On May 4th, 2026, Chris Smalls hopped a barricade at the “Costume Art” themed Met Gala in an attempt to protest Jeff Bezos’s contentious involvement. While the Met Gala is criticized every year for being an already-opulent display of access and wealth, Bezos’s association took that criticism to a rightful new peak for the famous fashion fundraiser. In the limited footage, you can see Smalls quickly taken down and restrained by security as celebrities, photographers, assistants, and other event staff continue on, with a style of blinders only the disillusionment of fame and manufactured importance can buy.
Smalls is intelligent and experienced enough to know how his protest would most likely play out: arrest. This is only one of the many times he has been taken into custody for his activism, most recently by the state of Israel as one of the twenty-one members of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in August of 2025. The cofounder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union, working class advocate, system disruptor, leader, father, American – Chris Small’s debut book When the Revolution Comes is a candid account of his life and what he has overcome to stand where he is today as one of the most indispensable voices our joke of a country has on the side of real, regular people.
Chris Smalls, born on the 4th of July, begins his story in his hometown of Hackensack, New Jersey. His father was incarcerated for most of his childhood, and he was raised by a single mother with the help of other single mothers in a tight knit community of friends, neighbors, and cousins trying to make ends meet. He depicts his long history with dependence on jobs that overwork and underpay and the persistent afflictions that come with being forced to function in a system not built to serve him. His point of view and political awakenings came to fruition just by being alive, paying attention, and watching the people around him struggle.
However, not everything Smalls knows now about community and empowerment comes from the feats of his labor and upbringing. As a former high school track captain, an impassioned party thrower, aspiring music artist, and loyal friend, his writing makes a clear and implicit point that his personhood has always had very little to do with what he does for a paycheck: a position not often shared among the financial analysts and account managers of Midtown Manhattan or Chicago’s Fulton Market. Before Chris Smalls started organizing at Amazon, speaking out, interfering with corporate agendas and annoying soulless executives, he was just a guy doing the best he could. More importantly, he still is.
Though Smalls is an advocate for the labor reform movement for all working individuals, much of this book is focused on Amazon and his experience as an employee and union organizer. There is no glamorous heroism when it comes to going up against goliath corporations, some of which seem to have more power and reach than the U.S. government. It is failure after failure, road block after road block, frustration after frustration. Amazon in particular has entwined itself in our lives more than we even realize. Between the low-price monopoly they have on millions of products with same-day delivery just a click away, the advertisements that slideshow in our living rooms while a TV show is paused, the fact you can now only watch the NFL on Thursday nights if you have an Amazon account and pay for Prime—in the same breath they do little to hide the mistreatment of their employees, engrossingly invest in artificial intelligence, military weapons, and maniacal foreign governments, and their CEO sits on such an unfathomable amount of cash people have to create diagrams comparing fingernail dust to the net worth of an average American household to help the public conceptualize it.
Yet you take a quick look around and realize how many people are struggling to catch a single break. How can this kind of advanced technology, accessibility, convenience with a price tag, live in tandem with the financial and work-life-balance difficulties millions of Americans deal with everyday? It can’t. We live in hell, and the devil is co-hosting the Met Gala. Smalls writes:
“All of this makes me want to go back to my communities and explain to people that we are at the point of no return. Amazon has been around for a mere thirty years, and yet in that time the number of people it has hired and fired is equivalent to the entirety of the current American workforce. It has changed how we interact with one another. We used to get the things we needed by talking with other people. At the shop, at the grocery. Now we have become accustomed to getting what we want without ever interacting with another human being. Don’t you see this is taking us even further away from our ability to organize? And disorganized people can be easily exploited. I might even go so far as to say that is the plan.”
People like Chris Smalls are a threat to the corrupt functionality of the United States of America. Corporations think they can sell you things like hope, inspiration, desire for change, and bravery, but they are really just selling products and experiences that are marketed to evoke these feelings. In a world where most of us are too burnt out to do anything but keep our heads down to provide basic needs for ourselves and our families, Chris Smalls stays awake. He keeps figuring it out, adjusting, reading between the lines, finding new ways to use his willpower and motivation to pull the hope, inspiration, desire for change, and bravery out of others. He has yet to be adequately silenced because a movement is stirring beneath our feet. As a population, we have become even more distracted and confounded by the algorithm and the slop of the day-to-day to realize how much bigger the cracks in our infrastructure have grown, and the heinous things slipping through. It has intensified since 2020, and it is going to get worse. It is going to get worse.
When The Revolution Comes is the story of how the revolution found Chris Smalls, and I believe the integrity of his experience, his refusal to stop, will help others find it too.
NONFICTION
When The Revolution Comes
Chris Smalls
Pantheon
Published June 2, 2026
