Work Reform

Booooooo

Block

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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".

4 Boxes of liberty, use in order.

Maybe some amendment after the first ome need to be considered 👀

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.

Block

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?)

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.

Not if their plumbing needs fixing

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

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.