EDITORIAL
Rising Violence of Capitalism Directed against the Population

Sep 15, 2025

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is being presented in the news media as a tragic event that marks a time of reckoning, a chance to bring the country together. As Utah Governor Spencer Cox said repeatedly in recent days, “This is our moment. Do we escalate or do we find an off-ramp?” All this, in order supposedly to reduce the level of violence.

This is the usual message of unity that politicians push during a period of crisis—which the Democrats readily agreed to. But not Trump. He doubled down on blaming what he calls “the lunatic left,” as one more excuse to increase the repressive violence that he had pushed since Day One of his administration.

As if on cue, the news media, schools and other businesses responded to Trump’s rhetoric by firing a long list of people supposedly for what they said or wrote somewhere. These firings had one aim: to intimidate anyone who dares question how this society is being run.

So, behind all the rhetoric about “unity” and “bringing us together,” big employers and the heads of government agencies have continued to go on the attack, a violent attack. For what else can one call it when the boss takes away the livelihood of a person and their family, just in order to make an example of them?

Today, we are told that all the school shootings, mass murders, political assassinations mark a new period of violence. But horrible violence has always been an integral part of this society. As the revolutionary black militant, H. Rap Brown, said in 1967, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.”

It was true in 1967—and it is even more true today. The entire economic system and society is controlled by a tiny minority, the capitalist class, the billionaires. Everything is run in order to increase their profits and wealth. They extort more work out of fewer workers. They cut jobs. They cut wages and benefits. They increase prices so that workers can’t afford to buy what they make, nor increasingly to put a roof over their heads. They move investment from one region to the other, leaving ruin and waste in their wake, while vast parts of the population have no jobs, and young people have no future.

It takes incredible amounts of violence to impose this on the population. Companies try to break strikes and unions. Cops regularly gun down poor people, poor black people, plenty of poor whites and immigrants, also.

Those who aren’t killed often wind up in prison. More than two million people are in prison in this country at any one time. That’s more than any other country on earth. Almost all are poor, from the working class. And this also means that a big percentage of the working class has some kind of record—which the boss often takes advantage of.

At the same time, this society fosters racism and prejudice of every kind in order to divert workers’ anger and get them to fight each other, feeding racist violence and violence against women.

That’s how violent this society is—in ordinary times. Today, the violence is getting worse. The capitalists grow richer by sucking the society dry, imposing an ever more violent and vile rule over the population.

A society run for the profit of a tiny minority can have no answer other than violence. The answer has to come from the working class. It’s the working class that is in the center of the economy and the entire society. That gives it the means to take the power away from the capitalist class and organize the society in a completely different way. Instead of it being run in the interests of a tiny minority, it will be run in the interests of all humanity.