Yes! It Is Difficult to Remove the Rich from Power and It Will Likely Take a Long Time. No! That Is Not a Persuasive Reason for Only Doing Things that CANNOT EVER Remove the Rich from Power.
Let's think carefully about what moral people today should do, given the reality of the world we live in
What do egalitarian revolutionaries look like? Take a look at 500 of them in my neighborhood (zoom in on any photo to read the sign they are all displaying), and see a sample them below. Now read why you should become one of them!
In the title I say it is “difficult” to remove the rich from power. But some people—perhaps most—say it is impossible, not just difficult. So before talking about why I think we should aim to remove the rich from power, let me say what makes me think it is possible, even if difficult. Here it is.
Earlier today I was passing out stickers at my local CVS drug store that say, “Let’s remove the rich from power: have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.” As readers of my Substack know I’ve been doing this regularly since April, and the response to the sticker is overwhelmingly positive, as I reported earlier here. People respond to the sticker by saying things such as “I agree,” “Good cause,” “Perfect!,” “Awesome!” And LOTS of people take extra stickers to give to friends. Why? Because people know from their personal experience (see 25 example here) that the rich treat us like dirt and they hate that.
On July 19 I began asking people who liked the sticker if they wanted to stay in touch by providing me their email address. So far 26 people have signed up. I asked the 23rd person, “Do you think that a majority of people think the idea on the sticker is a good idea or a bad idea?” He said a majority think it’s a bad idea (even though he, personally thought it was a good idea.) When I’ve asked other people who liked the sticker this question I’ve gotten a variety of answers: some say they’re sure most people think it’s a bad idea, others say they’re sure most people think it’s a good idea, but most say they don’t know for sure what most people think but they hope that they think it’s a good idea.
When I tell these people that in fact the vast majority of people would love for what the sticker says (egalitarian revolution) to happen and that I know this to be true based on talking to thousands of random people (as I discuss and illustrate with videos here), they believe me. And when I point out to them that all expressions of this egalitarian revolutionary aspiration are censored in the mass and alternative media, they always agree that this is so. And when I go on to say that the reason the rich censor any expression of the egalitarian revolutionary aspiration is to make people think that nobody else shares that aspiration and that they better keep their own mouth shut about it or else people will think they’re crazy or even dangerous, they agree with me. And when I go on to say that this is how the rich keep people so hopeless about the possibility of egalitarian revolution that they don’t even try to do the obvious concrete things to build an egalitarian revolutionary movement despite the fact that people hate being routinely treated like dirt by the rich…when I say all of these things—ideas they have never heard before—they readily agree! They agree because it’s not complicated, and it corresponds with the reality they know all too well.
It is because of thousands of conversations like this with random people “on the street” that I believe it is in fact possible to build an egalitarian revolutionary movement that explicitly aims to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.
It is because of these conversations that I understand what is the actual obstacle to building such a revolutionary movement and what is not the actual obstacle. Lack of desire for an egalitarian revolution is absolutely NOT the obstacle. Hopelessness about the possibility of such a revolution, based on the false belief that hardly anybody else wants it, is the obstacle.
The conclusion I draw from this is that in order to build the egalitarian revolutionary movement it is necessary to implement a strategy that aims to inform the people who want this revolution that they are in fact the great majority and not the tiny hopelessly weak minority that the rich work so hard to make us believe we are. The strategy is to make people as confident that they are the great majority in wanting an egalitarian revolution as they are confident that when they drop a stone it will fall down and not up—THAT confident. A confidence that is entirely lacking today. A confidence that is the condition for people doing the actual things required to organize and build an egalitarian revolutionary movement large enough and determined enough to really remove the rich from power, as I discuss in more detail here. (Read here how I learned this in 1969.)
So why, then, is there not an explicitly egalitarian revolutionary movement today?
