A Report On My Egalitarian Revolutionary Organizing On A Street In Brighton, Massachusetts

I'm talking about concrete real life stuff here, not abstract theory

I live in Brighton, Massachusetts, USA which is a neighborhood (zip code 02135) of the city Boston. Before the pandemic I asked my neighbors in Brighton to pose for a photograph displaying a sign saying that they aimed to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor (i.e., egalitarian revolution), and 500 of them gladly did so. Their photos are all online here. Below is a small sample of them (zoom in on any online photo to easily read the sign they are displaying):

Before the pandemic I displayed these photos in a banner in public places, such as the local branch library:

My purpose in doing this was to let people see that in having their egalitarian revolutionary aspiration they were part of the vast majority, not a tiny and hence hopelessly weak minority as the ruling class works so hard to make us believe. I learned in 1969 that when people know their anti-establishment aim is morally right AND they also know they are in the vast majority in having that aim, then there is a political sea change and a massive uprising takes place. This is the basis of the egalitarian revolutionary strategy that I spell out here and that I am trying to implement in my neighborhood of Brighton.

How am I implementing this strategy?

Here’s what I’ve done. I bought online 2,000 stickers (the ones with a 2 inch diameter cost about $.25 each and the ones a bit smaller were only $.08 each) with this image:

I made a large version to hang in front of my chest like this:

And starting in mid-April of this year I began standing in front of the Brighton CVS drug store handing out the sticker to people and telling them to “Enjoy my website at the bottom of the sticker.” My website is PDRBoston.org. The photo of me above was taken by a nice young man that I gave the sticker to. He emailed me the photo and when I ran into him at the CVS on a subsequent day he told me that he found my website “inspiring.” He said the red thing on the photo was his attempt to draw a heart. I told him he should probably not become a heart surgeon. He said he didn’t intend to do that but would keep my advice in mind. I also told him that I told my friend I thought the photo made me look skinny and that she replied, “That’s because you ARE skinny.” He laughed and said being skinny was not as bad as being a billionaire.

I’ve been going to the CVS generally from around noon to 2pm two or three days a week (Hey! I’m retired and I’m a lousy golfer so what else can I do?) depending on the weather and whether or not King Charles III is visiting me that day for tea. :)

By happy happenstance the entrance to the CVS drug store is only one foot away from the public sidewalk, which means I can stand on public property and be as close to the entrance as I need to be, so there’s no problem with the manager of the drug store telling me to leave. (Not sure he/she would do that anyway.)

The response to the sticker has been overwhelmingly positive. I have passed out about 700 so far. It is entirely due to the fact that people love the “Let’s remove the rich from power, …” sign. I know that because many times a person walks by clearly not intending to take a sticker, but then they read the sign on my chest and smile and reach out their hand to take one. Over and over again people tell me “I agree with that!” Many people have asked for more than one sticker to give to others. (I’m going to discuss the significance of this below.) Today a woman came running back into the drug store from her car in the parking lot, telling me she accidentally left her sticker in the store. I gave her another one in case she couldn’t find it. The other day another woman when she saw the sign on my chest from about 20 feet away came literally running towards me to get a sticker.

Two people, on different days, have literally thrust a dollar bill into my hand, in appreciation of what I’m doing. I accepted it with pleasure as a donation to help pay for the stickers. Another person came out the CVS store with a bottle of cold water that she gave to me because it was a very hot day. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have told me they really appreciate what I’m doing and are so happy I’m doing it.

Lately I’ve encountered a good number of people who have told me they have looked at my website and loved it. One woman told me she loved it because it was so biased in a GOOD way, showing that I had “good critical thinking.”

After having passed out 700 stickers, only two individuals have expressed disagreement with it. TWO! Three if you count the woman who misread my sign from a distance as “Lets remove the Irish from power.” But we cleared up that little misunderstanding quickly. Four if you count a man who came from Russia and who equated “Let’s remove the rich from power” with “Let’s put the Communists in power like in the Soviet Union.” We talked a bit, during which I explained that I was an ANTI-Marxist and that I thought the Communists in the Soviet Union were terrible and that one example of how bad they were is that even 20 years after the revolution they still had ENORMOUS inequality in pay and made no effort to have real equality. For the next 15 minutes that we conversed all we did was agree with each other.

