Our Political Context and Philosophy
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“The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, 1967
We are building a nonviolent Poor People’s Army to keep people alive and to build a cooperative economy and society. This is our mission. We are an organization for present-day conditions, and we are also building an organization that can help for the future. Our Political Context and Philosophy explains the Poor People’s Army’s analysis of the world and how “takeover houses” are a tactic that has fit into our work. In this extended version of our Political Context and Philosophy, we have included discussion questions for readers to explore in community with others. This philosophy has developed over the course of our 30+ year history, based on our practical lived experiences, our organizing, many mistakes, and much study and discussion with countless individuals across the world.
We are a nonviolent organization based in the United States. Our headquarters is in Philadelphia. We are a movement that came out of the welfare rights and anti-poverty movements of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and we were founded and are led by poor people, homeless people, people at the bottom that want the power to control our own destinies. (See also our History in the Introduction.) The Poor People’s Army has organized communities to advocate for themselves on various issues, used mutual aid and resource sharing to keep poor people alive, fought for and helped people to navigate government benefits and systems, and generally focused on helping people get what they need to survive in a very unfair world. Housing takeovers–finding vacant government-owned houses and moving in homeless families–is one tactic to keep people alive. These actions are central to our organization for today’s world. They also challenge people to think of how we could organize a better world.
We are also an organization fighting for humanity’s future. We see capitalism, the latest iteration of class conflict, crumbling before our eyes. We know a new kind of fascism is being planned and implemented by the ruling elite to retain their class rule. We know we need to fight for power to create a cooperative society where everyone can get what they need to survive and thrive.
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We believe economic conditions today will allow a cooperative society to exist within our lifetimes. We live in a world where it is possible for every human being to have the basic necessities of life and live comfortably. We know that the ultra-rich and corporations will not willingly share the wealth and resources the world has to offer. They undemocratically hoard the wealth, the world’s abundant resources, and the incredible productive powers that could allow for all humans to flourish.
We understand that the ultra-rich—a class that rules society, a ruling class—are at war with us daily. Their class uses a variety of means to fight against poor and working people. We are an Army that seeks to unite our class. We identify our class as unemployed, underemployed, working, the so-called “middle class,” and professional class—anyone who does not control the way the system runs. We identify the ultra-rich, with the exception of some class traitors, as the main benefactors and controllers of the current system. The ultra-rich are not people with a couple million dollars; they are fantastically wealthy and control how the economy operates.
There are multiple publicly available resources documenting who the ultra-rich are and how much their wealth has continued to skyrocket while people go hungry. According to the report “Inequality Kills: The unparalleled action needed to combat unprecedented inequality in the wake of COVID 19”, published in 2022 by Oxfam, “The world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion—at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day— during the first two years of a pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million more people forced into poverty.”
This is not a conspiratorial, shadowy group of figures—the names of these men are publicly available. According to Forbes’ 2024 Billionaires List, the 14 richest people in the world have over $100 billion each. These are their names: Bernard Arnault of France, Elon Musk of the United States, Jeff Bezos of the United States, Mark Zuckerberg of the United States, Larry Ellison of the United States, Warren Buffet of the United States, Bill Gates of the United States, Steve Ballmer of the United States, Mukesh Ambani of India, Larry Page of the United States, Sergey Brin of the United States, Michael Bloomberg of the United States, Amancio Ortega of Spain, and Carlos Slim Helú of Mexico.
We call these people and the rest of the ultra-rich the “ruling class” because they effectively control the economy—making decisions about how much food is grown, how housing markets operate, how the healthcare system runs, and more. They own thousands of hospitals, they own the majority of farmland in the country, they are trying to own the water. They help write laws and use their money and power to undermine our so-called democracy. Many of them are politicians themselves. They have bought out and corporatized the media and culture that shapes our perception of what’s possible. They rule over society. The ruling class owns, controls, and uses corporations to do a lot of this work. Some call them capitalists because they control the system of capitalism.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Americans do not own corporations, do not own businesses that can decide how food and medicines are made, how housing is planned, how water is kept clean, or how educational resources are created for our children. Most Americans have to work to survive, run small businesses or side hustles, or other means to get their basic needs met. According to “The State of U.S. Wealth Inequality,” a 2023 report conducted by the U.S. Federal Reserve, these people—the bottom 50%—control less than 3% of the wealth. In fact, the bottom 90% control little more than 30% of the wealth. This system—the ruling class exploiting the working class—is capitalism.
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This capitalist system that keeps people poor or running every moment of their lives has come to a turning point: unprecedented innovation alongside “unprecedented inequality”, as the Oxfam report says. The system is based on competition and creating new innovations. Though it exploits and hurts people, it also races to build up technology and creates marvelous advances in science and industry. If corporations wish to survive, they cannot stop innovating and competing, finding new ways to make money. But in that innovation, they have created new tools that are seeds for a new society. Computers, robots, science, and other technologies are producing more and more things with less and less necessary human labor. It was only around 60 years ago that the first microchips and robot arms were introduced to the production of goods. So much has changed in 60 years, and we can’t begin to comprehend the changes that are coming in the next 60 years. In the beginning, it was physical labor that was assisted and then replaced by machines. In the modern day, intellectual work and specialized work have been added to that list.
These new advances are making all human work precarious—no one can count on their job being there in the future. According to “A future that works: Automation, employment, and productivity,” a 2017 report by McKinsey & Company, 1.1 billion workers across the globe could be replaced with currently existing tools of automation, impacting $15.8 trillion in wages. Even “professional” employment that appeared untouchable by automation and extremely wealth-producing– such as doctors, professors, actors, writers, and lawyers– is becoming precarious through the advance of technology. World class surgeons are now assisting robots doing the actual surgeries, learning devices and online courses are taking over huge sections of educational markets, and the legal world is implementing discovery and brief-drafting software. Actors and writers in Hollywood have gone on strike in an attempt to prevent automation from ruining their careers. Some are hurting now because of labor-replacing technology, some will hurt later. We all have the potential for our labor to be replaced by machines.
To be clear, it’s not the technology itself that is the danger. The fear and danger is us not being able to pay for food, housing, and healthcare. The fear and danger is that we don’t control how technology is used. This is an antagonism that is being created today that cannot be resolved in the current system. We see an unprecedented world of possibility based on the productive capacity in the machines, computers, and automation that humans have built. Things that seemed impossible, like feeding, clothing, and sheltering the entire human population, are now easily possible. Scarcity only plagues us because the people lack power. Not power through Congress, or power through entrepreneurship, or entering corporate boardrooms, but economic power by controlling how we make and distribute all goods and services.
Technology is merely a tool for humans to use. But in today’s unjust society, the ruling class uses these tools against the vast majority of people only for their own benefit. The ultra-rich are using these tools to strip away the utility of human work. In our contemporary world, human work is intrinsically linked to human value. The possibility exists for a society where everyone has the basic necessities of life, where war and famine are prevented, and where problems are collectively solved. Computers, science, and machines can allow for this. We also acknowledge that humans must enact a better harmony with the Earth and mother nature. We can look to lessons of Native peoples who have always centered this relationship. But it can only happen if the people collectively own and control technology.The Poor People’s Army hopes to be a force to unite people around a new vision for taking control of technology, of taking control of the basic necessities of life for all people, of sharing and developing a new system for all people.
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While we understand the allure of “fighting against capitalism,” a system that has hurt so many people and built on genocide, white supremacy, and patriarchy, we want to be clear that capitalism is already dying. We don’t need to proclaim ourselves “anticapitalist” (even as we philosophically may be)—we no longer need to use ideology alone to convince people to create revolutionary change. Capitalism is in the revolutionary process of ending itself by innovating technologies that will render it obsolete. We don’t need people to be ideological revolutionaries. We need people to understand concretely what is occuring in society and the economy. The ruling class sees how capitalism is shifting into something new, a society where human exploitation is not central. The ruling class is thinking of ways to adapt to a society centered around automation, but they are not thinking of it in a way that will benefit all humanity. They are using all their think tanks, military power, and money to brainstorm ways to center the economy around robot labor while retaining political power over 99.9% of the rest of us. The expansion of AI into arts and entertainment in a way that co-opts human labor (and even human likenesses) is a prominent example of this; there are many others.
The only thing worse than being exploited is not being needed. Capitalism requires exploitation of the vast majority of humanity. If society runs primarily on automation instead of human labor, then the ruling class will seek other ways to keep us divided, distracted, numb, isolated, and self-destructive. Ultimately, they may be faced with more extreme solutions to keeping their power. But by displacing more and more human labor, corporations that sell products can’t get their profits if people can’t afford to buy them. The system comes to a grinding halt if people can’t buy stuff.
While the death of capitalism is causing the ruling class to begin to implement fascist controls, this era also creates fertile ground for something new to grow. Whether our new world prioritizes care, focuses on our collective well-being, and keeps power in the hands of the people depends on how effectively we can organize and unite the class of people who now find themselves at the economic margins. This new revolutionary class, growing by the day, will ultimately need to take power in order to survive.
