Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

A Short History of Progress (2005) by Ronald Wright

The above quote – often misattributed to John Steinbeck¹ – has been floating around for a long time. Regardless of who actually said it or what their intention was, it’s resonance rests in an open secret about American culture and identity: that the US is a vastly unequal society worthy of a revolution that never comes, partially because so many of us non-elites have bought into the lie of the American Dream that wealth is within reach of any person who works hard enough…that the shame of failure and downward mobility are real, but only brief hurdles faced by individuals on their journey to occupying Mars. Collective action and the commons be damned.

Permanently Embarrassed Billionaires are self-admitted proletarians. They do not aspire to become rapacious dragons, sitting on piles of gold and riding on rockets while tens of millions starve and the environment collapses around them. They refuse to treat people and the earth as objects for their own exploitative desires. They do not dream of mega yachts, personal jets, or wielding power over other humans. They dream of a post-capitalist world of enoughness and connection, a world where healing and self-actualization aren’t just for those who can afford to not work all the time.

PEB as a collective aspires to be a sandbox for building and participating in liberation movements today and those to come as the Empire falls further into crisis. Permanently Embarrassed Billionaires are people who – owing to some combination of lived experience, study, and neurodivergence – are unable to assimilate into the status quo that reproduces violence, domination, exploitation, separation, disposability, and exhaustion.

PEB collective members are involved in (or want to be involved in) a social movement or group project oriented towards collective liberation or mutual aid in the community where they live. They are interested in documenting their attempts and experiments over time – especially the “failures”, from which there is so much to learn. They want to build relationships rooted in solidarity, compassion, accountability, openness, reciprocity, and care.

Permanently Embarrassed Billionaires is in the very early stages of forming a small collective of about ten people. More details to come.

1. It is a riff on a passage from America & Americans (1966) by John Steinbeck talking shit about lifestyle communists: “I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.” ↩︎