How to Tell If You, Dear Activist, Are Unknowingly Influenced by Anti-Working-Class Propaganda

All too many activists unfortunately are, as I have discovered

If you are an anti-establishment activist you probably don’t think you are influenced by ruling class propaganda. But are you sure? Let’s find out.

The #1 ruling class propaganda theme is this: “Resistance is futile. It is futile because most people support the status quo. If you try to build a revolutionary movement to remove the rich from power nobody will join it.”

This is anti-working-class propaganda. It is PERVASIVE.

The propaganda primarily works by censoring in all of the media—mainstream and ‘alternative’—absolutely any expression of what most people (i.e., the working class) would LOVE, namely to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor, and make the economy be based on the FAIR and JUST egalitarian principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.”

This censorship of people’s egalitarian revolutionary aspiration is why people think hardly anybody else wants to remove the rich from power.

It is why people are surprised to see these 500 photos of my Brighton (zip code 02135) neighbors proudly displaying a sign saying “We the People want affordable housing for All. To get it we aim to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.” They are surprised to see that the people look like this (small sample):

When people see nobody expressing their own egalitarian revolutionary aspiration they conclude that they better keep their mouth shut about it for fear they’d be seen as crazy or even dangerous if they expressed it. And this silence further reinforces the propaganda.

Additionally the ruling class propaganda represents working class people with negative stereotypes, such as Homer Simpson and the husband in Married With Children (I stopped watching TV a while ago, so forgive my use of old examples here.)

Dear activist, have you ever lamented that people are brainwashed into supporting the status quo? Or have you ever heard another activist say that and then nodded your head sadly in agreement? Well then, you’ve been snookered by anti-working-class propaganda my friend.

Dear activist, do you worry that the slogan “Remove the rich from power” will be misunderstood by regular (i.e., working class) people to mean removing from power nice people such as a nice physician who owns a Mercedes Benz? Do you think people will thus react negatively to that slogan, that they won’t understand that “the rich” means the billionaires and such people who really do control things and treat regular people like dirt?

If you do believe that, you’ve accepted as true the #1 ruling class propaganda theme, that most people support the status quo and will find some reason to disagree with the slogan “Remove the rich from power.” The fact is that when one stands in front of, say, the entrance to one’s local drug store, with a sign that says “Let’s remove the rich from power,” the overwhelming response is positive; people say they agree! People understand exactly what the slogan means. But you don’t know that, do you? You get your “knowledge” about what working class people think from the mass media, from ruling class propaganda.

Do you do things like stand in public with a sign saying “Let’s remove the rich from power”? Or are you are afraid to do that? Is it that you fear encountering a negative response? Do you see what’s going on here now? If you fear a negative response it is because you’ve been greatly influenced by anti-working-class propaganda!

When you hear somebody like me say that the economy should be based on the egalitarian principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need” and that there should be genuine democracy with sovereign local assemblies of egalitarians, how do you react? Do you say, “Yes!” Or do you, as I heard one activist on a zoom call recently do, say something like, “I’m afraid of this “work according to ability” because that could mean working way too much?

If you react this way, then think about why you do so. In a genuine egalitarian democracy (i.e., NOT a Communist dictatorship!), when the rich have been removed from power, who do you fear is going to “make people work too much”? Your fear is based on a negative view of working class people, that they will do bad things. You seem to think that only activists such as yourself are concerned about people having to do too much work. You’ve been influenced by the ruling class propaganda, my friend.

Likewise, when you hear egalitarian revolution being advocated, how do you respond? Do you say “Yes!” Or do you instead warn the egalitarian revolutionary that people (meaning working class people) need to be VERY careful that they don’t do terrible things such as allowing oppression to continue? The sub-text of this warning is that working class people are VERY likely to do such terrible things if they have the real power in society. This warning reflects fear of the working class. Of course people need to be very careful about such things, but the people who understand this best are working class people, something too many activists don’t believe. They don’t believe it because they’ve been influenced by anti-working-class propaganda and they don’t even know it.

What about this? How do you respond when you hear somebody say that oppressors have no right to use speech to oppress; that the Nazis, for example, had no right to publish their antisemitic propaganda? Do you say, “Yes, absolutely! I agree”? Or do you, as SO MANY activists in my experience do, say, “No! We need to defend freedom of speech. That means freedom of speech (as long as it’s not inciting imminent violence) for everybody, even Nazis”? If the latter, here’s what is going on. You’re afraid that if you say that oppressors have no right to use speech to oppress, then this will give a green light to (gasp!) working class people to deny freedom of speech to you yourself. You are afraid of what the working class will do when it truly removes the rich from power. And so you will not agree with the vast majority of working class people who say that oppressors, such as Nazis, have no right to use speech to oppress.

