Are They Rich Because They're Smart?: Class, Privilege and Learning Under Capitalism

Explains the sharpening class inequalities in the United States and the resulting conflicts accelerated by today's slow-burning world depression. It takes apart the self-serving rationalizations of a growing layer of well-paid professionals that their schooling and "brightness" equip them to "regulate" the lives of working people, who can't be trusted to know what's in our own interests.

In the coming battles forced upon us by the capitalist rulers, says Jack Barnes, workers will begin to transform ourselves and our attitudes toward life, work, and each other. Only then will we discover our own worth and learn what we're capable of becoming.

Also available in Spanish (ISBN: 9781604880885), French (ISBN: 9781604880892), Arabic (ISBN: 9786148041075), Farsi (ISBN: 9789645783400), and Greek (ISBN: 9786185130213).

“Analyzes the social inequalities caused by capitalism and the intensification of the conflicts they produce.”—McGill Journal of Education

Jack Barnes (1940– ) is national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. He joined the SWP in May 1961 and has been a member of the party’s National Committee since 1963 and a national officer since 1968.

Since the mid-1970s Barnes has led the political course of the SWP and its sister parties worldwide to build communist parties whose members and leaders in their large majority are workers and unionists organizing workers to forge and strengthen trade unions and lead the working class and its allies toward a successful socialist revolution.

Barnes is a contributing editor of New International magazine and author of numerous books and articles on revolutionary working-class politics and the communist movement.

His writings include:
The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party (2019)
Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power (2009)
The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People (2016)
"The Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class: In Defense of Land and Labor," in New International no. 14 (2008, coauthor)
Cuba and the Coming American Revolution (2007)
Their Trotsky and Ours (2002)
"US Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" in New International no. 11 (1998)

Other Contributor:

Steve Clark (1948– ), a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee since 1977, is editorial director of Pathfinder Press and managing editor of New International magazine.

Active from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s in the fight to halt the US war in Vietnam, Clark joined the Young Socialist Alliance in 1970 and Socialist Workers Party in 1971. He is a leader of the party’s work in solidarity with the socialist revolution in Cuba. He was editor of the Young Socialist magazine (1974–75) and YSA national secretary (1975). He edited the Militant newsweekly (1977–80, 2011–12) and the socialist news magazine Intercontinental Press (1981–84).

Clark is the editor of Malcolm X Talks to Young People and other collections of speeches and writings by Malcolm X, and author of the introductions to Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? and The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record, both by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes. In July 1980 Clark interviewed Maurice Bishop, central leader of the workers and farmers government in the Caribbean island of Grenada, for the Militant and is editor of Maurice Bishop Speaks: The Grenada Revolution and Its Overthrow, 1979–83 and author of “The Second Assassination of Maurice Bishop” in New International No.6.

Among Clark’s other articles in New International are “Farming, Science, and the Working Classes” and “The Politics of Economics: Che Guevara and Marxist Continuity,” co-authored with Jack Barnes.