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'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
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u/Preeng Jul 28 '26
I just want to say that MLK never advocated for "peaceful protest". He specifically said "non-violent protest".
Protests are supposed to be disruptive and grind society to a halt until demands are met.