My Revolutionary Message Is NOT "Our Rulers Secretly Do Much Worse Things Than You Know Of"; It Is "We Should Not Tolerate What We Already Know, From Personal Experience, That the Billionaires Do."

We need to promote a wide public conversation about why our routine everyday class inequality--treating the have-nots like dirt--is grounds for revolution

The reason people tolerate being treated like dirt by the rich is not because they don’t mind it. They hate it! They tolerate it because they don’t think they can do anything to stop it. They think maybe they can mitigate it a little bit with enormous effort—such as creating a labor union for example, or voting for the “lesser evil”—but ending it…no way.

We need to talk to people about what they already know and hate—that they and other have-nots like them are treated like dirt by the rich. And we need to talk to them also about the fact that we can STOP IT.

I have compiled this list of 25 examples of ways that the ruling billionaire plutocracy—‘the rich’—treat us, the have-nots, like dirt. This list is about things the rich do openly, not secretly. These are things that the people who are directly affected by them know all about from personal experience, with total confidence, with no need to trust or rely on experts to inform them about it. Virtually every have-not person has some personal experience of a way that the rich treat the have-nots like dirt.

Here is one example (item #2) from my list of 25 examples:

Subjecting retail workers to "on call shifts" --"periods for which an employee must keep an open schedule but might not end up working. Instead of simply reporting for work, the employee has to check in with a supervisor a few hours in advance. If she gets called in, she may have to scramble for a babysitter. If she doesn’t get called in, she doesn’t get paid, and it’s too late to get a shift on a second job. 'People will be scheduled for eight on-call shifts in a pay period and only get called in for one shift,' says attorney Rachel Deutsch of the Center for Popular Democracy, a labor advocacy group." [Boston Globe, April 19, 2015]

Dear fellow revolutionaries,

We need to promote a wide public massive conversation about the fact that being treated like dirt is not something to be tolerated.

We need a massive conversation about why there is nothing natural or inevitable about being treated like dirt.

We need a massive conversation about how people in the past have created egalitarian societies in which people were not treated like dirt, and about how we can do that too.

We need a massive conversation about how society ought to be and can be, for example what genuine democracy is in contrast to our fake democracy that is a dictatorship of the rich.

We need a massive conversation about the fact that an economy based on “You can have whatever you can afford to buy and ONLY what you can afford to buy” is not moral and is in violation of the Golden Rule.

We need a massive conversation about why an economy based on “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need” is moral and is consistent with the Golden Rule and entirely practical and even more productive when that is desired.

When we promote such a massive conversation, people will see that, in wanting to abolish class inequality and to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor, they are the vast majority. They will see that this is what most people want, despite the fact that the rich censor all expressions of this aspiration in the mass and alternative media in order to make us think that nobody else has this aspiration and therefore that it is impossible to actually remove the rich from power this way.

When we promote such a massive conversation about how the rich treat us like dirt and how we can stop it, we will grab people’s attention because we’ll be talking about what they already know is true and what they already hate. We will not be saying to people, “Trust me when I tell you the rich do horrible things you don’t even know about.” We’ll be saying, “You’re absolutely right about how bad the rich are. Would you like to talk now about how we can stop them from doing it?”

Be creative and figure out ways to promote this massive conversation.

The hardest part about promoting this massive conversation is taking the first step, which is DECIDING TO DO IT.

After that first step, you’ll be able to come up with a way that is best for you in your personal situation. In my case, I’m doing this.

In your case, it might mean doing it very differently. But do it!

Even better, join with others to do it in an organized way on a larger scale.

The ruling class relies on our not doing it. That’s how the rich stay in power. You don’t want that, do you?