Here's my email to My Neighbors Who Told Me They Agreed with "Let's Remove the Rich from Power: Have Real, Not Fake, Democracy with No Rich and No Poor" and Who Said They Wanted to Stay In Touch:

I aim to create an explicitly egalitarian revolutionary organization, starting with my neighbors

This email may have gone into your email spam (or junk) folder. To prevent this from happening in the future please enter my email address—spritzler@comcast.net—into your email address book. Thanks—J.S.

Here’s the email I sent:

Subject line: Let’s Remove the Rich from Power: Introductory Message

Hi neighbors,

I am sending this email (blind cc) to everybody whom I met at the Brighton Center CVS drugstore who said they agreed with my sticker and wanted to stay in touch.

As you know, I enjoy conversing with people about what I call the egalitarian revolutionary aim expressed in the sticker: “Let’s remove the rich from power: have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.” As of July 21, 2025 I have handed out a bit more than 2000 stickers since I started doing it in April, all at the CVS drugstore location where I met eleven of the twelve people receiving this email (the twelfth is a personal friend of mine who also lives in Brighton.) I only began asking people to sign up to stay in touch on July 19. Probably I should have started doing that earlier. Live and learn.

As you probably have seen for yourself, the response to the sticker is overwhelmingly positive. Many people have taken extra stickers to share with friends, and as a result lots of people¹ are now visiting my website that is on the sticker: PDRBoston.org . (This is just my personal website; there is no “People for Democratic Revolution” organization.)

The conversations I’ve had with you on the street have been excellent, but of course too brief to properly address all the questions and concerns that I assume you have about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it and why I want to be in touch with you. Let me here briefly introduce myself and start what I hope will be an ongoing conversation.

You can click here to read about me personally, where I’m from, what I did for a living before I retired, and so forth.

Just to be clear, I am indeed very serious about wanting to build an egalitarian revolutionary movement that really can do what the sticker says, not just locally but on a very large scale. I encourage you to read here about why this goal is truly possible, despite the great military power that the billionaire class currently has.

The reason I am handing out the stickers is to meet people like you who, I hope, will want to get together on a regular basis to discuss the goal expressed in the sticker:

• whether it is possible to accomplish,

• what it would actually mean in practice, such as how would the economy work,

• whether it could truly work given how people really are,

• whether genuine democracy is really possible and, if so, how,

• whether it would be a desirable alternative to the status quo or just make things terrible like Communism,

• whether it would—or could—prevent the abuse of power,

• whether it would ensure personal freedom,

• whether it has ever happened anywhere before,

• whether it is sensible or foolish to try to make it happen,

• whether it can be accomplished nonviolently, perhaps by voting, or not,

• whether building a movement for it could win important reforms even if it fails to win the egalitarian goal itself,

• whether it is safe or just too dangerous to try to build a movement for it,

• whether we can do things locally in an organized way to help people learn that they are the vast majority in wanting it,

• whether we can do things to spread our deeper discussion and understanding of it to the larger public,

• whether we should form an explicitly egalitarian revolutionary organization (I hope we do),

• and all of the many other questions and concerns you may have.

An important example of people getting together to have this kind of ongoing discussion—about how the world OUGHT to be—happened in Spain in the decades preceding the 1936 Spanish Revolution; I invite you to read about this here because it gives a sense of what I am trying to make happen today, starting in our own neck of the woods and, I hope, spreading far and wide. Additionally, I hope you will read some of my website articles where I address the above concerns and questions.

To those of you who do wish to get together to have this kind of discussion, the question is How can we do it? My preference is that we meet face-to-face (as opposed to on zoom) at places and times that are mutually convenient for at least some of us on any given occasion. We could get a table at a Brighton Center cafe or restaurant or a room at the Presentation School Community Center in Oak Square, for example. I am open to suggestions. Please email me your thoughts on this.

To those of you who just want to communicate by email, please feel free to do that. I look forward to hearing from you, hearing your comments and suggestions and questions.

I blind cc’d all of you because I didn’t know if you wanted to be in the non-blinded cc list. Please let me know if you wish to be in the non-blinded cc list in future emails so that you and others on that cc list can read what each other say.

Lastly, I write a daily Substack post online that I invite you to read. It’s free to subscribe to but you can read my posts even if you don’t subscribe. One of my Substack posts (click here to see it) is a copy of this email from me to you, because I want my Substack subscribers (many of whom do not live in Massachusetts or even in the United States) to know what I’m doing and to consider doing something similar where they live.

All the best to you,

—John

1. I can tell that the “sticker-ing” has had a big effect by comparing the number of people visiting the website who live in Massachusetts versus who live in California, which is the state with the second highest number. In the last 30 days there were 82 unique visitors to the website who lived in Massachusetts and they made 779 different page views. In California during the same period there were only 24 unique visitors and they made only 38 different page views. While it is possible that some of the Massachusetts visitors were not people who received the sticker, the only explanation for the much larger Massachusetts numbers than any other state is the sticker-ing at the Brighton CVS drugstore.