The Lies They Tell about Egalitarianism to Make You Tolerate Class Inequality
March 1, 2021
The members of the ruling billionaire plutocracy are not stupid. They know perfectly well that most people* hate class inequality and would love to see it abolished because they don't like being treated like dirt. So, to prevent the vast majority from removing the rich minority from power to have no rich and no poor and real, not fake, democracy (i.e., from making an egalitarian revolution), what do the rich do?
Here's what the rich do. They use their mass media and pundits and politicians to tell us lies:
1. The rich lie to us about our pro-egalitarian aspirations.
The rich work hard to make people think that if they want to abolish class inequality they are part of such a tiny, hopelessly weak, minority that it is just foolish, even insane, seriously to try to build an egalitarian revolutionary movement; that the only sensible thing to do is keep quiet about one's egalitarian revolutionary thoughts so as not to be thought crazy by one's neighbors. Read about this here where I discuss how the Gallup Poll Co. refused my offer to pay them to do a poll asking people if they thought it was a good idea or a bad idea to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.
The rich lie to us by deceitfully framing 'hot button' social issues for the purpose of making us think (no matter what camp we are in regarding any specific issue) that about half the population (the ones that disagree with us) are immoral and/or bat-shit crazy stupid, so that there's no way we can unite sufficient numbers of people to actually remove the rich from power to make a more just society. Read here about the basic strategy the rich now employ to do this, and go here to find all the gory details.
2. The rich lie to us about what egalitarianism is.
The rich tell us that egalitarianism's goal of "equality" is about making everybody the same as--identical to--everybody else, with exactly the same talents and same intelligence and same integrity and same body shape-size-beauty and same everything else. The rich say this is what "equality" means and egalitarians are therefore stupid in thinking it can be attained since, as everybody knows, people differ from each other in all sorts of ways.
Furthermore, the rich say, it would be terrible if people were somehow made all the same the way egalitarians want them to be because then we wouldn't have the wonderfully talented, skilled, dedicated and truly exceptional people that we fortunately have today. Read in "What 'Equality' Does NOT Mean" what egalitarian "equality" is truly about and how it doesn't mean what the rich say it means at all, and how the rich try hard to spread their lie about it.
3. The rich lie to us about what is required to have an egalitarian society.
The rich tell us that the dream of an egalitarian society is an impossible one in reality because it requires that everybody be a virtual saint. In response to the egalitarians' principle of "From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need" the rich reply that a society can never be based on this principle because it flies in the face of human nature--it would never work: people are motivated by self-interest and would not abide by this principle. Capitalism, say the rich, works because it is based on the truth about human nature.
What the rich say here is flat out false.
First of all, human nature (as I discuss in some detail in "Human Nature: the Capitalist Big Lie") is fully compatible with egalitarianism. In fact, egalitarianism OUTPRODUCED the capitalism it replaced in almost half of Spain 1936-9, as I discuss in detail here; egalitarianism works BETTER than capitalism, even just in terms of productivity not to mention justice and morality.
Secondly, it is absurd to think, as the rich pretend to think, that everybody has to be pro-egalitarian in order for society to be egalitarian. No! What's necessary is merely that enough people are pro-egalitarian (and it's already a large majority, by the way) to prevail (like this) over the anti-egalitarians and thereby shape the society by egalitarian rather than, as presently, by anti-egalitarian values. Think about it! Only a small minority of people today want anti-egalitarian class inequality and yet our society is an anti-egalitarian class inequality society. This shows that the nature of a society can absolutely be contrary to what many--even most!--people want it to be. Egalitarianism only requires that the egalitarians (not everybody!) prevail against the anti-egalitarians, and since most people already today want an egalitarian society, egalitarianism is perfectly feasible.
4. The rich lie to us that abolishing class inequality means having a Marxist dictatorship.
First of all, Marxist regimes are themselves a form of class inequality, they are not about abolishing it. Marxism is based on the premise--a fundamental axiom of Marxism!--that ordinary people, because they are (supposedly) motivated only by self-interest**, do not want a classless society and therefore they must be prevented from having the real say in society; they must instead be socially engineered by a dictatorship of the Marxist party so that in far future generations there will be a new kind of person (Che Guevara in his article on this theme, concludes, "We will forge ourselves in daily action, creating a new man and woman with a new technology.") who will willingly abide by the principles of a classless, communist, society. In the meantime, the Marxist party's goal is NOT to end class inequality but instead to USE class inequality (the way the Chinese Communist Party uses it today by promoting a billionaire class) to increase economic production so that one day in the far future there will be no economic scarcity; "only then," wrote Karl Marx, "can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" I discuss this fundamentally anti-democratic basis, and practice, of Marxism here.
Secondly, egalitarianism is anti-Marxist (discussed further here). Egalitarianism rejects the false Marxist view of ordinary people. Egalitarianism is based on the understanding that most (not all, but most) people want society to be based on the egalitarian values of no-rich-and-no-poor equality and mutual aid. Egalitarianism therefore aims to have genuine democracy of egalitarians as described here in which most people have the real say in society without any central government bossing them around from above, and without any authoritarian central planning of the economy from above, as I describe here and in more detail here.
Read about what egalitarianism actually is here.
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* If you want to find out for yourself that this is true, read here about one way you can do it, and if you want me to send you some free stickers to do it then just send me an email with "stickers" in the subject line and with your postal address (where I'll send the stickers to) in the message.
** Lenin, in What Is to Be Done, wrote, "the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness"; in other words that working class people just want more more more for themselves, not a classless society of equality.
Karl Marx quotes Adam Smith approvingly in his Das Kapital, writing:
“The understandings of the greater part of men,” says Adam Smith, “are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations ... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” [my emphasis, source: Marx's Capital, Volume I, Chapter 14, "Division of Labor and Manufacture," Section 5]
The reason that Marxist parties treat ordinary people so anti-democratically is because Marxists have utter contempt for ordinary people. I discuss today's American Marxists in this regard here.
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