Who is Comrade Morlock?

For forty years, it looked like H. G. Wells was wrong about humanity being divided into Eloi and Morlocks. Under New Deal economics, the wealth gap was slowly shrinking in the U.S. Then both Wall Street parties adopted neoliberalism and the wealth gap began growing again. Warren Buffett was astonishingly honest and completely right when he said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

To distract us from the class war, neoliberals promote identitarianism to make us fight identity wars instead. Comrade Morlock isn’t falling for that. My gender is Comrade. My race is Morlock. If the Eloi win, I’ll go down with the Morlocks. If the Morlocks win, well, then there won’t be Eloi and Morlocks. There’ll just be people, and Earth will be the heaven it should have been long ago.

• Five favorite quotes

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” — George Orwell

“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

“I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.” -Terentius Afer

“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” -Thomas Paine

“I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think that it will be based upon the color of the skin.” — Malcolm X