- cross-posted to:
- usa@midwest.social
- cross-posted to:
- usa@midwest.social
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Fear and propaganda.
Join your local chapter. Volunteer for mutual aid groups. Help establish a strike fund for your local chapter. Get. Involved.
Enough unions to organize it.
nearly a century of coordinated, targeted anti-union operations by corporations and the federal government will do that.
It’s really cool learning about stuff like the Mohawk Valley Formula and how it’s been known about as an overtly articulated strategy for like a hundred years now and they still do the exact same shit to discredit and disperse movements against their interests
and even knowing their fucking playbook doesn’t help us simply because a solid majority of the population is conditioned to have their eyes glaze over, seeing nothing, when told about the tactics that are literally at that moment being used on them
More than a century honestly, that shit goes as far back as the 1800s
This is why my advice to everyone who is like "But what should I actually DO!’ is “get to know your neighbors.” Community together strong
Oh I see you don’t spend time on NextDoor.
get to know your neighbors AND learn how to trust and be trusted.
get to know your neighbors AND learn how to trust and be trusted.
My strategy is to just dump my nuts on the table and tell you my whole deal, with many death to Americas sprinkled throughout, and if you don’t find me trustworthy or are mean to me then well f you i’ll go rant at someone else
I know my neighbors.
- One of them went no contact when my wife asked how they could possibly support trump when he is so clearly against their religious ideals.
- A fraction I would rely on for general help but nothing major.
- Half I would rely on to shoot me for inconveniencing them.
- The rest won’t answer the door if I knock.
your reply says a lot more about you than it does about your neighbors
👍
The internet caused us to forgo our tight communities in exchange for being acquaintances with millions of people.
it was not the internet that did that
I’m in a good union and people would actively die if my power plant went down.
Lack of worker solidarity. We’re too atomized and stressed to support each other through a GS. Hopefully that is beginning to change. I just hope its not too late.
Lack of worker solidarity
In theory, the problem of “two paychecks” is solved (at least in part) by working people seizing certain critical means of production for the purposes of mutual aid. So, grocers strike not by closing the front doors but by shutting down the cash registers and handing out food for free. Landlord admins strike by refusing to collect rents. Teachers strike not by refusing to teach but by refusing to grade. Etc.
And if everyone knows this arrangement will be in effect, they can act together as a bargaining unit to threaten the control of the landlord class.
But if they aren’t in close communication, because the public forms of media are censored and strictly controlled, then individuals can’t express solidarity prior to the strike. And if they aren’t in alignment, then you end up with the same “haves” and “have-nots” reproduced across the striking cohort, creating contradictions that landlords can exploit. And if they can’t repeat this experiment of communication, trust building, strike, reap concessions, then they can’t build momentum of numbers or expand the demands.
Hopefully that is beginning to change
I haven’t seen much to suggest it has. Perhaps the soul is willing, but the body public remains weak and emaciated. We still don’t have avenues of communication independent of the capitalist class. We haven’t built trust between industrial sectors. There’s little we can point to that’s been successful, much less reproducible.
I just hope its not too late.
It’s never “too late”. All that changes is the players and the stakes at play.
But whatever comes next, you’d be foolish to believe you’ll see both the beginning of it and the end. You’ll be lucky to know what you’re in the middle of.
Two paychecks seems optimistic.
Agreed. 2-3 paychecks for the union workers and skilled trades. 0-1 for most others.
Lack of grassroots, well-structured organizing to kickstart a movement in an economy of 250 million workers.
The fact that a general strike hurts smaller and less-wealthy businesses first and hardest. It only further consolidates wealth and market share into the hands of mega corporations.
Loud, terminally online leftists need to stop romanticizing Eastern Europe in the 1950s and address the landscape in front of us today. Economies and the culture we face now is distinct from those in the past and require different tools to dismantle.
People in more precarious positions than now organized and that’s how they got every concession ever. The conditions may be different, but it will only get worse without organizing and striking.
Also, the average American barely knowing what a union is, much less being a member of one.
And too many of the ones who do and are have accepted the paradigm of unions as a consumer service, rather than a place for rank-and-file organization. Union dues for collaborator leadership makes a union into a sort of absurdly cheap, shitty lawyer with whom you get what you’re paying for, when it’s not actively betraying you.
Americans have had every participatory inclination beaten out of them (metaphorically speaking). Their political parties have no participation beyond asking for money and their unions are the same. They’ve been fed a steady drip of 24/7 news designed to keep them afraid of everyone they don’t already know, and that’s by design. Things are going to have to get a lot worse for the average American before they’ll be willing to organize in any meaningful way. I hope this changes, don’t get me wrong, but I expect that it’ll have to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Haha. Joke’s on you!
It’s the start of the month, so I have three paychecks to live. I’m going to celebrate with drive-thru coffee and avocado bread.
2? More like half a paycheck. Most people can’t even afford to call in sick to work.
Debt servitude works better than any whip or chain.
No universal healthcare for when they shoot you in the face with pepper balls or whomp you to a pulp with nightsticks…
I like the idea of a government shutdown, rather than a General Strike. A Strike hurts us, a shutdown hurts them. Strikes might work in other countries, because they don’t have a mechanism to shut down the government , but we do.
I was all for keeping it locked down last Fall, and all through 2026, and making the Midterm Election Campaign a giant national Food and Health Care drive. Show the nation who really cares, while MAGA loses their minds.
But as soon as the shutdown hit the airports, and the Donor Class couldn’t move their operatives around the country, the MAGA comedy act of Schmuck & Jeffries surrendered. We were winning that battle, but we got literally NOTHING in exchange. No wonder MAGA has such disrespectful disdain toward the weak cowardly Democrats. They deserve every bit of MAGA derision.
They aren’t going to care if we go on strike and get fired from our jobs and go homeless. But they’ll care if we shut down the MAGA government and hurt THEM.
A general strike absolutely hurts the owning class because the value their companies produce is created by the workers. When the workers stop working, then production stops and that is the single most direct way to hurt capitalist interests.
Again, workers take the hit. I don’t want self-inflicted wounds, and hope that the Sociopathic MAGA government will take pity on us, and change. They won’t change, they’ll just laugh at our morality.
I want to hurt MAGA, not citizens, and the best way to do that is take away their money, which is the ONLY thing they really care about.
Like I said, most countries don’t have a mechanism to shut down their nation’s government, so they have to default to a General Strike. But we have an alternative strategy that truly hurts them where they care the most, with less damage to the Citizens. Shouldn’t we start there?
We can always start with a Government Shutdown, and add the General Strike to it if we need to tighten the noose.
Again, you should read the history of the US because mass strikes and militant labour organization was precisely how workers wrestled concessions from the ruling class in the past. The idea that most countries don’t have a way to shut down their government is also nonsense. That’s just a strike carried out by government workers. Any country can do that.
Meanwhile, the type of a government shutdown you’re talking about can only be carried out by the politicians and it’s entirely out of the hands of the workers.
The labor strikes of the 30s were a almost a century ago, against a different kind of enemy, with different objectives. That was to obtain better wages, conditions, and workers rights. That has to be directed at the corporation that supplies those things.
But today, our first, and biggest beef is with the government. If we want to force them to react, we have to hit them directly. And remember, it’s MAGA, and they are really stupid. They require a 2x4 across the face, just to get their attention.
The government represents the class that holds power in society, and that’s been capital owning class both in the 30s and today. There’s been no fundamental change in how the system functions.
