The fire that devoured 1.2 million square feet of paper products in the Ontario, California Kimberly-Clark warehouse was lit by capitalism. Figuratively of course. Non-figuratively, it was (allegedly) lit by 29-year-old warehouse employee Chamel Abdulkarim, who posted a video of a man holding up a lighter to pallets of toilet paper on his private Facebook page. Over this cathartic footage, he says “all you had to do was pay us enough to live”, and “there goes your inventory!”. In a call to his co-worker and friend, he explained “they had it coming… fucking eight hours, six days… stuck paying rent on a bullshit ass apartment that I can’t afford to fucking live… pedophiles out here fucking children, profiting off… fucking wars”.⁽¹⁾

No wonder the videos went viral. This incident has struck a chord in many who only feel bitterness when they think about going into work. The arsonist has already likened himself to Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, whose name has become a byword for unorganised working class anger.

Kimberly-Clark is one of the major American monopolies of paper-based consumer goods, second only to its far larger rival Proctor & Gamble. Its major brands include Kleenex, Kotex, Cottonelle, Andrex, Huggies, Depends, and KimWipes. Despite an annual revenue of over $20 billion, workers like Abdulkarim – outsourced to distribution company NFI Industries – are paid an average of around $18 an hour (£13.38).⁽²⁾ The average rent in Ontario, CA is just under $2,500:⁽³⁾ in other words, 137 of these hours, 79% of a month's work without overtime. Unsurprising, many are working long hours – and the bosses try everything possible to avoid paying them for it. National Freight Inc., which advertises itself as the sixth largest dedicated carrier and fourth largest warehouse provider by gross revenue in the US,⁽⁴⁾ keeps up the industry reputation of exploitation and drudgery we all know warehouse work for. It was forced in 2016 to pay $1,072,061 in unpaid overtime to 357 driver dispatchers and trailer yard spotters whom it had classified as exempt from the overtime law.⁽⁵⁾ This didn't stop its subsidiary California Cartage Company LLC (CalCartage) being convicted of wage theft just two years later, for which it was forced to pay $3,573,074 to 1,416 employees at its federal drayage contract in the Port of Los Angeles.⁽⁶⁾

We sympathise with all those who are fed up with this wage slavery. But such individual acts of revenge will not change the fundamental reality we live under. The loss of one billionaire or warehouse is effortlessly absorbed by the giant stinking pool of capital, while the workers who are now free from the Ontario Kimberly-Clark Distribution Centre will have to go find another workplace to shackle themselves to. To really change our lot, we need to get organised as workers. Both in the workplace and in a political sense, putting forward our own alternative. As well as taking action together, we need to seriously politically reflect on where we are, the cause of our problems, and the solution. Inevitably, that means developing a collective understanding of what the capitalist system is and how to end it.

This is what Abdulkarim could've used. Thought pieces, left and right, whether they think it’s an indictment or a compliment, have called him an ‘anti-capitalist’. If only. Abdulkarim was rightly pissed at the system, but sadly unable to see the alternative. Bosses "pay[ing] us more of the value WE bring"⁽⁷⁾ will not change our fundamental situation either. And anyway, as the crisis drives them to intensify our exploitation higher and higher, we can expect even further attacks on our conditions – all the more reason for workers to ask ourselves how to not only defend our immediate interests but to get rid of this system which lives off our exploitation.

Fighting not as individuals, but as a class, we have the power to destroy the very social relations that necessitate wage-labour, not just the workplace where those relations are most directly imposed on us. The basis of this system is the ownership of the means of production by capital (whether in private or state hands), while we own nothing and are forced to survive by selling our own labour. However, because we do all the labour of the world, together – far beyond an individual with a lighter – we also have the power to stop it dead. This power shows itself every time we go on strike.

In a society without workers or bosses, warehouses (and apartment blocks, technological innovations, etc.) could be repurposed for our own ends, the needs of humanity, not profit. The means of production would belong to the whole community, and everyone would be entitled to the fulfillment of their needs. ‘Work’, then, would no longer mean being forced to work – in increasingly unbearable conditions – to have the surplus value you produce extracted by your employers in exchange for a wage to barely scrape by on; but doing what we want to do for the benefit of all.

There would be no profit motive to drive down our conditions – in fact, instead of the irrational mess we find ourselves in now, improving our conditions would be the whole basis of society. We could massively reduce the amount of shit work that needs doing through automation (and getting rid of genuinely useless production). Under capitalism, this just means unemployment, as the bosses can produce the same amount of commodities while paying for less wage-labour. In a true communistic society (which, let’s remember, has nothing in common with the state capitalism of the former Eastern Bloc) it would free up time for other things. We could end the division of labour, which forces most of us to either waste our time doing inane repetitive jobs for hours on end or sitting idle due to lack of jobs, and instead pursue the whole variety of labour we find enjoyable, fulfilling, and beneficial. To workers fed up of the weight of the chains of capital, we say: communism means the self-liberation of the working class!

