As swathes of English people are fooled into flag wars, and Americans are being groomed to hate oil rich Venezuela, Karen Orr explores the history of the working class dying for billionaires…
The history of conflict is not the grand narrative of kings and causes taught in schools; it is, at its core, a sordid balance sheet. On one side of the ledger sit vast colonial territories, mineral rights, strategic trade routes, and enormous, untaxed fortunes. On the other side sits the lifeblood of the working man, the factory floor mechanic, the miner, the farmhand, and the dock worker. They are the expendable capital, the foot soldiers used to secure the assets of the untouchable elite.
This brutal truth was understood with fierce clarity by the Red Clydesiders of Glasgow, who during the furnace of the First World War, saw past the jingoistic banners and straight to the commercial interests being protected. It was the great Clydeside trade unionist Willie Gallacher who later lamented that during the revolutionary ferment of 1919, “We were carrying on a strike when we ought to have been making a revolution.” The fight against the bosses’ exploitation at home, he recognized, should have been immediately married to the fight against the bosses’ wars abroad.
WWI, The Mothers’ Resistance, and the Real Cause
The First World War, an unimaginable slaughter which dragged millions of working-class boys from the fields and factories into the mud of Flanders, was the ultimate imperialist land grab, dressed up in the colours of patriotism. The empires of Europe—controlled by oligarchs, barons, and monarchs—sent their proletariat to kill each other over access to resources in Africa and markets in Asia. The men who died were not dying for King or Country; they were dying to protect the fortunes of the Krupp family, the Rothschilds, and the burgeoning American industrialists who profited immensely from supplying the war machine.
The resistance to this madness was fiercely embodied by the working-class women who paid the ultimate price. Many socialist Suffragettes, led by figures like Sylvia Pankhurst, fiercely rejected the imperialist war, maintaining that the real struggle was class-based, not national. Pankhurst, focusing her activism on the East End poor, knew exactly what the war meant to them. She argued that the working man had no stake in the ruling class’s conflicts, famously stating: “The people are too hungry to think of patriotism.”
After the carnage, the mothers and wives of the fallen became the bedrock of peace movements. Having served as replacement factory labour during the war, these women, newly empowered and profoundly grieving, refused to let their sons’ deaths be forgotten or repeated. They formed organizations across Europe, born not of political theory but of raw, collective trauma, aiming to prevent the return to the old order that had so casually sacrificed their children for corporate greed. Their demand for peace was not sentimental; it was an economic and moral imperative, insisting that resources be used for welfare, housing, and life, not for profit and death.
From Flanders to the Fall of Saigon
Decades later, the Vietnam War—a conflict driven by geopolitical chess and industrial-military complex profits—consumed another generation. The true cost of this recurring exploitation is captured with haunting simplicity in the lyrics of Billy Joel’s “Goodnight Saigon,” sung from the perspective of the frontline soldier:
“We met as soulmates on Parris Island,
We left as inmates from an asylum.”
They were moulded into instruments of corporate foreign policy, only to return as broken men, forever haunted. The sheer, terrifying futility of that sacrifice is epitomized in the blank, stunned faces of the steelworkers in the film The Deer Hunter—working-class young men from Pennsylvania who were sent across the globe to bleed for a war they barely understood. Their lives were treated as cheap, disposable commodities in the pursuit of distant, high-stakes interests.
The Hidden Autocracy: Billionaires and the Fascist Thread
Today, the playbook remains dangerously similar, but the actors wear sleeker suits. When modern strongmen like Donald Trump threaten military intervention in countries like Venezuela—a threat he voiced repeatedly between 2017 and 2019, talking of a “military option”—the rhetoric is always framed around “restoring democracy” or fighting “narco-terrorists.” But the material reality is that Venezuela sits upon the world’s largest oil reserves. The threat of invasion, regardless of whether it materializes, serves the underlying oligarchal desire to secure control over sovereign resources, destabilizing rivals and opening up new frontiers for corporate profit.
This malign power structure—now dominated by “untouchable” billionaires and global oligarchs—has a long, deeply disturbing history of supporting autocratic and fascist regimes precisely because they crush working-class solidarity.
In the 1930s, major US and German corporations often provided financial and industrial support to Hitler and Mussolini. Fascism was a useful tool: it systematically banned Trades Unions, eliminated the right to strike, and ensured that profits flowed unimpeded to the top. The fight against fascism in World War II, initially a purely anti-imperialist conflict, became a necessary war fought by the working class—the very people fascism sought to enslave—against the autocratic systems that had historically been financed or tacitly supported by the millionaire-owned industrial giants of the day.
The Strategy of Division and Death
The fundamental goal of this global, malign power remains the same: to prevent the working class of the world from uniting. The billionaire model operates by dividing us into competing nations—a brilliant, yet cynical, strategy.
This division is enforced through inward-looking, mock historical nationalism—a fabricated, glossy version of a country’s past that never existed, creating a fantasy of ‘us versus them.’ While the working class is tethered to a fixed location and encouraged to hate “the other,” the global elite operates with absolute fluidity. Billionaires can move their money, assets, and even their residency across the planet as they please, fundamentally unbound by the borders they demand others respect.
Central to this scheme is the weaponization of flag-waving patriotism. This isn’t the genuine pride of community or culture; it is a hollow, manufactured sentiment designed only to recruit machine gun fodder. Using their vast, often opaque, wealth, the wealthy fund nationalist organizations, leveraging popular discontent and cultural grievances to achieve political power. Their ultimate goal is not to preserve the nation, but to secure rights to foreign markets and resources, using the anger of the working poor as the political cover necessary to keep the global working class perpetually divided, isolated, and focused on an enemy across a border, not the corporate master across the table.
The result is a perpetually fragmented global working class, perpetually convinced that their economic rival is not the billionaire who owns their housing, their media, and their political influence, but the labourer on the other side of a thin, fabricated border.
And so, when the call to arms comes—whether in the past or in the recent threats against nations like Venezuela—it is always the working class that answers. They are sent to die on the side of the continuance of oligarchal/royal/billionaire autocratic (hidden and not so hidden) power, fighting for a flag whose corporate-controlled government ensures their wages remain stagnant and their children’s prospects slim. The only true resistance is to recognize the common enemy: not the worker in the next country, but the billionaire in the penthouse, whose wealth is measured in the blood of the poor.
