If You Want to Change the World, Talk to Your Neighbors about How things OUGHT to Be
WHEN most people KNOW that most people want the world to be egalitarian, THEN most people will make the world egalitarian; but not UNTIL then.
Most people would love it if the world were (what I call) egalitarian. They would love it if instead of having to live under a dictatorship of the rich we had real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor. But the rich are in power. How do the rich stay in power? It’s not because they have the proverbial 82nd Airborne Division; read why not here.
The rich do it primarily by preventing us-the have-nots—from ever learning that the vast majority of people would love to remove the rich from power. They do it by making us believe that most people are against the idea of removing the rich from power. They do it by making us believe that in wanting to remove the rich from power we are a tiny and powerless minority and that, therefore, it is impossible to remove the rich from power. They know that this hopelessness will prevent us from thinking seriously about removing the rich from power and will paralyze egalitarian revolutionary movement building.
The first step to remove the rich from power is therefore to talk to one’s neighbors and find out what they think about the idea of removing the rich from power; not whether they think it is possible but whether they think it would be a good or a bad thing if it happened.
By taking this first very modest step, you—yes YOU!—will discover that you are NOT alone in wanting to remove the rich from power. You will thus have started to build the egalitarian revolutionary movement.
Another way the rich make us feel hopeless about the possibility of removing the rich from power is by promoting the ideas that:
no rich and no poor would mean having a totalitarian centralized economy like in the Soviet Union, which would be worse than today (not so, read here why there is no centralized economy and read here about why there is no anti-democratic Bolshevik kind of government);
no rich and no poor means everybody is exactly the same—UGH! (not so, read why here);
no rich and no poor means no freedom (no so, read here about an egalitarian Bill of Rights);
no rich and no poor means no private property (no so, read why here);
no rich and no poor means no luxuries (not so, read why here);
no rich and no poor would just revert back to rich people being back in power over us (not so, read why here);
no rich and no poor is a utopia, nice but impossible (it is NOT utopia, read why here);
no rich and no poor means letting free loaders have a right to the fruits of the labor of those who work (egalitarianism is anti-free-loader, as you can read about here and here).
By starting a massive public conversation about what kind of society we want, about what is actually possible and desirable, we will begin the building of an egalitarian revolutionary movement that can actually eventually remove the rich from power. This happened in Spain in the decades before the egalitarian revolution there (read about these early decades here) and created the conditions that made the egalitarian revolution from 1936-9 possible (read about it here including about the fatal mistakes it made that led to its defeat, and here).
There are no short cuts!
Some people, instead of doing the above (which makes THIS possible), try to remove the rich from power by relying on a short cut of one sort or another. These short cuts, or (to use an awkward but understandable metaphor) “get rich quick” schemes, don’t work! They leave the rich in power. The ruling class wants us to think they work so that we will avoid doing what it takes actually to succeed in removing the rich from power. (
Here are some of these “short cut”/”get rich quick” schemes that don’t work:
use the electoral process to elect a ‘good’ president of the United States;
try to get good laws passed by referenda (the rich use their power to threaten horrible results if people vote the ‘wrong way’1);
try to get the legislature to pass a “get money out of politics” law;
sneak in through the back door by creating cooperative economic enterprises (ignoring the fact that the rich own almost all of the means of production, as I discuss here);
Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to really remove the rich from power.
In the state of Massachusetts in the 1990s there was a binding referendum on the question, "Should there be Single Payer Health Care in the state?" The only reason the "Yes" vote lost was because Big Money totally out-spent the pro-Single Payer folks and dominated the air waves with T.V. ads showing doctors, wearing stethoscopes and looking directly into the camera, warning that "If you vote for this it will destroy the health care system and you'll lose your health care." It was an outright threat, and it worked.