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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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lol, strike in America?
most American workers would rather lick oligarch boots than look like a commie.
there hasn't been one since 1919, not even with unpopular Vietnam was.
and they are illegal, and Americans love loving police boot and following the law like freedom loving sheep they are
1934? When Americans won our new deal? Bloody Thursday? Teamster Rebellion? Little UAW?
Tend to agree we aren't ready but study your labor history if you wanna be an even cooler Albert.
We actually had a left in this country before Stalin and FDR destroyed it. Time to rebuild
Italy just had a general strike.
and look at all those countries that have just had a revolution.
the Americans ain't got the guts for something like that
We shut down our entire government rather than let them take away our health care to give the money to Sociopathic Oligarchs. That's a better response than a general strike. We tie their hands, but we keep getting paid.
You need to have a theory of change.
compared with other countries, US working class is quite tame.
that's why they have so little to none labour rights,
I dont define things like this. I dont care really what people are, only what they could become. Consciousness and radicalism is shifting left, hard.
The active left is growing rapidly. Democratic Socialists of America has become larger than ever. In less than 10 years, we grew from like 10-15k members to 80k members, and still growing. Our unions, many of which were mired in bureaucratic stagnation, are seeing legit reform movements in some of the largest industries, with admittedly mixed results.
Remember that a general strike is illegal in the USA, and our people are very legalist minded. But reformer UAW president Shawn Fain is encouraging unions to renegotiate their contracts to end on May 1 2028. If all the contracts expire on the same day and all the different industries renegotiate, it isn't a general strike. Its many small craft unions and a few big ones renegotiating at the same time. So no, we aren't ready to have one today, but we are getting ready to have one in less than 3 years. While Trump keeps ruining everything, the people are getting prepared to shut it all down.
The die isn't cast but its a good start and we are growing rapidly and improving in radicalism, experience and audacity. I'm very close to it because I'm an organizer, so I may have my biases, but I can also see the changes occurring.
i joined the DSA, and I want more unions, class solidarity, strikes.
it's just so fucking frustrating how many workers will die protecting their oppression.
every protest where the organisers speak more about how to make sure the protest doesn't inconvenience anyone.
Fuck, use No Kings protest to block the roads they are protesting in for a few days and the government will collapse and a new one who is terrified of the people will make good policies.
They can't send the police to arrest half the nation. And if dems had balls they would state that they will pardon all the protesters who are detained. (Dems with balls, that's like a horse with a horn)
but we can't inconvenience a single driver. no no no.
When I lived in Barcelona, I think most protests blocked the whole road.
otherwise it is just a party, not a protest.
Ahh, yes then I am too familiar with your frustration.
We are organizing, for the first time in our chapter, a visible coordinated intervention in No Kings. We are taking sign up sheets and lit, wearing our DSA gear, making plans for before and after.
I did some work with 50501/No Kings groups earlier this year, but I didn't have support and burned out with little lasting effect. In general our chapter is slow to mobilize because, like you said, its a waste of time waving signs at empty govt buildings for 2 hours on a Saturday. I worked alongside PSL and they were a lot more effective because they could coordinate. PSL is far from perfect, same as DSA, but at least they are 1:1 much more centralized, with a greater deal of cohesion on strategy and tactics.
Now we finally have some capacity and urgency. And can stand apart from the liberal mobilization movement and light a beacon for people looking for something more practical and radical. There are a ton of people getting the message everyday.
Fear can have the intended effect but it can also backfire. It might take a while, and we def aren't ready to meet the moment as a movement. But the imperial core is where all of the contradictions of empire are stock piled. If history is ever gonna happen here, we will have to grow the fuck up. And maybe it won't start here. But the working class is international, it doesn't have to. In either case we gotta try and hang with it.
In any case I was not aware of your game Albert, see there's hope for us yet
100%
I might be a bit pessimistic, because the road to victory is long and hard. but we will get there.
Fuck, the imperial core is collapsing all by itself.
Solidarity forever brother/sister
Pessimism of the mind, optimism of the spirit!
Solidarity forever comrade!
Uhm, he's the one who deployed the social safety net, implemented a regular work schedule and 40-hour work week when we had 80+ regularly, implemented overtime-pay requirements, put forth food stamps, and built up social security when none existed before. Seems pretty leftist to me. So how did he destroy the left when he had the most leftist presidency?
Do you mean Regan?
Def Reagan too, firing striking air traffic controllers and then overseeing and writing off blatant union busting and attacks on workers rights at the dawn of neoliberalism was a disaster for us.
But the answer is in your question. FDR didn't give those things away for nothing, it was a conciliation to workers demands. In 1934 a nationwide strike wave shut down a number of cities from coast to coast, and in 1935 we got our new deal. FDR rescued capitalism from the jaws of socialism with social democracy. But the great depression was long and regular people were tired.
During ww2 he asked the workers movement not to strike, and they didn't under the direction of his political ally Stalin. But without the ability to fight, the unions were bureaucratized and businesses organized against labor. By the end of ww2 the american left was gutted and couldn't even fight against passing Taft-Hartley. That last point can't be laid at the feet of FDR as he was already dead.
But FDR doesn't deserve to be lionized, he played his part, legalized a labor movement that had earned its right to exist through our power, not his blessing. And as soon as he died, the right started scraping back those legal protections, so that Taft-Hartley was an easy nail to hammer in our coffin.
"How is good thing bad," you say? The new deal was a tactical retreat on behalf of the ruling class against the ascendant working class. The state exists to manage the interests of the ruling class. Roosevelt wasn't great, he was a representative of his class using the state to maintain capitalist control over the means of production. Once that was assured our rights began disappearing immediately.
Next time there can be no deal. The international, inclusive working class have to take power and fight to keep it, or we will lose it. The old American communists understood this, so had to be destroyed. The sooner we realize the liberal economic order is what brought us here to these horrible conditions, the sooner we can leave behind old illusions about reforms and private property and start to create something real.
He might have in fact done so, but recognize the culture of the time. Was he actually intending to rescue capitalism? Or were his policies the best that the oligarchs would accept at the time?
right, because there was a war on. What was more important, improving the life of striking workers after they staked a few social reforms/victories? Or, was it rescuing people from the Nazis who used gas chambers? Maybe it was also revenge for the dead sailors from Pearl Harbor.
I mean, we can go back and forth rationalizing our historical perspectives until we are just talking past each other. Ultimately I think I'd like to have a more complete understanding than what I have now. So in time, I'd like to be able to see value in your emphasis.
But almost no-one teaches the labor history that lead up to the new deal. Its something that was given to workers, not something we fought for. It elevates a representative of the ruling class to hero status, while the heroes of the labor movement are all but completely forgotten.
Remember, this is the same guy who put a million Japanese Americans into concentration camps. The excuse he gave was risk of sedition, but what it actually accomplished was liquidating the farms of Japanese farmers and ag workers, to be bought up by American farmers and large producers. Japanese farming practice yielded much higher volume and quality of produce per acre, and US firms couldn't compete.
Also, the New Deal was essentially a deal for whites. BIPOC workers were left out and suffered severe material wretchedness and discrimination.
So I choose not to give any leeway to the man who oversaw this, and I choose to decenter the liberal hero analysis to replace it with one that recognizes and lionizes the working class.
If you have any books or articles you think support your views I'd happily consider them however.
From someone with a mis-spelled user name.