First of all, note the word “explicitly” above. This is important because there is an implicitly egalitarian revolutionary movement today. The late Dave Stratman in a talk he gave to high school students titled, “Why We CAN Change the World,” expressed it this way:
We know that capitalism is the most dynamic social system in history. We know also that the fundamental dynamic of capitalism is the principle of competition, the idea of dog-eat-dog. The logic of capitalism is that this world should be a loveless and savage place: we should each be trying to screw each other all the time. But we can look around and see that this isn't true. We can see that most people, in the little piece of the world that we think we can control–which might just be with our friends or our classmates, or our wife or husband or students or colleagues–that in this little piece of the world most people try to create relationships the opposite of capitalism. They try to create relations based on love and trust and mutual respect and commitment. We may often not get very far in our efforts–capitalism is a very powerful culture hostile to equal and committed relationships–but to the extent that we have any committed and loving relationships in our lives, we have created them by a struggle against capitalist culture.
This means, I think, that most people are already engaged in a struggle to change the world. You are, your friends are, your parents are, your teachers are. Most people are already involved in a fight against capitalism. None of us are alone in our struggle, and we can succeed if we build on this great, shared human longing for a better world where we're all equal and all depend on each other.
But why is this implicitly egalitarian revolutionary movement not explicit, which it has to be in order to succeed, as I discuss below?
I believe the answer is this. For the last nearly two centuries the idea of revolution has been the absolutely wrong Marxist idea. The Marxist idea of revolution is that there is a historical process driven by impersonal laws of social change that will lead one day to a classless society (communism) not because ordinary people (the working class) consciously want such a society but despite the fact that they do not. According to the Marxist idea, everybody acts in their self-interest, which depends on their relation to the means of production (e.g., workers want higher wages while capitalists want lower wages.) The Marxists say that everybody’s chief value, workers no less than capitalists, is thus selfishness, not concern for others.
Marxists say that the unintended result of everybody acting in their self-interest is the operation of impersonal laws of economics that lead to a falling rate of profit and then a crisis of capitalism and then the working class (proletariat) taking power (socialism) and then, only when economic scarcity is eliminated (Marx says only in a ‘higher phase of communist society’) but not before, can there be “From each according to ability, to each according to need” because only then will people be transformed from their selfish values to good “class conscious” values. The Marxist, Che Guevara, said that people needed to be transformed into what he called “the new man and woman” because people as they are today can’t make a good society.
This Marxist understanding of revolution is the opposite of the egalitarian view. Because Marxists view ordinary people as having the same values as the capitalists—self-interest—Marxists typically say things such as, “Ordinary people are brainwashed by capitalism to support the unjust status quo” or “Ordinary people want to keep the rich in power because they hope and expect to be rich one day themselves.” Marxists view ordinary people not as the solution but as the problem because they are (supposedly) racist and homophobic and transphobic and complicit with the criminality of their governments because they willingly pay their taxes. Marxists view the task of revolutionaries to be changing people’s bad capitalist values to good (‘class conscious’) values, which is the opposite of the egalitarian view that the task of revolutionaries is to champion the positive anti-capitalist values most people hold and to help them gain the confidence in those values to shape all of society (not just the little piece of the world they have some control over) by their positive values. Egalitarians thus want ordinary people to be the real power in society; Marxists want to make sure that ordinary people are NOT the real power in society, at least not until the distant ‘higher phase of communist society.’ (Read more about Marxism here and here and here and in the articles these articles link to.)
While the Marxists express their wrong view of revolution by citing Karl Marx, there are many people—activists for reforms of all sorts—who do not consider themselves Marxists but who have internalized the same wrong view of ordinary people on which Marxism is based—a wrong view that the ruling class itself promotes with its liberal media especially. As a result, virtually nobody today, either a reform oriented progressive or a self-declared radical or revolutionary, thinks it is their task to champion the positive values held by ordinary people (they don’t think most people hold positive values), or that it’s their task to do things to help people discover that they are the vast majority in wanting an egalitarian revolution (they believe hardly anybody wants an egalitarian revolution), or that it’s their task to explain that the purpose of revolution is to shape all of society by the positive values most people already share (they think their task is to change people to make them stop having bad values and start having good values), or that it’s their task to build an explicitly egalitarian revolutionary movement (they think this is impossible and that what is possible is to persuade lots of people that it is in their material selfish interest to get the Marxist party in power) as I am advocating we do.
