KEY ARTICLES BY JOHN SPRITZLER OF INTEREST TO THOSE LISTENING TO ME VIA ZOOM etc. NOW
I advocate egalitarianism, described here. It is about shaping all of society by the positive values that the vast majority of people currently share and by which they try to shape the small corner of the world over which they have any real control.
Read "How We CAN Remove the Rich from Power"
Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to make it possible to remove the rich from power as the above article describes.
The factual basis for my strategy:
"I Know Something You Don't Know. I Know it from 1st Hand Experience that None of You Have. I know that Most People Want an Egalitarian Revolution: I know this because I have ASKED thousands of random people on the street, and you don't know it because you have not."
Photos of 500 of my zip code neighbors, each proudly displaying a sign saying, "We the People want affordable housing for ALL. To get it we aim to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy, with no rich and no poor." These people, and others in the same zip code who feel the same way, should, in a democratic assembly, be the sovereign authority in that zip code local community.
On 11/24/2024 10:09 PM EST John Spritzler <spritzler@comcast.net> wrote to Thomas Smith and others:
Show me the Marxists who call for the people who are fighting for affordable housing, etc, to also call for removing the rich from power to have real, not, fake democracy with no rich and no poor (or truly equivalent words) and not just “equality,” and who explain that they would GAIN, not lose, support from the general public if they did this, as well as strengthen the revolutionary movement.
—John
So far I have heard no answer to this request.
I do it in articles like this one, addressed to members of the Amazon Labor Union. "HOW THE AMAZON LABOR UNION CAN GAIN MUCH MORE SUPPORT."
Read "What Replaces the "Free Market" in an Egalitarian Sharing Economy? (This is about how an economy that is not based on money works)" This is an economy WITHOUT central planning.
Read "Why Should Laws Only Be Made By Local Assemblies?", especially the section titled: "When sovereign power resides in a national (or any large regional) rather than a local-community body, it is a 'welcome mat' for an oppressive elite to EASILY gain power over many millions of people. It means ordinary people are a 'sitting duck' for an oppressive elite to dominate. Here's why."
Read about the history of people properly rejecting the principle that one must obey the national government, in "History of People Rejecting the Invalid Authoritarian Principle."
Regarding central "vanguard" leadership during a revolution:
I recommend reading here about a pamphlet published by The Friends of Durruti Group in 1938. It is about a very sharp criticism of the anarchist leaders of the Spanish Revolution 1936-9, a criticism made by anarchists who fought for that revolution and blamed its defeat (in 1939) on the very wrong decisions made by the anarchist leaders.
I wish to point out that this criticism is of the anarchist leaders, not of the rank-and-file workers. In fact this pamphlet makes a point of saying that the rank-and-file workers were eager to do what had to be done to defeat the capitalists (the liberal as well as fascist ones), and would have done so were it not for the betrayal by, and class collaborationism of, their anarchist leaders.
The pamphlet argues that there needed to be good leadership--meaning good political leadership that rejected class collaboration and aimed at taking real power by the working class--with effective organization to lead. Note that the leadership required was not in any way about commanding rank-and-file people to do what they didn't want to do, or even providing military-style coordination to rank-and-file actions. No. the required leadership was about telling the rank-and-file that what they wanted to do was indeed the right thing to do, and that they had the numbers and determination to do it successfully.
For this kind of leadership the pamphlet uses words such as junta and vanguard, but let's be clear on what the pamphlet author did and did not mean by those words in the actual circumstances.
There is another meaning of vanguard. In this different meaning the vanguard consists of the few who know what must be done, and their task is, by hook or by crook, to get the rank-and-file working class people to do it despite their reluctance to doing so. Those who think we need this kind of vanguard do so because they have a wrong understanding of ordinary people. They talk all the time about how ordinary working class people are POTENTIALLY class conscious, etc., [1] but only POTENTIALLY, meaning not actually so today. Hence, according to this 'potentially' kind of thinking, ordinary people are only POTENTIALLY fit to be the sovereign rulers of society at some future time, but in the meantime only the vanguard must have the real power. This is the root of the profoundly anti-democratic nature of all Marxist regimes.
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1. From Thomas Smith in his email On Sunday, November 24, 2024 at 06:51:43 AM PST:
"Because we understand that the working class, in both its potential for socialist consciousness, and its power to paralyze the capitalist system by shutting down production, is “the only really revolutionary class” in capitalist society (the quote is from Marx and Engels’ Manifesto) Marxists like Wilhelm and me (perhaps also, Stu, Kate, Judy, and Jon?) we believe the first approach is the best approach."
The Marxist argument for authoritative (top-down) centralization (as opposed to the egalitarian bottom-up voluntary federation mode of order on a large scale) hinges on the Marxist view of ordinary people that is opposite to that of the egalitarian view. Marxists say that ordinary people, if there is not a strong central authority determined to prevent it, will engage in tribal warfare and selfish behaviors that would make a good ("socialist"?) society impossible. Please read a bit about human nature here:
#1. "The Capitalist Big Lie about Human Nature" (This contains many scientific study reports at its end.)
