Political Disagreements Come Down to Opposing Views about What Makes Ordinary People Tick, What Values Motivate them. Here's My View. What's Yours?

My writings and activism are all entirely based on my view of ordinary people. Those who disagree with me invariably have an opposing view.

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The year was 2011 when I co-authored (with the late Dave Stratman) the following words excerpted from the online document, Thinking about Revolution (PDF). I have bolded some passages below because they express a positive view of ordinary people that is the ENTIRE basis for what I have subsequently written, and the entire basiss for my subsequent activism and for what I propose that others do.

I have discovered that what Dave Stratman once said is true, that every substantive political disagreement hinges on a disagreement about what makes ordinary people tick. This is why one never sees the people who disagree with me—including people who self-identify as Marxists or leftists (whom I wrote about here)—expressing the view about ordinary people that is expressed in the bolded text below, because they don’t agree with this view.

Here are excerpts from the 30 page document that I strongly encourage you to read in full. It lays out a vision of a good society, one that I only subsequently began referring to as an egalitarian society based on egalitarianism as I now elaborate upon here.

Is Human Nature the Problem?

What are most people really after? What motivates us? These are critical questions. The answer to them determines what kind of society is possible.

Years ago an elderly woman said to one of us, “Most people are good people. All our friends are. But then along comes a Greedy Gus who spoils everything.”

Greedy Gusses want to grab more than their share. They have no care for others. Most people aren’t like The banking collapse of 2008-09 was a deliberate attack on the working people of this country and Europe. Thinking About Revolution 6 that. Common sense and common decency are just that: traits that people have in common. Most people would never engage in the behavior of corporate CEOs and bankers and politicians. Murder a million and a half Iraqis to get their oil and to justify the Pentagon budget? Ordinary decent people would never do these things. They have to be fed constant lies and horror stories to let the government get away with these wars. Ironically, it’s the fact that most people find such behavior completely unacceptable that makes them vulnerable to the politicians’ lies. They would never do anything so evil themselves, so they find it hard to believe anyone else would.

What kind of people would dump toxic chemicals into a town water supply? What sorts of people would drill through 18,000 feet of sea floor under 5,000 feet of seawater in the Gulf of Mexico and ignore basic safety requirements, resulting in the worst environmental catastrophe in history? BP§ was engaging in the kind of behavior that corporations engage in every day–behavior that normal people find unacceptable and actually incredible; they are hard put to believe that anyone would knowingly do it.

There is a vast chasm between the values of most people and the values of the ruling class—the Greedy Gusses—who run the world. Warren Buffet, the billionaire “Sage of Omaha,” was right when he said that there is a class war and his side is winning. And his side, the side of the rich and powerful, has rotten values.

The class war pits the people who do the work that makes human society possible–the electricians and teachers, the nurses and auto workers and IT folks, the carpenters and doctors and ironworkers and secretaries and waiters–against corporate CEOs and bank executives and capitalists who reap the rewards of that labor. The super-rich have grabbed most of the treasures of the earth and the fruits of our labor for themselves.

But the class war is about far more than money. It’s also about values: the way we relate to each other and to the earth and future generations. The class war is a struggle over how we should live and what it means to be a human being.

Most people have very different values from the class that runs society. Most believe in solidarity–people supporting each other. They believe in people having their fair share and no more. They believe in people having their say in the decisions that affect their lives.

The ruling elite believe the opposite. They believe in competition and getting more than the other guy. They believe in inequality. They think there should be a few super-rich and powerful and that most people should be their slaves, and they work mighty hard to make it that way. More than anything they hate democracy–not the lying, fake democracy we have now but real democracy where ordinary people make the important decisions. Within corporations there is no pretense of democracy or equality. Corporations are dictatorships. You abandon all hope of democratic rights when you punch in. Outside the confines of the corporation–that is, in corporate society–the ruling class makes a pretense of democracy and tries to paper over its real values. But beneath the facade, corporate society is a dictatorship. Laws are designed to promote and protect corporate power. The formidable powers of the government–police, the Courts, the military–are arrayed on the side of the bankers and corporations to enforce their laws.

Why are there so many deeply ugly goings-on in our society? Because we live in a dictatorship of the rich.

The class war is a conflict over what values should shape society, what goals it should pursue, and who should control it.

This war goes on in every part of our lives. It affects how we feel about ourselves, how we relate to each other at home, to our friends, to our community. It affects how we are treated at work and how our children are treated at school. It affects whether we live in a state of contrived, constant warfare with people of other lands or faiths, whether our environment is completely destroyed on the altar of profit, whether we have a future at all.

Class conflict is the central fact in our society. It lies at the heart of our problems. To solve our problems, we have to win the class war. Revolution means overthrowing the government of the rich and creating a society where the people who do the real work of society have the power. It means destroying the present structure of power and establishing a real democracy.

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Why We Can Win

Many people see revolution as necessary, but few think it’s possible. Why do we think revolution is possible? The answer to this question brings us back to one’s view of what people are after. We know that the capitalist system is the most powerful social system that has ever existed. The basic principle of capitalism is profit and self-interest: dog-eat-dog competition. We should each be trying to screw each other all the time. But we can see that this is not so. Most of us in our everyday lives–with our wives or husbands or children, our friends or neighbors or co-workers, our students or patients–try to establish relationships based on love and mutual support and fairness. We try to create relationships that are the opposite of capitalist relations. It’s true that we don’t always succeed in creating supportive relationships–we live in a very screwed-up world where we are constantly told to just look out for Number One–but to the extent that we have any good relationships in our lives, we have created them in spite of a powerful culture profoundly hostile to them.

This means that most people are already engaged in a struggle against capitalism and its values. People’s everyday lives have revolutionary meaning. Our acts of kindness to family, friends, and neighbors are part of the effort to shape the world with humane values. The most personal acts of kindness are on a continuum of human effort with the most public, collective acts of mass revolutionary struggle.

Revolution is possible because a world-wide revolutionary movement already exists in people’s lives. But this everyday struggle is invisible to conventional views of politics, left and right. Part of building a revolutionary movement is bringing this inspiring struggle to light so that each of us can see that we are not alone in our aspirations for a new world. We are already part of a vast movement.

This movement remains hidden until people find new confidence in themselves and each other, as they have recently in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, and as they did worldwide in the 1960s. As people grow more confident, they expand their sense of how much of the world they can change. They reach out to each other to discuss their goals and experiences. They build informal support and communication networks. As they gain more confidence, they build movements and challenge the authorities. When they develop enough awareness of their power and strong enough connections, they make revolutions.

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The revolutionary strategy is to make the need and possibility of revolution the issue of public and private discussion, the issue in every struggle, the issue wherever people come together to discuss their concerns. This is how we can take the offensive. This is how—by showing the roots of every issue in an undemocratic social order—we can bring together the broadest and deepest possible movement. This is how we will go on the offensive.

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We are proposing a revolution based on values people already share and activities we already engage in—reaching out to other people to discuss the things we care about. The starting point of democratic revolution is democratic relationships. The more we talk with each other about making a new world, the more we will discover that we are not alone in these hopes. The more we discover we are not alone, the more able we will feel to reach out further. The more our idea of revolution reaches into people’s most deeply-held values and beliefs, the more unstoppable it will be.