The most successful propaganda operation in American history was convincing American workers that they were middle class. Not working class. Not employees. Not people whose survival depends on selling their labor to people who own capital. Middle class. The word does enormous work. It places the speaker in the center: not at the bottom, not at the top, but in the reasonable, stable, neither-extreme middle. It produces identification with the system rather than critique of it, because middle-class people are not dispossessed. They are participants. It severs solidarity with the people below, because if you are middle class, you are not working class, and the interests of working-class people are not automatically your interests. And it produces aspiration upward rather than organization horizontally. The middle-class person is always potentially on their way to wealth, never actually on their way to collective power. The word "middle class" dissolved the American labor movement more effectively than the Pinkertons ever did. And people use it about themselves voluntarily. Without any prompting. That is how you know it worked.

Gaza was livestreamed. That sentence should have ended the world as we know it. A genocide, documented in real time, filmed by its victims, uploaded from phones in rubble, available to anyone on Earth with an internet connection, watched by hundreds of millions of people while it was happening. And the governments of the world's self-described democracies continued to supply the weapons. And the platforms continued to suppress the content. And the people continued to scroll. And the weapons continued to arrive. We live in the first era of human history where it is possible to watch, in real time, the killing of a people, to see their faces, to hear their voices, to watch the moment the building falls, and for all that visibility to produce almost nothing. Almost nothing. No Nuremberg. No intervention. Hashtags. Protests that were permitted and then ignored. A ceasefire resolution vetoed. More weapons authorized. If visibility alone could stop power, Gaza would have stopped it. It didn't. Which means we need to stop telling ourselves that awareness is the same as action. That sharing is the same as solidarity. That witnessing, even anguished witnessing, even enraged witnessing, is, by itself, a political act. It is not. The empire has made peace with being watched. It has made peace with your outrage. It factored your outrage into the plan. And then it dropped the bomb anyway.

The media will tell you the Global South is poor because of corruption. Because of poor governance. Because of cultural factors. Because of geography. Because of a tragic cycle of instability that well-meaning international institutions are working tirelessly to address. What the media will mention less: The Democratic Republic of Congo contains an estimated $24 trillion in mineral wealth. Its people have a life expectancy of 62 years. It has been extracted from, colonized, had its democratically elected leader assassinated by a CIA-backed operation in 1961, subjected to proxy wars funded by foreign powers, had its resources removed by multinational corporations operating under agreements signed by governments that did not represent the people living above those resources. For over a century. And the explanation offered is corruption. Local corruption. Not the transnational corporate structures that move money through shell companies in jurisdictions that exist specifically to make money disappear before it can be taxed. Not the arms sales that fund the militias that create the instability that justifies the peacekeeping missions that provide cover for the continued extraction. Local. Corruption. The simplicity of that explanation is not accidental. The simplicity serves a purpose. The purpose is to keep you from following the money. The money goes somewhere. It goes to the same place money from poor countries has always gone.