Are you afraid to advocate egalitarian revolution explicitly and prefer instead just to talk about “safe” things such as taxing the rich (like Eisenhower did) or having some kind of monetary reform (instead of abolishing the use of money to have a truly FAIR and JUST society)? Is it because you fear getting a hostile response to “Let’s remove the rich from power”? If it’s not that fear—fear of the working class—then what is the reason? Cat got your tongue?

Do you make absurd excuses for not refuting the Zionist lie about how Israeli violence against Palestinians is supposedly for the purpose of making Israeli Jews safe? Do you refuse to tell people the truth, that Zionist violence against Palestinians has, for seven-plus decades, had nothing whatsoever to do with keeping Israeli Jews safe; that on the contrary it has been for the purpose of making the Palestinians be a bogeyman enemy that the Israeli billionaire ruling class uses to get away with severely economically oppressing and getting rich off of the Israeli Jewish working class, as I explain and prove with mainstream sources here? Do you make absurd excuses like one activist I encountered who told me he actually agreed with me about the anti-JEWISH-working-class purpose of Zionism (after initially resisting that idea) but insisted that there was no point in talking about it, that it was a “So what?” point, and that INSTEAD, and I quote, “the point is to stop the slaughter”?!!! As if we could stop the slaughter without winning over most of the U.S. public to oppose Zionist violence instead of believing that they had to support it because it was for the purpose of making Jews safe.

Activists who make these kind of absurd excuses for not explaining that Zionism is an anti-working-class, including anti-JEWISH-working-class, attack, have so much contempt for the Israeli Jewish working class that they cannot bring themselves to even talk about how those working class people are HARMED and not made safer by Zionism.

These activists see how successful Zionist propaganda and manipulation has been in making Israeli Jews fear (and hate, since the two emotions are really the same) Palestinians. (The manipulation includes Israel funding Hamas and working to keep it in power—even after October 7, 2023—precisely because Hamas deliberately aims to kill un-armed Jewish Israeli civilians and thereby makes Palestinians maximally frightening to Israeli Jews.) These activists see Israeli Jews fearing and hating Palestinians and, because of their contempt for the working class, they will not admit the fact that when Americans learn that Zionist violence is for the purpose of oppressing, not making safe, Israeli Jews then, and only then, will the VAST MAJORITY of Americans (not just barely 50%) force the U.S. government to do a 180 and condemn Israel’s violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

These activists make excuses for refusing to refute the Zionist lie (about making Israeli Jews safe) because they view Israeli Jewish working class people as just as much the cause of Israeli Zionist violence as the Israeli billionaire ruling class, as innately racist people who would hate and kill Palestinians even if the Israeli billionaire ruling class did nothing at all to make them do so. Because of their contempt for the working class, these activists don’t actually help the Palestinians at all. In fact they harm the Palestinians by attacking working class people in the name of being “Pro-Palestine,” as these “anti-Zionists” did when they blocked cars on U.S. highways in the name of anti-Zionism.

These activists are the kind of people who would never dream of doing what Martin Luther King, Jr. wonderfully did when, in his 1965 Selma, Alabama speech, he carefully explained that the racist Jim Crow laws’ purpose was not only to oppress blacks but also to oppress the poor whites. (Read and listen to MLK, Jr. speech here.) These activists would have said, “See, some poor whites support the Jim Crow laws. This shows that poor whites are just as much the cause of those laws as rich people. It shows that poor whites are simply just racists. It shows that poor whites are just as much the real enemy of anti-racists as are the wealthy whites.”

And so these activists, blinded by anti-working-class propaganda, would not do what it takes (as MLK, Jr. did, fortunately) to build solidarity of black and white working class people against the ruling class and its use of racial discrimination for divide-and-rule. But these activists would have declared that they are anti-racists, while being unaware that they were bamboozled by anti-working class propaganda and thereby rendered no threat to the ruling class at all. This is what’s going on with the Left in the United States.

The Left is extremely influenced by the ruling class’s anti-working-class propaganda, as I discuss in some detail in my “Why I Am Critical of "The Left" and Not Just Certain Individuals.” Karl Marx, like most intellectuals then and today, was also very influenced by anti-working-class views, as his own writing reveals and as I discuss here.

The way to become immune to anti-working class propaganda is to talk to working class people about egalitarian revolution.

The only way to become immune to anti-working-class propaganda is to talk to working class people—random people where you live!—about egalitarian revolution (not just about so-called “safe” subjects). When you do this you will learn the truth about what most people want and what their values are. Until you do this, you won’t know the truth. You’ll be highly influenced by the ruling class anti-working-class propaganda and you won’t even know it. You’ll think your radical views mean you’re just smarter than most people. (Hint: that’s a form of elitism.)

Activism that is based on anti-working-class notions is activism that will NEVER remove the rich from power. The ruling class understands this perfectly. So should we.

Read here how you can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement.