Most of you guys have been having fun saying that it essentially stands for nothing, it's just a funny joke that The Dude would get so worked up about something so essentially unimportant. There is a lot of truth to that viewpoint, but you're giving the movie too little credit if you think that there's nothing more to it than that. There clearly is, and the rug (and the soiling of it) is part of the central theme of the movie.
The Dude and his friends grew up in a different society from the one the movie takes place in. Once upon a time, The Dude was a radical. He was molded in a world that told him that standing up to the man, occupying buildings, writing manifestos and protesting Vietnam and inciting riots ("with six other guys") would change things. It would make the world a better place, a more just and fair place. He was taught that in order to make a real difference, you had to go outside society's boundaries, and protest the system instead of submitting to it. He fully committed to this, sacrificing his education and his future prospects for it.
But he was wrong. Society ultimately ignored his generation and tossed him and Donny and Walter aside (Walter, as a neglected Vietnam veteran, is a different side of essentially the same coin). The Big Lebowski says as much in the beginning of the movie ("Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski! Condolences! The bums lost!"). He now finds himself discarded, unemployable and totally unprepared for the America that Nixon, Reagan and the 80's would usher in. This America is now ruled, unquestioningly, by the inherited wealthy like The Big Lebowski. Even pornography is changing, going all digital, though The Dude will still jerk off manually.
The radicals that do exist today are people he doesn't understand, people with more money than sense, people who suspend themselves from roofs in order to make "vaginal" art (the word itself, apparently, makes some men uncomfortable. Vagina.) These people aren't radical because they are genuinely idealistic and want to change the world, they're radical because they have so much money that they don't know what to do with their days, they're radicals just because they can be (you also see this with the nihilists, who literally "believe in nothing", something which old guard revolutionaries like The Dude and Vietnam veteran Walter can barely comprehend).
His life, then, in this new society, will consist of bowling, smoking weed and going to the grocery store in his robe and paying for milk with a check. When he dies, he (like Donny), will be barely remembered by only a few friends and life will go on without him like he never even existed. Nobody will even pay for a proper funeral.
But by the time the 90's come about, The Dude is more or less fine with this. He "abides". He doesn't need to be remembered, he doesn't need to be "somebody", if he can just go on and live out his existence unimpeded, he's just fine with that. By the time the movie starts, he has long given up on radicalism, but that doesn't mean that it was never there. Just because he just floats through life now doesn't mean that he never had aspirations of greater things.
But then, a chinaman (not the preferred nomenclature) pisses on his rug. Just because The Dude has come to terms with being a nobody doesn't mean that he deserves to be pushed around, especially not since he did nothing wrong. The person who deserves getting his rug pissed on is the rich guy, the guy who won, but he's too powerful, so it's The Dude who has to pay the price. Note that the characters start using President Bush's rhetoric about Saddam Hussein: this is an aggression, it will not stand, it's about drawing a line in the sand. A truce had been established between the "bums" like The Dude and the fat cats like The Big Lebowski, where the fat cats get all the power, and as long as they leave the bums alone they wont complain. The Big Lebowski has violated that truce, and The Dude is seeking reparations. All The Dude wanted was his rug back.
Mostly though, it just really tied the room together.
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