What's the Measure of Our Success?

WHAT'S THE MEASURE OF OUR SUCCESS?

December 14, 2020

What's the appropriate "yardstick" for us to use to measure our success as we work to build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to one day make all of our society be shaped by the egalitarian values of no-rich-and-no-poor equality and mutual aid?

Should our "yardstick" be the number of reforms we win? Should it be the magnitude of new taxes on the rich that we win? The number of new jobs we win? The amount we get the minimum wage to increase? The decrease in the number of homeless people? The decrease in the number of unjust wars the government is waging? The number of "good" politicians that get elected or "good" judges that get appointed?

No. None of these kinds of things--things we might win--are the appropriate yardstick. Why not?

Because as long as the billionaire plutocracy remains in power whatever we win one day it can take away the next.

The true yardstick of our success is the number of people who have, in one way or another, joined the egalitarian revolutionary movement with the explicit (read here why this is key!) aim of removing the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor and to shape all of society by no-rich-and-no-poor equality and mutual aid.

When the number of such people is increasing, then we are succeeding, even if the ruling class is taking away good reforms we won in the past, and even if the ruling class is stepping up its repression.

As long as we are succeeding in increasing our numbers in the egalitarian revolutionary movement, then we are getting closer to the day when we can truly remove the rich from power in the manner described here.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN WE SHOULD BE DOING?

It means we should be recruiting people to join the egalitarian revolutionary movement. I discuss some of the ways we can do that here.

But in order to believe that it's worth the effort to try to persuade people to join the egalitarian revolutionary movement one must first have confidence that most people would love an egalitarian revolution; and in order to gain that confidence one must ASK ONE'S REAL-LIFE NEIGHBORS (no matter for whom they voted!) if they think it would be 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." Read here how you can do that, and if you want some stickers to get started just send an email to spritzler@comcast.net with "stickers" in the subject line and with your postal address in the message and I will mail you some for free. By doing this you will be joining the egalitarian revolutionary movement; you will be increasing the magnitude of its success.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN WE SHOULD NOT BE DOING?

We should not be doing things that we do as a SUBSTITUTE for what we should be doing. There are all sorts of such things that people do as a substitute for what we need to do. Here are some of them:

Making declarations that sound "revolutionary" but that lead to nothing, e.g., "General strike on MAY DAY!" or "Shoot white supremacists on sight!" or "Get money out of politics" etc., etc.
Telling people that the ruling class does very bad things (as if most people didn't already know that) because one thinks (wrongly, as I discuss here) that the reason people aren't rising up is because they think everything is hunky dory.
Diving into some reform effort without trying to persuade the people in it to tell the public the ACTUAL reason why they're fighting for the reform--that they want to make the world closer to being egalitarian (as I discuss here.)
Denouncing ordinary people for being bad, for being part of the problem and not the solution, for being racist and homophobic and transphobic and selfish and 'sheeple' and 'un-woke' and complicit and dehumanized by capitalism, etc., etc. (This is what people do who have never deigned to ask their real-life neighbors if they think it is 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.)