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It's so fucking weird. I'm accustomed enough to people on Lemmy SWEARING that they aren't allowed to talk about [thing which is only controversial to Fox News boomers] and "they" will delete it if you even try, that I assumed this was crap too, but it seems like it's true.
From the community rules:
R5: No posts about Democratic Socialists or Third Parties
- No posts about Democratic socialists
Apparently these use this to delete Bernie stuff.
WTF, why would people subject themselves to this
America seriously needs new options for political parties. Or at least a coalition that goes against the "5 corporations in a trench coat pretending it's two political parties." they currently have.
I think they should have strong unions as the basic political organizational units, and deal with political parties minimally if at all. I think this whole thing of delegating governance to a particular class of people who are designated as the power-brokers and then choosing which power broker to put in charge is always doomed to failure.
IDK, I'm not an expert on any of this stuff, I have just observed that every new party that comes along to be the insurgent reformist movement that will fix the rot of the previous parties inevitably starts to get rotted itself. The problem is that having a populace that strongly organized and puts effort into making sure things stay on the rails requires that people put that effort in, and they generally won't do that for as long as things are basically comfortable and okay...
A Marxist perspective would be that mass movements and unionization are the real mechanisms by which ordinary people can wield power. The main reason to engage in electoral politics is because it's what people are invested in and pay attention to, and so it can serve as an avenue to promote a message, but one should not expect to actually produce significant results through bourgeois elections.
Unions in the US are (like the other user said) rare, weak, and often lack solidarity and clarity of vision. But there are new ones popping up and they are gradually gaining in strength. New unions like the ones at Amazon and Starbucks seem to have younger, more energized leadership.
A lot of the problems unions have go back to red scares. Things like, representing newer members and not just seniority, standing together and cooperating with other unions across different industries, trying to make sure the union is welcoming and accommodating to everyone - those sorts of things would get you branded as a communist, whether it was true or not. Way back in the New Deal era, unions got carrots as well as sticks to go in that direction, and then as they became weaker, by the 80's, carrots got a lot more scarce. And so over the past century they were dismantled.
But young people find themselves in this capitalist hellscape and are recognizing the need to organize and stick together and leaving a lot of that baggage behind and starting from scratch. At the same time, it's important to learn from the mistakes of the past, like kicking the commies out of the AFL/CIO in the hopes that the government would see it as a sign of good faith and protect the union's interests. At the end of the day, they're going to pursue their own interests and appeasement doesn't work, especially when it undermines the union's own strength. A new, more inclusive and clear-sighted wave of unionization is our best chance of getting anywhere.
Unions are weak here and they are impossible corrupt. I worked with the operating engineers and ibew. Both had the dumbest people I have ever worked with. The job was not difficult but the bitch ass whining, back stabbing, negativity, and gossip were intolerable nonsense. People have no lives in that environment. The only thing that matters is no sticking out, and always showing up no matter how bad things are. It does not matter if it will kill you or everyone else by showing up for work or doing some job. March to your death or get fired and blacklisted by the union hall.
Just want everyone to know that in fact there’s a lot of variety in how unions are run everywhere, including the USA, and an anecdote shouldn’t be universalized.
Big industrial unions seem to be the worst.
I was running a series of interviews with early auto worker union organizers from USA and Canada (they were united at first), and the particular form of corruption that infected the UAW was a kind of takeover by industry management in the late ‘50s, and the old timers I talked to maintained the UAW hadn’t recovered. The CAW, on the other hand, was criticized by members as lacking solidarity with other industries and being too mainstream, though I heard few accusations of corruption.
Divide and conquer has been a long running capitalist strategy.
Don't forget being addicted to pills and constantly having your physical health being wrecked and complete disdain for anyone who doesn't want that
Yes I completely agree. A lot of these things need to societal foundations to exist for them in a form that they simply do not in America right now