Such activists, on the contrary, think that the problem is indeed that people are brainwashed into supporting the unjust status quo and therefore their task is either a) somehow to make people break free from this brainwashing, or b) get the brainwashed people to support movements for reforms that will enable the un-brainwashed people to gain power.
The first type of such activists place all their hopes on exposing secret evil deeds of the ruling class such as the 9/11 inside job, counting on these revelations to make people “wake up” and finally want to go against the ruling class. These activists do not know that most people already want to remove the rich from power based on their personal experience of how the rich treat the have-nots like dirt routinely and openly. These activists think that people have to be ‘hit over the head with a 2 x 4’—i.e., made to watch some experts on YouTube tell them the shocking hidden truth about 9/11 or the JFK assassination or Covid, etc.—before they will be angry at the ruling class. These activists are barking up the wrong tree, and that is why they don’t build an explicitly egalitarian revolutionary movement.
The second type of activists, based on the same wrong view of ordinary people as being “brainwashed to support the unjust status quo,” take a different approach. They try to identify and organize in support of reforms (such as raising the minimum wage or getting medicare for all) that they figure many people will support in spite of their brainwashing. These activists work hard to make sure that the public will not view the reform demand as in any way radical and certainly not part of an effort to remove the rich from power. These activists believe that if their reform effort is connected to the aspiration of removing the rich from power then it will “scare the public away” and the reform effort will lose support from the public. These activists are flat out wrong because their reform struggle would GAIN support from the general public if it declared that the people waging it also want to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor. The activists’ wrongheaded thinking comes right from their wrong view of ordinary people. When these activists’ leaders succeed in gaining governmental power as they sometimes do, they continue the class inequality with some rich and some poor and with the rich treating the have-nots like dirt. Sometimes they call this ‘socialism’ (Read about socialism here.)
Today’s activists—be they ‘progressives’ or ‘radicals’ and be they focused on talking about secret evil deeds of the ruling class such as 9/11 being an inside job, or focused instead on winning reforms such as raising the minimum wage—do not do what egalitarian revolutionaries do, such as my sticker-ing at the CVS drug store.
Furthermore they do not do what egalitarians do in response to the ruling class’s use of social issues for divide-and-rule. Egalitarians expose how the ruling class creates deliberately divisive frameworks for these social issues in which people are offered two opposing bad views to choose from and are made to think that those who chose the “wrong” bad view are the enemy of those who chose the “right” bad view. Egalitarians, in contrast, express the view on each of these social issues that reflects the positive values of most people—a view that the ruling class always censors—and in this way unite the great majority of people against the ruling class. The ‘progressives’ and ‘radicals,’ on the contrary, support one of the bad views offered by the ruling class and denounce those who choose the other bad view as the enemy—exactly what the ruling class loves. Or else these activists ignore these divisive social issues on the grounds that “they are just diversions,” and thereby let the ruling class get away with using them to divide-and-rule us.
The egalitarian view of ordinary people as the solution, not the problem, is almost never expressed in the world today. It is a view most people have not yet even heard of. This is why there is not an explicitly egalitarian revolutionary movement today. But by understanding the obstacle—a wrong, negative, view of ordinary people, held by both Marxists and non-Marxists—we can begin the process of building an explicitly egalitarian revolutionary movement by rejecting that wrong negative view of people. We should not draw from the present absence of an explicitly egalitarian revolutionary movement the wrong conclusion that it is not possible to build it. Everything indicates that it is possible because the obstacle—hopelessness—is something we can overcome; we can turn hopelessness to hopefulness with the strategy of doing what it takes to let people learn, and be 100% confident, that in wanting an egalitarian revolution they are the vast majority.
The historical evidence—read about what happened in Spain here—is that a revolutionary movement can—even if it takes decades—grow huge if it has a positive view of ordinary people. We can do today something extremely important: get the ball rolling so that one day in the future—even if it’s the far future—the egalitarian revolutionary movement will have grown large enough to really win, to really remove the rich from power. That is something worth devoting one’s life to. It is the most moral thing we can do today.
