Electoral politics doesn't get the job done
Electoral politics doesn't get the job done
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24998458
138 comments
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In a world where the average household has <$500 worth of savings, you'd have problems implementing a general strike for 2 days, never mind 2 weeks. Good luck ya'll, I think the time for action was a while ago and I don't see this being feasible right now.
You can try to prove me wrong, but explain how these households are going to make it two weeks.
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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.
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It’s the best way to let them know what issues concern us most and what policies we like.
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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.
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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.
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In the UK we missed the gernal strike because there are too many people making decisions for unions with egos. :(
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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
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In this political climate a 10 day general strike would be dealt with by deploying the army.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Neither. The army joins the strike.
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Would it though?
Firstly, the general population is stretched so financially thin that a 10 day strike is unaffordable for most
Now, ten days to bring everything to a halt sounds great. But unless it's coordinated in certain areas, then there's just a freeze on everything. Remember the COVID pandemic? Even if only certain areas strike, the situation is so bad that alot of jobs would be covered.
Secondly, do you honestly believe that the general population is selfless enough to not place any e-commerce, online services or any sort of digital product purchases within that 10 days? No.
Lastly, what happens after those 10 days? The whip comes out, there's catching up to do.
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UAW is calling for all unions to align their contracts to end on May 1st 2028 and calling for a general strike to start that day. That gives us 3 years to get organized, set up local strike funds for our communities, and make sure we have representation at the negotiating table whether we're in unions or not.
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/general-strike-2028-unions-labor-movement/
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How can we help?
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Get organized with a progressive or socialist organization. DSA, PSL, or just you and some homes. If you're completely isolated, an org like DSA is good because they have a lot of "at large" members that aren't in formal chapters, but at large members have access to national resources too (not in day 1, its a political org, but DSA is good for at large membership). But the people who seem "the most organized" in your area, who have good politics and active membership, is the best org for you to join since these things can vary drastically from place to place.
From there, get involved in local labor organizing, your group might even have like a labor group that focuses on it.
If you live in a place where you can get a job that is a part of UAW Union, you can try to get it and "salt", which means adding radical militant labor organizers to existing stagnant or bureaucratic unions, and start mobilization campaigns.
A pretty easy thing that would be super helpful, would be to fundraise for materials to create "strike-ready" kits, basically 5 gal bucket and lid full of supplies for an extended period, since strikes are long, difficult, protracted affairs. People get hungry, they get cold and wet, etc., mutual aid has a very low barrier to entry. I'm not a mutual aidist, but its something you could start basically today and have a bunch ready by that time.
If you can, don't go alone, bring like minded people in or find like minded people. The best individual thing you can do is to educate yourself so when the time comes you can educate others. Read! Class Struggle Unionism is a classic, but there are probably books about UAW specifically. Another favorite of mine is "Teamster's Rebellion" if you can find it
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In three years?
This has to be bait from the fascists. In three years you won't be able to strike. What a stupid idea.
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It might seem out there, maybe a little too late.
But, organizing these things, attracting people to it, raising funds, building up oversight; those things take time. A lot of time.
Just the ‘attracting people to it’ part is an almost impossible task. 40% of the American population can’t even be bothered to vote. They aren’t going to get up and protect their labor without a MASSIVE push.
It might seem way out there, but getting it at all would be triumphant and victorious.
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Presuming there are still elections, this is basically calling for a general strike when it will have the most electoral weight. So, basically it comes down to whether or not you believe there will be another presidential election or if we'll already be a fascist dictatorship by then.
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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.
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When a million Americans died of Covid people demanded to end Covid restrictions.
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A strike that has a scheduled end date is a strike that's has scheduled its own failure. A ten day strike would achieve nothing except the suffering of it's participants.
Yes, the economy would grind to a halt, yes people would likely die, yes it would financially hurt the powerful people in charge.
But do you really think those powerful people will give a shit? They know after ten days the gravy train will resume, but only for them and not the people who lost their jobs, got arrested, were injured, etc. The rich and powerful can afford to be patient, meanwhile everyone who sacrificed for ten days is going to have to question whether they can survive doing it again.
No, we're way past the point where our society can afford another failed effort to affect change. We need a general strike that doesn't end until the government capitulates to the needs of the people. It's all or nothing, now. ☹️
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Once you have built the list of demands and the political alliance for a one day strike, the infrastructure stays around. So the next one day or longer strike is easier to execute.
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That's not always accurate. A strike where people sit at home and watch TV might have this result, but a 10 days of people on the streets talking and hyping each other up, can easily grow revolutionary, especially if during those 10-days people use direct action for their mutual aid to cover their needs
1-day strikes and random marches on the other hand are practically useless
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Reddit protest be like. Huffman literally said 'You only protest for 2 days? Sure, we'll wait'.
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We need a general strike that doesn’t end until the government capitulates to the needs of the people
Many cannot afford to strike but that is the way the system was set however we only need 10% participation to send a powerful message - any more is icing on the cake. Those who cannot fully can participate by cutting back 10% or more. Everyone should be able to cut back to some extent. Yet, expect the corporate controlled MSM to NOT report on the effects or participation of a general strike. Look for your news on independent sites, some reliable foreign sources and the Fediverse only.
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The strike is not the end of the exercise, oh, no! To pull off a huge action like this will take coordination, spreading awareness, cultivating relationships of trust, establishing lines of communication, laying the foundations by organizing, and getting people primed for action. That's what we lack now.
Right now, we could all just choose to disobey together, and there are so many of us that they couldn't stop us. But it would take a lot of people; only a few here and there taking action would simply leave those few destitute or in jail.
A general strike is not the goal, it's the announcement that we're organized. That awareness, those relationships, that trust, doesn't just have to go away...
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A strike that has a scheduled end date is a strike that’s has scheduled its own failure.
A flex of power is a great way of demonstrating to both your own union members and your bosses/administrators. Proving that coworkers can and will dictate the terms of economic activity is an incredibly powerful statement that illustrates exactly who is in charge of the workfloor.
No, we’re way past the point where our society can afford another failed effort to affect change.
People are going to try things and those things are going to continue to have a mixed chance at success. The idea that an ill-defined indefinite general strike will work better than a highly coordinated short-term shutdown is predicated on a number of your own personal theories about how oligarchs will respond and how long union organizers can effectively maintain a work outage.
You're rolling dice just like the rest of us. Nothing you're suggesting guarantees a particular outcome.
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Booooooo
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What about canceling a specific day of work every week? That would spread out the pain on both sides, but in a way that makes it less painful for workers because some may have sick days they can use. If literally nobody shows up on every Friday it sucks pretty bad for the bosses, even if they show up all the other days.
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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.
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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.
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Who the hell can afford to go one day without pay, let alone 10?
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A well organized Union will have strike funds stashed away. Saving up is part of organizing a strike.
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Start saving now, start learning how to fix things, grow food, make do with less.
A whole lot of people may not have any choice about going without pay for awhile, much less one day, the time to start preparing is now. I tell people as often as I can, especially my trans and bipoc friends; now is the time. Get a couple guns (a long one and a short one) and learn how to use them. Learn some basic first aid, you really just need to know how to stabilize someone. Start networking with like-minded people in your communities, learn how to to grow food and repair things.
The police will not protect us, they’ve proven they’ll happily club senior citizens to the ground and shoot any protesters in the face with rubber bullets while escorting a rightwing murderer to safety. Iran was a secular, liberal state until almost 1980 when they (mostly legitimately) elected an Islamist theocracy; it could happen here.
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Get a couple guns (a long one and a short one) and learn how to use them.
This is a pretty intense topic to get involved with.
I dithered a little bit about getting a firearm. I still do not have one. I know how to use them, in a cursory kind of way.
Part of why I've held back on getting one is this: Imagine playing a board game for the first time, and if you lose, you're going to die. Or sitting down at a poker table to play for the first time in your life. How well are you going to play? Are you probably going to win? Also, the game only lasts for fifteen seconds.
Having a gun sounds like not a bad idea for what's coming up in this country. Having a gun and no experience at all in the types of situations you might get yourself into, if you have a gun, sounds almost worse than just not having one. People freak out, they fuck up, they take the wrong decisions. It's what naturally happens when you're playing an adversarial game for the first time in your life. After a while, you learn the game, and you start making generally good decisions a lot more of the time. But the first time...
I'm not saying having a gun is a bad idea. There are days when I think I'm being stupid for not having one. But also, you need to know what you're doing, and if you don't have some kind of military or other professional training, you're not going to know what you're doing, and you can walk yourself into situations there's no good way out of if you don't know what you're doing.
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A gun is going to be at least what - $500?
If I had $500 lying around, that’d be a down payment on an apartment in a place where they can’t fire you for being a tranny.
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You've had eight years to save up some money.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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4 Boxes of liberty, use in order.
Maybe some amendment after the first ome need to be considered 👀
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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.
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I'm blocking you, per your request.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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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?)
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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.
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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.
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You need to go vote too. Probably for Democrats, if you’re reading this here.
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I love you OP. I give you blowie? You are so fucking hot.
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Actions speak louder than words
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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
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They would start killing you until moral improves
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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.
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