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.
While government funding shutdowns do hurt more, the difference is that a general strike is an expression of the power of the Proletariat, while a government shutdown is an expression of the power of the Bourgeois parliament.
The Bourgeois parliament can be a progressive force when it is at odds with even more reactionary forces, but it will never be in the direct interest of the worker.
Valid perspective. It’s just that in America, we have NO worker protections, so if someone joins a General Strike, they can, and will be, fired, and there is NOTHING that they can do about it. I doubt they’d even be able to collect unemployment benefits.
I’m self-employed, if I don’t work, my family goes homeless and hungry. Nobody hates Trump and MAGA more than me, but I’m not destroying my family over something that simply won’t work. MAGA doesn’t care if people go on strike. They’ll fire them all, and there will be an endless line of scabs willing to take their place.
They’ve driven Citizens to the brink, and we have to constantly fight the pressure, or we’ll go over the edge. A General Strike is asking people to voluntarily jump off the cliff, to force MAGA to behave.
MAGA will NEVER behave, they’ll just watch people jump off the cliff, and laugh.
That’s why people organize. Black people with job insecurity fought against worse odds in the civil rights movement. You build community and mutual aid so you can afford to strike and get the concessions you need, and then keep organizing because the struggle doesn’t end there.
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.
I think you may be focusing a bit too much on MAGA. Like yeah its a movement that is enacting change now but workers rights have been continuously stripped even before MAGA was even thought about. The reason why is because the workers have not organized a general strike for their own rights. (caused by a variety of factors; lack of support, distrust of others, union busting, union leaders betraying for capital interests, etc) but ultimately striking DOES hurt companies and demand better concessions within America. Many politicians are deeply invested in companies as well, take for example AI. If we had an organized general strike to prevent the use of AI in a majority of industries, we don’t even need the law to be passed to enforce it. This would tank investments in it and directly hurt capitalists. It would also empower workers to fight for more of their rights.
A disconnect you might be having is this idea that the majority of profit doesn’t come from the workers. While yes most capitalist wealth comes from speculative ventures and investments allowing them to use as collateral on loans. Those are primarily backed BY the excess value that is extracted from the labor force.
**Capitalist **forces workers to make chairs for 1$/chair and sells them for 10$. He uses another 1$ to pay for materials. He pockets 8$. (Lets assume he simply sells 1 a day for ease of math) An Investor buys a portion of his business for 10$, expecting the growth to pay off. So now the Capitalist, uses this as proof of growth and takes a loan for 18$ to buy more materials and pay for more workers. Now he has enough workers and materials to make 10 chairs a day. (10 workers make 1$/chair with 1$ cost to materials per day) Now the companies profits has grown and the Investor’s share, which previously was purchased for 10$ has now grown 10 times that and is worth 100$. Instead of selling, he stays invested and uses it as collateral to take out a 200$ loan.
By exploiting the workers of 90%~ of their true value, the company has enriched the Capitalist, and the Investor, despite them contributing nothing to the process. But has enriched the worker. The Capitalist could hire more workers to grow, or could pay the workers less, or use cheaper materials to make the chair, etc. But ultimately the WORKER is the sole source of value.
It doesn’t matter how complex the chain becomes, the workers are always the ones with all the power and value that is being taken from them. If the workers strike and stop producing chairs, the profit of the company drops, its value drops, the shares drop and the investor and capitalist are unable to pay back their loans.
This is the basic idea, in America there are tons of bail outs for corporations that use government funds to prevent companies from going under but the money used to do this is primarily taxed from people’s pay and spending within the country. It always affects them and the oppression is not just from MAGA but from the ruling bourgeoisie class as a whole. ICE existed way before trump and was STILL killing people in detention and putting families in camps.
Overly simplified and also sorry for using the chair example again i just really like it. Pls anyone send corrections if i got something wrong with the theory.
-edit: formatting issues
Either a radlib or a fed
deleted by creator
Enough unions to organize it.
Keep the serfs destutute so they can’t organize against the rich, disgustingly lavish aristocracy is a tale as old as time. We’re literally seeing ruling philosophies Medieval kings used and people say this is the best system.
Destitution didn’t stop the French, it emboldened them.
The other half of it is conditioning a society to be so dependent on convenience and little luxuries (yes, even poor people in US have luxuries compared to other parts of the world) that they technically could strike, but doing so would be so below their standard of living that it would not be sustainable.
how do 3 men in their 30’s not have $500 between them?
Fear and propaganda.
Join your local chapter. Volunteer for mutual aid groups. Help establish a strike fund for your local chapter. Get. Involved.
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.
Only 10% of the US is in a union. Who’s going to lead it?
The biggest of those unions I’d guess would be AFL-CIO, which I suppose did a okay job leading the Minnesota strike
Roughly one in four Minnesota voters either participated in the January 23 day of shutdown and protest against ICE, or have a loved one who did…Of those participants, 38% percent stayed off the job, either because they did not go to work, or because their employer closed for the day of action… 45% of voters “generally support the call for no work, no school, no shopping as a form of protest.” https://inthesetimes.com/article/labor-general-strike-minnesotans-ice-protest-trump-cbp
Keep in mind those numbers are voters in minnesota, not super great for a bunch of “progressive” people.
Even the national strike on the 30th wasn’t terrible, but neither had any economic effect. There just isn’t enough organization, especially in key industries. People aren’t educated on unions, even in communist circles a ton of us are running around without a clue what good union organizing looks like.
Isn’t that the entire point? lol
Imagine this conversation in 18th century France.
Peasant: Should we do a revolt?
Other peasant: Are you kidding? I’m down to my last loaf of bread over here, no way!
Americans love making excuses because working class solidarity is pretty much impossible for them to even imagine. It’s a settler colonial state to it’s very roots.
It’s the same reason you won’t see socialist leanings in Israel. At best it’ll be fascism pretending to be socialism. Remember ACP?
No class consciousness, and americans are cowards. Next question
reductive and unhelpful. next dumbass
unhelpful
Americans when they can’t even help themselves and expect everything to be handed to them because “oh noooo what about my paycheck!?”
Like the rest of us didn’t have to fight through much worse conditions to get even half a crumb
yeah idk what you’re even talking about anymore. keep being delusional and blaming decades of systemic propaganda and decreasing education standards and material conditions on individuals with zero power or influence.
definitely a winning strategy
Not hungry enough
Lack of class consciousness and education in general
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.
Don’t forget that unions and strikes are unamerikkkan commie inventions that takes away our freedom.
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.