#2. "Which Ancient Civilization Was Best for the Common Man" (The Caral Civilization, 3,500BC–1,700BC, was peaceful, not warlike, and very large.)
#3. "Equality Around AD 300 In the Place Where the Aztecs Much Later Came to Occupy In What Is Now Mexico"
#4. "The Famous 'Stanford Prison' and Yale 'Obedience to Authority'/Shock Experiments" (the actual conclusions from which, about human nature, are the opposite of what the mass media has been telling us for decades.)
#5. It is well known by anthropologists that hunter-gatherer societies are extremely egalitarian. For example in the journal, Current Anthropology, Vol. 35, No 2 (April 1994) online here, on page 176 one reads, "Yet the universality of egalitarianism in hunter-gatherers suggests that it is an ancient, evolved human pattern." This Big Fact contradicts the Big Lie that human nature is innately selfish and that inequality is simply what human nature inevitably produces.
In this regard it is worth reading a passage from Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. In his chapter, "Mutual Aid Among Savages," he writes about the "Hottentots, who are but a little more developed than the bushmen":
"Lubbock describes them as 'the filthiest animals.' and filthy they really are. A fur suspended to the neck and worn till it falls to pieces is all their dress; their huts are a few sticks assembled together and covered with mats, with no kind of furniture within. And though they kept oxen and sheep, and seem to have known the use of iron before they made acquaintance with the Europeans, they still occupy one of the lowest degrees of the human scale. And yet those who knew them highly praised their sociability and readiness to aid each other. If anything is given to a Hottentot, he at once divides it among all present--a habit which, as is known, so much struck Darwin among all Fuegians. He cannot eat alone, and, however hungry, he calls those who pass by to share his food. And when Kolben expressed his astonishment thereat, he received the answer: 'That is Hottentot manner.' But this is not Hottentot manner only: it is an all but universal habit among the 'savages.' Kolben, who knew the Hottentots well and did not pass by their defects in silence, could not praise their tribal morality highly enough.
"'Their word is sacred,' he wrote. They know 'nothing of the corruptness and faithless arts of Europe.,' 'They live in great tranquility and are seldom at war with their neighbors.' They are 'all kindness and goodwill to one another....One of the greatest pleasures of the Hottentots certainly lies in their gifts and good offices to one another,' 'The integrity of the Hottentots, their strictness and celerity in the exercise of justice, and their chastity, are things to which they excel all or most nations in the world.'"
The Hottentots are, of course, the same species as us. Their innate human nature enabled them to develop an extremely egalitarian culture. That means that our innate human nature (whatever it may be) enables us to do the same, contrary to the Big Lie of capitalism.
Some defend the Big Lie (that human nature is fundamentally anti-egalitarian and prone to tribal warfare) by arguing that human nature may permit egalitarianism within a tribe, but it also causes tribes to wage war against each other. But the anthropological evidence does not support the assertion, made by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Warmonger in Chief, Barack Obama, that "war appeared with the first man." As John Horgan writes in his The End of War:
"The Homo genus emerged about 2 million years ago and Homo sapiens about two hundred thousand years ago. But the oldest clear-cut relic of lethal group aggression is not millions or hundreds of thousands of years old. It is a 13,000-year-old gravesite along the Nile River in the Jebel Sahaba region of Sudan. Excavated in the 1960s, the site contains fifty-nine skeletons,twenty-four of which bear marks of violence, such as embedded projectile points.
"What's more, the Jebel Sahaba site is an outlier. Most of the other evidence for warfare dates back no more than 10,000 years. The oldest known homicide victim--as opposed to war casualty--was a young man who lived 20,000 years ago along the Nile...
"Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist and authority on both primates and early humans, believes that our human and proto-human ancestors were at least occasionally violent. Given how often fights occur among virtually all primates, including humans, 'we can be fairly certain that lethal aggression occasionally broke out' in the Paleolithic era, she says. 'It would be amazing if it did not.' But Hrdy sees no persuasive evidence that war--which she defines as 'organized aggression between groups with the intent of killing those in other groups'--is either ancient or innate." [pg. 30-31]
An article summarizing anthropological studies, titled Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution: New light on old debates, by Richard B. Lee, a leading specialist on hunters-gatherers, concludes:
"All these initiatives build on the central finding of this article, that although warfare and deadly conflict are part of human history, they are conspicuously rare in pre-8,000 BCE cultures. The highest frequency of warfare is observed in Neolithic and post-Neolithic cultures and societies. Therefore, there is a sharp discontinuity between warfare as we know it and the behavior of our putative prehuman and archaic human ancestors.
"This finding strengthens the argument that the key to human evolution is the necessity of moving away from the aggressive behaviors of our primate ancestors to provide an environment suitable for raising infants of an unprecedented degree of helplessness. The evolutionary payoff of these radical shifts gave our species a host of adaptive advantages, the human brain, and, with it, quantum leaps in intelligence. This level of intelligence has been an absolute prerequisite for humanity’s subsequent accomplishments."
Please communicate with me at spritzler@comcast.net