Our Army seeks to keep people alive as we are attacked daily and the standard of living gets harder and harder in this time of major economic transition. As we keep people alive, we engage them in political education to see past divisive ideologies that have pitted them against their neighbors.
As capitalism crumbles further, poor and working people will continue to endure violence at the hands of the police, the courts, prisons, and detention centers. We endure violence from a healthcare system that excludes us, that ignores our mental health, that treats our addictions and sorrows as personal failures instead of systemic ones. We endure violence from social workers and systems put in place to criminalize poverty and punish poor parents by breaking up families, by removing children from their homes, and by imprisoning and punishing poor parents and caregivers. We continue to endure violence from corporations that influence and control laws that make us work ourselves to the bone or starve while they reap higher and higher profits. These same corporations poison our water, air, and soil, creating the conditions for mass extinction and climate catastrophes that impact billions of people across the globe.
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While the world at times seems hopeless for so many people, we look back to systems of oppression in the past that fell under their own weight… systems of brutal slavery and oppression, monarchs that people thought were ordained by God, empires that spanned the globe, and many instances of colonialism. We study the way human society has transformed as a result of new tools and people’s revolutions. In every existing society there are seeds for a future society. Although humans themselves impact great revolutionary change in society and politics, we also understand how tools and technological advancements in the economy always create revolutionary potential.
In the times of kings and queens, serfs and peasants and merchants, revolutions did not start with people deciding kings and queens must be overthrown. It started because some of the common people working as merchants built up better and better tools. The beginning of mechanized tools and industry began a revolution in the economy that would eventually end feudalism and monarchies, because it created an unresolvable antagonism in society at the time. Merchants using these new tools became the first leaders of industry– business or corporate leaders as we think of them today. As they built larger and larger workshops and factories, and began hiring other people to work for them, this new class of business owners was a threat to the power of kings and queens. There could not be two ruling classes, and the growth of industry could not be stopped. So the leaders of industry were forced to fight against the monarchies for “freedom” to continue expanding industry and their power over the still-existing peasant class and emerging working class.
Ideals of freedom, liberty, and democracy were developed around these new economic changes, and social revolutions occurred because of them. People of all kinds rallied around the concepts of liberty and freedom, and the very real brutalities of kings and queens, but most of those revolutions ended feudalism and created capitalism (a new system of exploitation). We are familiar with the phrases “all men are created equal” from the American Revolution and “liberty, equality, fraternity” from the French Revolution, but we know these new governments still repeated systems of exploitation despite the change in structures of power. At the time there was not enough to adequately take care of all people, even in places where so-called socialism/communism was implemented. We admire common people who fought and organized to rise up against oppression. But we also see that technology began the revolution.
We can also learn a lesson from the ways that Western capitalism dramatically expanded its domination internationally after WWII. When advances in technology made the specific locations of factories less restricted as well as increasing profits, rather than sharing that profit with workers, corporations moved their factories and operations from “developed” countries to the Global South in search of cheaper labor. This left millions of workers in the U.S. jobless, while continuing the exploitative legacy of colonialism for the people in the Global South forced into even more inhumane working conditions, and forcing people in the U.S. to take the jobs that came to replace manufacturing, which were largely low-paying service jobs. Booming cities transformed into post-industrial wastelands in a decade or two. During that time, Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color bore the brunt of job losses. Today, we are hurtling towards the edge of a similar cliff, but now white and middle class people who were previously privileged are now destined to join the permanently unemployed. Automation threatens all jobs. According to a June 2023 report by “outplacement” firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas, Inc., layoffs increased by 315% between May of 2022 and 2023, and it’s estimated that 4,000 jobs were replaced in one month by AI.
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The antagonism of today is here: people need work to survive in this system, but more and more work is being done by technology. If people can’t work, they will need another way to get food, clothing, housing, water. As the recursive self-destruction of capitalism expands into more and more sectors, the hope for humanity is that we no longer need to convince people of an ideology to fight the system. They will be forced to fight for their survival across racial lines, across religious lines, across all human differences as the material realities brought on by this moment become more and more evident if they can see this reality that humanity faces.
Doubtlessly ruling class ideologies of white supremacy and patriarchy, etc, will continue to live in the minds of people. But they will be forced to reckon with the reality of being thrown out of the economy in a way that will supersede those divisions. And we as organizers need to work with them to see past the various lenses they’ve been given to what is really going on.
