Still no rent strikes and general strikes?
Protests in the street are great but our real power comes from shutting everything down by not working. And by crippling the parasitic landowners by striking on our outrageous rents.
My rent has gone up around $600 a month over the last 8 years from $1200-$1800. It’s not some gigantic or nice place, though it’s not a slum either. All this increase of price and nothing has been done to warrant an increase. They didn’t improve this place. They just are allowed to starve us all.
Americans are not practiced in large enough numbers in protest, demonstration, civil disobedience, and solidarity for a large scale general or rent strike to be successful. There needs to be a ramp up period with increasingly more frequent and expansive demonstrations for that to become practical.
There needs to be a ramp up period with increasingly more frequent and expansive demonstrations for that to become practical.
Okay, and where is that?
We aren’t there yet. If we get there it’ll take an inciting incident. An inflection point. Probably ICE killing a kid on camera or another Luigi. Grim.
I sincerely doubt that Americans will ever wake up to the realities of class oppression within our lifetime. It’s always going to come down to a matter of identity politics, and that’s the way the ruling 1% would like to keep it. “Be angry at them, not us.” But since there’s now a literal resurrgence of neo-nazism in the US I’d say it’s a bit late now to for seeing eye to eye with your fellow worker.
It’s unfortunately going to be a long, long time before there’s any organized action around rent increases while everyone’s worried that their neighbors might get disappeared for having the wrong skin color.
The general strike is, of course, not an agency that can be invoked arbitrarily on every occasion. It needs certain social assumptions to give it its proper moral strength and make it a proclamation of the will of the broad masses of the people. The ridiculous claim, which is so often attributed to the Anarcho-Syndicalists, that it is only necessary to proclaim a general strike in order to achieve a Socialist society in a few days, is, of course, just a silly invention of evil-minded opponents bent on discrediting an idea which they cannot attack by any other means.
- Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-syndicalism: Theory and Practice
October 18 for anyone who doesn’t want to read the article
And it only took 6 months. Guess everyone needed a break to catch up on Squid Game.
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Found the Wumao
True. I get paid by being sent to the deathcamps.
Found the fash.
Where ya from?
From the heaven’s way. Dao?
Too afraid to say your country of origin?
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Nope. See, I can answer questions.
I wonder if this one will be any more productive than the last one.
Protests aren’t magic things. Especially when the stakes are so high, the government isn’t going to just cave in with one protest, no matter how “productive”. They need to happen again, and again, and again, to the point where it actually inconveniences them.
Take it from a french.
It won’t ever inconvenience them. Everyone would have to quit. All at once. And stop paying bills. Everyone. They couldn’t do anything about it.
It does, eventually. Else we frenchies would have stopped doing it a long time ago :)
Compare any recent French protests to the parades going on in America right now. They’re two completely different things.
It works in France because there’s an implication that you guys will start burning everything to the ground if the government doesn’t capitulate. The implication comes from a clear and demonstrated history of actually doing so.
Our history of that is much less clear, especially in recent history.
No, it works because we actually burn shit to the ground when the government doesn’t capitulate. And that’s not an ability only french genes have.
It’s up to you to make sure your protests have an effect.
this is bullshit. it might work in france where you have better educated people and a government that isn’t completely broken. But here, in ths US where the courts and every branch of government is stacked against the people, these weak fisted protests do absolutely nothing aside from satiate an angry populace whose energy would be much better spent doing something else. the idea that these protests will ever fucking work in this country is a goddamn myth.
Wrong. Just look at your own history…
- Rosa Parks.
- MLK.
- Vietnam war protests.
To only quote the ones off the top of my head. I’d expect an American to remember these better than me.
I don’t know about the Vietnam war protests, but the Civil Rights Movement was a lot more militant than do-nothing liberals would want you to believe. Look up the Black Panthers and people like Malcolm X, and even the peaceful side included real civil disobedience and obstruction. There’s no equivalence between what Americans are doing now and what MLK and crew did.
The Black Panthers weren’t even formed until the greatest victories of the Civil Rights Movement had already been won, and for all of Malcolm X’s rhetoric before leaving the Nation of Islam, the threat of violence from Black Nationalists was not a core factor to the victories of the Civil Rights Movement.
MLK Jr. spent nearly a decade and a half building organizations and connections for nationwide resistance.
To only quote the ones off the top of my head. I’d expect an American to remember these better than me.
American education in a nutshell lol (which is part of the systemic problem, and by design)
Yep. Lack of education and pacifying Americans by making them believe that stuff like protests and unions are against their interests. Sad.
We remember this shit. The problem is that the US was a different country back then. Look at Nixon, he did far less than trump and had to leave the presidency. Trump isn’t going anywhere, no matter how much bad shit he does. This country has changed for the worse. Those checks and balances which enabled those past movement to be successful are gone. They are completely utterly destroyed. History is one thing, but you have to look at the present as well, because right now the history is blinding you and the people in my country from doing things that might actually work.
It won’t work in the US
It works anywhere people in power can be inconvenienced. The US is no different.
Don’t hold your breath.