Speaking of conversations, I’ve had some very long, substantive conversations with some people who loved the sticker. When I explain the reason why I’m doing what I’m doing, they get it. It’s not complicated. People express varying degrees of agreement when I say that the vast majority of people agree with the sticker. Some agree, others are doubtful. I show the doubters the 500 photos of Brighton residents holding the sign saying they agree with the sticker. In fact, on the reverse side of my sign is a QR code that goes to those 500 photos online, and I sometimes ask people with a visible smart phone to scan that QR code to see their neighbors, maybe even see somebody they recognize. People like that!

Does everybody take a sticker? No, of course not. Many people just don’t feel like taking something that some stranger is handing out. They don’t even look at my sign; they just walk buy. But guess what? There are days when I would do exactly the same thing.

Are people visiting my website because of this stickering?

Yes. I can use the analytics feature of my website host to get all sorts of statistics about people visiting it. In the last 30 days just in Massachusetts there were 98 unique visitors who had 320 site sessions with 941 different page views. These are almost all visits to my site resulting from my stickering. The reason I monitor the statistics for the state of Massachusetts instead of for Boston is this. There are lots of little towns near Brighton that are not Boston and people from these nearby towns are among those I give stickers to. So the statistics for just Boston would be misleading, especially because my website host for some reason confuses Brighton with the town of Brookline that is a stone’s throw from the CVS store I go to, and in fact it even has listed me as living in Brookline even though I actually live in Boston. Very few people visit my website from towns in Massachusetts that are far from Boston. Therefore, the statistics for the state of Massachusetts give the best estimate for the impact my stickering has on visits to my website. As you can see, the stickers are working! And the fact that people who visit my website view, on average (941 divided by 98) 9.6 different pages of my website, indicates that people find the website very interesting.

What am I hoping to achieve?

One thing that I have already achieved is this. Many people already are taking the first little step of egalitarian revolutionary activism. Can you guess what I am referring to? I mentioned it above.

Yes! That first little step of egalitarian revolutionary activism is when people take extra stickers to show to friends or people they work with. Many people have done this. This is indeed a form of political activism. It may not be as dramatic as organizing a demonstration, but it is a first step, a baby step if you will, towards doing more ambitious things later to build the egalitarian revolutionary movement.

I am hoping to establish, perhaps initially, an ongoing email relationship with some people who have taken the sticker. I hope to have good conversations with them that way about egalitarianism and the possibility of actually removing the rich from power. I hope that this will lead to having face-to-face conversations, perhaps over coffee in a shop near the CVS store. In such conversations we can discuss what we might want to do to build the egalitarian revolutionary movement. More people passing out stickers would be one good idea. Writing and posting Notices such as this one in shop windows (with permission of the owner) would be another possible idea:

Displaying the banner with the 500 photos in public places is another possible idea. Organizing a demonstration against a new luxury housing development is another idea. Arranging to speak about egalitarianism with friends in somebody’s home, or at a church or other organization is another idea. Who knows what ideas people may have?

What will this accomplish?

In 1936 there was an egalitarian revolution in about half of Spain. Read about it here, where one of the linked articles is this one, which is about what made the Spanish revolution possible. It began in 1918 when the idea of egalitarian revolution first was introduced into Spain and it began to spread. It spread more and more, eventually with millions of people talking about what they called “The Idea”—the idea of how they thought society ought to be: egalitarian (or as the Spanish egalitarians then called it, ‘anarchism.’) Even illiterate peasants got those who could read to read to them the books and little newspapers that talked about “The Idea.” By 1936 so many people in Spain knew what they wanted that they actually made an egalitarian revolution.

If I can help promote the spread of The Idea that way, and promote an understanding that it is the vast majority and not a tiny hopelessly weak minority who love The Idea, then I think I will have done something important, even if it doesn’t result in a dramatic revolution during my lifetime. What I use for he measure of success is not winning this or that reform, but increasing the size and confidence and determination of the egalitarian revolutionary movement, as I discuss in my “What is the measure of our success?”

You can do this too, you know. :)

Or do this if you’re not retired yet.

What do YOU think?