There is more manufactured scarcity than ever, and at the same time there is more and more real abundance than ever. This antagonism could lead to either fascism and total control by today’s ruling class, or a new system where people control the basic necessities of life for ourselves, and decide together how technology can best serve humanity.
While we understand that poor and working people must find a way to unite during the difficult transition that lies in the years ahead, to ultimately get rid of inequality, we know that it will take organizing to build the forces possible of doing this. We need to share this vision, to educate people and empower them. We need to identify the potential of the beautiful world that awaits us. We need to build our class’s identity and consciousness more than anything. We need to meet people where they’re at, and catch people when they’re down. We need to be mindful that people will be most willing to see this potential when they are thrown out of the current system.
One way we can build our side is to increase activities that point out the contradictions and antagonisms in society today. We can’t just “fight back” against isolated disastrous changes, or organize in silos that only take on injustices facing one section of the population, of the new class of people cast aside by our changing world. We have to understand how all oppression and repression is connected. We must focus on collective solutions, on the control of how things are produced and distributed and shared. We can take every opportunity to highlight contradictions and antagonisms by taking back empty houses for homeless people, taking back empty land for communities’ use, by distributing free food instead of forcing people to be exploited in order to get their needs met. We can call out when our government can find billions of dollars instantly for wars but is gridlocked for any meaningful change at home, when it imposes sanctions on regimes abroad and does not recognize the sanctions against poor and working people in the U.S. through denial of benefits and withholding of the basic necessities of life. We can use portions of the system to expose the system: running for office as independent political candidates and challenging the dead-end corporatization of the Democratic and Republican parties. We can use existing organizations and institutions that are willing to look outside the system for change, we can create new organizations and groupings, and we can expose organizations propping up the status quo.
A major tactic and community-building tool we have used is housing takeovers. We take every opportunity to build unity by doing our best to catch people when they are thrown out of the system – when they are outsourced, downsized, or kicked out of their homes or apartments. We do our best to assist people when they can’t get access to decent healthcare or detox on demand, when they are bankrupted by hospital bills or denied treatment by insurance companies. We are there when they can’t reunite with their children, or the state is threatening to take their kids away for simply being poor. These are our people, a new class. And if we can grow the consciousness of this new class, then it will be possible to transform society together. We can break down the false political ideologies of “liberal” and “conservative” used to divide us, and unify the bottom to come for the top.
We must point out false opportunities, misdirection, and dead end roads for our side. We have to expose who the monarchs, slavemasters, and colonists are in this era, and we cannot work with them or their allies.
We ourselves – the bottom, this new revolutionary class, the majority of humans being displaced by automation – are the only hope for humanity. There is a role for all of us.
We hope this book is the first in a series of lessons, tactics, and philosophies that we intend to share to help our class fight to keep ourselves alive today, and to unite for the battles ahead.
We are the leaders that we are looking for. Let’s seize this moment.
Poor People’s Army, Spring 2024
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What do you know about the welfare rights and anti-poverty movement? Where could you go to learn more?
What special experiences do the “organized poor” like PPA have to teach? How can their life experiences and organizing experience benefit larger sections of the population?
What does “ruling class” mean? Who are these people and what are their relations to corporations and local, state, and federal governments?
Who is the richest person you know? How far away is that person from being a billionaire? What does that tell you about the way our society is structured?
What myths have you been taught about who has access to wealth and power? How can we break down conspiracy theories while building our understanding of the unequal distribution of resources in the world?
If science and technology does not ever stop advancing, does it mean that every job could be automated at some point in the future? What are some jobs that used to be done by humans that are now done by machines?
How has technology been used to harm people in your life, neighborhood, or community?
How could technology be used to help people in your life, neighborhood, or community in ways that it isn’t already? What would need to change for that to happen?
How do you hear people around you talk about capitalism today? How has that changed from when you were younger?
What are the opportunities in this moment where capitalism is in crisis? What are the dangers?
What does it mean that we don’t need to convince people of an anticapitalist ideology? How do we ground our organizing and politics in the concrete realities of people’s lives and show them that an economic revolution is already underway?
What examples of historical revolutionary change have you learned about? What caused that change to happen?
How do narratives around societal progress prioritize individual “heroes” over collaborative organizing and community efforts? Where can you go to learn about the ways that progress happened collectively?
What moments in the past feel connected or similar to this moment? What lessons can we learn from those times?
Who and what gives you hope right now? How can you organize around those people and inspirations?
How is the housing takeover movement connected to the bigger movement for a cooperative society?
How can you take the lessons from this philosophy and this book as whole and apply them in your own organizing?