“All you had to do was pay us enough to live.”
The young man’s voice in the video is earnest and clear, forceful but controlled. His face is not visible, but his hand is shaking a little as he holds a lighter. “There goes your inventory.” More than $600 million worth of damages later, a Kimberly-Clark warehouse lay in a smoking mess, and the young man alleged to be in the video — Chamel Abdulkarim, who worked for a distribution company servicing the warehouse — was charged with arson.
Mr. Abdulkarim has pleaded not guilty; his possible motivations will soon be litigated in court. But even as they are, the early April torching of the warehouse in Ontario, Calif., seems to capture a political mood. That same week, someone lobbed a Molotov cocktail at the mansion of the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. In June, prosecutors revealed that their case against the man charged with setting the blaze that grew into the deadly Palisades fire in California hinged on the argument that he was motivated by class rage. (The jury, which could not reach a verdict, was less convinced.)
Hanging over all these attacks was the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O., Brian Thompson, in broad daylight on a Manhattan street in December 2024, a crime that Luigi Mangione admitted to earlier this month. The manhunt for Mr. Mangione, and the ensuing coverage of his arrest and trial, helped cement an image of him as an avenger of all those wronged by private health insurance. But Mr. Mangione’s celebrity has spurred fear: Companies are spending more on security for their top executives. This year, a law enforcement intelligence hub put out a bulletin, as reported by The Intercept, stating that the rich are facing a “heightened threat environment” as more people blame them for economic duress: “Public discourse increasingly attributes the challenges faced by the middle and lower classes to the actions and influence of wealthy corporate executives.”
Class inequality has surged into the view of American politics in recent years, but this isn’t the first bout of class violence this country has seen. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when 12-hour working days were common and child labor legal and federal minimum wages nonexistent, neither political party offered meaningful relief, pressing the working class to the wall. Violence — sabotage, dynamite, assassinations — ensued.
But there’s a key difference. In that earlier era, the anarchists and trade unionists who committed acts of violence did so, however rashly, in the hopes of affecting change. What is more, there were labor organizations and political movements committed to bringing about better conditions for working-class people. In time, they achieved at least some of these goals.
Today’s class violence lacks logic; it seems only animated by revenge, resentment and despair. There is no conspiracy or political mobilization. The people committing these acts are acting alone. The very fact of their isolation hints at a society that is beginning to abandon the hope of transformation.
While the extreme concentration of wealth today may echo the dawn of industrial capitalism, the conditions of class confrontation then were profoundly different. Then, the workplace itself was extremely dangerous: Thousands of workers died in industrial accidents annually in the early decades of the 20th century. The police and National Guardsmen came in to break strikes, while companies hired private militias to prevent workers from organizing.
Radical workers responded with violence of their own, instilling great fear among the elites of the day. In the coal fields of Western Pennsylvania, Irish miners killed at least 14 mine officials over the course of the 1860s and 1870s. When the Western Federation of Miners sought to organize in 1899, union supporters used dynamite to destroy company property. The governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, imprisoned about a thousand workers in response. In 1905, after leaving office, a bomb killed him at his home. Union leader William Haywood was among those charged (a member of the miners’ union had confessed to the crime and implicated union leadership; a jury found Haywood not guilty). President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901 by an anarchist who had lost his job during an economic crash. Two union members dynamited the offices of The Los Angeles Times, widely seen as hostile to organized labor, in 1910.
There’s one attack among this history of violence that feels eerily familiar to what we see today: an assassination attempt against Henry Clay Frick, the general manager of the Homestead, Pa., steel mill of Carnegie Steel, during the Homestead Strike of 1892. When it looked as if Mr. Frick, who was acting for Andrew Carnegie, was seeking to replace the factory workers with hired strikebreakers, the entire town of Homestead rose up in revolt.
The Homestead workers were winning in the court of public opinion until Alexander Berkman, a young anarchist, broke into Mr. Frick’s office, shot him with a revolver, then stabbed him twice. Mr. Frick survived; Mr. Berkman was arrested. The union leadership passed a resolution condemning the assassination attempt, but the press, the politicians and many in the public blamed the union for the act of violence, even though Mr. Berkman had acted by himself. The strike fell apart not long after.
On the surface, Mr. Berkman’s act might resemble that of Mr. Mangione. He was a young man seeking to carry out an assassination to protest the extreme economic inequality and injustice of the time. His attack was a frightening demonstration that all people are frail when confronted by lethal force, no matter how much wealth they might control or how many private guards they might amass.
But the differences are far more profound. Mr. Berkman attempted to assassinate Mr. Frick after an entire community had mobilized to defend ideals of economic security, equality, democracy and freedom. He was not part of the union, but his act of violence was to him apparently part of a larger call to arms. Mr. Berkman was convicted and served 14 years in prison.
Mr. Mangione, by comparison, is believed to have acted alone, writing his “manifesto” without talking to comrades or friends. He had not previously been involved in political efforts to change the American insurance system. He has entered a guilty plea to federal stalking charges resulting in death, without offering an extensive political defense (he still faces murder charges in a New York State case); at one point, his lawyers had considered arguing that he suffered an “extreme emotional disturbance.” While he seems disconnected from any political mobilization, his act of violence has prompted a political response: the interpretation, which seems to be shared by many in the economic elite, that he was driven not by mental distress, but by the class divide.
