If Class Ruins Everything Around Us, What Can Movements Do?

Over 40 million Americans recently faced challenges to feed themselves and their families when the government shutdown of fall 2025 interrupted SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) support, and record-high levels of people are struggling to afford rent. It’s no surprise that many people in the United States are fed up with the current way the economy is organized as they watch the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Dream Defenders, a Black feminist-led organization based in Miami, FL, is a civil rights group that envisions a new economic structure, helping create “communities where safety is built through solidarity, care, and self-determination rather than through punishment and surveillance.”

The campaign asks participants to pledge to do one or more of a range of activities…like hosting conversations about capitalism with friends and family.

“Dream Defenders is one of those places where we are trying to organize to fight back against capitalism,” Fresco Steez, the organization’s communications director, told NPQ.

In the midst of attacks by the administration of President Donald Trump, the group’s C.R.E.A.M. campaign aims to offer a more positive economic vision rooted in their long-term organizing strategy of mixing Black culture and activism. C.R.E.A.M., which stands for Class Ruins Everything Around Me, is a play on the name of a 1993 Wu-Tang Clan song with the same acronym, and related meaning: Cash Rules Everything Around Me.

“It is a direct connection to the hip-hop song of the nineties and the critique that Wu-Tang was making about how we are forced to hustle and prioritize getting access to resources in our community in a way for our mere survival,” Steez said. “We deserve more than to survive; we deserve to thrive.”

The campaign asks participants to pledge to do one or more of a range of activities: from modest actions like hosting conversations about capitalism with friends and family or joining a local study group to more intensive activities such as organizing a teach-in or helping to develop larger-scale national actions.

A Campaign for a Gilded Age

The decision to launch the C.R.E.A.M. campaign came from looking at the current political moment and thinking not only about what’s at stake for marginalized people, but who’s responsible for the suffering and different mechanisms of oppression, according to Steez.

“I think people are experiencing and seeing very front-facing corrupt decision-making [from] corporations and billionaires,” they said.

There are more than 3,000 billionaires in the world, according to Forbes, with 902 of them residing in the United States. Class in America, although often hidden from view, has become increasingly visible.

“As the SNAP benefits are being cut this month, we’re seeing Trump build a grand ballroom,” Steez observed. “For whom? For the capitalist class to dance or have dinner parties in.”

The numbers are, in fact, astonishing and speak to the second Gilded Age in which our nation now lives. Back in 1980, the number of billionaires in the United States was 13. The shift in income from working people to owners of capital is so large that an NPQ article earlier this year estimated that the shift amounted to a difference of over $6,500 per person since the start of the century; in other words, a family of four would have $26,000 a year more on average if the share of income going to wage earners had remained the same as it was at the start of the century.

This shift can also be seen in the generational accumulation of wealth. Writing in TIME, entrepreneur Nick Hanauer estimated that between 1975 and 2020, the shift in wealth from the bottom 90 percent of the US population to the top 1 percent exceeded $50 trillion—or nearly $150,000 per capita over those 45 years.

In an op-ed published by NewsOne, Dream Defenders’ public relations manager Marjua-Giselle points out some of the many egregious examples of billionaire exploitation, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ pattern of union-busting tactics and Elon Musk’s rule over racial discrimination and unsafe working conditions at Tesla.

“These billionaires aren’t just stealing, they are actively engineering the conditions of the crisis poor and working-class people live in,” Marjua-Giselle wrote. “From housing and labor to surveillance and environmental degradation, they profit from our inability to lead a safe and good life.”

Connecting Racial and Economic Justice

Dream Defenders was formed in 2012 in the wake of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s shooting death by George Zimmerman. It was a moment that shook the nation into more seriously considering the harms Black people face when it comes to gun violence and surveillance.

In 2013, Dream Defenders helped organize young Black students and students of color at area high schools and colleges to hold a sit-in outside the governor’s office in the Florida State Capitol to fight stand-your-ground laws. These laws allow people to use deadly force when in a confrontation, and were key to Zimmerman being found not guilty for Martin’s death.

Since then, Dream Defenders has been organizing to build political power among young Black people and people of color in Florida, including developing a Healing and Justice Center in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood, along with partner organizations. Broadly speaking, the group organizes around issues involving housing, education, public transportation, and healthcare to help communities of color escape from a “vicious cycle of poverty, violence, and incarceration.”

“We think that it’s unethical for billionaires…to hoard wealth while people are starving on the streets.”

The current C.R.E.A.M. campaign, Steez indicated, emerged through community conversations in which residents emphasized the difficulties they faced affording basic life necessities like rent, transportation, healthcare, and groceries.

Organizing for the Long Haul

These days, as the recent election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor illustrates, criticism of capitalism is increasingly common. Despite, or perhaps because of this, Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) that names “anti-capitalism” as a supposed source of violence.

Trump’s memo was quick to spur a civil society response. Many nonprofits roundly denounced this memo, with over 3,000 nonprofits signing a public letter.

Steez pledged that Dream Defenders will not yield to any conceivable “McCarthy-style investigations,” adding, “we think that it’s unethical for billionaires in the capitalist class of this country—the 1 percent—to hoard wealth while people are starving on the streets. I don’t know about you, but [opposing] that doesn’t sound like violence to me; that sounds like community care.”

With this ethos, Dream Defenders follows the declaration by the World Social Forum in the early 2000s: “Another world is possible.”

Still, it doesn’t mean the journey will be easy. As a young organizer coming of age on the South Side of Chicago, Steez quickly learned how hard it was to become a critical thinker when one is in crisis mode. When you can’t afford to eat, Steez noted, it’s hard to focus on liberatory possibilities.

“Right now, I would say that Black and Brown working-class folks are in a constant state of fight-or-flight,” Steez said. “And so, we have to organize to get out of that economically in order to get to a point where we can think more expansively around the possibilities of what the future could look like.”