly what ended up happening. It wasn’t long before I saw the arrival of eco chic and Whole Foods and Tesla and the rest of this whole new luxury market designed to let rich people feel good about themselves while the world burns and create the illusion that we can profiteer our way out of our problems.

It was just such an in-your-face illustration of the problem. Lectric Soda wasn’t improved in quality, didn’t become harder to make or more difficult to obtain, the supply and demand remained the same; the price was changed because the market would bear it. The hidden hand of the market was not going to magically restore the product to its “correct” value; the value of such products was going to be determined by the narrative manipulations of entrepreneurs, consultants, con-artists, marketeers and ad-men.

“Let the market decide” really means let the manipulators decide, because the markets are dominated by those who excel at manipulating. We’re taught that letting the market decide means letting supply and demand take its natural course, as though we’re talking about ocean tides or seasons or something, but in reality both supply and demand are manipulated constantly with extreme aggression. Manipulating the supply of diamonds. Manipulating the supply of housing. Manipulating the supply of oil. Manipulating people into wanting things they’d never thought to want before through advertising. Manipulating women into feeling bad about their bodies so they’ll buy your beauty products. Manipulating people into paying $2000 for a $20 bag using branding. Manipulating people into buying Listerine by inventing the word “halitosis” and convincing them to be worried about it. Manipulating people into believing Beanie Babies were prized collectors items when they were just standard stuffed toys.

Capitalism gives us a civilization that is dominated by trickery. Those who get to the top are those who succeed in tricking as many people as possible. Tricking them into paying more. Tricking them into buying your product and not someone else’s. Tricking people who actually produce something of value into making you their middle man who gets paid despite producing nothing. Tricking competitors into making the wrong move. Tricking people into asking their doctor about your extremely lucrative pharmaceutical product. Tricking people into buying or selling certain stocks or cryptocurrencies or NFTs. Tricking people by using the legal system and your team of lawyers who understand it better than normal people do. Tricking people into letting you privatize their own drinking water and then selling it back to them in bottles.

It’s a scam competition. Whoever scams the best wins. How can you save the planet from destruction by human behavior when all of human behavior is driven by a bizarre scam competition? And the biggest scam of all is the narrative that this system is totally working and is entirely sustainable. That’s the overarching scam holding all the other scams together. . . .

 

MARK STEVEN.  “The Global Class War in Five Novels.”  CounterPunch (June 2, 2023.)   FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Since class war first appeared in radical thought during the final decades of the eighteenth century, it has continuously evolved through an exchange of ideas between political activity and literary narrative, reframing revolutionary action through military language. My new book, Class War: A Literary History, explores this fusion of politics and literature from the Haitian Revolution through the Black Panthers. But what can be said of class war and its purchase on the literature of revolution right now, in the historical present?

Ours is an era into which the story of class war is conveyed by literature, emerging from the revolutionary past into a moment defined by the death of liberal progress and the proliferation of new crises and new antagonisms. This sense of revolutionary inheritance belongs to any number of contemporary works, but it is exemplified with powerful if cartoonish acuity in Thomas Pynchon’s immense, transhistorical epic, Against the Day, which uses time travellers from the future (our present, circa the book’s publication in 2006) to rhyme today’s struggles with those at the beginning of the American century, culminating in the Colorado Coalfield War, when dynamite-wielding frontier workers faced off against the Robber Barons and their Pinkerton thugs.

But there is something distinctive about the contemporary literature of class war, and how it revisits old conflicts in all their national, regional, and cultural singularity. More so than in in previous moments when heightened militancy met with literary efflorescence – from England in the early nineteenth century through France during the Paris Commune to Russia in the 1920s or China in the 1930s – today’s narratives of class war read their specific conflicts as part of a struggle that is territorially grounded but also internationally expansive. . . .

Holding to a similarly expanded perspective, the following novels all affirm world-spanning solidarities that cut across all geopolitical divides, and which also understand class as a powerful undercurrent adjoined to the differently prominent variables of age, gender, geography, race, and religion. All the while, these novels remain, at their core, beholden to a vision of liberatory combat against the exploiters and the expropriators.

China Miéville, Iron Council

This is the final book in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy, three sprawling dark fantasy novels all set in what the author describes as “an early industrial capitalist world of a fairly grubby, police statey kind!” By the time I arrived at book three, I was already infatuated with the unholy city at the heart of the trilogy, with its arcane geography and its nightmare monstrosities, because Miéville’s language does so much to golem the whole thing into feverish existence, with a vocabulary that feels as overgrown and mutant as the city it describes. But this finale is also uniquely captivating in its dramatization of militancy as enacted and experienced by individual characters and the collectives they become. Across a fantastical geography, here a diverse array of magically augmented anti-heroes stands together against industrial expansion, imperial bloodletting, and an increasingly fascist sense of nationhood. I cannot think of a better, more glorious, more imaginative narrative about the meanings of obligations of class solidarity in times of conflict. You will find yourself cheering along during the great railroad mutiny, which reimagines the Railway Strike of 1877, and will perhaps know genuine heartbreak when a world of revolt suddenly is frozen out of time.