The bourgeoisie’s sympathies, on the other hand, are with the poor monopolists, who are mourning the loss of $200-600 million of precious value in the arson (about 1-3% of their annual revenue). This is the number all the bourgeois press outlets have focused on, not $18. Never mind that all of this property is probably insured anyway. Let’s listen to their legal spokesperson, Bill Essayli, first assistant US attorney for the Central District of California, at a press conference on the incident:

Look, America is founded on free enterprise and capitalism. Anyone who attacks our values, our way of life, our system, which provides the best goods and services to the most people, we're gonna come after aggressively.⁽⁸⁾

Essayli’s other claim to fame is declaring, in response to the public murder of intensive care nurse Alex Pretti by federal police: ‘if you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you’.⁽⁹⁾ If this makes you think the bourgeoisie doesn't care about working class lives, don't worry: Essayli drew criticism from other representatives of the bourgeoisie, most of all from the Gun Owners of America, who ‘condemn’ his words as ‘untowards’ (gasp!). Instead they offer the good old traditional American press release euphemising the murder as a ‘loss of life’ (Pretti must have caught spontaneous ten-bullets-in-head syndrome) and blaming ‘the Left’ for ‘antagonizing immigration and border patrol agents who… play a crucial role in protecting communities and upholding the rule of law’.⁽¹⁰⁾

So, it’s clear what these ‘values’, ‘way of life’, ‘our system’, and ‘rule of law’ are: the protection, through colossal and often arbitrary violence, of property and profits squeezed out of millions by forcing them into a life of shit work for shit pay. And it’s clear who, to the bosses, those who ‘attack our values’ are, who they threaten to ‘come after aggressively’: ordinary working class people who dare to protest these conditions they are being subjected to.

In fact, the penalty Pretti received for peacefully protesting in Minnesota – summary execution – is heavier than the sentence Abdulkarim or Magione will receive, no matter how many more-or-less-dubious federal and state charges the prosecutors are rabidly throwing at them. It is collective working-class action, rather than individual acts of revenge, that truly terrifies the bourgeoisie. Limited as the protests in Minnesota were – where the Democrats and co have succeeded in roping protesters in within the system with liberal, reformist demands⁽¹¹⁾ – such episodes of collective unrest have the potential to allow us to recognise ourselves as a class and develop into something bigger.

The bourgeoisie have some cheek to pearl-clutch about the Kimberly-Clark warehouse fire when they have far more of a record of causing fires. Isn’t this the same state where the sky literally turned red last year as 525,223 acres burned in wildfires, majorly exacerbated above natural levels by global warming?⁽¹²⁾ Isn't this the same country where, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, roughly 100 people are killed in workplace fires and explosions per year? (This is actually a small part of capitalism’s death toll in the American workplace: in 2024, 687 were killed by exposure to harmful substances and environments, and 1,937 were killed by the biggest killer, transportation incidents. And, of course, the statistics are even worse in the Global South).⁽¹³⁾

This is nothing special about America. We should remember the sentimentality the bourgeoisie showed when Grenfell Tower burned down in 2017, killing 72, injuring as many, and leaving hundreds homeless. In the richest borough of London, this block of council flats was left with substandard fire protections – including the eventually lethal flammable cladding that was chosen for being ever-so-slightly cheaper – despite the active protest of its residents for years.⁽¹⁴⁾ Despite the government’s heroic efforts to portray this as some unpredictable disaster and shift blame by holding an inquiry, the so-called ‘UK cladding crisis’, caused by austerity, deregulation, and the profit motive, is still ongoing almost a decade later. Today all you have to do to remind British workers of the indifference capitalism has for them is say the word ‘Grenfell’.

We should also count the African miners who die in fire-cave-ins,⁽¹⁵⁾ or the hundreds of Bangladeshi workers who die in factory and slum fires every year,⁽¹⁶⁾ or the 146 garment workers who were unable to escape from the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York because the doors were locked to prevent them from taking unauthorised breaks. Nor should we forget the literally hundreds of thousands of workers who are annually killed by imperialist fires – bombs, guns, landmines, napalm, etc – in the bosses’ wars from the Congo to Ukraine, or the tens of millions who have the mercy of having their homes and communities destroyed by them instead. The capitalist system is one big fire. Time to put it out!

The bourgeoisie are weeping about a problem of their own making. If it weren't for their thirsty exploitation of labour, constantly driving us to the brink, these spontaneous outbursts of individual anger wouldn't happen. But we can do better than that. Let's give them a problem of our own making to weep about.

Notes:

(1) Affidavit: courthousenews.com

(2) indeed.com

(3) zillow.com

(4) nfiindustries.com

(5) dol.gov

(6) dol.gov

(7) Affidavit: courthousenews.com

(8) theguardian.com

(9) x.com

(10) x.com

(11) The movement in Minnesota against Operation Metro Surge has been encircled by a bourgeois coalition of the Democratic Party, unions, and church groups. Workers, who made up the bulk of the movement, were not able to express themselves as an independent political force, and largely fell back into the reformist demands of their leaders. Nonetheless, against the inaction of this leadership, the spontaneous self-initiative to set up neighborhood networks to warn about and resist immigration raids puts this movement miles ahead of the No Kings protests last year.

(12) Research suggests global warming has led to a 31-66% increase in wildfire-driving hydroclimatic volatility since the middle of the 20th Century. bbc.co.uk

(13) 2022, bls.gov; 2023, bls.gov; 2024, bls.gov.

(14) For more, see Grenfell Tower: A Tragedy Foretold

(15) E.g. bbc.com

(16) One characteristic incident of many, last year: bbc.com