thinking about revolution.pdf

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Thinking about Revolution

September, 2011

John Spritzler and Dave Stratman

(This document is online at www.NewDemocracyWorld.org/Thinking.pdf)


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Thinking About Revolution

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ContentsThinking About Revolution........................................................................................................................ 1

Summary of Proposals for a New Society.................................................................................................. 2

What is Democratic Revolution?................................................................................................................ 3

Where Are We? How Did We Get Here?................................................................................................... 3

Is Human Nature the Problem?................................................................................................................... 5Why Democratic Revolution Is Necessary................................................................................................. 7

Why We Can Win....................................................................................................................................... 7

What Will the New Society Be Like?......................................................................................................... 9

Equality................................................................................................................................................... 9

Abolition of Money............................................................................................................................... 15

Local Power Trumps Every Other Power............................................................................................. 17

How Does the New Society Work?........................................................................................................... 18

Some Things Are the Same................................................................................................................... 18

Some Things Are Different................................................................................................................... 18

Democracy in the New Society............................................................................................................. 19

How the Sharing Economy Works........................................................................................................ 21

How Will the Revolution Protect Itself From Its Enemies?...................................................................... 22

Democracy and Armed Suppression of Counterrevolution.................................................................. 22

What About Prisons?............................................................................................................................. 22

Why Did Communist Revolutions Have Such Ugly Results?.................................................................. 23

How Can We Make a Democratic Revolution?........................................................................................ 24

What Strategy Makes Sense?................................................................................................................ 25

Overcoming the Obstacles.................................................................................................................... 27

What Should You Do If You Like These Ideas?...................................................................................... 29

About the Authors..................................................................................................................................... 30

Suggested Background Reading................................................................................................................ 30


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"What do we mean by the Revolution? The

war? That was no part of the revolution; it was

only an effect and consequence of it. The revo-

lution was in the minds of the people, and this

was effected from 1760 1775, in the course of

fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed

at Lexington.

John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, Au-

gust 24, 1815


nce again the time has come for revolutionin America. Instead of a British king wehave a ruling class of bankers and billion-

aires who control the gov-ernment and all the impor-tant institutions of society.Despite the electoral circusand other trappings of de-mocracy, the big shots callthe tune. Politicians servethem, not us. This dictator-ship of the rich has pushedeconomic inequality to ob-scene levels, has left moreand more Americans unemployed or working at jobs

that pay too little, has driven homes into foreclosure,deprived families of adequate medical care, saddledyoung people with huge student loans, caused envi-ronmental disasters like BP in the Gulf, and sentloved ones to kill or be killed in wars based on lies.The future holds misery for the many and privilegefor the few.

These and other problems are part of a system inwhich money is power and most people dont haveany. The powerful men and women who run ourworld were not elected and cannot be unelected.

They can only be removed from power by revolu-tion.

The goal of democratic revolution is to break thepower of the ruling elite and create a society run byand for the people: a true democracy.

A change in who has power, however, is not enough.We also need a change in the goals and values thatshape society. The greed and selfishness that dom-

inate our society must be swept away along with thesystem that promotes them, to be replaced by demo-cratic values and common decency.

Real democracy will require a whole new organiza-tion of society. This paper proposes radical changesin how we think about ourselves and what we im-agine human possibilities to be. It proposes a demo-cratic structure based on confidence in the valuesand good sense of ordinary people.

We are writing to invite you to a discussion of howto make a revolution and what the new societyshould be like. We hope you will spread Thinkingfar and wide and begin discussing the idea of revolu-tion with your family, friends and co-workers.

Some people believe a better world is not possiblebecause inequality andgreed are just human na-ture. Others believe thehistory of Communismshows that revolutions onlymake things worse. Stillothers think that the greatpower of the ruling elitemakes revolution impossi-ble.

Thinking presents a very different view. We be-lieve a better world is possible, that it will take ademocratic revolution to create it, and that such arevolution can indeed succeed, despite the power ofthose ruling our present society.

Only revolution can fulfill the aspirations of thegreat majority of people for a better world. The massuprisings in the past, including the social revolutionin Spain from 1936 to 1939, and the Arab Springuprisings in the Middle East in 2011, show that amovement involving at first just a handful of peoplecan grow into a mass revolutionary movement. If amovement taps into long-standing, heart-felt griev-

ances and hopes of a people, it can shake the world.

Thinking About Revolution is focused on Americabut in principle it pertains to every society where themoney-men hold the people in their grip. We shouldbegin to do in America what people across the globehave already begun. A global revolutionary move-ment can create a new world.

OWe propose a democratic structure

based on confidence in the

values and good sense.

of ordinary people.


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Summary of Proposals for a New Society

e propose a democratic revolution tosweep away the system of elite power andclass domination that so distorts our

present world. We propose a new society in which:

All who contribute to society, or who are notobligated to do so because they are children,elderly or otherwise unableto work, have free andequal access to its goodsand services, which are shared according toneed, not bought and sold. Money is notused. There are no rich and no poor people.

All the things that people use to produce

goods, such as factories and mines and largetracts of land, belong to all the people. Thesethings are like the air we breathe and thesunshine that warms usa common treasurefor all of society, not the property of a few.

The goal of economic production is to pro-vide the things and services people need andwant, not to make profits for capitalists.

Human lives are no longer degraded nor theearth ravaged for the greed of a few. Instead

of mindless growth laying waste the earth,we have creative, bottom-up planning tocreate a paradise.

There is no unemployment. The morepeople want to pitch in to do the work, thebetter for everyone. Work-time is dramatic-ally reduced. Automation is used to liberateworkers from drudgery rather than to speedup or control them or put them out of workwithout pay.

Everybody has a home to live in, good foodto eat, good health care when they need it, agood education for the whole family, and anequal right to enjoy all the other productsand services and benefits that society makespossible. If any of these things are scarcethen they are rationed equitably according toneed.

There is genuine democracy based on localassemblies of all community residents andall working people. All political power is

vested in local community and workplaceassemblies. Congress, state legislatures, cityand town councils, and all other instrumentsof the former capitalist state are disbanded.

All adults whoembrace the principles of

mutual aid, equality and democracy have anequal say in decisions.

All workers have an equal say in workplacedecisions. People do not work for somebody

else; they work with each other for thecommon good.

Workplace assemblies determine the hoursof work required per week and per yearbased on their assessment of needs and eachworkers personal circumstances. In a highlyproductive society with no unemploymentand no overwork, time spent working will bedrastically reduced.

Local and workplace assemblies decide how

to meet the needs of community membersfor food, shelter, health care, and other ne-cessities. When local needs exceed local ca-pacity these assemblies use voluntary feder-ation, to coordinate with each other, carryout plans for the common good and shareeconomic products and services on a largescale.

The Pentagon, the military, the police, andother instruments of capitalist power are dis-banded. Communities organize to meet local

needs for safety and protection.

There are no more unjust wars. People nolonger feel helpless before the mass murder-ers who control the government today.People take power into their own hands.

WThere will be no unemployment.


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What is Democratic Revolution?

emocratic revolution is the act of the greatmajority of people removing power from theformer wealthy ruling elite, taking power

into their own hands, and reshaping society to pro-vide well-being for all based on principles of mutualaid, equality, and democracy.

Mutual aid (solidarity): People help eachother rather than compete against one anoth-er.

Equality: All people have an equal right toenjoy the benefits of the earths resourcesand the wealth produced by society.

Democracy: Local assemblies of people incommunities and places of work decidewhat they will do and how they will do it,with no higher body having power overthem. Social order is achieved not by lawsimposed on people from above but byagreements arrived at among local assem-blies linked through voluntary federation.

The words democratic and democracy havebeen thoroughly corrupted in our present world torefer to the anti-democratic dictatorship of the rich in

which we live. We mean something entirely differ-ent: not this fake democracy we have in the UnitedStates in which politicians are front men and womenfor the real power hidden behind the scenes. Bydemocracy we mean government of the people, bythe people, and for the people. By the people wedo not mean capitalists or the super-rich who live offother peoples labor or those who manage workerson behalf of capitalists. We mean the people who dothe work that sustains human society.

Where Are We? How Did We GetHere?

People may be deeply angry with the way the UnitedStates is going, but there hasnt seemed to be muchresistance. Ordinary people have been beaten downby corporate America and its hireling politicians andthe corporate media for forty years. All this has left

people feeling powerless to change things. Not tomention that it hasnt been exactly clear what to do.

Demonstrations pleading for our leaders to do theright thing have been a bust. A lot of us put our faithin the Democrats in 06 or in Obama in 08and a lotof good that did. Weve been betrayed by all the or-ganizations that we thought were on our side: thegovernment, the politicians, the unions, the politicalparties, the churches, the synagogues, the schoolsand colleges, the media. The upper class*

uses everyinstitution in society to control ordinary people, thepeople who make things or do things but dont runthingspeople like us. There is no institution thatrepresents us or fights for our interests. Were on ourown.

The effect of this is very disorienting. We are lied toevery day, so its hard to know what is true. Theytell us not to trust our own experience. Deep downwe may understand the situation, but the leaderskeep telling us that everything we know to be true isfalse.

The official leaders of societystarting with thePresident, and including Congress, the Courts, theother politicians, the media and the union leadersand the talking heads on TV and the loudmouths onradioare all in on the same lies. They may evenappear to violently disagree, but not one of themexposes the system for what it is. Not one of themtells the whole, ugly truth. Not one of them ralliesthe people against our real enemies.

The Revolution of Rising Expectations

To understand why people seem so beaten down, wehave to see how we got here.

In the 1960s and early 70s, a revolution of risingexpectations swept the world. Ordinary people tookto the streets, challenging the rule of capitalist andCommunist elites alike. In Poland shipyard workers

*For discussion of who, exactly, make up what we referto as the upper class, ruling class or ruling elite, go tohttp://newdemocracyworld.org/world_who_rules.html.By 'upper class' we mean that top 0.5% to 1% of thepopulation who exercise effective control over the corpo-rations, the banks, the media, the government. We do notmean people who simply have a higher than average in-come.

D
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burned the Communist Party headquarters to theground. In Prague workers and students fought So-viet tanks. In France in May 1968, ten million work-ers and students went on a wildcat (unauthorized)general strike, occupying their factories and officesand universities. President Charles DeGaulle and hiswife fled the country.

The U.S. was swept by the civil rights movement,powered by the he-roic actions of blackpeople facing policedogs and clubs. Apowerful movementagainst the VietnamWar took root incommunities and college campuses and in the mili-tary itself, where troops began to frag gung-hoofficers and refuse to fight. The country was sweptby wildcat strikes by workers in defiance of unionofficials. When Teamsters in 1970 went on their firstnational wildcat strike, the National Guard wascalled out in Ohio to protect scabs. After a studentstrike broke out at Kent State University in responseto the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, these same Na-tional Guard units were sent to the campus and mur-dered four students. Auto workers in Lordstown,Ohio and Detroit and elsewhere struck againstspeed-up and brutal work conditions. Coal miners inWest Virginia and Kentucky struck against their un-ion and the coal operators. U.S. postal workersmounted an illegal, wildcat national strike led by theNew York City local. Everywhere, it seemed, work-ers were rebelling against union officials and theircozy relationship with management. Everywherepeople were challenging the authorities.

The Empire Strikes Back

The world-wide revolutionary upsurge scared thehell out of the ruling elites of the world. In Septem-ber 1972 the CEOs of the 200 largest corporations inAmerica met in Washington, D.C. to map out a

strategy to go on the counteroffensive. They formedthe Business Roundtable to direct a wide-rangingcounteroffensive that left no part of Americans livesuntouched. On the international side, David Rock-efeller and others organized the Trilateral Commis-sion, involving representatives of the US, WesternEurope, and Japan. The history of the last forty yearsin America is the history of government and corpor-

ate leaders trying to break the spirit of Americanworking people.

To counter the revolution of rising expectations, therulers reasoned, they had to lower peoples expecta-tions. Business leaders undertook a massive publicrelations effort to convince the public that the gainsworking people had made during the '60s were hav-ing a negative effect on the competitive position of

the US. An oft-citedBusiness Week edi-torial proclaimed onOctober 12, 1974:

It will be a bitterpill for people to

swallowthe idea of having less so that bigbusiness can have more. Nothing that thisnation or any other nation has done in mod-ern history compares with the selling jobthat must be done to make people accept thenew reality.

Corporate and government leaders pressed theircounteroffensive on many fronts. Corporations wenton the attack with sharply-intensified supervisionand disciplinary practices, speed-up, and othermeasures. They began to spend millions on union-busting consulting firms. They began to "deindus-trialize" America. Doug Fraser, then the president ofthe United Auto Workers union, said that business"has declared a new class war."

Democratic and Republican administrations alikeslashed social programs like unemployment insur-ance and welfare. They attacked workers pensionsand health care plans. The government gave taxbreaks to corporations to ship jobs overseas and re-place workers with machines. The balance of classforces shifted dramatically in 1981 when PresidentReagan fired 11,000 striking PATCO union air traf-fic controllers, and the International Association ofMachinists (IAM), whose members filled crucial

jobs at airports, ordered its members to cross PAT-CO picket lines. Three decades of union betrayal ofworkers followed. Hormel, Caterpillar, Staley, De-troit News: these and other workers struggles weredefeated when the International unions joined withthe companies to break their strikes.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. rulersneeded a new enemy with which to frighten the

It will be a bitter pill for people to swallow

the idea of having less

so that big business can have more.


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American people and prevent us from identifying thereal class enemy at home. In 2001 the 9/11 attackprovided our rulers with a new Pearl Harbor tojustify police-state measures against the Americanpeople and to legitimize a War on Terror against anew enemy. The authors of Thinking and manypilots, architects and responding firemen believe thatthe official story about 9/11 is a lie and that over-whelming evidence suggests that 9/11 was an insidejob.Our own rulers orchestrated the 9/11 attack onAmericans in order to replace Communism withRadical Islam as the omnipre-sent danger. The governmentlaunched wars in Afghanistanand Iraq to project U.S. pow-er, feed the arms industry, andstoke fear in the Americanpeople.

Four decades of attack by themost powerful ruling class onearth have had their effects. There were only fivework stoppages in 2009 involving 1,000 or moreemployeesthe fewest since 1947, when record-keeping began. U.S. workers inflation-adjustedwages peaked in 1972 and have declined 6% sincethen, while their productivity has increased morethan 114% in the same period. Working familiesnow need multiple jobs to supply their needs, andare still falling into debt. About 17.4 million familieslacked enough money to feed themselves at somepoint in 2009. More than 45 million Americans arenow on food stamps.

For discussion of this, seehttp://newdemocracyworld.org/9-

11/david_ray_griffin_miracles-1.html andwww.newdemocracyworld.org/world_911.htmlFor more discussion of how our rulers use war to controlus, see the following by John Spritzler: The People AsEnemy: The Leaders Hidden Agenda in World War II

(available at Amazon.com), Concealing the Real Goalsof War(http://newdemocracyworld.org/old/Concealing.htm);Why is Israel Killing Gazans?(http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/War/Why%20Is%20Israel.htm )

The Looting of America

There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class,

the rich class, that's making war, and we're win-

ning.

Warren Buffett, Billionaire

The big business counteroffensive continues to thisday. The banking crisis of 2008-09 was but the lateststrategy for imposing a "new normal" so that "big

business can have more."

The banking collapse of2008-09 was a deliberate at-tack on the working people ofthis country and Europe. Itwas designed to create a mas-sive crisis to justify "austeri-ty" for the masses. This iswhat Naomi Klein has styled

"disaster capitalism" at its most perverse. Bankersand governments created this huge disaster to un-dermine state budgets and Social Security and Medi-care in the US and dismantle the generous socialprograms in Europe that strengthen the workingclass there. The goal is to leave workers unprotectedin the face of raw corporate power.

The looting by bankers and insurance companies ofthe US Treasury has been on a scale wholly withoutprecedent. The combined Bush and Obama bailoutsof banks, insurers, and auto makers were estimatedin July 2009 by Neil Barofsky, Special InspectorGeneral of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, tototal $23.7 trillion dollars. Generations of Americanswill be impoverished to pay off these debts.

Is Human Nature the Problem?

What are most people really after? What motivates

us? These are critical questions. The answer to themdetermines what kind of society is possible.

Years ago an elderly woman said to one of us, Mostpeople are good people. All our friends are. But thenalong comes a Greedy Gus who spoils everything.

Greedy Gusses want to grab more than their share.They have no care for others. Most people arent like

The banking collapse of 2008-09

was a deliberate attack

on the working people

of this country and Europe.
http://newdemocracyworld.org/9-11/david_ray_griffin_miracles-1.htmlhttp://newdemocracyworld.org/9-11/david_ray_griffin_miracles-1.htmlhttp://www.newdemocracyworld.org/world_911.htmlhttp://newdemocracyworld.org/old/Concealing.htmhttp://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/War/Why%20Is%20Israel.htmhttp://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/War/Why%20Is%20Israel.htmhttp://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/War/Why%20Is%20Israel.htmhttp://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/War/Why%20Is%20Israel.htmhttp://newdemocracyworld.org/old/Concealing.htmhttp://www.newdemocracyworld.org/world_911.htmlhttp://newdemocracyworld.org/9-11/david_ray_griffin_miracles-1.htmlhttp://newdemocracyworld.org/9-11/david_ray_griffin_miracles-1.html


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that. Common sense and common decency are justthat: traits that people have in common. Most peoplewould never engage in the behavior of corporateCEOs and bankers and politicians. Murder a millionand a half Iraqis to get their oil and to justify thePentagon budget? Ordinary decent people wouldnever do these things. They have to be fed constantlies and horror stories to let the government getaway with these wars. Ironically, its the fact thatmost people find such behavior completely unac-ceptable that makes themvulnerable to the politi-cians lies. They wouldnever do anything so evilthemselves, so they findit hard to believe anyoneelse would.

What kind of peoplewould dump toxic chem-icals into a town water supply? What sorts of peoplewould drill through 18,000 feet of sea floor under5,000 feet of seawater in the Gulf of Mexico andignore basic safety requirements, resulting in theworst environmental catastrophe in history? BP

wasengaging in the kind of behavior that corporationsengage in every daybehavior that normal peoplefind unacceptable and actually incredible; they arehard put to believe that anyone would knowingly doit.

There is a vast chasm between the values of mostpeople and the values of the ruling classthe Gree-dy Gusseswho run the world. Warren Buffet, thebillionaire Sage of Omaha, was right when he saidthat there is a class war and his side is winning. Andhis side, the side of the rich and powerful, has rottenvalues.

The class war pits the people who do the work thatmakes human society possiblethe electricians andteachers, the nurses and auto workers and IT folks,the carpenters and doctors and ironworkers and se-

cretaries and waitersagainst corporate CEOs andbank executives and capitalists who reap the rewards

BP and Goldman Sachs, with help from President Ob-

ama, dramatically lowered the years of life expectancy ofpeople in the Gulf Coast region just to make a buck, asreported here:http://www.newswithviews.com/Hodges/dave111.htm

of that labor. The super-rich have grabbed most ofthe treasures of the earth and the fruits of our laborfor themselves.

But the class war is about far more than money. Itsalso about values: the way we relate to each otherand to the earth and future generations. The classwar is a struggle over how we should live and whatit means to be a human being.

Most people have verydifferent values from theclass that runs society.Most believe in solidari-typeople supportingeach other. They believein people having theirfair share and no more.They believe in peoplehaving their say in the

decisions that affect their lives.

The ruling elite believe the opposite. They believe incompetition and getting more than the other guy.They believe in inequality. They think there shouldbe a few super-rich and powerful and that mostpeople should be their slaves, and they work mightyhard to make it that way. More than anything theyhate democracynot the lying, fake democracy wehave now but real democracy where ordinary peoplemake the important decisions. Within corporationsthere is no pretense of democracy or equality.Corporations are dictatorships. You abandon allhope of democratic rights when you punch in.Outside the confines of the corporationthat is, incorporate societythe ruling class makes a pretenseof democracy and tries to paper over its real values.But beneath the facade, corporate society is adictatorship. Laws are designed to promote andprotect corporate power. The formidable powers ofthe governmentpolice, the Courts, the militaryarearrayed on the side of the bankers and corporationsto enforce their laws.

Why are there so many deeply ugly goings-on in oursociety? Because we live in a dictatorship of therich.

The class war is a conflict over what values shouldshape society, what goals it should pursue, and whoshould control it. This war goes on in every part ofour lives. It affects how we feel about ourselves,

There is a vast chasm

between the values of most people and

the values of the ruling class.
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how we relate to each other at home, to our friends,to our community. It affects how we are treated atwork and how our children are treated at school. Itaffects whether we live in a stateof contrived, constant warfarewith people of other lands orfaiths, whether our environmentis completely destroyed on thealtar of profit, whether we have a future at all.

Class conflict is the central fact in our society. It liesat the heart of our problems. To solve our problems,we have to win the class war. Revolution meansoverthrowing the government of the rich and creat-ing a society where the people who do the real workof society have the power. It means destroying thepresent structure of power and establishing a realdemocracy.

Why Democratic Revolution Is

Necessary

The present civilization is based on a paradigm inwhich the economy must constantly expand, turningever more of the earth and human interactions intocommodities to sell. In this economy workingpeople are merely consumers or expendable produc-ers. The natural world is used by the powerful as if itwere a limitless source of private riches and a gar-bage dump. As the oceans die, the fisheries disap-pear, the environment is ravaged, clean water isfouled, fossil fuels grow scarce, the message be-comes unavoidable. Civilization based on this para-digm is not sustainable. We cannot go on this way.

There remain only two alternatives open to us: eitherbe sucked ever deeper into a vortex of war, tyranny,suffering, and mass liquidationthe planned die-offof excess populations in societies that cannot besustainedor make a fresh start, rebuilding societyon a fundamentally different model.

We are proposing a new basis for organizing humansociety, in which human beings will relate to Natureand to each other as caretakers, not exploiters. Wewill produce food and shelter and goods, but not toserve a profit machine that creates false needs inthose with money and exploits and starves thosewithout money. Instead we will produce socialwealth to serve real human needs. We will safeguard

the earth as a sacred trust held on behalf of futuregenerations.

Even if civilization were not atthis critical stage, revolutionwould still be necessary. We areconfronted with the same uglyfacts that have confronted human

beings in class societies over the centuries. A worldof gross inequality, of privilege for the few and mi-sery for the many, of brutal wars and savage exploi-tation to satisfy the lusts of a few for money andpower is intolerable to us because it violates our ideaof what human life should be like. We can fulfill ourdesires for a fully human world only by creating anew society.

Capitalism is anti-human. It can only maintain itscontrol by attacking those things about us which aremost human, our understanding of ourselves andeach other and our connections with other humanbeings. Capital must attack our natural impulses forsolidarity and love for our fellow beings, lest wecombine against it. It must undermine our self-confidence, lest we try to rise above our place. Itmust constantly lie to us, lest we understand andchallenge its policies. It must keep us frightened of aforeign enemy, lest we identify the real class enemyat home. It must make us feel alone, lest we senseour collective power. We can only fulfill ourselvesas human beings and achieve the world we desire byoverturning this one.

Hopes of reforming the system are sheer illusion.Without revolution, whatever victories we may wincan only be temporary. If we stop one war they willstart another. If we win better wages in one plantthey will outsource the work to another. Revolutionis the only way to escape the treadmill of defeat.

Why We Can Win

Many people see revolution as necessary, but fewthink its possible. Why do we think revolution ispossible? The answer to this question brings us backto ones view of what people are after.

We know that the capitalist system is the most pow-erful social system that has ever existed. The basicprinciple of capitalism is profit and self-interest:

We live in a dictatorship of

the rich.


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dog-eat-dog competition. We should each be tryingto screw each other all the time. But we can see thatthis is not so. Most of us in our everyday liveswithour wives or husbands or children, our friends orneighbors or co-workers, our students or patientstryto establish relationships based on love and mutualsupport and fairness. We try to create relationshipsthat are the opposite of capitalist relations. Its truethat we dont always succeed in creating supportiverelationshipswe live in a very screwed-up worldwhere we are constantly told to just look out forNumber Onebut to the extent that we have anygood relationships in our lives, we have createdthem in spite of a powerful culture profoundly hos-tile to them.

This means that most peopleare already engaged in astruggle against capitalismand its values. Peoples eve-ryday lives have revolutio-nary meaning. Our acts ofkindness to family, friends, and neighbors are part ofthe effort to shape the world with humane values.The most personal acts of kindness are on a conti-nuum of human effort with the most public, collec-tive acts of mass revolutionary struggle.

Revolution is possible because a world-wide revolu-tionary movement already exists in peoples lives.But this everyday struggle is invisible to conven-tional views of politics, left and right. Part of build-ing a revolutionary movement is bringing this inspir-ing struggle to light so that each of us can see thatwe are not alone in our aspirations for a new world.We are already part of a vast movement.

This movement remains hidden until people findnew confidence in themselves and each other, asthey have recently in Egypt and elsewhere in theMiddle East, and as they did worldwide in the1960s. As people grow more confident, they expandtheir sense of how much of the world they can

change. They reach out to each other to discuss theirgoals and experiences. They build informal supportand communication networks. As they gain moreconfidence, they build movements and challenge theauthorities. When they develop enough awareness oftheir power and strong enough connections, theymake revolutions.

The Driving Force of History

Why has this struggle of ordinary people for a betterworld not already succeeded? Actually it has suc-ceeded in important ways. It got us to where we arenow. We would still be serfs or slaves in the DarkAges, our lives controlled by Church and King, ifnot for this struggle. All social advances throughouthistory, such as the abolition of slavery and serfdom,came about through the struggle of ordinary peoplefor a better world.

But the many rebellions and revolutions in historyhave never completely swept away the old elites and

the ideas on which their pow-er depended, so that ordinarypeoples revolutionary visionof a free and equal society ofmutual aid, in which theEarth [would be] a CommonTreasure House for all, asGerrard Winstanley, a farm

laborer, wrote in 1649, has never been realized. Or-dinary people have never been fully conscious that itis they and not their betters who are the source ofa better world. The result is that reforms and revolu-tions have always been turned by ruling elites intomore sophisticated ways of dominating people.

History has thus been a long process of two stepsforward, one step back. People broke the bonds ofserfdom and chattel slavery only to be enslaved bycapitalism. They organized unions to fight the fac-tory owners, only to see the unions become tools ofmanagement. They created governments that calledthemselves democratic, only to find that the realpower remained in the hands of the rich. They wonthe vote for propertyless white males and womenand black people, only to find that the electoralprocess is trickery. They invented new technologiesto make life easier, only to find the machines usedagainst them. As long as the ruling elite hold statepower, and as long as elitist ideas prevail, the rulers

will turn every reform and every new product ofhuman intelligence into new chains to bind us.

Elites have succeeded in subverting the revolution-ary struggle precisely because the meaning of theirstruggle has been hidden from people. We aretrained to think that the good things flow from thetop of society: not only material wealth and the greatworks of civilization but also moral vision and vir-

Most people are already

engaged in a struggle

against capitalism and its values.


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tue. The leaders of corporations and universities andchurches, the members of Congress and the Courts,are reputed to be the wisest andmost intelligent in the land. Weare trained to think of society asa meritocracy; those at the topare our betters, no matter howmuch blood is on their hands.The force for revolution todayis the same force that has produced all the revolu-tions of the past. We can only succeed at overturningthis morally bankrupt social order when we under-stand that ordinary working people, not elites, arethe source of a new world as well as of the good inthis one.

What Will the New Society Be

Like?

Democratic revolution is the only practical solutionfor a society being strangled by tyranny and greed.Our goal is a society refreshed by the initiative, in-telligence, and energy of people who finally havereal power over their lives.

What follows aims to provide enough detail abouthow we think the principles of mutual aid, equality,and democracy would play out in practice to enableyou to fill in the gaps with your own imagination.Of course we can only propose ideas for a futuresociety, which would surely be the ever-developingproduct of the imagination, experience, and trialsand errors of millions of people.

Here are some of its important features.

Equality

In the United States, two percent of U.S. wealthholders own 54 percent of all net financial assets,

while more than half of families have no financialassets, or owe more than they own. One percent ofthe U.S. population owns sixty percent of the stockand forty percent of the total wealth. The richest 1%of adults in the world owned 40% of the worldstotal assets in the year 2000 while the bottom half ofthe world adult population owned only 1% of globalwealth. This grotesque situation must end.

We propose a new society in which all who contri-bute to society (including, of course, those not ex-

pected to contribute, such aschildren, and people who areretired, disabled or otherwiseunable to contribute) have freeand equal access to its goodsand services. There are no poorpeople and no rich people. Ja-

nitors and physicians, Ph.D.s and those with just ahigh school education, airplane pilots and auto me-chanics, all are allowed to take things from storesand use services for free when these things are plen-tiful, or to have equal access according to need tothings that are scarce and therefore rationed. Thechildren of a janitor enjoy the same standards ofeducation, healthy food, quality health care, com-fortable living space, quality clothing, leisure time,fun vacations, healthy and attractive environment, asthe children of a doctor. The principle of this eco-nomic system can be expressed as, From each ac-cording to ability, to each according to need.

Equality, in our view, is essential to human libera-tion. By equality we do not mean equal opportu-nity to become richer than other people and rise tothe top of an unequal society. We mean equality ofcondition, where everyone who contributes to socie-ty has equal access to the amazing wealth that hu-man effort and ingenuity produce: equal access tofood and shelter and leisure, equal access to educa-tion, healthcare and family security, equal standingin decision-making.

Equality is a necessary condition of satisfying socialrelationships and real personal freedom. In thepresent society, human relationships are distorted byneedless conflict based on class and competition.Human abilities are undermined, held in check, ordiverted toward the perverse needs of the profit sys-tem and its masters. The aim of democratic revolu-tion is to create a classless society, in which collec-tive human relationships can fully flourish, and in

which each individuals abilities find their full de-velopment. The capabilities of the billions of peoplewhose talents and intelligence have been suppressedby a system that has no use for them will burst forthin an astonishing revelation of what great gifts havelain unused.

Democracy cannot exist where some people are en-titled to more than others. With superior entitlement

Democracy cannot exist

where some people are entitled

to more than others.


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comes superior power; if some people are moreequal than others, the more equal will contrive togain more privileges and special treatment. Prettysoon theyd be running the showas in AnimalFarm, or in the late, unlamented Soviet Union, or asthey do now in the U.S.

The astonishing fact is that most of the problems thatcan make life hell for ordinary people are imposedon us to maintain inequality. War, unemployment,grinding poverty, lost pensions, social insecurity:things that are problems for us are solutions for theruling class to the problem of how to control us. Thesuperior classthe people who now own thebanks and Big Business and the governmentneedunemployment to keep people inline, and so they send jobs over-seas and create unemployment.They need wars to frighten uswith supposed enemies and tosupport defense contractors, andso they make wars. They need tosteal our pensions, to make ourGolden Years a source of nightmare-inducing fear,and so they steal our pensions and our health careand our homes. Our problems are not a natural orinevitable part of human society. They are policiesdesigned to divide and intimidate us. They are thenecessary pillars of a society based on inequality.

Inequality can be eliminated because it is in fact anunnatural condition. This might sound like a truth-defying statement. After all, hasnt society been un-equal since Time Immemorial? Even the Bible says,The poor you shall always have with you. Whatthe Bible doesnt mention is what a gigantic effort ittakes for the rich to keep people poor.

Nearly every aspect of life in America is organizedto justify and enforce inequality. Human beings areconditioned from the cradle to the grave to acceptinequality as the natural condition of human societyand accept their place in society as right. Inequality

is maintained only at great human cost: by under-mining the self-confidence, underutilizing the intel-ligence, under-developing the talents of the greatmajority of human beings, to get them to internalizetheir status.

The education system, for example, is designedto reinforce competition, docile acceptance of au-thority, and social inequality. In spite of the best ef-

forts of teachers, the schools undermine the self-confidence of working class children, often makingthem feel stupid and unworthy, even as they makethe children of the wealthy and a select few amongthe middle class feel capable of great things.

The schools convey these messages in various ways,some of them subtle, some not. Schools withouttextbooks or toilet paper or enough desks or enoughteachers are telling children to expect little fromthemselves or life. Since school funding in the U.S.is based mainly on local property taxes, children inwealthy school districts always get more of every-thing. In school as in life, them that has, gets.

