By Dennis Rahkonen

The "fabulous" wealth of the super rich didn't miraculously fall from the sky, nor is it attributable to the imagined entrepreneurial genius or other supposedly superior qualities of Mister Money Bags.

In most cases, there's a direct link connecting palatial estates in plush, gated communities to deteriorating working-class neighborhoods, either here or abroad, where people who toil too hard in their bosses' enterprises, for too little pay and scant benefits, experience lives ranging from merely hard-pressed to desperately poor.

It's a one-way pipeline through which the value created by ordinary folks' blood, sweat, and tears, at the daily job site, is routinely appropriated in its greatest part, leaving little left over for the actual producers.

The owning class sucks "its" wealth from those who make the things, or deliver the services, that business owners profitably sell, without an instant's thought to the reality that veritable wage slaves on the shop floor are responsible for the lavish "rewards" that they so ostentatiously enjoy.

For every tycoon being chauffeured about in a Rolls Royce, there are hundreds of haggard souls driving rusting clunkers, or using creaking donkey carts, who put in often egregiously under-compensated time in factories, mines, mills, and retail counters to make the magnate's enormous prosperity possible.

Which is why global working-class revolution, never mind half-hearted measures to try to hike taxes on the upper crust, will be entirely justified, if strict emphasis on economic justice is the deciding factor.

As should properly be the case.

I'm definitely pacifistic by nature and count Gandhi, King, and Mandela as the only true giants who've walked the earth during my lifetime. Violence is abhorrent to me.

But I'm also convinced that any bloodshed that rectifying rebellion entails, after everyday families have exhausted all peaceful possibilities for necessary change, will be mild in comparison to the ongoing violence that capitalist exploitation inflicts on international multitudes day in and day out.

That violence takes the form of widespread, withering poverty, grimly manifested in pervasive hunger, a lack of elemental healthcare, spreading homelessness, inferior or nonexistent education, and the cumulative impact of profits-before-people priorities that give millions of children around the globe cruelly compelling reason to cry.

Far too often, weeping is their last act, as death arrives to steal their futures and simultaneously condemn the wicked, rapacious system that made their lives so mercilessly impossible.

A planetary revolution is assuredly, unavoidably coming.

It'll be a united uprising by both what Frantz Fanon termed the Third World's "wretched of the earth" and industrialized nations' outraged proletarians, unwilling to sacrifice their living standards on the altar of "austerity," just so a few fat cats can continue luxuriating to an unconscionable degree.

This impending cleansing of our capitalism-putrefied cosmic home will be openly socialist in those countries where leftist thought and theory have long had fertile ground in which to grow. Europe will go unequivocally red, for instance.

In places like the United States, however, a kind of instinctive, spontaneous Marxism will initially arise, as it's occasionally done during our historical past, in a localized way

The primary example of this is how white, Christian, and ordinarily quite conservative coal miners in Kentucky and West Virginia were forced by their chronically exploitative circumstances to take on plundering coal companies with tactics and ideological underpinnings of economic fairness that could have been advocated -- and in fact were -- by communists.

Anyone who views the award-winning documentary film "Harlan County, USA" will quickly understand that blue-collar souls who adhere to cynical diversions (such as those posited by today's Tea Party) will break with their wrong beliefs to become impassioned battlers for real worker advancement as mass consciousness and resulting action grow.

Struggle itself is the decisive teacher and key radicalizing agent.

All of this is more true now than ever.

What's been derisively termed "The Cat Food Commission" recently issued its list of extensive cuts to already intolerable American living standards that we'll be asked to accept so that criminally corrupt Wall Street banksters and corpulent corporate honchos can keep their second or third luxurious residences, and yachts.

We, the creators of the wealth that they stole, are expected to make an ungodly trade-off, compliantly absorbing what amounts to a total abandonment of everything that constitutes either an existing or anticipated "good life."

This impoverish-my-kids-so-that-capitalists-can-flourish "solution" just isn't going to fly.

And yet, due to the thoroughly depraved nature and ruthlessness of capitalism in its moribund imperialist stage, America's reactionary elite will repeatedly attempt to send that dead albatross into the air.

At some point, much sooner than many think, the masses will just revolt in angry disgust.

That's when the New York Stock Exchange will be set ablaze.

In a dramatic foretaste of things to come, English protesters enraged by exorbitant college tuition hikes recently attacked the limousine carrying Prince Charles and Lady Camilla, with accompanying shouts of "Off with their heads!"

Sentiments equally as bitter have risen in several countries. Super-exploited multitudes have reached their breaking point.

The entire capitalist world is but a hair's breadth away from wholesale rebellion.

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(Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the Sixties)