The Revolutionary Significance of Everyday Life

The ruling class counts on our not understanding this.

I have copied below two recent posts on my Nextdoor social media app because:

• they are so ordinary, so absolutely unremarkable, so typical of the kinds of things so very many people do in their everyday lives without thinking of it as political at all, and yet

• they are in fact IMPLICITLY very political, indeed revolutionary, for reasons that I hope you will appreciate after you read the linked articles of mine below, and the excerpt from Dave Stratman’s wonderful book that appears below.

Tracy Balthazar in her post is expressing her egalitarian, anti-capitalist, values: mutual aid, fairness, truth.

Sean Singh in his post is expressing his egalitarian, anti-capitalist, value of mutual aid (concern for others.)

Please read about the significance of these everyday life examples

The Golden Rule: The Transcendent Value That Is the Basis of a Good Society

Religion, the Golden Rule and Revolution

We CAN Change the World: The Real Meaning of Everyday Life, by Dave Stratman, online, from which the following is an excerpt:

If there is anything that defines the world as we approach the end of the twentieth century, it is the loss of hope.

The fundamental reason for this loss of hope is that there seems to be no alternative to the capitalist system. Communism provided the fullest articulation of apparently revolutionary ideas in the twentieth century, and it has turned out a disaster. The idea of revolution has been defeated by the reality of it.

Without an alternative to the system, fundamental change seems out of the question. We seem doomed to live in the grip of a system which defines human life in terms of its own imperatives of profit and loss, competition and inequality. It seems that the deepest human values and most important human relationships must forever be subordinated to the needs of the economy and the dictates of the elite.

Hope in the future and belief in the possibility of fundamental change—belief in the possibility of revolution—are inextricably linked. The defeat of the idea of revolution has led to an end to the belief that human beings have the capacity to create a human world.

My purpose in this book is to show that we can triumph over the system to create a truly democratic society…

Revolution, in my view, does not mean simply a new economic structure, and it does not mean control by a new elite. It means transforming all the relationships in society to accord with the values, goals, and idea of human life of ordinary working people.

There seem to me to be two values which are fundamental to most people's lives and which are critical to creating a new society. Most people believe in equality and in commitment to each other. Revolutionary democracy means changing all the relationships and institutions in society to reflect the values of solidarity and equality.

Revolutions occur when people gain sufficient confidence in their own view of human life and in themselves as the makers of history to shape all of society with their vision…

The Importance of a Revolutionary Conception of Change

The idea of revolution has no legitimacy in contemporary society. Yet a revolutionary conception of society is essential if we hope to understand the world around us or to change it.

The reason for this lies in the nature of the system in which we live. Capitalism is not merely an economic system. It is a system of human relations, which projects and enforces its own view of the world as its primary source of control. The essence of the capitalist view of the world is a view of people: the idea that capitalist society expresses human nature.

According to this view, society is competitive and unequal, driven by greed and self-seeking, because that is the way people are. The goal of society is economic development; the goal of the individual is to produce and consume. Society is a jungle in which only the fit survive, and the most fit rise to the top. Whatever is good comes from the top of the social order. The feudal aristocracy claimed that the order of society was the will of God and therefore eternal. The capitalist class claims that the order of society is human nature, and therefore cannot be changed.

Capitalism holds that self-interest is the fundamental human motivation. Capitalism defines the possibilities of human society in terms of this view, and it shapes the fundamental relationships in society, such as economic relations, to conform to this view. Capitalism means a society constructed on selfishness as the basis of human development.

The culture of capitalism has great power to convince us that the world cannot be different, because "this is the way people are." In this competitive world, we are taught to be always on the defensive. We are forced to compete for grades at school and for jobs when we graduate. The stories we read in the newspaper, the ideas we are taught in school, our experiences on the job can all serve to convince us that people really are just out for themselves.

To understand that the world can be different, we have first to realize that people are different from what capitalism says they are. We have to realize that selfishness is not the fundamental impulse of most people's lives.

The heart of a political vision is thus not a view of economic or political structures but a view of people. The revolutionary vision which I develop in this book is a view of people which shows that most people are moved primarily by goals other than self-interest and thus are capable of creating a new society together…

The necessity and possibility for revolutionary change lie in the vast gulf between the world as it is and the world as most people would have it to be. The logical end of the struggles in which most people are already engaged is the creation of a new society which expresses their values and their idea of what it means to be human.

POSTSCRIPT July 9, 2024

Today a new chair I ordered was delivered. It was in a large and heavy box/package left on the sidewalk in front of my condominium unit’s building. As I was struggling to move the box into my building and was not able to do it, a person delivering somebody’s ordered take out meal walked into my building with, leaving his truck idling in the middle of the one-way narrow street. After he put the food inside he helped me lift the box and carry it into the building, no questions asked. He was under a lot of pressure NOT to help me because a car behind his truck was honking for him to move it, but he spent time helping me anyway.

Why did he do this? Did he expect I would one day return the favor? No likely, since we would probably not ever see each other again.

Clearly he helped me because it was virtually instinctual to do so. Most human beings (not all!) are like that; we are hard-wired to honor the Golden Rule. When it is most human beings instead of the few who don’t honor the Golden Rule that have the real power in society, that’s when it will be the egalitarian revolution that so many people would love.