Unequal expectations for youngpeople are also conveyed in sub-tle ways. Many education poli-cies and practices are designed toreinforce class inequality. Forexample, U.S. students now haveto pass high stakes tests at var-ious grade levels to pass on to the

next grade and to receive a high school diploma.These standardized tests are norm-referenced; thatis, they are designed to produce a range of testscores so that, no matter how well students havelearned the classroom material, a large percentagewill do poorly on the test. Since so much depends onthem, these tests create a climate of fear in the class-room. Education in poorer districts has been reducedto mere test preparation. The tests work directlyagainst teachers efforts to encourage self-confidence and critical-thinking in their students andengage them with interesting material.

Why are such destructive policies imposed on theschools? Our young people have more intelligencethan the capitalist system can use. As millions ofjobs disappear overseas, and as society becomesmore unequal and less democratic, the expectationsof many young people must be quashed, so that ifthey end up with only a low-paying job or no job at

all, they will blame themselves instead of the sys-tem.**

Work too is organized to deprive people of theirskills and make their intelligence lie unused. Fred-

**

For more on education, see Dave Stratman, Youll

Never Be Good Enough: Schooling and Social Control(http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/control.htm).

Our young people

have more intelligence thanthe capitalist system can use.
http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/control.htmhttp://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/control.htm


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erick Taylor, the inventor of scientific manage-ment, advised factory owners that workers wouldhave power on the shop floor as long as work skillsand knowledge of production processes remained intheir hands. Taylor encouraged management to learnthe work processes, encode these processes in ma-chinery or tools (now software too), and break thework into many small parts. Workers jobs would bereduced to trivial tasks requiring a minimum of skilland no understanding of the work being done. Onlymanagement would understand work processesoverall. Workers would become cheap and easilyreplaceable parts in an overall process that they nolonger understood.

The reason so many jobs are boring and meaninglessis that they are meant to be that way. The problem isnot only that most work istoward a trivial endmakingmoney for the owners. Mostwork in capitalist society hasbeen sucked dry of humaningenuity and interest to con-trol the workforce.

The corporate media play a key support role in thismassive theft of peoples sense of self-confidenceand understanding how the world works. Nobodyneeds to be told that we are fed a constant stream ofmisinformation by the media and constantly divertedby celebrity gossip and sports and clownish politi-cians from the issues we need to understand. Thepoint is that the constant stream of crap from thecorporate media fits seamlessly with the educationsystem and working life into a 24/7 system aimed atundermining peoples understanding of their actualexperience.

It is true that people resist these assaults in a multi-tude of ways. People are deeply skeptical of gov-ernment and corporate officialdom and of corporatemedia. Teachers and students and parents reject thecorporatization of education and resist it in the ways

they feel able. Workers try to find ways to resistmanagement with solidarity and to cope with stulti-fying jobs. As we have already seen, most people intheir everyday lives forge relationships that resistcapitalist values. But peoples struggles at schooland work and elsewhere are now only defensivestruggles. They by no means tap peoples full poten-tial as makers of a new world.

When we say that the revolution will change how welive, we mean that the institutions of society thatnow function to suppress and distort the develop-ment of human beings will be turned on their head.Schools will not work to impose inequality. Insteadteachers and students and parents will transformeducation into a liberating and exciting experience.Workers will transform work into a humanly satisfy-ing and intellectually rewarding activity. The peoplewill run the media to spread human equality andtruth.

Equality and Mutual Aid

Equality is essential to any society that takes se-riously the Golden Rule, Do unto others as youwould have them do unto you. The Golden Rule

stems from the heart of whatit means to be human. Withrevolutionary democracy wecan build a society that rein-forces and reflects the best ofhuman nature. We can createa paradise.

Human beings are a social species. We cannot sur-vive as lone individuals because our bodies andminds are not made for it. The way we survive onearth is by cooperation with each other: mutual aid.We go beyond mere survival to create comforts andenjoyments and security the same way, with mutualaid.

Cooperation and mutual aid are the source of thematerial and emotional well-being in society. Thiscooperation requires trust among people. Treatingothers as you would like to be treated is a behaviorpattern that makes it possible for human beings tosurvive and thrive. An intuitive understanding of theGolden Rule is part of our very makeup as humanbeings, as important for our survival as our oppos-able thumb and large brain. Only in a society basedon this principle will people have maximum trust in

one another.

When a society is not based on economic equality,the Golden Rule is broken: there is less trust, lesscooperation and mutual aid, and hence less materialand less emotional well being for all. The more un-equal a society, the more anxious people feel abouttheir place in the hierarchy of wealth. The more

Equality is essential

to any society that takes seriously

the Golden Rule.


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equal and supportive a society, the more happy andfulfilled people can be.

Making society economically equal will improve thelives not only of the poorest but also of many peoplewho are financially better off than most people to-day. Professionals, intellectuals, managers and smallbusiness owners will all benefit.

They will not bear the constant stress of scramblingto save for their childrens education or their ownretirement or keeping up with the Joneses. Theirmarriages will not break up overdisputes about money, the leadingcause of divorce today.

They will wake up each morningin a world where people trust eachother and are friendly towardseach other. It will no longer be aworld of Orwellian wars of socialcontrol designed to make us live in fear of otherpeople.

They will no longer feel threatened by the good for-tune and creativity of others, as is the case todaywhen every business owner must fear his competitor.

Managers will no longer experience work as battlingwith workers under their supervision. They will notexperience social isolation, but will be part of agroup of equals working toward a common purpose.

Should Physicians Be Paid More Than Janitors?

Equal living standards for all, including doctors andjanitors, go to the heart of creating a better society.The aim of the pecking order of pay and status in oursociety is to divide workers and convince people tofeel better and more deserving than all those slightlylower in the pecking order and respectful and sup-portive of all those higher up. Pay differentials aremeant to recruit people to the capitalist team.

So should a janitor have the same standard of livingas a doctor, and the same right to participate inworkplace decisions? Here is why we think so.

In the new society, the usual arguments for higherpay for physicians would not hold water. Medicaltraining would be free, eliminating one argument forhigher physician pay.

But even in todays society the argument that physi-cians deserve higher pay because of the sacrificethey must make does not hold up. The education andtraining of a doctor are largely a function of the sta-tus of the family into which a doctor-to-be is born.Few doctors are born to low-status families, just asfew janitors are born to high status families. (This isnot a function of so-called intelligence. Those SATscores etched in our brains correlate with nothing somuch as the economic status of our families.) If thePrince and the Pauper were switched at birth, howdifferent might their lives be? Should the doctor be

rewarded for his luck in beingborn to a high-status family, thuspreserving inequality into the nextgeneration?

Then too, the doctors rigorouseducation and training representan opportunity for intellectual andpersonal development accorded

relatively few people in our society. A physiciantakes on considerable responsibilities, but this is oneof the benefits of being a physician. The professionof medical doctor carries with it its own incentives,irrespective of status and pay. Which would you ra-ther be, a doctor or a janitor?

What about the argument that the demand for physi-cians, unlike janitors, exceeds the supply? The rea-son physicians are relatively scarce today is becauseour unequal economy is not based on providing forthe needs of everybody, but rather on providing forthe needs of those who can afford the price. Physi-cians, good schools, and many other things are keptartificially scarce for this reason, and also for thepurpose of social control. The rulers use artificialscarcity to make people feel insecure and to makethem compete against each other for things in shortsupply. In a society organized on new principles, wewould not have this problem.

What about the argument that a physicians skills are

more valuable to society than a janitors? This ar-gument suggests that the doctor accomplishes herhealth miracles by herself. But medical schools andhospitals could not function without the janitors whocontribute to the hygienic cleanliness of the hospital,or the carpenters and masons and electricians andplumbers and sheet metal workers and all the otherconstruction workers who build the hospital andmedical school, or the nurses and orderlies and

Professionals, intellectuals,

managers and

small business owners

will all benefit.


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cooks without whom a hospital cannot care for thesick, or the farmers and agricultural workers whogrow and harvest the food all the others need to beable to do their various jobs, and the list goes on andon. Without all of these other people doing theirjobs, there would be no physicians.

Do The Rich Deserve Their Wealth?

Capitalists are able to get rich by paying their em-ployees less than the value their employees produce.This is exploitation, and itis at the heart of every jobcreated by a capitalist.Except for the self-employed and the veryrich, everybody is forcedto accept such a job inorder to live. Capitalists justify this exploitation onthe grounds that they own the means of produc-tionthe land, factories, shops, offices and minesrequired to produce things, without which workerscannot produce anything. Thus business owners actas if they are doing us a favor by providing jobsi.e.,exploiting workers.

Why do capitalists now own the means of produc-tion? Because we live in a very upside down world,with a very unnatural arrangement of thingsanarrangement we have grown so used to that it nowseems natural. The land, the earths natural re-sources, and the factories and mines and buildingsthat millions of human beings labored to createinother words, the means of producing the wealth ofsocietythese things rightfully belong to all of so-ciety, but we have been dispossessed of what isrightfully ours.

When were we dispossessed of our common owner-ship of the land? It began a very long time ago. Hu-mans did not evolve as two species, one to own theland but not work and the other to work but not ownthe land; people held the land in common. As Native

Americans expressed it, The land owned us. Butthousands of years ago some ruthless people estab-lished themselves as an upper class, took the com-mon lands from the people, and subjugated them aspeasants and serfs, whom the upper class claimed toown along with the land. The upper class also mademany people literally slaves. These peasants, serfs,and slaves are the ancestors of todays workingclass.

Powerful elites have continued to seize the com-monslands or property held for the common useof allfor their private use and enrichment over thecenturies. As capitalism emerged in Europe aroundthe sixteenth and seventeenth century, aristocraticlandowners drove peasants off the land in mass evic-tions (known as enclosures). Evicted from thecommons, people were forced to work for wages inthe dark, Satanic mills springing up around Eng-land. The British Parliament passed repeated Enclo-sure Acts through the 19th century. Colonialism in

the New World, the Mid-dle East, and Africa wasnothing if not the seizureof vast richesminerals,gold, diamonds, oil, andthe land itselffrom indi-genous peoples by power-

ful elites of colonizing countries.

Under the new name of privatization, the theft ofpublicly-owned resources like water, minerals, tele-phone exchanges and public transportation systemsin countries from England to South Africa to SouthAmerica continues to this day. In the1970s MargaretThatcher privatized public transport and public hous-ing in England. In Bolivia the government gave theLa Paz water supply to a French corporation in 1997,and in 1999 gave the Cochabamba water supply to asubsidiary of Bechtel.

Seizure of public wealth by the powerful few is cen-tral to American history, from the earliest seizure ofNative American lands (along with the destructionof Native peoples) to the grant by Congress of hugetracts of land to railroad magnates, to the granting ofoil leases to companies which then destroy thecommon environmentthink BP. The seizure ofslaves in Africa constituted the seizure of humanbeings for private wealth.

Private seizure of public wealth is now reaching un-heard of levels. Americans are just beginning to feel

the real effects of the Mother of All Privatizations,when in 2008-09 the federal government transferred$24 trillion in public wealth to private Wall Streetbankers and insurers. Cities and states are sellingvaluable public resourcessuch as all the receipts ofall Chicago parking meters for the next thirtyyearsto private investors. At this writing (summer2011), French and German banks are seizing Greek

Humans did not evolve as two species,

one to own the land but not work and

the other to work but not own the land.


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public resourcesports, bridges, even entire is-landsin part payment for fraudulent loans.

This centuries-long history of theft, carried outsometimes by legal chicanery, sometimes by violentseizure, is what has made and continues to shape theworld we live in today. It appears normal only be-cause we were born into it and weare surrounded by propagandathat tells us this system of prop-erty rights is right and natu-ral. We were all once equal co-owners of the means of creatingour livelihoods and our society,but now the rich expect us to aspire merely to bewage-slaves.

Balzac said, Behind every great fortune there is agreat crime. Its not difficult to see the crimes be-hind the bloody history of enclosures and colonial-ism and privatization. But what about someone likeBill Gates? Surely hes an exception to Balzacs dic-tum.

Gates, the richest man in the world, is apparentlysome kind of geek saint. At least according to themedia, he earned his billions with sheer brain-powerand is using them to benefit us by employing thou-sands of people and by making charitable donations.Were told that the reason Gates is many times rich-er than most Americans is because he worked manytimes harder or smarter than they did. But did BillGates write the Microsoft code alone? Did he buildthe buildings where the software developers worked,grow the food they ate, teach them how to read andwrite and create software?

Gates has managed to get his hands on a world-classtreasure, but it is a treasure created by uncountablehands working collectively to do a million thingsneedful for creating human society. Did he come upwith some brainy ideas? Yes. Did he come up withhis ideas all by himself, as if he were raised by

wolves? Obviously not. His intellectual contribu-tions, however great or small they may have been,reflect small steps forward on paths laid out and trodby others working in societies on which they, likehe, were dependent. Could software developmenthave taken any different paths? Ask the many crea-tors of Linux and other Freeware, who see the Inter-net precisely as The Commons, owned by all, and

who resist its exploitation and privatization by indi-viduals for their own enrichment.

Gates great wealth is a product of society, and it hasbeen appropriated by a single individual. By whatright does Bill Gates or anyone else claim to ownprivately the wealth that was produced by so many?

Based on his stolen wealth, BillGates sets himself up as a kind ofking who decides on his own(with his philanthropic founda-tions) how our schools should berun and how our society should

respond to diseases around the world. Bill Gatestreats all of us as his hired hands while he makeskey decisions about social policy that should bemade democratically by all of us as equals. None ofGates philanthropic decisions, by the way, involvemaking society more equal or democratic.

In the good society, nobody will make a fortune inbusiness. The wealth created by society will belongto all of us equally, to enrich all our lives. Jobs, inthe good sense of the word, will be plentiful, andrich business owners will be a thing of the past.

Is it True That People Only Work Hard to Rise

Above Others?

Some say that society needs to provide some peoplehigher standards of living than others because peoplewill not do excellent work or make the great effortrequired to learn socially valuable skills (such asmedicine or piloting a jet plane) unless the rewardfor doing so is a higher standard of living than mostother people.

But many people enjoy learning socially useful skillsfor reasons having nothing to do with the higher paythey receive. The best doctors love making otherpeoples lives better with their knowledge and skills.

Jonas Salk did not patent his polio vaccine or earnany money from it. Good pilots love flying. Carpen-ters love being very good at what they do. There is anon-monetary reward that people crave: the satisfac-tion of knowing that they are doing something im-portant that improves the lives of others, that theyare doing it skillfully, and that they are admired byothers in society for what they do. This is one reasonwhy people would learn skills in the new society.

Balzac said,

Behind every great fortune

there is a great crime.


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It is true that people today work hard and learn skillsin order to earn more money than they would other-wise. But this is not the same thing as wanting to bericher than other people. To see that this is so, con-sider what would happen if the typical person whoworks hard to earn more money in order to have ahigher standard of living knew that, as a result of hishard work, everybody else would also enjoy thesame higher standard of living. Would he say,Well, in that case I have no motive for doing thehard work? Improving ones own life along withthe lives of others is a powerful motive for doingwork and learning new skills.

History demonstrates this is true. From 1936 to 1939in nearly half of Spain, workers and peasants made asocial revolution and for a few years successfullydefended themselves against General Francos and

Hitlers forces. Their revolution included more thanthree million peasants taking over control of the landfrom the former large landowners and creating morethan 1200 voluntary collectives based on economicequality among all of the workers.

This revolution was led by anarchist peasants andworkers. Some collectives abolished money alto-gether. Others took steps to eliminate inequality thatcould result from some having more money thanothers; they paid people a family wage that waslarger for people with larger families to support, and

they made the most important things such as homesand food and medical care free.

In the village of Magdalena de Pulpis a visitor askeda resident, How do you organize without money?Do you use barter, a coupon book, or anythingelse? He replied, Nothing. Everyone works andeveryone has a right to what he needs free of charge.He simply goes to the store where provisions and allother necessities are supplied. Everything is distri-buted free with only a notation of what he took.

If only inequality motivates people to work, theSpanish Revolution should have resulted in an eco-nomic disaster. But quite the opposite happened.Agricultural and industrial output increased, despitethe need to send many men as soldiers to the front-lines against the Fascist military forces.