Next, a few more words about the possibility of getting this revolutionary ball rolling based on history, and then a final section about the five big reasons it is important enough to devote one’s life to making it happen.
Some history
First of all, for most of the 200,000 years of human history, the rich were not in power. People lived in egalitarian societies, some small and some large. This is not disputed by anthropologists today. In terms of our human history, the emergence of a dominating oppressive class of rich people is a recent development. Human nature—the same for all of these 200,000 years—is obviously consistent both with egalitarianism and with class inequality.
Secondly, people have been making efforts with greater or less success to remove the rich from power for a very long time. Read about these efforts here (Naples, 1647) and here and in this video (England 1831) and here (England 1640s) and here (Spain 1936-9) and here (much of Europe 1524-5) and here (China, 1864) and here (recently in Mexico) and here (recently in Ethiopia) and here (Seattle 1919) and here (recently in Syria) and here (from 1597-1695 in Brazil) and here (Mexico AD300) and here (Europe 6,000 years ago [full article is behind a paywall]).
These past efforts to remove the rich from power are inspiring for what they accomplished and also are cautionary tales for alerting us to fatal mistakes (such as discussed here) that we can learn from and avoid in the future.
In particular, the failure of the famous American and French and Russian and Chinese revolutions to end class inequality is easily explained by this fact: these revolutions were led by people who had no intention of ending class inequality, as I discuss here regarding the American revolution and here regarding the French revolution and here and here regarding the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Many working class people did indeed participate in these revolutions and did want to abolish class inequality, but there was not an organized effort by these people with this explicit aim (which must include the aim to have an egalitarian genuine democracy and an egalitarian economy.) The failure of these revolutions to abolish class inequality provides evidence that doing so requires an explicitly egalitarian revolutionary movement (on a world wide scale); it does not provide evidence that egalitarian revolution is impossible.
In contrast to the above-mentioned revolutions, the Spanish Revolution (1936-9) was led by egalitarian revolutionaries (who called themselves anarchists). It failed because of fatal mistakes the anarchists made and also because of the failure of revolutionaries in Germany and Italy to be explicitly for egalitarian revolution, as I discuss in some detail in my “What killed the Spanish Revolution?”
Why try to do something as difficult as removing the rich from power, which likely won’t even happen in our lifetimes? Why not just work on winning much easier but still important reforms even if they leave the rich in power?
Here’s why.
First of all, and most importantly, is this fact.
It is ONLY by removing the rich from power and having an egalitarian world that we can eliminate the threat of thermonuclear war. Anti-egalitarian governments need nuclear bombs; egalitarian governments do not. Oppressive ruling classes—the rich—need to keep the world in a state of actual or cold war because warmongering against bogeyman enemies is their key strategy for controlling their own have-nots, as I show in great detail here. The warmongering leads some nations to acquire nuclear weapons and the logic of war creates an extremely high risk of thermonuclear war either by accident or intent. Watch the first part of this video by Alexander Mercouris—hardly an alarmist or an egalitarian!—describing the heightened risk today of thermonuclear war.
Sure, there may not be a thermonuclear war in our lifetime; it may only happen after we’re gone. Does that mean it’s OK to avoid working today to build the egalitarian revolutionary movement that is required to prevent thermonuclear war in the future?
Second of all is this fact.
The rich are literally mass murderers (as I show here) and they will keep at it as long as they are in power. The horrible ongoing genocide in Gaza is just one example of the mass murder oppressive ruling classes commit to control the have-nots in general as I discuss here, and as is the case with the Israeli ruling class specifically as I prove here.
Sure, we can ignore this fact and only try to win good reforms that are easier to win than removing the rich from power. But is this the moral thing to do? I say it is not.
Thirdly is this fact.
As long as the rich remain in power, nothing prevents the rich from taking back in one way or another the benefits we gain from winning a reform.
