The obvious anti-democratic reality of the Soviet Union and of present day Communist China only helps the ruling class portray as crazy or stupid the very idea of aiming to make our society fundamentally equal and democratic.
The ruling class fills the airwaves and newspapers with arguments for the notion that as bad as things are, any fundamental change will only make things worse. We're told that the rich produce jobs and anything that makes them less rich will only result in fewer jobs. We're told that the rich give to philanthropy to make our lives better and we don't want to end that, do we? We're told that genuine democracy might not really be such a good idea after all because haven't you heard about the Milgram psychology experiment that showed how ordinary people will administer horrible electrical shocks to people just because an authority tells them to, and this shows that people will blindly follow a demagogue; better to have trusted members of the upper class actually in control of things, no? [All these things we're told are false, by the way.]
The ruling class propaganda has us convinced that if we start talking about changing society fundamentally we will be rejected by the general public. We are thus afraid to identify the dictatorship of the rich as the problem. Instead we "play it safe" by identifying mere symptoms as the root problem: insufficiently strict campaign finance laws, excessively high college tuition, racist policing, lobbyists in Congress, failure to obey the Constitution, wrong person in the Oval Office, etc. We do this even though we know that addressing these symptoms is like putting a band-aid on cancer because in our society in which money is power, the people with billions of dollars have the power, and can use it to get around any law that may be passed and any politician who may be elected.
We don't ever identify what, exactly, is wrong with our current society, in the sense of what is the root cause of our always losing. It's a taboo subject. And yet almost everybody (not just we but the general public) knows what the root problem is: we live under a dictatorship of the rich--the billionaire plutocracy.
What the General Public ACTUALLY Believes
Since we all hear the ruling class propaganda day in and day out, we assume that most people believe it. After all, you never hear or see anybody in the mass (or alternative) media express the egalitarian revolutionary opinion that we should remove the rich from power to have real--not fake--democracy with no rich and no poor, do you? The ruling class controls the media, including Democracy Now! and the other so-called "alternative" media, and it censors the expression of any such egalitarian revolutionary aspiration. Naturally, we just assume that nobody except a tiny minority has this egalitarian revolutionary aspiration.
But the fact is that the vast majority of Americans DO have this egalitarian revolutionary aspiration, and they will tell you so if you ask them, which is what you can see me doing with random people on the streets of Boston in this video (with no cherry picking!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95b3SmBYwfU . Almost everybody (91%), when asked if it is a good idea or a bad idea to "Remove the rich from power, have real--not fake--democracy with no rich and no poor" says it is a good (or a great!) idea. You can do the same thing to see for yourself what ordinary people really feel about egalitarian revolution; to see how to make it easier for you to do this, just go to https://www.pdrboston.org/why-wear-a-pdr-button .
How Can We WIN?
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
