The Strike Is Coming

If you're going to ask 11 million people to commit to striking, shouldn't they know what they're striking for? Committing to a strike is an enormous commitment and risk - how can I possibly sign this if, when push comes to shove, the demands end up being like "coal workers will get a $0.10 raise through additional subsidies" or something. They don't seem to even have a hint of what they will demand.

The idea of a general strike has enormous power, but this in particular seems like a recipe for disappointment.

A general strike is potentially useful tool in the US but the sketchiness factor here is high.

I'm not opposed to the idea of strikes but ... why would I join a movement when it's not clear to me what I'm signing up for.

Check it out, nowhere in their site, nowhere in their media, nowhere in their comms do they lay out exactly what such demands are.

>Research shows We need 3.5% of the population, OR 11 million Americans, to be successFul

(typos from the original source)

What does it mean "to be succesful"? Who gets to win what, how, and why?

>A strike of 11 million people means people of every race, gender and ability must come together to win.

(from their "Values" page)

Again, what exactly does it mean to win?

These questions should be answered in the opening paragraph of the site. If they don't do it it's because they are either extremely incompetent or have a covert motivation. Both reasons make me want to stay away from this movement.

Let me know when the strike is supposed to happen so I can laugh when nothing happens.

What I mean is this idea you get 11M to commit then they'll do it and not chicken out.

IF all you have to offer is your labor, you are completely fungible. You have almost no power as there is almost always someone else who can do what you do.

You need to find ways to deliver more value if you want more control.

so good luck, but unless you do the sustained ground work it'll be the same call i've seen for the past decade with no meat behind it

I think this funimendimentally misunderstands what a strike is and how it works. When collective bargaining works, it's because you can force a negotiation with an owner or boss. A group can prevent the business from making money until the owners come to the table.

Having a bunch of people walk off the job for a day might make some kind of statement, calling it a general strike is a bit embarrassing from my perspective. This is a protest of a sort, but with no clear message or goal

I mean I can guess, but the site doesn't make it clear.

I would gently suggest that you need to focus on your messaging more. You need, like MAGA a key goal.

We already experienced a general strike during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than breaking billionaires and multinational corporations, it made them stronger. So withholding our labor is part of the equation, but not all of it.

We're moving into hypernormalization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

I only learned of this documentary this morning, so have yet to watch it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr7T07WfIhM Hypernormalisation | Full Documentary | Adam Curtis

Within a corporation, one person at the top dictates all behavior in exchange for monetary compensation, meaning that it's the job of each subordinate to shield superiors from work or anything that's against the interests of the corporation. Yes-men are rewarded handsomely while objectors are laid off.

Over time, corporations become akin to feudal states, vying for control of the kingdom. The wealthiest/most powerful person performs the role of king and dictates each corporation's behavior in exchange for that corporation's right to exist.

What this means is that corporate strategies such as running government like a business are eroding democracy globally.

Where is this all going? Labor compensation diverged from productivity in the 1970s when global industrial capacity and energy production could no longer keep pace with the rising cost of the Cold War - aka the guns vs butter model. The Reagan administration began dismantling the US social safety net in the 1980s with the rise of neoliberalism, cemented by the George HW administration when it fell on its sword rather than dismantle trickle-down economics aka voodoo economics as named by Bush himself. The Clinton administration continued this trend in the 1990s by undermining welfare in exchange for support from Wall Street to gain the moderate vote, which ended the Democratic Party's committment to labor. The George W Bush administration brought The Big Lie and Truthiness mainstream, taking advantage of patriotism on the right to mire the US in the security theater of a quarter century Global War on Terror under false pretenses, which ended the Republican Party's commitment to shared prosperity. Obama, Trump and Biden so conflated government operations with corporate interests and packing the courts to minimize antitrust enforcement, that we've reached a point where we're staring the full regulatory capture of the US Federal Government in the face.

Without consequences for their actions, our elected officials act against our best interests with impunity. Which creates sentiment that the greatest clear and present danger to the US is the state itself. Or more precisely, the merger of the state with corporate interests, aka fascism.

Even if Trump is used as a patsy to dismantle the remaining government agencies that support workers' families and then is removed from office, JD Vance (much like George HW Bush) will do nothing to reinstate those agencies. The end of term limits as well as free and fair elections may finally end both parties' committment to the US Constitution and the American way of life.

Now with the rise of AI and unprecidented wealth inequality, it may not be possible to stop this process. We might have been able to transition to a tech utopia like Star Trek before the Dot Bomb and 9/11, but now will almost certainly fall into a wild west free-for-all of empire and rebel resistance like Star Wars.

This reads like a tragic LLM summary of the last 50 years. But it's the most concise analysis that I can come up with. After the optimism of the 1990s after the internet arrived, I can't believe it's come to this. Big tech has kept us under the yoke making rent for most of our lives, while the promise of the web to bring about full access to information and resources for all people has been gradually stripped away. What could have been a scalable distributed p2p information economy and automation paying for UBI end eventually UHI (Universal High Income) has been replaced with surveillance capitalism and wealth concentration.

It's hard to tell which corporate leaders are working under cover to slow the US decline into authoritarianism and which have drank the kool-aid to think they are our savior. But since none of them are promoting public education, health and welfare, medical research, UBI, etc etc etc, they are all suspect. It's curious that not even one of them has stepped forward to call out everything we're witnessing under hypernormalization.

So for all of these reasons, I don't think that a strike will be enough. We'll need more sophisticated tactics, such as using AI to direct all of our purchases away from the constituencies that fund empire. With real consequences presented to leaders, so that if they do X, then Y happens as a result. Taking away a human right or government agency here results in the bankruptcy of a corporation and its billionaire there.

Or we could all step back from this mutually assurred destruction and stop acting so hysterically. I looked at the poster's profile (ebcode) and it just says forgiveness.