We CAN Change the World

I read this book when it first came out more than 15 years ago, and it changed my life. Having spent much of the 1960s and 70s trying to change the world with a Left/Marxist framework, and having seen the hopeful movements (Anti-War, Civil Rights and Welfare Rights, among others) of that period collapse in the 1980s into hopelessness about the possibility of the fundamental change in society that was so clearly needed, I felt the same hopelessness and abandoned political activism for the entire 1980s.

When I read Stratman's book in 1992, I saw that there was indeed a very real basis for hope, but it was not the wrong one that Marxism offered--the inevitable working of impersonal social-economic laws-- but rather one based on an insight about ordinary people that is entirely absent in Marxism: they are an implicitly revolutionary force, with implicitly revolutionary values by which, in their everyday lives, they try to shape the small corner of the world over which they have any real control.

In the Marxist framework, the task of revolutionaries is to change ordinary people's values, a project about which it is difficult to be hopeful. In contrast, Stratman demonstrates that the task of revolutionaries is to give ordinary people confidence that they are right, and that they are not alone in wanting a more equal, democratic and mutually supportive world opposite from the kind of world the corporate elite want. This is a project about which we can be very hopeful.

Stratman's book is about what makes people tick, and though the examples are not contemporary the insights are as true and important today as they ever were. I can guarantee that if you read this book it will change your life.