On April 8, 2026 an employee at a Kimberly-Clarke warehouse in Ontario, CA started a Facebook Live, (allegedly) remarked that, “all you had to do was pay us enough to live,” struck a windproof lighter and set the inventory ablaze. One hundred seventy responders from 11 jurisdictions extinguished the blaze.
The underlying crime (arson) we can reasonably assume that, like most crime, was based on a need, perceived or real. Our alleged perpetrator discerned the absence or removal of a necessity and acted in a way to alter or eliminate the situation.
The phrase quoted above is repeated time and again in the article that we’ve gathered to analyze, this I believe is a deliberate choice. We are given a contrast in the article. The irrational, grievance based folly of Mr Chamel Abdulkarim is counterbalanced by the voice of reason. Co-worker Alejandro Montero is in the article to help our author make a little sense of what happened.
“I just met him that night. He was helping me load my trailer,” Montero said. “I was working together with him right there for two hours before break and then right at break... I went to my car, and that’s when it happened.”
We have in this news story two of the clearest examples of Proletarian individuals reacting to material conditions. The tale sounds almost like a thought experiment for its perfection of detail. Mr Abdulkarim is the example of a worker with no Revolutionary direction toward a wider future. The exact person that the American Communist Party desperately must reach and redirect. If he is guilty of the arson at his workplace, Mr Abdulkarim engaged in an individual act intended to bring about wider material change. What Liberals would brand simple terrorism, Communists recognize as useless adventurism. I would love to suppose that had the proper recruitment effort met with him, that he would be today, unfettered and even more effective an agitator. I cannot accurately suppose that because of our other archetype…
The disgustingly lumpenproletariat Montero rushes to the defense of the wounded $32b corporation. His mystified lack of understanding is typified with his insistence that he is personally well paid, presented for either added context or to counterbalance the violent grievance. There is always a contingent within the workforce that has attained a level of comfort from which any change, let alone violent change, represents only negative. They have erroneously identified with the very system creating lethal friction in the people present with him in his same cohort. The contradiction between upholding the system and the system being designed to harm you becomes entirely fantastical if the victim can be convinced that he is in fact in conspiracy with the oppressor and that is what we hear in Montero’s complaint that they are now out of work because of Mr Abdulkarim’s actions. Let us not waste time trying to remind Montero that there is no scenario in which a company worth $32b is unable to help its workers, displaced by the actions of a lone malefactor.