The Revolution is Already Here
by Joanna Kenty & Poor People’s Army
If you know about the Kensington area of Philadelphia, maybe it’s from Dr. Oz’s 2022 Senate campaign ad, where he used our heroin-riddled streets as the backdrop for a campaign ad. That’s certainly how our new Democratic mayor, Cherelle Parker, thinks of Kensington: a mess to be cleaned up by police sweeps. Just make all those addicts disappear.
For those of us who live in Kensington, we see a different story. We see a backdrop of huge brick warehouses, all empty, a hundred years past their glory. Once, they were the home of a thriving textile industry. If you quit a job in the morning, you could have a new one in the afternoon.
It wasn’t all good: Kensington’s textile mills are where Mother Jones first began to organize against child labor in 1903, gathering a group of children missing fingers or limbs from work in the factories:
I held the little ones of the mills high up above the heads of the crowd and pointed to their puny arms and legs and hollow chests. They were light to lift.
I called upon the millionaire manufacturers to cease their moral murders, and I cried to the officials in the open windows opposite, "Some day the workers will take possession of your city hall, and when we do, no child will be sacrificed on the altar of profit."
The officials quickly closed the windows, as they had closed their eyes and hearts. (Autobiography of Mother Jones)
Then she and the children marched from Kensington all the way to Long Island, NY to confront President Theodore Roosevelt at his summer home. He refused to see them.
More than a hundred years later, politicians are still closing their eyes and hearts to Kensington. The factories and mills are all long empty and silent.
There are no jobs for anyone in Kensington. As “urban renewal” and gentrification and impossibly high housing prices push Philadelphians out of other parts of the city, many of them end up here.
Many of us used to have good jobs in manufacturing. We lost those jobs to robots. We got new ones– cashiers, customer service, retail associates– and then lost those too. Automation is an economic revolution, and it’s already here. It is changing the shape of our society. We used to be able to sell our labor by working at data entry, driving vehicles, making parts and materials, typing, filing, making music or graphics–lots of things that can now be done (or will soon be done) by robots or by exploited data workers.
We see campaign ads from both Democrats and Republicans, bragging about how they’re bringing us low unemployment rates and middle class prosperity, in return for campaign donations that could feed and house us instead. Whatever America they’re describing, it’s not the one we live in. Once, being employed in a “good job” meant working full time for a pension, benefits, and a salary that could get you a decent home and feed your children. There aren’t many jobs like that anymore. Even jobs that require a lot of education–professor, nurse, teacher, coder, journalist–mostly don’t come with a decent salary or benefits anymore.
Article 23 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights states:
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work, and to protection against unemployment.
Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself [sic] and his [sic] family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
But our right to work is meaningless if there is no work to do, so it’s time to think about “other means of social protection” to protect our human right to “an existence worthy of human dignity.”
We are forming a Poor People’s Army as a way for us to protect each other. Money and a job can’t buy you safety; we keep each other safe. When one of us needs a place to sleep or food to eat, another one of us steps up.
These are projects of survival, and we are surviving. But we know that this is a temporary solution. Every day, more and more people lose work and join a new class: a class of permanently unemployable people who have been cut out of our cruel capitalist system of selling labor in order to buy the means of survival. If we can’t sell our labor anymore, how can we survive?
If we cannot make money to buy the means of survival, then the means of survival must be distributed without money.
There is enough food in this country to feed us all. There are enough housing units in this country to shelter us all. The only thing keeping us hungry and unhoused is the capitalist system that demands that these resources must be sold for a profit. When housing, healthcare, education, and food are sold for a profit, poor people die.
Every year, more people join this “new class.” Misery is spreading far beyond Kensington. We’re frogs slowly being boiled alive in a pot of water, and we need to recognize that the pot is already boiling and join together to do something about it. Nonprofits and the welfare system are just throwing an ice cube into the pot every once in a while, doing nothing to stop the pot from boiling. Fascist militarized police are trying to close the lid on the pot, as if that will fix anything.
The Poor People’s Army is working to build a movement to transform our society into one where the means of survival are distributed to all of us without anyone trying to make a profit. This summer, we’re gathering at the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention to tell both political parties that we are here, that it is our human right to survive, and that we are not going to tolerate being boiled alive. In between the two Conventions, we’ll march 100 miles from Milwaukee to Chicago, bringing our vision of a better world to American communities and building a movement for change. To join us, visit poorpeoplesarmy.org.