An illustration of how people work together whenthere is economic equality is this anecdote reported

after the defeat of the revolution in a book publishedin 1968 in Spain, during the rule of General Fran-co. During the revolution peasants collectivized theland properties of Count Romanones:

The peasants altered the topography of the

district by diverting the course of the river toirrigate new land, thus tremendously in-creasing cultivated areas. They constructed amill, schools, collective dining halls, andnew housing for the collectivists. A fewdays after the close of the Civil War, CountRomanones reclaimed his domains, expect-ing the worst, certain that the revolutionaryvandals had totally ruined his property. Hewas amazed to behold the wonderful im-provements made by the departed peasantcollectivists. When asked their names, theCount was told that the work was performedby the peasants in line with plans drawn upby a member of the CNT Building WorkersUnion, Gomez Abril, an excellent organizerchosen by the Regional Peasant Federation.As soon as Abril finished his work he leftand the peasants continued to manage thecollective. Learning that Gomez Abril wasjailed in Guadalajara and that he was in avery precarious situation, the count suc-ceeded in securing his release from jail andoffered to appoint him manager of all hisproperties. Gomez declined, explaining thata page of history had been written and hiswork finished.

Abolition of Money

Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguish-

able from the old simply by the fact that it is imper-

sonalthat there is no human relation between

master and slave.

Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer

These accounts of Spanish history are from The Anar-

chist Collectives (see Suggested Readings), p. 71, 73, 150.


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It is well enough that people of the nation do not

understand our banking and money system, for if

they did, I believe there would be a revolution be-

fore tomorrow morning.

Henry Ford, founder, Ford Motor Company

Perhaps the most surprising feature of the new socie-ty is that money is abolished. Why is this necessaryand how does it make sense?

The economy of revolution-ary democracy is based onthe principle of From eachaccording to ability, to eachaccording to need. It is aContribute what you can andtake what you need economy, not a If you give methis I will give you that economy. This meanspeople share things rather than exchange them.Money, which is a means of exchanging things moreconveniently than barter, is therefore not necessaryin the new society.

Furthermore, buying and selling is not an equitableway for the wealth of society to be distributed.Goods ought to be shared on the basis of need. Ifsomeone who contributes to society is in need offood or shelter, he should receive them, whether hehas money or not. (Most homeless in the U.S. arefull-time workers whose jobs pay too little to affordthem a home.) If somebody is sick and needs care, itis immoral that he should only receive as muchhealth care as he can buy. The Golden Rule is toshare, not buy and sell.

Money may not be necessary in a good society but itis, however, extremely important for a society basedon inequality. In a society based on money a singleindividual can accumulate a great deal of money anduse it to buy many things and pay many people, andthus control the use of things and the behavior ofpeople on a vastly greater scale than would other-

wise be possible.

Money thus makes inequality easy to impose be-cause it makes it easy to concentrate power in thehands of a few, even in a society like ours today thatpurports to be a democracy. Money enables wealthypeople to buy the votes of politicians, make laws tobenefit themselves at the cost of society and swaypublic opinion through their corporate media. A so-

ciety based on money is incompatible with genuinedemocracy and equality.

On the surface it might seem that without moneythere would be no way to accumulate capital for in-vesting in new enterprises. But if we look closely atwhat capital is, we see that capital accumulationfor new enterprises does not require money in a so-ciety based on sharing.

Today, when a businessmanwants to start a new enter-prise, he needs money tobuy or rent the necessaryequipment and to pay wagesfor the necessary labor. Inthe new society, when

people decide to start a new enterprise and the largersociety democratically approves of it, then thepeople who carry out the enterprise may freely usethe required land and natural resources and machi-nery, and the workers may freely take what theyneed to live on. The point is that in a money-basedsociety, money is indeed important, but in a money-less society it is not.

There remain two additional major reasons for notusing money: money is an instrument of elite socialcontrol, and money poisons social relationships.

Money Is an Instrument of Elite Social Control

In an earlier time in America, the rich landowner orbank would extend credit to the tenant or farmer forseeds and fertilizer and food to sustain his family tillharvest. At harvest the farmer would often find thathis debt combined with the interest owed exceededthe value of his crop; with each passing year hewould sink further into debt-peonage. In currenttimes in the United States, a young person graduatesfrom college saddled with gigantic loans, which bylaw he can never escape, not even through personalbankruptcy. He is in debt-peonage to the bank. He is

forced by his debt to seek out the highest paying jobhe can find, no matter what career he would prefer.Economic pressures make him work at an unfulfil-ling job for a boss he may despise. The more suc-cessful he is at finding that high-paying job, themore pressure he is under to conform to capitalistvalues and keep his mouth shut.

A society based on money

enables the few who are wealthy

to control the many who are not.


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At the same time his parents may carry a mortgageon a home worth perhaps half of what they paid forit. They are in debt peonage to the bank. Someonewith a car loan or needing health insurance is undersimilar pressure to find and keep a job and make thedaily compromises necessary to stay employed in acorporate dictatorship. Young people under econom-ic stress join the military and are trained to kill theirclass brothers and sisters on command. As the rulerscrank up the economic pressure on families, moreparents are forced to work two or three jobs andbarely have time to share with their children. Moneyreduces life to a rat race.

The banks gain and exer-cise their power in societythrough the power of mon-ey. The power of the bankslooms over all our life-choices. They hold ourlives in their hands. A so-ciety based on money enables the few who are weal-thy to control the many who are not.

Money Poisons Social Relationships

In a society based on money, many human interac-tions are mediated by money, with one person usingmoney to exert power over another. The more mon-ey plays a role in society, the less of a role is playedby the Golden Rule: moral persuasion, mutualagreement, or reciprocity of good deeds amongequals. Money suppresses the role of positive humanvalues and replaces it with greed and domination.

In a money society, money confers on its possessoran almost magical power. If the owners of a corpora-tion want a manager to fire long time employees inorder to increase profits, they just pay the managerto do the nasty deed. No need to persuade the man-ager that it is a morally good thing to do. The own-ers of the corporation have a perverse power overthe manager.

In the absence of money, social power comes fromones ability to persuade others that doing this orthat is morally right or at least that it benefits them.It also comes from having relationships of mutualsupport: because one has helped others in the past,they want to return the favor. In the absence of mon-ey, social power is not power over people but power

to act with people to accomplish goals that areshared.

It has long been said that the love of money is theroot of all evil. Only in the absence of the power ofmoney will peoples moral feelings and their bestvalues truly shape society.

Local Power Trumps Every Other

Power

Yet another novel aspect of the new society is thatpeople in democraticlocal community andworkplace assem-blies are the onlyones who can makeand enforce lawsthere are no higher

lawmaking bodies. Why is this important?

Two factors undermine democracy in our presentsociety. One is that the legal structure is dominatedby the capitalist economic system and serves thatsystem. Some American towns are very democraticin that all citizens may vote at town hall meetingswhere laws are made. But they cannot pass laws thatinfringe on the property rights of the corporations,no matter how beneficial those laws may be.

The other factor is that state and federal laws aremade by politicians in capital cities quite distantfrom the people they supposedly represent. Whenpeople are forced to obey laws made by people in adistant state or capital, they inevitably have little sayin the decisions that concern them, no matter howdemocratically the distant lawmakers are selected.

For true democracy to prevail, it is necessary to ab-olish both the capitalist system and the power of dis-tant political bodies to make laws. Order in society

must come from voluntary federation, not from cen-tralized top-down control. Laws must only be madelocally. Without this understanding of democracy,anti-democratic regimes could claim, as today, to bedemocratic just because they allow elections.

Buying and selling

is not an equitable way

for the wealth of society to be distributed.


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How Does the New Society Work?

Some Things Are the Same

The key difference between the new and the old so-cieties is the decision-making process: Who decidesand on what basis?

Before looking at what is different in the new socie-ty, lets see what is the same.

One should assume that things would look very sim-ilar to how they look today. All of the things that areeconomically useful or desirable would probablystill be around: farms and mines and factories largeand small, roads and railroads and shipsand airports, trucks and cars and publictransportation (or whatever people de-mocratically decide to use for transpor-tation in light of energy and pollutionconcerns), stores of various types andsizes from convenient mom-and-popstores to department stores, and officebuildings, sports arenas, theaters, restaurants, hospit-als, hair salons, laundromats, small businessesproviding everything from dog-walking services towhatever other products or services creative peoplecan think of that are useful, residential houses andapartment buildings, schools of every sort from pre-school and kindergartens to universities, scientific

research institutes, television and radio stations andnewspapers, art galleries, playgrounds, hotels, golfcourses, etc. Some things would be missing: banks,insurance companies, pawnshops, and the chasmbetween rich and poor.

