With Apologies to Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers and the casts of South Pacific, "What Ain't We (the Have-Nots) Got? You Know Damn Well"... If Not, Read Below

Hint: You either have it or you don't; it's like being pregnant or not: there's no in-between.

We got sunlight on the sand,
We got moonlight on the sea—
We got mangoes and bananas
You can pick right off a tree—
We got volleyball and ping-pong
And a lot of dandy games—
What ain’t we got?

We ain’t got dames state power!

This is state power:

We the have-nots do not have state power. We have only this:

That means the haves—the ruling billionaires—have the power to prevail over us; they have a monopoly of overwhelming violence. Whenever push comes to shove in a dispute between them and us over anything, they win because they have control of sufficient violence to prevail. The billionaires know it; and we know it too.

I started this post on a light note hoping more people would read it than otherwise. But the situation is not one calling for a light-hearted response.

As the video below makes frighteningly clear, our billionaire rulers and politicians with their state power are drastically increasing the risk of thermonuclear war,

and they are backing racist Zionist genocide to the hilt to foment a regional if not world war in the Middle East that will kill even more innocent people for sure.

Until we the have-nots have state power, there’s nothing we can do to stop these warmongers from killing millions of people and all too possibly ending our lives and our children’s lives and their children’s lives.

Yes, we the have-nots CAN gain state power, but only if we aim to do exactly that.

We the have-nots CAN win state power. I discuss how this might happen here, and it is possible despite the proverbial 82nd Airborne Division. And I discuss here how we (YOU!) can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement that can make it possible for us to win state power this way.

Otherwise, we know how it is, right?

If we the have-nots decide to use land and factories and mines and buildings and radio and TV stations, plus our labor to make life good for the have-nots instead of making the rich even richer, then we know what happens, right? If we decide to stop letting the rich use the economy to wage unjust wars and genocides and even thermonuclear war, then we know what happens, right? We know damn well!

The billionaire class says, “No, you cant’t.”

And then what? We can write letters and demonstrate and protest and use nonviolence (and go to jail to show how sincere our convictions are) and even resort to using our guns and rifles all we want, but in the end the rich get their way as long as they have an obedient military and police force that will bring to bear—or credibly threaten to bring to bear—far more violence against us than we can bring to bear against them. This is what it means to say that the billionaires have state power.

When we the have-nots have state power with genuine democracy, then whenever we have a dispute with the billionaires, it is we, the have-nots, who win; not the billionaires. We win because we are able to use or credibly threaten to use sufficient violence to prevail against whatever violence the billionaires might have.

The conflict between we the have-nots and the billionaire class is a fundamental conflict.

What does that mean? It means that the conflict—whether there should be class inequality or not, whether the haves should be able to treat the have-nots like dirt, or not—is one for which neither side will willingly agree to let the other side have its way no matter who has the most votes in any supposed “democracy.” It means that there is no compromise possible that both sides will mutually accept. It means that this conflict, like the conflict in 1860 over whether there should be slavery in the United States or not (when even though Lincoln won the most votes, it STILL required winning a violent Civil War to abolish slavery), is one that can only be settled by force: by violence or the credible threat of violence. It means that the side that has state power—superior force of violence or its credible threat—will win.

What happens as long we do not have state power?

As long as we don’t have state power, we keep getting treated like dirt. The billionaire class can always prevail by, when necessary, doing things like this:

Or when necessary, things like this:

Or this from our own United States rulers:

Or like this, when U.S. rulers needed to do stuff like those in Bangladesh did recently:

On November 7, 1919 (the second anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia), U.S. federal and local authorities raided the headquarters of the Union of Russian Workers in New York City and arrested more than 200 individuals. On November 25 a second raid on the Union of Russian Workers headquarters unveiled a false wall and a bomb factory, confirming suspicions that the union harboured revolutionary intentions. Palmer believed that the way to deal with the radicals was to deport the immigrants. On December 21, 249 radicals, including anarchist Emma Goldman, were packed aboard the USS Buford, which the press dubbed the Soviet Ark, and deported to Russia. On January 2, 1920, the most spectacular of the Palmer Raids took place, when thousands of individuals (estimates vary between 3,000 and 10,000) were arrested in more than 30 cities. The following day, federal, state, and local agents conducted further raids. In all the Palmer Raids, arrests greatly exceeded the number of warrants that had been obtained from the courts, and many of those arrested were guilty of nothing more than having a foreign accent.

It is foolish for we the have-nots to ignore the need to win state power.

Whenever we make reform demands but keep silent about our aim to win state power to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor, we thereby guarantee that we will continue forever to be treated like dirt by the billionaire class.

When, in contrast, we declare that we aim to remove the rich from power—in other words to win state power—then we are on the road to winning state power and ending the horrible class inequality. Here online are photos of 500 of my wonderful neighbors declaring their aim to remove the rich from power as part of their fight to win affordable housing for all (click on any photo and zoom in to read the sign they are proudly displaying). Here is a sample of these people:

Unfortunately, these people are not organized to win their goal. We need to create egalitarian revolutionary organizations that explicitly aim to win state power, in other words make an egalitarian revolution.

The problem is NOT that too few people want such a revolution. In fact most people would LOVE an egalitarian revolution, as I prove here.

The problem is that people don’t KNOW that most people would love an egalitarian revolution (the mass media work hard to keep this a secret) and for this reason they mistakenly think that when they are trying to win a reform they need to censor their egalitarian revolutionary aspiration in order not to “scare away” support from the general public. In fact they would GAIN support for their reform struggle if they announced their egalitarian revolutionary aim, as this video (mainly starting at time point 7:36) of people on the street illustrates.