If you live in the US, or possibly even other "first world" countries, you might have noticed that the media and the actors in it, politicians and news anchors and talk shows and guests of them sort of go crazy whenever someone mentions "class war".
The funny thing is that our entire society seems to be centered around how much money you have. Of course our current society uses money to "pay" for everything, and people do have to be paid for their time, but there's almost an obsession with ensuring that people pay for everything directly and in a timely manner.
It doesn't even really make sense in many cases. If someone is hospitalized they can't very well work to pay off a massive medical bill. You have to get them better. So our society has created this system where you pay in a massive amount of your income into a private corporation's coffers, then when you get sick or have an accident or something, they figure out any excuse they can come up with to not pay, to ensure their coffers remain full and they can keep getting massive bonuses, including making you pay a massive fee for the right to even use the insurance that you have been paying into.
There are a lot of things like this in our society. Like how we have set it up so that kids have to attend school for the majority of their life, until they are 18, then they have to pay to get an extra amount of schooling to prepare them for a specific job, or risk forever being kept from ever getting a good job. Of course, when you're 18 and have never had a job because you've been forced to attend school all your life, you don't exactly have a ton of money to pay for college. There's this idea that your parents were supposed to save up enough money for you to be able to go to college, but that's not exactly fitting with the reality of the world anymore, since most people are actually living from paycheck to paycheck and probably couldn't afford to pay for college outright, even if they weren't. So of course they get loans, which they then have to pay for out of their income for years after that.
The idea that you have to set aside money to pay for things isn't that bad. You know, unless you're poor and barely making it as it is. Then the idea that you have to split off a piece of your moldy bread to give to a rich guy who will just sell it to another starving person is just fucking asinine. And I don't care if you have a problem with my analogy.
See, the weird thing is that there are a lot of things in modern society that everyone sort of needs. We all need food. We all need a place to sleep. We all need help sometimes. We all eventually need medical help. But our current society is like, "If you don't have money right now to pay me, then fuck you. I'll possibly give you a loan, but it's only so that I can fuck you again and again over time." The poor people are of course the most needing of loans to survive and live life, so they end up paying the largest percentage of their income to interest and such, such as on credit cards, or student loans.
But for some reason whenever someone talks about changing the system, people cry socialism and communism.
But the system is fucked up.
When you start thinking about and listing out all the ways that poor people are disadvantaged, is starts to become very clear that they are in a seriously bad way.
Our entire society is based on how much money you have and make. How much you pay in interest and on credit cards is based on how much income you make, meaning that the poor pay the most when they have to get a loan, which they probably need, not just to buy some fancy shoes at the mall or whatever, but to actually fucking survive. But it's not just loans. There are fines all over the place for doing all sorts of things. You cheat on your taxes because you just can't afford to pay them, that's a fine. You speed or forget to wear your seat belt, that's a fine.
Hell, if you're poor, you probably can barely even afford to own a car with not just the original cost, but insurance, upkeep, repairs, occasional new tires, etc. And you kinda need a car to even go to work in America, because many places have piss poor public transport.
But a lot more than just fines negatively effect the poor when it comes to the "justice" system. If anyone does anything to you, or you get arrested for whatever reason, you need a lawyer, which costs money. If you get arrested for something, they'll provide you with a really shitty lawyer that will try to convince you to plead guilty, even if you maintain that you are innocent, ensuring that many poor people just go straight to jail without passing go or collecting $200. But, when you're arrested, if you can't afford bail, you'll actually be stuck in jail, even if you're innocent, just waiting for a judge to have time to review your case.
Of course, you don't have to commit a crime to need a lawyer. Companies fuck people over all the time, usually for small amounts that it's not even worth suing for, if you even have enough to afford a lawyer. But, if someone does cause injury to you, or costs you money or something, you have to have money to sue them, or have someone who has money finance the lawsuit, or have the lawyer take pity on you, and take the case for free, in exchange for a lot larger of a percentage of any possible reward from the case.
I can't even believe that I live in a country where you have to have money to seek recourse for someone screwing you over. That should be something that the state provides for you. You should go to the courthouse or somewhere, file some sort of paperwork, then a lawyer should review your case, talk to you, possibly find you a different lawyer, and then you should move forward in the system.
But of course, it's plenty fucked up that people often wind up stuck in jail because they're poor because of how the system works. Plus there's massive systemic racism and classism that ensures poor people of various colors end up in jail for various charges, such as drugs, or living while black, then depending on how poor they are, they get stuck there for weeks or even months while the system determines whether or not they are guilty. That's just fucked up. In essence, they are being jailed for being poor, because they have been accused of committing some other crime.
Maybe you don't "believe" that driving or walking while black is a real thing...but statistics show that they get arrested more...and convicted more...get harsher sentences, etc. There is a systemic problem. Of course, part of it might actually be classism, and statistics is just making it seem like there's a bit more racism than there is, because cops patrol poor neighborhoods more, and black people are kept poor by society because of separate and unequal schools that are segregated by default due to the makeup of neighborhoods. Then those same people end up with shitty public defenders that try to convince them to plead guilty, and judges that want to be tough on crime, when they should be soft on humans, because humans make mistakes in life.
But our entire jail system is fucked anyway. It's fucking stupid. We waste a ton of money building massive buildings to keep people in concrete boxes as a deterrent, feeding them horrible food, at the same time and cutting the budget for rehabilitation, ensuring they just wind up back in there. They've often just been called criminal training facilities, because you just get shoved in a torture building with other criminals. They don't work, making the expensive even more stupid. We have more people in jail than any other country in the world. Why can't we look at other countries where their crime and punishment systems actually work and reform ours?
We can have publicly run police forces that end up arresting more poor people than anyone else, which results in these massive jails full of poor people that are a huge drain on the economy, while also making them work for pennies for companies just to buy candy bars, and yet we can't just manage a fund to pay for the healthcare of the poorest, or their education, to ensure they get jobs and stop being poor. It's not communism or socialism, unless we want it to be. It's not like we're going to steal the property of corporations to make healthcare. In fact, there are likely quite a number of things that we could farm out to corporations, if we so chose, if we did want to ensure that common things that everyone needs were provided for the poorest among us.
But it seems that's not what we want.
We have built this society for the poor to stay poor. It costs money to make money in this world. It costs a fuckton of money, ensuring that the richest stay rich, and the poorest stay poor, and potentially in some form of jail or slum.
It's not a "class war", it's a systematic enslavement of those unlucky enough to be the lowest classes of society...and kinda the "middle class" too, because even those that think they're doing pretty well these days probably spend a good portion of their lives working some job that makes them miserable, and unhealthy, and possibly bankrupts them when they eventually need to seek medical care.
Possibly the most obvious warlike action by the rich upon the poor is the massive campaign of propaganda ensuring that the poor spend all of their money on shit they don't need. Yeah, I meed advertising. Maybe you don't realize how fucking horrible it is that we are all inundated with advertisements constantly trying to convince us that we need the latest medication, shoes, car, and whatever the fuck else they want us to pay for that we probably don't actually need.
By Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1077169
Execution reportedly at Verdun at the time of the mutinies. The original French text accompanying this photograph notes however that the uniforms are those of 1914/15 and that the execution may be that of a spy at the beginning of the war
No one's gonna get off so easy in this "war". They'd rather strap you down with debt and have you work for your entire life until you die a pauper, alone and afraid.
Keep working, stop paying.