An Invitation to Your Organization from PDRBoston
(Is your issue one of these?)
No matter what the specific aim of your organization is, your aim or issue of concern is ours too. Here's why. The reason WHY you and others in your organization are working for your organization's goal is no doubt because you don't like inequality and domination of the many by the few. It's because you want the world to be based on the values of equality and democracy and people helping each other (solidarity, mutual aid). This is exactly what egalitarian revolution is all about. Your organization is trying to make the world more egalitarian in some specific way. Our goal is for you to succeed along with others in completely shaping society by our shared egalitarian values. Our goal is removing from power those who (as is the case today) prevent good people from making an egalitarian world. This is why we say that Your Issue Is Ours Too.
In the letter (below) from PDRBoston to your organization, we invite your organization (or members of it as individuals) to tell the public the values that you want the world to be shaped by and how your organization's specific aim fits into that larger aspiration, and we discuss why this is important. We would like to send this invitation to your organization--to all of the members if possible, otherwise just the leadership. Please let us know if you would like to help arrange sending this invitation to your organization--write us at PeopleforDemocraticRevolution@gmail.com . Thank you.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear [your organization],
On behalf of People for Democratic Revolution (PDRBoston.org) we invite your organization (or members as individuals) to join ours in formally endorsing (signing) the statement “This I Believe” (copied below), by mailing a hard-copy letter (signed by individuals identified as members of your organization and, if you wish, by your organization itself) stating your agreement with "This I Believe." We also invite you to say in your letter how your organization's specific aim(s) reflects your agreement with the values espoused in "This I Believe." The letter can be mailed to us at PDR, PO Box 300860, Boston, MA 02130.
“This I Believe” is not a petition; the signatures are displayed to the public (as is done here and here) in order to let people see that they are not alone in having revolutionary egalitarian aspirations. We aim to collect signatures from a majority of adults living in the United States. Our experience in collecting signatures in public places (such as sidewalks and shopping center parking lots) in Massachusetts (Somerville, Watertown, Jamaica Plain, Malden, Roxbury and Dorchester) is that at least 75% (often more) of the people who stop to read "This I Believe" sign it. Many of the signers have never seen egalitarian principles spelled out so explicitly before, but in reading "This I Believe" they recognize these principles as their own. People who sign "This I Believe" say they would love for the world to be that way. Often in the next breath, however, they express doubt that it can ever happen because, they wrongly believe, so few people want it to happen.
The obstacle to building a movement for egalitarian revolution in the United States today is not that most people don't want such a revolution (they do!); the obstacle is that most people don't KNOW that most people want such a revolution. We're at the very beginning of the campaign to collect 130 million signatures for "This I Believe." Although most people sign it, most do not collect other signatures. Why not? Because they're not convinced that most people will sign it. As the number of signatures grows, however, more people (a few at first and many more when there are a lot more signatures) will be persuaded to join the effort to collect even more signatures, making the goal of 130 million signatures an eventual realistic possibility. This is where your organization comes in.
When your organization (or individual members of it) endorses "This I Believe" it tells the wider public that the values motivating you to struggle for the particular goal of your organization are fundamental egalitarian values of equality, democracy and concern for one another. It tells the public that you consider your struggle part of an effort to shape all of society by egalitarian values, that you know it will take a revolution to do this, and that you want to help make that revolution. When you endorse "This I Believe," other people, even though they are not focused on your organization's particular goal, will nonetheless say of you, "Yes, those people are fighting for the same thing I'm fighting for. We're all in this together."
The more signatures and organization endorsements people see, the more confident they will become: confident that they are not a hopelessly small and powerless minority, but rather a majority. People will know they are a majority in wanting to solve the Big Problem--the dictatorship of the rich--with a Big Solution based on an inspiring egalitarian vision of how the world ought to be. This is what inspires people to build a movement with revolutionary egalitarian goals that is large enough and determined enough to persuade a "critical mass" of members of the military forces to refuse orders to attack the revolutionary movement and instead to join and protect it. This is how we can actually prevail against the ruling class that causes the problems that organizations like yours are fighting to solve.
For all of these important reasons, we urge members of your organization to read, discuss and sign "This I Believe." Please feel free to contact us at PeopleforDemocraticRevolution@gmail.com with any questions you may have about this effort.
Sincerely,
John Spritzler, Kathy Felgran and Carol Bradford, for
People for Democratic Revolution-Boston
--------------------------------------------------------
To my neighbors near and far:
This I Believe
Something is very wrong about our society today. It should be based on the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” But instead it is based on the opposite: “He who has the gold makes the rules.” The ones with the gold celebrate greed and looking out for #1, destroy the environment for personal gain (like BP did to the Gulf), and pit people against each other to control them.
In the United States we have a fake democracy. Big Money owns the media and political parties, controls the electoral process and politicians, and determines government policies, which have nothing to do with campaign promises or what most people want. This is not right!
Our capitalist economy is based on, and perpetuates, enormous economic inequality. Most people are merely “hired hands” working for, and required to obey, employers who claim, illegitimately, to personally own the earth’s land and minerals as well as the material and intellectual wealth produced by millions of working people. The poorest people do the hardest work and enjoy the benefits of socially produced wealth the least; the richest do the easiest work in great luxury or do no work at all, and enjoy the lion’s share of these benefits. This is wrong!
We the undersigned want real democracy and an economy based on equality and concern for one another and generations yet unborn.
Laws should only be made by meetings at the local level open to all who support equality and democracy. Social order on a larger scale—such as complex economic coordination—should be achieved by voluntary federation of local communities and workplaces, not by laws written by so-called “representatives” in distant capital cities or by commands from CEOs imposed from above.
We should all equally own and enjoy the benefits of the earth’s resources and the wealth that we produce by working together, with nobody being rich or poor. The principle of our economy should be, “From each according to ability, to each according to need,” a Golden Rule idea as old as the Bible (Acts, 4:34-35). Work should be for shared goals, to produce things that people need and want, to share freely, not buy and sell.
A greedy, rich and powerful minority, who were never elected and therefore cannot be unelected, prevents Americans from making ours a more equal and democratic society, which is why we need a revolution to remove them from power.