Talk:Arts/Outreach/Minutes

Demands?

user:spritzler Wednesday, 12:36 pm

We need lots of discussion about whether or not to have demands. I'll start by saying why I don't think we should.

A demand (or a set of demands)constitutes the offer of a deal to the 1%: "If you grant these demands then we will be satisfied and stop protesting and occupying." But until the 1% cease to rule our nation and stop enforcing the very class inequality that enables them to BE the 1%, I don't think we should be satisfied.

What we want is a new kind of society in which there is no 1% with concentrated wealth and power in their hands.

To get what we want requires removing the 1% from power and then creating a genuinely democratic and equal society. This is a revolution. The kind of society we can envision, and the way it can be achieved, are discussed in "Thinking about Revolution" at www.NewDemocracyWorld.org .

One does not demand a revolution; one makes a revolution. A demand is a message to the 1%. What we need, on the contrary, is to send a message to the 99%. The message to the 99% is that we have a revolutionary vision of a better world, a genuinely equal and democratic society, and that we invite them to join with us to discuss these aims and to build the revolutionary movement that it will take to achieve them.

Some say we should demand a huge public works project like the one FDR initiated in the Great Depression. But what caused FDR to help the unemployed this way was not that people demanded it, but rather that FDR feared that the working class was becoming increasingly revolutionary and convinced that capitalism held no decent future for them. Whatever changes the 1% might make to help ordinary people today will be made in response to the growth of an explicitly revolutionary movement far more than in response to a movement that merely makes some demand for a limited "realistic" reform. This is how it works in real life.

--John Spritzler, spritzler@comcast.net www.NewDemocracyWorld.org