Working Class Struggles in Fight Club, Chapters 16 - 30 (End)

Fight Club eventually becomes something called "Project Mayhem," which is Tyler's plan to eventually blow up every credit card building in the country, to reset everyone's financial records back to "zero" so that the working class has a chance to make something of themselves. While this isn't made very clear in the book, it is extremely clear in the film.

"Jack" describes the creation of Project Mayhem as, "When Tyler invented Project Mayhem, Tyler said the goal of Project Mayhem had nothing to do with other people. Tyler didn't care if other people got hurt or not. The goal was to teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. We, each of us, can take control of the world" (122).

Jack says, "What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that's how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have. [...] I wanted the whole world to hit bottom" (123).

Project Mayhem sets out to do just that - start getting the upper class to hit bottom. They do so by doing the following:

• "One day it's in the newspaper how a team of men wearing black had stormed through a better neighborhood and a luxury car dealership slamming baseball bats against the front bumpers of cars so the airbags inside would explode in a powdery mess with their car alarms screaming" (132).
• "And one night in an uptown square park, another group of men poured gasoline around every tree and from tree to tree and set a perfect little forest fire. It was in the newspaper, how townhouse windows across the street from the fire melted, and parked cars farted and settled on melted tires" (133). 
• "Another night that Tyler didn't come home, someone was drilling bank machines and pay telephones and then screwing lube fittings into the drilled holes and using a grease gun to pump the bank machines and pay telephones full of axle grease or vanilla pudding" (133).
• "Mischief and Misinformation Committees are racing each other to develop a computer virus that will make automated bank tellers sick enough to vomit storms of ten- and twenty- dollar bills" (145).

Later, Jack describes the goal of their soap-making business: "Our goal is the big red bags of liposuctioned fat we'll haul back to Paper Street and render and mix with lye and rosemary and sell back to the very people who paid to have it sucked out. At twenty bucks a bar, these are the only folks who can afford it" (150).  This steal-from-the-rich-to-benefit-the-poor is a classic example of class tensions that is seen in Robin Hood, and the reference is even made in the book with, "That makes tonight a kind of Robin Hood thing."