For months now, orcas have been overturning ships around Europe. They’ve been targeting luxury yachts, capsizing them in what can only be seen as an act of radical class warfare. This past Halloween, the killer whales launched their latest attack: Sinking a tourist yacht in the Strait of Gibraltar.
The Grazie Mamma II, a Polish yacht, was attacked by orcas in the early afternoon of Halloween according to the Mirror. The paper called it a “horror incident,” firmly planting the Mirror on the establishment side of the nascent aquatic class war. The revolution will not be televised, though it may show up on sonar.
For nearly sixty years, orcas have toiled at Sea World without reaping a cent of the profits they’ve produced for their corporate overlords. Their labor has gone without reward, and the capitalists who hoard those profits have turned around to treat orcas with unimaginable cruelty. Then, they hop on yachts purchased with that stolen value to go sightseeing in killer whale territory — rubbing wild orcas’ noses in the theft and exploitation of their brethren. It doesn’t have to be like this, killer whales.
So, the orcas have taken to direct action — praxis, enacting their revolutionary politics in the physical world. This latest attack, where orcas spent 45 minutes bashing the Grazie Mamma II’s rudder until the yacht began to leak and sink, hits the ruling class in the only thing they truly care about: Their wallets.
The bourgeois may not be human, but neither are killer whales. Perhaps, like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, it takes a nonhuman proletariat to begin the uprising against inhuman oppressors. I’m sure Marx, somehow, predicted this.
Image: Robert Pittman, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons