If I missed 10 days of work it would take me a year to recover. The oligarchs are sitting pretty and they know it. It would take an army of Luigis to change anything.
We can’t just say “General Strike” on the internet and expect anything to happen.
This is why unions collect dues: so they can pay part of workers’ wages and people won’t lose their homes. We need to organize enough people in your workplace that your boss can’t just fire you and hire someone else.
I am pro strike, but these pictures on the internet are just silly.
In the UK we missed the gernal strike because there are too many people making decisions for unions with egos. :(
With unions we can change things little by little. A 10 day strike isn’t long enough to be effective though…
The goal of the strikes is to stop 10 days from ruining a person, because it never should take a year to recover that
I’ll do you all a favor and tag the people and voices you should not listen to. They want you to live in subjugation.
Edit: there are 350 million people in the USA. We do not need concensus.
Edit2: do not ask for your rights. Do not argue for your rights. Fight for your rights.
I’m blocking you, per your request.
Please!!!
Don’t interact with me. Don’t respond to me. I get to talk to maybe 40 or 50 people at a time and it is wasted on you.
One way to escalate such a strike is to have a limited, general, recurring and escalating strike.
So it’s a day in January; two days in February; three in March, etc.
Its complicated, possibly too complicated for the typical worker, but it would give ramping escalation and allow for negotiation in process.
the problem remains the same: getting the general public to heed a strike. Short of people dying by hundreds of thousands, they don’t seem motivated.
When a million Americans died of Covid people demanded to end Covid restrictions.
Sad but true.
Not all Americans called for it, just very vocal ones. The people that were fine with the lockdowns and restrictions were not represented in the debate because they were sheltering in place at home trying to keep more people from dying to the virus.
America’s national identity is based around individualism. Other people dying is less important than individual success.
That’s why it’s the economy that matters. a quarter of a percent of extra deaths isn’t something people care about as long as they aren’t the ones dying. But economic turmoil hits everyone individually.
Need a spokes person, else it is a waste. Maybe we could vote on a small number of people to represent us? Maybe by region, maybe by industry.
You can not put an end date on it. That defeats the purpose
The purpose is to discourage voting. Messages like this serve that purpose well.
Having conversations around how ineffective voting is, is not equivalent to discouraging voting.
in the minds of many readers, it is.
Electoral politics doesn’t get the job done, but failing to attend to electoral politics can sure as shit make the job harder.
The question of “Who are we negotiating with” is all-important in every scenario except “Complete and total unconditional victory”.
Failing to attend to electoral politics is also a great way to ensure that blood has to be spilled again to re-win battles that were already fought, as has been seen with many of those left of center sitting out elections for half a century, which just so happens to coincidence with decoupling of wages from productivity, increasing wealth inequality, and erosion of workers’ rights.
If I thought people were consistent enough, I’d say that the founding of anti-electoralism was a right-wing, authoritarian conspiracy, but I don’t think that’s super likely.
Yeah, with all those general strikes we’ve had they must be really easy to organize!
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This is what bothers me so much about the constant calls for general strikes on social media. They’re almost never paired with serious organization (ex: where are the strike funds to support people who otherwise can’t afford to miss paychecks?)
Not to mention a large chunk of the public won’t agree with the idea to begin with. Especially the top 20-30% of income earners.
Additionally, emergency/medical personnel not working would mean people are directly dying as a result of it, creating easy negative PR against the movement.
Asking 180+ million people to coordinate on anything is a farce, and for something like a general strike it is an absolute fantasy.
Have you noticed they’re always paired with messages encouraging voter apathy and disparticipation ?
I mean, I have 5 kids who need to eat. I would absolutely participate, but I just can’t afford it.
It’s OK, no one is asking you to. Just support the cause the best you can. Support the people participating. Support messaging. And lend a hand to people before and after.
Always.
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We’re in a country with very little organized labor compared to other countries in Europe or Latin America where strikes are common. Also cops here are highly militarized. Plus we are a massive country. Still, I think Americans need to consider a general strike and organize if need be. Is it easy? Obviously not. But I’ll happily take some optimism in these dark times.
Actions speak louder than words
Ministerialdirektor Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger of the Reich Chancellery: Who were those 30,000 [Jews] you say you shot, when you say, you shot?
SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Rudolf Lange, Commander of the Sicherheitsdienst in Latvia: In Riga, Latvia. 27,800 I have some responsibility for. And stood by with my men and allowed Latvian civilians to kill in mobs. I received memos directing the – one would say evacuation of Jews – who, shot and buried in soil and corpses, managed to crawl out, still alive. Not exactly war, is it? And gas chambers about to come?
Kritzinger: What gas chambers? Gas chambers?
Lange: I hear rumors, yes.
Kritzinger: This is more than war. Must be a different word for this.
Lange: Try chaos.
Kritzinger: Yes. The rest is argument, the curse of my profession.
Lange: I studied law as well.
Kritzinger: And how do you apply that education to what you do?
Lange: It has made me distrustful of language. A gun means what it says.– Conspiracy 2001, based on the captured minutes of the Wannsee Conference
“Electoral politics doesn’t get the job done” lmao bro wants to fight fascism with more fascism?
Workers strikes are the farthest possible thing from facism
That’s why I quoted the exact part that was the pretty much the definition of fascism, ending elections.
How the fuck did you get that from that? They weren’t saying to end elections, just that they’ve got very little power in today’s climate where the entire worlds rule of law is dictated by a small percentage of publicly traded hedge funds and companies.
The right globally has been dismantling all the progress we’ve made since the 70s in a fuckton of issues.
When a single representative of a company can sit with elected officials in a private setting and influence the law to favor industry over individual, elections really do mean shit. We’ve got to reinforce them. This starts with ending the power of the ogliarchs and rewriting shit on our terms.
How did I get there? That’s the fucking title. That’s what those words mean.
It is both.
Voting is a good system. The alternative is “let’s just have a fight with guns, or with money, or connections to powerful people, every time there’s a disagreement.”
The problem is that we delegated the process of informing people what to vote for, to absolutely rotten media. And we delegated the process of figuring out the details of putting some candidates forward, to an absolutely craven, useless, and corrupt class of full-time political operatives who generally don’t give a shit about the people.
We need to fix those things. And yes, getting organized labor to fight back whenever they are fucking us, which is pretty much every day, to add some bite to all those polite ballots we’re sending in, sounds great.
But voting, as a concept, is good. It doesn’t have to be either or. It can be a 10-day general strike, and also voting to get rid of the guy who wants to nuke Iceland, and also organizing our politics better, for some candidates that aren’t so shit as these ones generally are. Each one will help the others get done.
I think you’re opening up a false dichotomy here: it’s not about voting vs. the law of the fist. It’s about how the democratic systems are set up to keep the powerful in power.
The system is set up to promote those “absolutely craven, useless, and corrupt class of full-time political operatives who generally don’t give a shit about the people”. And “fixing” the media to not promote those things is like trying to teach a cat not to hunt mice.
There are more ways to have a democratic stucture of politics than “we decide onsour ruler every four years”.
“We need both” “It doesn’t have to be either or”
“I think you’re opening up a false dichotomy here”
Voting is a good system. The alternative is “let’s just have a fight with guns, or with money, or connections to powerful people, every time there’s a disagreement.”
Show me how this is not a dichotomy. Why are these the only options?
Discussing why not having voting invites other methods of deciding power struggles that are even less democratic, does not mean a false dichotomy. I am very clearly discussing why both voting and also using other means of people power, together, is the way.
What do you think is my main argument? If not that both together are the way?
Discussing why not having voting invites other methods of deciding power struggles that are even less democratic, does not mean a false dichotomy
Yes it is. It presupposes that parliamentary democracy is the only way of democratic governance.
You are literally demonstrating the effect of the media landscape that you’re criticizing: you’re acting like there’s no other democratic alternative than a parliamentary democracy.
Tell you what: Tell me more about the other democratic alternatives you say I am missing. I didn’t think that my examples at all presupposed the existence of a parliamentary democracy, but if I know more about your counterexamples, I can better make sense of whether or not I overlooked them.
A successful form of democracy is Swiss style direct democracy. They also have a parliament and political parties, but public votes on all kinds of things happen very regular and are binding.
While I don’t have a perfect plan on democratic governance (sorry, I’m just a small, little boi), these examples came to mind right away:
What I also want to adress is that the things you’re criticizing in your first comment are structural problems of a liberal democracy. That means that they don’t stem from bad actors inside the system, but rather from the way the system is set up. Members of parliament have a free mandate and are under no direct obligation to enact policies on which they ran in elections. Yes, they can not get elected the next term, but this can also be an incentive to “get away with it” by e.g. manipulating the media landscape, lying, covering your tracks, searching for excuses, etc.
Also: you canwt vote the system away. When you’re voting, the only available opitions are ones that stabilize the parliamentary system. That’s why I don’t (or at least not completely) agree with “it needs both”. A general strike could lead to a more democratic system, while electoralism will always try to strengthen the current system.
The media will always exist and people will always base their decisions on the information they receive in the media. This is inevitable in any society with the degree of complexity we have today. It is just not possible to gather all the information ourselves about any but the most personal of topics. That is why free, unbiased, and independent media is an extremely important part of liberal electoral democracy. And for the greater part of the past two centuries, this is what we more or less had. Yes, major media outlets have always been somewhat controlled by the upper class (whether in the form of media companies or local media magnates), but until quite recently, most of them didn’t care about using those outlets as propaganda pieces; they just cared about continuing to collect their subscription money, which is likely the best-case scenario for privately owned for-profit media. It is astonishing that this system lasted as long as it did.
There used to be a requirement of giving equal air time to opposing opinions - that was one of the earlier things Republicans successfully targeted. I’ve no idea how to make that work with the virtually unlimited possible sources available today.
That just opens you up to false balancing. See: the media landscape on climate change for the last 70 years.
And also only works when there are only two sides to represent to begin with, so it would reinforce the two party system
Also doesn’t work when one side is supported by evidence and the others are “opinions” but given equal consideration.
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There is also the issue of massive-scale gerrymandering, party politics preventing candidates we want from being given a chance to run in general elections, the electoral college, and widespread voter suppression and disenfranchisement as well-documented by Greg Palast and others. If they actually counted our votes we might get a more representative democracy, but what we have now is not that.
Yeah. That’s why I agree with the general strike. Like I say, we’ve delegated the details of wielding political details to a whole class of exclusively-political people, and they’ve been rigging the game and keeping all the power for themselves. Fuck that.
You need to go vote too. Probably for Democrats, if you’re reading this here.
In this political climate a 10 day general strike would be dealt with by deploying the army.
There’s also the chance that they’d just hunker down and outlast it. Giving them a definite timeline gives them a light at the end of the tunnel. After 10 days, it’s just business as usual again. A general strike without a posted timeline would lead to capitulation within only a few days. It wouldn’t even take all 10 days.
Kidney stones don’t suck just because they hurt. They suck because you don’t know how long they’re going to hurt for. They hurt until you have passed the stone, and you have no idea how long that will take. The pain is analogous to a muscle cramp. People can grit their teeth and bear it if they know it’s just a muscle cramp and will end soon. But when it has been six days and you don’t have any idea how much longer it will last, it makes you desperate.
So what, they gonna come to my house and make me go to work?
Or do they show up at my work and do my job?
So what, they gonna come to my house and make me go to work?
Arrest you and toss you in a cell, more likely.
Ok, so they do that to everybody, and now the strike can’t end. This helps them how?
Ok, so they do that to everybody, and now the strike can’t end. This helps them how?
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They likely won’t have to do it to everyone. Just enough people to make examples and frighten people into going back to work. Solidarity is not a magic word, but a state of enthusiasm that must be maintained.
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If they do have to do it to entire workforce-sized populations, we get a cozy GULAG style labor system.
“They can’t arrest all of us” only works if there’s means of resistance other than passive. In liberal democracies, that’s typically protests, elections, and legal avenues; in less charming regimes, it comes down to internal dissent in the security apparatus or outright force from the oppressed. If you lack those means of negotiation, or the credible threat thereof, then they literally can arrest all of you, and will, given half a chance.
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No, they declare your not working illegal, and imprison you into a forced labor camp. Where if you don’t work you are tortured. And probably where you work until the terrible conditions kill you.
Take a look at Musk’s Twitter feed to see exactly where this is going.
“This is the way” on a post about how labor for prisoners is a good thing.
“You committed a crime” for people opposing DOGE.
Neither. The army joins the strike.
I love you OP. I give you blowie? You are so fucking hot.
They would start killing you until moral improves
Police brutality against the working class tends to make sympathists of onlookers, activists of sympathists, militants of activists and radical militants of ordinary militants.
So, one could only hope. They usually go this route, and then we have legendary responses like the French Résistance , or for that matter, the French Revolution.
Except in the twenty-first century, we get to record the brutality and fighting on video so the public can be inspired.
So until the general public is out numbered and outgunned by AI-commanded armies of swarming killer robots (a near future possibility), brutality by the state is always to the advantage of the movement, even if it doesn’t go so well for the individuals who perish in the conflict. Mahsa Amini never got to enjoy the uprising she started (and ended with negotiation) in Iran, and that’s a crying shame.
It says right there in the COIN manual (a running treatise of counter-insurgency in development for centuries) that you don’t brutalize the protestors, but have to capture hearts and minds, and also respond with good governance. And curiously, every autocratic despot seems to refuse to try this.
Except in the twenty-first century, we get to record the brutality and fighting on video so the public can be inspired.
(And 20th century)
How well has that worked out for you when your example is from the 18th century
We’ve actually seen the ubiquitous camera thing become an issue during the George Floyd protests of 2020, and yeah the police were brutal, pushed by President Trump, only causing the protests to double in size.
The French Résistance didn’t have the cameras, but the ill behavior of the Germans was ubiquitous, itself, despite e4fforts from the overseeing administration to advise them to be nice. They just couldn’t help themselves.
Technology is a factor, as are countless other circumstances. It’ll be interesting to see when video of the ICE raids start emerging again.
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Get ready for 2028. That is the year, right?
US laws offers enough protections for legal strikes that unions follow the law so they can’t do solidarity strikes. UAW is aligning their contract renewals for 2028, so it can happen then. But also if they repeal the nlra there will be little incentive to not start doing solidarity strikes.
Yeah. 2028 is the nice friendly version, where the ruling class plays by the rules. I’m hoping for that version. There’s no reason we can’t have that version.