Perhaps the most heartbreaking example of this is what happened to the black South Africans who won the hugely important and worthy reform of abolishing apartheid. They won this reform but they did not remove the rich from power. As a result (as discussed in some detail here and demonstrated with horrific facts here1 (PDF) which you really should read) conditions of life for most black South Africans after apartheid was abolished are WORSE now than before it was abolished. (This is obviously not because there was anything good about apartheid!)
American blacks abolished Jim Crow, which was a wonderful accomplishment. But they did not remove the rich from power. As a result we now have the horrible New Jim Crow of racist incarceration. And the old Jim Crow was what the rich imposed on blacks right after they succeeded in abolishing slavery but not removing the rich from power.
We won the 8 hour day but now have to work two or even three jobs.
We won the right to form a labor union but now those unions have been turned into instruments for controlling workers, not empowering them.
Sure, we may be able to win important reforms in our lifetime and the rich may wait until we’re gone before undercutting those reforms to make things much worse. Does that mean it’s OK to avoid building the egalitarian revolutionary movement that is required to prevent the rich from making things much worse for the people in future generations?
Fourthly, is this fact.
The most effective way even to win just a reform is to build a movement that aims to remove the rich from power. This is because what frightens the rich more than anything is a movement to remove the rich from power growing stronger. What most compels the rich to grant a major reform (such as the New Deal or the abolition of Jim Crow) is fear that they (the rich) will be removed from power if they do not grant such a reform. Read here how this is why the racist LBJ worked so hard to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished Jim Crow, passed. And read here why this is what made FDR implement The New Deal. The rich do not want us to understand this, which is why they teach us that important reforms came from the good-heartedness of people such as LBJ and FDR. In fact it is the growth of explicitly revolutionary movements that win reforms.
One of the ways to build the egalitarian revolutionary movement is to persuade people who are fighting for a good reform to declare to the general public that they also aim to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor, and to explain to the public that the reason they want to win the particular reform they are fighting for is because that reform will make society be at least a little bit closer to the way it ought to be—egalitarian. Doing this will lead to an increase, not a decrease, in public support for the reform effort, as I discuss further here.
Building an egalitarian revolutionary movement is thus something one can do while also participating in a reform struggle. It is not a question of having to choose one or the other. My 500 neighbors in these photos (zoom in on any photo to read the egalitarian revolutionary sign they are holding as they fight for affordable housing for all) fought for a reform and for egalitarian revolution with the same action—posing for a photo. All actions for a reform can also be actions for egalitarian revolution.
Sure, we can just work for reforms and forget about building an egalitarian revolutionary movement. That will mean the reform struggle will be fighting with one hand tied behind its back (it will not have the enthusiastic support from the general public that it otherwise could have.) Is that a good idea?
Fifthly, is this fact.
The rich cannot be removed from power by a mass movement that does not explicitly aim to do exactly that. Those who say, “If we just win such-and-such a reform then it will result in the rich being removed from power” are flat out wrong. If a movement is not aiming explicitly to remove the rich from power then the rich stay in power because of these resultant facts:
The rich will be able to grant—or pretend to grant—almost anything (except the rich being removed from power) and thereby get the movement to stand down and be satisfied.
The rank-and-file members of the military (who support the revolutionary movement just like civilians because they didn’t enlist in the military to keep the rich in power) will have no reason to believe that the mass movement will remove the rich from power. This means that the members of the military will know that if they refuse orders to attack the movement they will surely be severely disciplined—perhaps even shot as a traitor—and so they won’t refuse such orders. Only if the mass movement is explicitly aiming to remove the rich from power will rank-and-file-soldiers have reason to believe that if they refuse orders to attack it and go over to its side then they will be going over to the winning side and hence will not be severely disciplined for having refused orders to attack it. (I discuss this further here.) As long as the members of the military keep obeying orders from the rich, the rich will remain in power.
Sure, we can come up with all sorts of reasons for not working to build the explicitly egalitarian revolutionary movement. But they are all bad, unpersuasive, reasons. Here are some ideas about how to start building such a movement.
Like JAS wrote, this is a profoundly important and insightful piece. Your effors are very deeply appreciated John. Thank you
Momentous effort John. When do you ever sleep given your prodigious output?