The American Guillotines

This week was the start of the worker’s revolution.

Last Tuesday, a 29-year-old warehouse worker named Chamel Abdulkarim set fire to a 1.2-million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Ontario, California. He filmed himself walking through the building with a lighter, saying, “All you had to do was pay us enough to live.” Six hundred million dollars in damages. No one was injured and he texted a coworker afterward comparing himself to Luigi Mangione.

Between April 7 and April 11, six significant warehouse fires broke out across the United States: California, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Bakersfield.

On April 11, a man set multiple fires inside stores at the Ontario Mills mall (the same city) four days later.

A 20-year-old from Texas threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home, then went to company headquarters. Two days later, two more people were arrested after shots were fired at the same residence. Three separate incidents at one man’s home in three days.

All in one week - a warehouse torched by a worker who filmed his manifesto. An AI CEO’s home firebombed, then shot at by separate people. Six warehouse fires across the country and a mall set on fire.

People are calling Abdulkarim the “warehouse Luigi.” That tells you where our collectively tensions and sentiment are at.

We are so done with the billionaire class and the unequal, brutally unjust system and world. Abdulkarim injured no one but faces up to life in prison. Meanwhile, the average convicted r(a)pist in America serves only 5.4 years. And no one from the Epstein files has faced any consequences besides Ghislaine Maxwell.

When a man who burns inventory - stuff! - gets a longer sentence than those who destroy human beings, that’s not a flaw in the system. That IS the system. Our criminal legal structures don’t exist to protect us. They exist to protect businesses, assets and capital. They always have.

There is an African proverb that says, “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

The village is being burned down.

This is what every early breaking point in history looks like; a series of seemingly unrelated acts of desperation that share the same root cause. The warehouse worker and the man at Altman’s door have nothing in common except the conviction that the normal channels of justice and equality are not available to them.

They’re not just unavailable to them. The systems that are supposed to absorb our grievances - labor protections, political representation, courts, etc - are failing us all. And when people feel unseen and unheard by the people and institutions that are supposed to serve us, we destroy things. We burn it all down.

To be clear, this is not me endorsing it. It’s me naming the pattern.

If you think about it, the Mangione comparison makes sense. He’s a folk hero not because people support murder, but because the system he attacked made itself so hated and so allergic to reform that violence against it felt logical.

The warehouse fires are attacks on capitalism. The Molotov cocktail at Altman’s door is an attack on tech at the altar of capitalism. These are America’s guillotines.

The guillotines themselves weren’t the revolution. They were a symbol that the social contract was so broken that the people who broke it would no longer be protected by it. By the time the blades fell, the aristocracy had already lost.

Same thing is happening here.

The power hungry ruling class in the US are making the same miscalculation the French aristocracy made. They believe their wealth makes them untouchable, and they confuse our sleepy compliance with consent. But they shouldn’t be surprised when the people they’re squeezing refuse to play by the same rules anymore when the rules only ever protected the ruling class.

The difference between 1789 and now is that there’s no organized movement directing our rage. Instead it’s individual acts of destruction by people who’ve decided they have nothing left to lose. Which in a lot of ways is more dangerous than an organized revolution, because there’s no one to negotiate with, no demands to meet.

So it would be wise for the political class to stop doing what Marie Antoinette’s court did by pretending it wasn’t happening, or calling it criminality, or doubling down on the conditions that are causing the rupture.

Whether this becomes something organized or stays chaotic and destructive depends on things that haven’t happened yet. The power hungry ruling class can put a stop to this destruction if they place the needs of the people over their need to consume and dominate.

But make no mistake: what is happening, right now, this week, is the start of a revolution. And while I don’t condone violence, I do support the revolution.

Long live the revolution.