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

Rachel Kushner recontextualizes the belligerence of Italian workers during the infamous Years of Lead. With an intergenerational narrative that moves at the speed of a turbo-charged motorcycle burning across salt flats, The Flamethrowers ranges from the early years of European fascism, through peripheral resource extraction in the jungles of Brazil, into the artworld of 1970s New York, and finally the streets Rome at a time of revolt. Its protagonist – a young woman from Nevada – becomes a prism through which refracts the modern world-system in a moment of transformative upheaval, as well as gendered perspective from which to reemphasize the oppression of working women both in the factory and the home. And in that electrifying moment when protest erupts into riot, when the movement becomes an insurrection, Kushner’s novel highlights the actions of oppressed women, now the agents of revolution: “It was women throwing the firebombs now. Dress shops. A department store. A lingerie boutique. Up the Corso they moved.”

C. A. Davids, How to Be a Revolutionary

How to Be a Revolutionary by C. A. Davids takes its guidebook title from a list of useful skills its protagonist, Beth, might learn from her radical friend, Kay, a charismatic organizer who might teach her “how to kiss a boy” as readily as “how to apply lessons learned from Communist China to South Africa.” Focalized to these interpersonal dynamics, this is an elegiac novel about the challenges of sustaining political commitment against the tides of disillusionment: “After she was gone, nothing could be thought of as normal, if there’d ever been such a thing. The sadness never let up: waited beneath my eyelids, watched when I went to school, when I spoke, breathed on my behalf.” Spending time in Shanghai during the Great Leap Forward, Apartheid-era Cape Town, and the Harlem of Langston Hughes, this novel explores international and intergenerational connections among aging revolutionaries on three continents, all of whom long for a better world than this one but who are all haunted by defeat. Steeped in left melancholia, this is a narrative that finds its way forward via unflinching commitment to an internationalism that demands acts of practical solidarity with comrades both known and unknown, to those who have gone before and those who will come after.

R. F. Kuang, Babel

I teach literature at a university in the southwest of England. The ongoing culture shock of doing this as a working-class immigrant has fuelled in me a critical fascination with the student subculture known as “dark academia,” which seems to be all about the performance of reading old books, wearing cardigans, and leaning into autumnal dreariness (and is, in Amelia Horgan’s characteristically sharp assessment, “a response to marketization, in particular to the temporal stresses of the neoliberal university”). R. F. Kuang’s tremendous alternate history, Babel, is marketed as a work of dark academia, or at least that’s the impression its cover design and publicity signal, but it is so much more than that. It is a forceful, decolonial critique of the institutions of higher education and literary attainment and of all their complicities in reproducing class hierarchy and imperial power. At the same time, it combines that critique with the historical actions of those who fought against such as system, from the Luddites and the Chartists to the dispossessed and enslaved persons on the peripheries of empire, in China and the Caribbean. As the novel thunders toward its almighty, insurrectionary conclusion, the book’s subtitle becomes crucial to knowing what it’s all really about: “Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.”

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

If environmental crises are a profound violence perpetrated against the global poor, a neoliberal holocaust of the dispossessed, then literary fiction is correct to read climate change as class war. In The Ministry for the Future, sci-fi legend Kim Stanley Robinson uses an almost Melvillian sense of capaciousness to explore our collective potential to end capitalist accumulation to save the biosphere. The narrative refers to its diversity in tactics, from legislative reform through sabotage and assassination, as “The War for the Earth,” and that war is framed as emphatically and necessarily international, organically weaving hundreds of local actions into a global tapestry upon which capitalism would cease to remain viable. It is also a war waged by and on behalf of the global underclass. The opening chapter, which is both devastating and catalytic, is a gruesome depiction of a massive heat wave hitting India and killing millions. What follows is a proliferation of both independent and interlocking actions, each with local objectives but also wide-ranging and often symbolic appeal, each geared toward the demolition of capitalist social relations so as to ensure a liveable future for all. When asked if this novel is a work of “combat literature,” which is Frantz Fanon’s term for writing composed under the force of decolonial insurgency, Robinson suggested why such a literature might be necessary, but also why it alone is not enough. “It’s going to be chaotic and confusing,” he says, “and it’s going to last for as long as anyone alive is still alive. We have to get used to it, and fight effectively. Combat literature might help give us ideas or warn us of ramifications, but it’s the actions in the world that will matter – laws, norms, behaviors.”

Mark Steven is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the author of Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (2017) and Splatter Capital (2017). His most recent book is: Class War: a Literary History.

 

“You’re not deficient, you’re just ruled by assholes” by

Caitlin A. Johnstone.      Mronline.org (5-3-23).

Times are hard, and they’re getting harder, but we can turn this thing around. Please be kind with yourself in the meantime.      Originally published: Caitlin A Johnstone Blog on April 30, 2023 (more by Caitlin A Johnstone Blog).

Culture, Health, Ideology, PhilosophyGlobalNewswire

. . . But even more worthwhile than pointing out that a lot of your assumed mental health problems have more to do with being surrounded by assholes is considering the possibility that you are in fact ruled by assholes. By tyrants who are making life needlessly difficult for ordinary people while psychologically abusing them into thinking their situation is normal and appropriate.

A popular socialist YouTuber called Second Thought has a good new video out called “You’re Not Immune To Propaganda” which examines the subject from a different angle than you might be used to. Second Thought emphasises the mundane, everyday nature of propaganda in our society as opposed to the shinier, better-known instances of its use like the consent-manufacturing for the Iraq invasion; the way it manipulates our understanding of who we are and what our values should be so that we will blame our struggles on ourselves instead of the neoliberal systems of oppression that are crushing people’s spirits throughout western civilization. . . .