Mr. Berkman’s assassination attempt very likely awakened fear and guilt in Andrew Carnegie. He had been in Europe during the Homestead Strike, and he found it deeply upsetting: “Never employ one of these rioters,” he wrote Mr. Frick. But even before Homestead, Carnegie had become persuaded that the extreme concentration of wealth would inevitably breed “social distrust.” As he put it in an 1889 essay: “Each Caste is without sympathy with the other, and ready to credit anything disparaging in regard to it.”
Carnegie believed that the answer to class rage was for the rich to invest their money in philanthropic projects so that the poor would become convinced that they were benevolent at heart, able to steward the resources of society. As he put it, “Even the poorest can be made to see … that great sums gathered by some of their fellow citizens and spent for public purposes … are more valuable to them than if scattered among them through the course of many years in trifling amounts.” In other words, libraries, concert halls and universities over higher wages.
Whether Carnegie’s efforts were successful at ameliorating the anger of working-class people is doubtful. What is striking in Carnegie is not so much the sense of social obligation as his recognition that the perceptions of poor people might matter for his own comfort and the stability of his society. That acknowledgment seems lacking today.
Instead, fear is causing the wealthy to invest in literal fortifications. Luxury home builders are incorporating a vast array of new security features into the mansions they construct, from safe rooms to retina scanners to guard towers and moats. Island communities like Indian Creek Island in Miami, also known as “Billionaire Bunker,” reportedly draw ultrawealthy residents like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos with the benefit of being effectively closed to the public. With one guarded bridge as the only way in or out, the island takes the idea of a gated community to a new level. There are Land Rovers remodeled for the frightened rich, augmented with pepper-spray guns, and dog breeders who specialize in canines designed to attack intruders.
But it is hard to imagine these measures doing anything other than making the paranoia of the wealthy worse. If anything, they create visual reminders of a deeply fragmented and divided society, physical testimony to the barriers that separate the haves and have-nots. Like the infamous “Wall of Shame” built in 1980s Lima, Peru, which separated a privileged gated community from an impoverished neighborhood, they are efforts to create security that wind up making fear manifest.
American class relations continued to be fiercely violent after World War I, as companies and the government worked together to break the labor movement. Hundreds of immigrant radicals faced deportation following a series of bombings, as the historian Beverly Gage has written, including one at the home of the United States attorney, general, A. Mitchell Palmer.
The class violence of the late 19th and early 20th centuries continued during the 1920s, in the mine wars of West Virginia, and the 1930s, when many corporations stockpiled gas equipment and guns to resist rebellion. Company security forces fired on unemployed workers at the Ford Motor Company in 1932 who were participating in a “hunger march.” Police officers killed strikers on the San Francisco waterfront in 1934, sparking a general strike. In Chicago three years later, police officers shot and killed 10 pro-labor marchers in what came to be called the Memorial Day Massacre. Only days before, Ford security guards savagely beat up United Automobile Workers union leaders, including the union president, Walter Reuther, on camera — images that were carried in newspapers throughout the country.
But the growth of the labor movement over these years opened up new possibilities. The creation of independent institutions, like unions and consumer cooperatives, gave workers a say over their basic conditions on the job, to grant them more autonomy and more freedom. Such “countervailing powers,” to quote the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, also mitigated the total power of employers and the wealthy. Henry Ford fought unions at his company bitterly, but when workers finally were able to vote on the question in a federally supervised election in 1941, 97 percent voted to unionize.
After World War II, regular increases in the minimum wage, the expansion of health insurance and pensions, tax policies that reduced extreme inequality and public investment in higher education all added up to an economy more responsive to the needs of working-class people. The political circumstances of these measures are distinct, but they generally grew out of the political organizing that had helped support the New Deal of the 1930s. They came to be with the help of New Deal Democrats who were responsive to the labor movement, which not only represented workers on the job, but brought their interests into political life.
In short, the distance between the wealthy and the underclass became smaller, and the virulence between the classes did, too.
In the past 50 years, however, political leaders have vilified government programs, tried to break public sector strikes, starved the welfare state of funds and transformed the tax system so that it has tilted to favor the wealthy. Organizing a labor union has become far more difficult and a first contract much harder to win. We’ve seen precisely the hardening of the “castes” that Carnegie warned of long ago.
Societies in which there is an extreme division between the wealthiest and the rest tend to be politically unstable ones as well. They provide fertile ground for conspiracy theories to flourish, as people grapple with why they are struggling and why the mechanisms of democracy do not seem to respond to their needs. Inequality makes it virtually impossible to sustain the feeling that we’re all part of the same political project, and so it makes it hard for people to believe that democratic government is possible — that we all have a common stake in society. Small numbers of people with great fortunes come to exercise disproportionate political power.
But highly unequal societies also become ones in which the very rich fear the rest of the world they live in. They cannot help but view the Uber drivers, the subcontracted warehouse employees and the people whose livelihoods are displaced by their technologies with suspicion.
They are not wrong to fear the anger of those dispossessed groups, and the dispossessed are not wrong to be angry. But what matters is how this class anger is expressed, whether it leads to nihilism or solidarity, to isolated rage or collective action. By so profoundly weakening many of the institutions that once nurtured collective action — labor unions, political organizations, protest groups — our society has made itself one in which people torch warehouses. What we need is a more viable path to a better world, or at least a more equal one.
Kim Phillips-Fein is the author of “Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians and the Long Fight Against Equality in America.”
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