It’s a serious question because the president is elected so it’s not just “hey you need to step down”.
- Definitely Musk shouldn’t be a part of things.
- Definitely the courts should be listened to (but what that means as a demand I don’t really understand)
- Definitely reign in the presidential orders, reduce their scope or number or SOMETHING
I mean, I’m not the guy to do this. But what exactly kind of things could be done to control this crazy ass situation?
EDIT: I’m taking about how we can restore and reform the United States, not visions for a new entity.
U.S. capitalism has hijacked basic needs like housing and healthcare, and these problems aren’t accidental—they’re built into the system. Housing is unaffordable because banks and financial institutions treat it as a commodity, locking people into debt. To fix this, we’d need to devalue real estate as an asset and limit speculative loans. The same goes for healthcare: the system isn’t broken, it’s designed to profit off human need, so true reform means nationalizing healthcare and removing corporate control.
The demands for a successful strike should include: • Housing as a right: End the financialization of housing and limit speculation. • Universal healthcare: Nationalize the healthcare system and eliminate private insurers. • Living wages: Set a living wage for all and drastically reduce the pay gap. • Job security & union rights: Real worker protections and job stability. • Progressive taxation & wealth redistribution: Tax the ultra-wealthy and corporations fairly. • Environmental justice: Transition to a green economy that prioritizes workers.
Real change requires systemic transformation, not reforms that merely patch up the existing system.
Okay, but Trump isn’t going to do that. So, what do we demand to fix our current, URGENT situation?
A general strike isn’t the end goal - it’s just one tool in a larger movement for a fairer society. Without deep structural change, any victory will be temporary, and moderates will be swept aside just like in the Russian Revolution.
The real fight is against a system that: • Turns housing into feudal lodgings • Keeps workers powerless through debt, low wages, and job insecurity • Uses healthcare as a profit engine instead of public infrastructure • Pushes every aspect of life toward privatization and financialization
A successful movement won’t just demand small fixes - it will challenge the entire system that allows exploitation to continue.
Okay and I’m trying not to be contentious here but the question itself was if we have a general strike and it’s successful what will be the demands?
This was not a general question about what is needed in the USA. It was a specific question about the end goal that a general strike would have.
I was asking people to answer that question.
To quibble, housing isn’t just treated as a commodity, it is treated as a financial asset that will accrue value. This nearly always leads to a massive price spiral. The same applies to university loans, for example. Once financialized, pricing spiraled even faster than the cuts to funding that were passed on to students as tuition. Health insurance and healthcare have a similar dynamic because the insurance industry is similarly non-productive and can only make larger and larger profits by basically scamming: paying out less than they promised and investing their cash reserves.
Re: a successful strike, this requires having your workers on board and ready to hold a line for each other. They have to be ready for a fight and not backstab, undercut, or balk because they are afraid. And they need to be at the table in the first place, coordinated and ready to go. This would amount to a level of organization that is currently unimaginable in the US, where false consciousness is dominant. Most importantly, whichever material forces drive people to organize will shape their demands. When forming a union, you do research first to see which workplaces are good prospects and what they care about most, then roll that into a campaign. We don’t really know what forces may build to drive people to be ready to take some kind of action, nor do we know that left organizational capacity will be what that energy ends up feeding. The false consciousness in the US that has been so effective is marginalization. Chattel slavery, genocide of indigenous people, a temporary exploitation and then rejection of Mexicans and Chinese people. A temporary exploitation and then white-ification of Irish, Eastern Europeans, Greeks, Italians. Scapegoating women, black people, gay people, trans people, and do on. This is currently a stronger tradition in the US than left organizing and it is the society the Nazis took notes from when designing their racial conquest and empire plans (though they thought the US’ racial rules were too extreme to work in their region).
The real question is not what is an idealistic list of demands to address the contradictions of US capitalism, but how we could organize from the left to win out over these fascistic tendencies (really just the dark side of liberalism qua the political ideology of capital). The path taken to organize and the historical events surrounding it will determine any hypothetical demands of a hypothetical general strike.
So, framed another way: a more appropriate question is what will those reading this thread be doing to learn how to organize, to understand capitalism and historical currents, and to join, enlarge, and improve principled anticapitalist parties and organizations that can survive and win out over left liberal cooption (like many unions suffer fron today) and right liberal reactionary violence?
Check your local anti-capitalist actions and see if anyone needs help. Trust your gut or ask here if a given organization you’re thinking of joining seems off. But get involved! May Day, as in May 1, the true day of labor, will be here soon and is a good event for seeing what anti-capitalist organizations are in your area. The lead orgs doing the work for the events of the day are a good bet.