If every black person in louisiana decided to stop working tomorrow until their state was ungerrymandered against them, it would be done within a month. The state economy would fail in less than a week.
The main issue I see with this, many people are one or two paychecks away from homelessness. The moment you start disrupting, you risk losing basically everything short of your life.
At-will employment, healthcare tied to your job, a lack of community to fall back on, and everything expensive enough that you can't build up any real savings while you are perpetually in dept are just not a good foundation for a general strike, and I honestly can't blame anyone that literally can't afford it. Worse if you have family that depend on you.
I don't know how, or if, this was different in the past.
There are two reasons, first of which is that many general strikes were organized by established unions, so the process was generally more mapped out and there was more direct negotiation ability. IE people could be reasonably assured that it would not drag on and they would get their jobs back at the end.
The second reason is because historical strikes were basically guarenteed to be resolved one way or another fast because they forced a response with HEAVY disruption. When you hear about stuff like railroad strikes, you think railroad workers stopped working. The reality was that railroad workers stopped working, and then massed up with guns, basically hijacked trains so that literally zero trains could run, beat the shit out of scabs, and tended to burn down buildings and stuff.
There is a level of absorbtion that businesses can do and drag out a strike, there is not a level of absorbtion a business can do if your workers are willing and able to literally physically destroy the infrastructure of your business along with stopping work.
Not to mention the workers literally threatening the lives of the owners, since in most cases, the owners hired goons to kill and threaten protesters or had the police doing this for them.
what would that railroad strike look like today? Given the police state, drones, and a criminal administration coddle by a corrupt court and complicit senate. We strike, mass up with guns, stop the trains, etc. We risk getting drone striked, CECOT, or terrorist charges in Guantanamo. Theyd pass laws to automate the trains before giving any ground to the "terrorist" workers. Wtf do we do?
I mean there is risk involved with any action like this, but in reality the risk is a middle ground between what you described. I dont think there is any sort of realistic reality in which the US government would be shooting hellfire missiles at people occupying a train station.
The risk of police action is already much lower once you are past a certain threshold of people, cops are scared to go up against one person with a gun until they have 30 dudes, and swat backup, they arent going to actually storm like a 1000 people with guns lol, what would happen is that, especially presuming this is organized with the support of actual outside organizations, there would be a lot of negotiation happening and very little violence as long as the strikers arent like literally murdering people or taking prisoners.
In terms of terrorism charges and what not, thats also very much fluid and depends on who is in charge, like the democrats however bad they are, arent going to be in the level of send people to CECOT, and well to be frank there will always be some amount of legal backlash after the fact, but when people are against the wall they are willing to accept risk of imprisonment if the flipside is actual change.
I dont think there is any sort of realistic reality in which the US government would be shooting hellfire missiles at people occupying a train station.
If the alternative is people realizing that organized labour action will work to effect change, you bet your sweet ass they'll do everything short of nuking the city. They've already dropped bombs on strikers from airplanes
Yes? But mid terms are coming, if those at least can shake out positively we would be moving into a climate where stuff like sending everyone to CECOT is not realistic anymore for republicans, though I dont think that would be realistic even now tbh.
I don't think it was different in the past. You had company towns where people get deeper and deeper in debt as they worked because wages were in company script so they couldn't spend it anywhere but company shop which gauged them.
It was always in interest of upper class for lower to be put into prisoner dilemma.
I say point number three (lack of community) is the master reason there's no mass disruptions towards all of the horrible things this administration and the corps have done. I think alot of us are only now realizing that the dark side of a hyper-individualist culture is that you're effectively on your own when attempting to elicit greater change.
There's always a sacrifice being made in these. The oppressors don't change their hearts easily. It's not easy, which is why it's not very common. But it can and has worked -- a good read of Gandhi and his tactics (which King followed closely) shows that it can work on a very wide basis, if there's solidarity
The main issue I see with this, many people are one or two paychecks away from homelessness. The moment you start disrupting, you risk losing basically everything short of your life.
But isn't this the same or worse with violent revolution?
Nobody is getting a paycheck during a violent revolution; nobody is getting health insurance during a violent revolution
Your family will depend on you whether everyone is striking or whether everyone is throwing firebombs - at least with the former there's less chance of your family being burned alive
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u/barrinmw Jul 28 '26
If every black person in louisiana decided to stop working tomorrow until their state was ungerrymandered against them, it would be done within a month. The state economy would fail in less than a week.