Fighting Capitalism with $250,000,000
from THE FREE PRESS, Dec 4, 2023
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It’s been all over the local news: Fergie Chambers, self-styled left-wing revolutionary and heir of a billionaire, is using his $250M family payout to establish a commune in Alford, in the town of Great Barrington. He has bought land some place on East Road, and set up provisional housing for his followers. Tattooed with the portraits of Mao and Stalin on his upper thigh, he is apparently determined to use this money to regroup and re-ignite an old battle of the American proletariat against capitalism.
Here is an excerpt of Suzi Weiss’ article in THE FREE PRESS, which appeared on December 4, 2023 with the title He’s Got $250 Million to Spend on Communist Revolution:
“It’s a commune. It’s a ‘liberatory training space.’ It’s a housing collective meets agricultural collective. It’s where the People’s Gym (‘free for working-class people and permanently closed to cops, active military, landlords, and capitalists’) is located. It’s where the journal Combat Liberalism is based. It’s the headquarters for the Berkshire Communists group, which Fergie started. It’s where the Babochki Collective, the funding arm of all of Fergie’s projects, sometimes meets.”
The full article is found at this link.
Fergie’s battle, we all know, is anachronistic — time-warped by almost century now — as are the weapons in his rhetorical arsenal. It is true that, as most of my friends, I’m alarmed and disgusted by the excesses of capitalism, and count myself as standing with Bernie Sanders in the political spectrum. But today’s situation is so much more complicated. What counts as our proletariat? Is it the MAGA crowd, a confused bunch of people, listening to a clown, entirely unaware of their best interests?
The news perked everybody’s attention because of the immigration of people with curious habits and quirky agenda into our neighborhood from their former domicile in Connecticut. It is so far a matter of amusement, except there is concern about his public violent antisemitic stance, right in the footsteps of Stalin.
But I do see a larger story here, ironically aligning Chambers with the oligarchs like Musk, Zukerberg, etc. whom he is trying to fight: the amassment of capital in the hands of single people (in his case entirely unearned) enables them to pursue agendas entirely divorced from the interests of the community; money in their hands is a pure liquid form of amorality; it liberates them from all responsibility to the rest of humankind.
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