People would be doing the same kinds of usefulwork as today, driving trucks, providing health care,entertaining others, making art, growing food, har-vesting timber, making jewelry and iPhones, teach-ing children to read and write and adults whateverthey want to learn, and countless other useful things.

People's primary residence remains their personalproperty. There is plenty of U.S. productive powerto make comfortable homes available for everyone,including the homeless and those who live in sub-standard housing and those who have been fore-closed on by banks. In the case of properties ownedby the super-rich, there would have to be populardiscussion of the proper way to distribute the wealth

of billionaire exploiters. The people will have to de-cide democratically.

The general principle after the revolution is that,whenever possible, consistent with the limits of asustainable economy, peoples standard of livingshould be leveled up, not down.

The U.S. economy today produces such giganticwealth that much of it has to be wasted, even literal-ly blown up. The military budget, for example, ex-ceeds 1.2 trillion dollars per year, without countingthe costs of its multiple wars; the Middle East warshave been estimated by Nobel laureate economistJoseph Stiglitz already to have cost 4 trillion dollarsin direct costs and in funds committed to caring

for disabled veterans. For perspec-tive, four trillion dollars is theamount of domestic budget cuts thatthe Obama Administration is pro-posing over the next decade.

Why must so much wealth bewasted? Because, as we have seen,

the ruling class learned to its horror in the 1960s thatthe more economically secure people feel, the morerebellious they are prepared to act. The past fortyyears have witnessed an enormous redistribution ofwealth in the U.S., all of it upward, into the pocketsof the rich. Their motive in snapping up all thewealth is not simple greed but a keen interest in con-trolling people by making them economically inse-cure. Imagine what could be done with all thatwealth if there were no ruling elite.

Some Things Are Different

The difference between the new and old society liesin the reasons people do what they do. The motivewont be fear of starving, or a desire to get rich atthe expense of others. One motive might be to make

the lives of ones fellows better. Another might besimply to enjoy life with family and friends in a tru-ly free society.

People will have equal rights to use the products andservices of the economy and to have a say in socialdecisions, and they will be free to be as differentfrom one another as they wish, both on the job andafter work.

Laws are only made

and enforced

at the local level.


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It is up to community assembly policies to determinethe purposes for which the resources of the commu-nity will be used. (By resources we mean the meansof productionlarge tracts of land and natural re-sources, buildings other than private homes, machin-ery and equipment and so forth, which belong to allpeople equally, as opposed to personal propertyones house and car, garden, clothes, books, musicalinstruments etc.) Within this framework, workplaceassemblies decide how to achieve these purposes,what skills are needed and what effort is expectedfrom their members.Workers are no longeremployees working foran employer; they col-lectively (as membersof both a communityand a workplace as-sembly) make all of thedecisions that formerly were made by the employer.

By workplace we dont mean only a factory oroffice. A workplace assembly may consist, for ex-ample, of people who take care of children (theirown and/or others, in their home or elsewhere), orfishermen or truck drivers or farmers or adult stu-dents in a school.

All members of a workplace assembly enjoy equalstatus with respect to decision-making in the assem-bly. Of course some workers will be more knowled-geable or experienced or skilled than others and theiropinions may be accorded greater respect; this isnatural, and perfectly compatible with all workershaving equal status.

Entrepreneurship, in the positive sense of creativityand a desire to do something better than has everbeen done before or produce something new thatpeople will love, will flourish in the new society.Anybody with a good idea that makes sense to theircommunity assembly will receive a green light (i.e.,the necessary resources as well as membership in the

sharing economy for the required workers) to give ita try. If it is a big success, the person who initiated itmay be rewarded with greater respect and perhapsfame and honor, but not with more possessions.

Community assemblies decide how to solve socialproblems, such as who will do the necessary but un-pleasant work, like trash collection. A communityassembly might persuade some to volunteer to col-

lect the trash by requiring fewer hours of work fromtrash collectors than others, or specially honoringthose who collect the trash. The assembly might re-quire every able-bodied person to collect a littletrash, or it might develop some previously unima-gined technology to deal with trash. Now in our ca-pitalist society, trash collectors are told, If you wantto support your family, you better pick up our trashbecause thats the best job were going to offerpeople like you. In the new society people will cer-tainly figure out better solutions to such problems.

Peoples participationin public and economicdecision-making is byno means limited toattending assemblymeetings, which mightbe rather large and im-

personal. Smaller groups of people who live in thesame neighborhood or work together or who havesomething else in common and who know and trusteach other would meet regularly to discuss newideas or proposals, coordinate with other similarsmall groups, and bring their ideas and proposals tothe full assembly. These small groups would alsodirectly implement proposals approved by the as-sembly.

For planning, coordinating and distributing goodsand services on a large scale, assemblies would actas a federation. Neighboring local assemblies mightsend delegates to a district assembly to make unifiedproposals for their respective assemblies to accept orreject as they see fit. District assemblies may senddelegates to a county assembly who may send dele-gates to a state assembly, and so forth up to nationassemblies sending delegates to a world assembly.At any level from the district to the world there maybe many assemblies, with different concerns rangingfrom economic production to sports, culture, educa-tion, scientific research, the environment and what-ever else people care about.

At each level an assembly proposes policies or plansto the assemblies at the level below them. A stateassembly, for example, might make a proposal forapproval by its delegates county assemblies. If theproposal did not get sufficient approval, it wouldneed to be modified until it did. The county assem-blies would resend the proposal to their district as-semblies and the process would continue until the

For planning, coordinating and distributing

goods and services on a large scale,

assemblies would act as a federation.


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proposal met with the approval of sufficient com-munity and/or workplace assemblies to be imple-mented.

The negotiations and compromises that this processentails are similar to what goes on among the rulingelite today, but with some very important differen-ces. Our elite rulers negotiations take place in or-ganizations like the Council on Foreign Relations,the Federal Reserve Banks, corporate boards of di-rectors, and international elite gatherings like theannual one in Davos, Switzerland, in meetings thatordinary people are not allowed to attend. In the newsociety anybody who supports the principles of therevolution may attend delegate assembly meetings(although only the delegates have a formal vote).

Today our rulers decide among themselves how todominate and exploitthe rest of us, whe-reas in the new so-ciety people demo-cratically decide howto help and supportone another. Thedecisions that our rulers make today are imposed bythe few on the many, either by overtly undemocraticcorporate policies that employees must follow or befired, or by state and federal laws made by so-calledrepresentatives who are in fact beholden to the upperclass. In contrast, in the new society people at thelocal level who act in accord with the principles ofthe revolution are free to do as they please.

How the Sharing Economy Works

Federation makes it possible for people to imple-ment a sharing economy on the basis of From eachaccording to ability, to each according to need on avery large scale. Community assemblies democratic-ally agree to share products and services with each

other according to need, for free, with no exchangeof money or bartering of goods. Products are deli-vered to stores, and stores make things convenientlyavailable for people to take, not to buy. Things inshort supply are rationed by whatever equitable me-thod the appropriate assemblies choose.

When a community or workplace assembly dis-cusses things such as what specific products to make

or services to provide, what quality to strive for, howmany hours per week to work, at what age one mayretire, where to deliver the product they make or towhom they will provide the service they perform,and so forth, they will decide in large part on thebasis of what will seem reasonable, under the pre-vailing circumstances, to themselves and to all of theother people in the sharing economy. If they persistin doing something unreasonable, such as being verylazy and not producing anything themselves, or pro-ducing and freely sharing with others things that areuseless or unwanted or much less important thanother things that are more necessary but scarce, thenthey will likely end up being excluded from the larg-er sharing economy. If, on the other hand, they pro-duce and freely share with others useful things orservices then they will enjoy the benefits of remain-ing in the larger sharing economy.

Thus the actual conse-quencepositive or nega-tive as the case may beofdoing or not doing this orthat kind of work acts as theself-correcting (feedback)

mechanism in an economy based on sharing. It actsin a manner analogous to market prices in a capital-ist economy. In the new economy it ensures thatmost people most of the time make sensible eco-nomic decisions that promote the welfare of all.

Importantly, a sharing economy based on Fromeach according to ab

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