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No, electoral politics won't ever get the job done, however we're also long past the point of a general strike being enough on its own.
Fascism has been here longer than people are comfortable to admit, but it is going in to full blast mode now, and the masks are well and truly off, those in power will not hesitate to use whatever force they need to to maintain it, and that requires full forced self defence in return, not playing nice (which is what a strike is).
the american government has ariel bombed its bombed its citizens before. they will do it again. and i will point out the workers who got bombed last time knew that was a possibility. they were storming machine gun emplacements for the right to only work 40 hours a week. our ancestors fought to the death to make our world more survivable for us
Meanwhile, people today don't have enough gumption to quit their shit job and try another one.
Last two perfectly good jobs I left was because they annoyed the fuck out of me. Got a 30% and 50% pay bump both times. Hell, even if you can't do that, you can at least move laterally.
Quiet quitting is for losers. QUIT
Those poor, unfortunate souls!
they were unfortunate to have been born into the time they were, but they also did something incredible: they banded together to work together to forge a new world from the ashes of the old. they took a long view towards the world and made a concerted effort to shift things for the better. they were heroes and inspirations
My strike started a year ago. No longer unemployed. I'm on hiatus and on strike. Work doesn't even seem worth it anymore.
They have enough money to hold out for 10 days. Your rent is still due, and you’re broke—as intended. Good luck.
Sounds crazy, but that's irrelevant. Understand the cost of shutting down a just-in-time economy. You're thinking like an individual, not a corporation.
You're out of work for 10-days, you're out of 10-days pay, that's it. Shut down, say, Walmart, and the logistical boondoggle would reverberate like a fucking shockwave. It would take months to resume normal operations.
FFS, look at what COVID did. Semis backup up for miles, for days, ships delayed for months. And that was with all of us trying to work and muddle through. After shutting down I-10 for a measly 2-days, I drove past 24-miles of backed-upped trucks once it started again. (There was plenty more, but I was at my exit.)
The scale of our economy is hard to grasp from an individual perspective, but the owners sure as fuck grasp it. There are factories and plants where stoppages cost millions per hour.
It's called solidarity and community, look it up, in fact go learn some actual labour history before you make any more assertions about a subject you clearly know nothing about
This reply is a great way to alienate people who are interested enough in a general strike to get in a thread and point out questions that literally everyone will have.
I’m right that the rich are willing to hold out until we are bled dry. It’s going to take a lot more than 10 days to have actual lasting change. The rich are looking down at us and saying, “isn’t it cute how they starve themselves to make a point, as if their life matters to me at all.”
Okay, let's just not do this then. Carry on everyone, nothing to see here. ;)
Or we could just go at it harder.
They're not mutually exclusive, do both
Electoral politics can get the job done but the populous is apathetic for various reasons.
What makes anyone think that people will instead decide to put their livelihoods in peril to accomplish the same thing?
Vote people!!
Don’t get suckered in by identity politics and wedge issues.
Don’t ever vote for a populist with dictatorial tendencies. Especially when that person is a convicted felon, a known liar and a narcissist.
It is so obvious!!!
You're talking as if liberals didn't lay the groundwork for everything Trump is able to accomplish.
You're also trying to conflate apathy for people refusing to vote for someone that does not represent their best interests. People that say 'vote' are usually looking out for their best interests and demand that everyone else support their best interests.
Liberals laid the groundwork to prevent Trump from doing far worse. Without courts and checks and balances, Trump would never have left power after 2016 and women, trans people, and minorities would all be literal slaves.
I agree a general strike will do far more than voting, but don't lose the plot of what's realistic and possible in pursuit of your idealism. It's a problem of scale. A general strike is many orders of magnitude more difficult than winning an election.
I'll be there to strike when the general strike is supposed to happen, but until the general strike happens, if it ever happens, you calling for a general strike does zero material good.
Billionaires will never let you vote away their money or power.
Never.
the populous is apathetic for various reasons.
Typical lib, refusing to actually look at the core of the problem (like trillions spent on propaganda, state and capitalist indoctrination since birth, people being deliberately kept too busy and burnt out trying to keep their head above the water, people being deliberately taught a whitewashed version of history and deprived of critical thinking skills, and the list goes on and on and on, but sure "various reasons" so easily dismissed and ignored), and instead expects individual to "solve" systemic problems (and I put solve in ~~brackets~~ quotation marks, because liberals, eternal guardians of the status quo, don't actually want to solve anything, hence the insistence of repeating the same mistake over and over, playing by the oppressor's rules, and pretending to expect a different result).
Typical lib.
You know you're parroting nazis, right. If you have a problem with corporate centrists you should come up with a different slur for them.
Liberals are a lot closer to nazis than any leftist, and infinitely more willing to work and compromise with them. Libs are the left wing of fascism, a necessary piece to allow nazis to take power, and you'll never realize that bc you think your politics are 100% infallible and good and flawless
Where did you get that garbage?
From growing up in the US and paying even the tiniest amount of attention to national politics. You should try it some time, or just learn some history from 1930s Germany considering how things are going
electoral politics DOES get the job done, just not to the same standard as the popular vote.
The problem is that the people who WANT things to change for some reason, don't seem to vote.
Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.
Lucy Parsons
Not a single one of our rights has ever been won via electoral politics, they have been won with a great deal of violence against the state and capitalism.