And you’re never going to get people on board if the solution (general strike) doesn’t meet their material needs. If people have to starve and lose their homes while under threat of arrest or more violent action, you need a way to support them or they won’t stick with it. Revolutions are built on mutual aide and community organizing, not empty platitudes and gumption. Or, worse yet, shit posting and cynicism.
Don’t limit the size of your movement or it’s popular support because you’re unwilling to include people who aren’t able nuke their lives. If I don’t keep my job my children go hungry and lose their home. I’m unwilling to do that to them.
Is your argument is that anyone who is unwilling to nuke their entire life for the movement is insufficiently motivated and shouldn’t even bother getting involved?
If that’s your stance, then you’re just plain wrong and you should probably keep quiet about it because your working against the movement.
Vanguard revolutions don’t work. They just replace one set of shitty authoritarians with another. The ONLY way this can ever work is if we make the movement accessible to as broad a swath of people as humanly possible.
I’ve been a political activist for 22 years now. I cut my teeth on the front lines of the anti-Iraq War movement in 2003. I was at Occupy. I spent my early-to-mid 20s with little regard for my personal safety and financial stability. But nobody keeps that up forever. I’m pretty sure I did it longer than most. But that’s not all I want from life.
Yes, fighting fascism is important to protecting my kids’ future (I have 2 kids). You know what else is equally important to that, though? Making sure they have a stable home and food on their plates now. And I can’t do that if I nuke my life by spending every single day in the streets, losing my job, and getting arrested.
My kids won’t have to ask me what I did because they’re there with me. Both my 3 yo and 5 yo were at the DC protest on Saturday. And this wasn’t either of their first action. My 5 yo was with us at the 2020 uprising when she was less than a year old.
A successful movement takes all kinds. Yes, there are some who can take greater risks and more radical actions, but I’m not at that place in my life anymore and that’s fine. If we can’t find a way to include people who have other responsibilities in life, too, without insulting them or implying they’re not really interested in change, then the entire movement is cooked.
So, thank you for your past service to the cause, but if you don’t have anything constructive to say, kindly fuck off.
There were multiple US House Representatives as the protest in DC on Saturday. Several spoke on the stage and others were out in the crowd.
You do realize these are regular ass people who have jobs and rent and mortgages and bills to pay and kids to support? Like, we can’t be out on the street every single day.
How often are you out in the streets?
I know it’s easy to criticize the media, but, like, they have been reporting on it.
It’s really REALLY funny to see you criticizing people for what you described as “repeating near verbatim the talking points on the left” then go on to literally do the exact same thing with fascist talking points.
I was protesting fascism. What were you protesting?
These events started pretty much the moment Trump took office. This was the second national day of protest since inauguration, and smaller events have been happening all over the country weekly. This event was not motivated by the stock market.
That’s not really how a general strike works. You can’t just post on the internet “do a general strike” and expect it to happen or be effective. Where are the strike funds to help feed people and pay their rent when they stop getting paychecks? Where are your strike captains to organize demonstration events? Where is your army of strike lawyers to defend people when they inevitably get arrested?
General strikes take a long time and a lot of resources to plan. Only then can one be effective.
This is exactly how every single popular uprising in history has started: by overwhelming numbers of people getting out in the streets to have their voices heard. They always start off as peaceful until drive past that by elite/institutional reaction.
If this were a single instance, then, yes, it would seem feeble and ineffectual. But it’s not. It’s the early days of a large movement. We’re less than 3 months into the regime and this past Saturday was already the single largest day of protest in American history. And there’s another one scheduled in 2 weeks on the 19th.
I was at the protest in DC. There was 100k+ people there. I’ve been a political activist since the protests against the Iraq War in 2003. This event on Saturday was notably different than any other I’ve attended in 2 ways. One was the sheer size, larger than any other protest in DC I’ve seen. The other was the demographic composition of the crowd. All previous protests I’ve been to were primarily filled with male-presenting young people. This was very different. At 38 years old, I was definitely younger than the majority of the people there. It was also far more racially diverse than any other events I’ve been to except for the 2020 uprising.
What do you expect a giant crowd of people mostly in their 40s-60s to do? You think they were all going to storm the White House or Capital?
For that matter, what are you doing? You say these demonstrations are pathetic? Then surely you must be taking more radical actions that have a much higher chance of effecting change. I’d love to join in, so, please, tell me what you’re doing that’s puts the 5 million people out in the streets on Saturday to shame?
He didn’t seem to care when he got dozens of kids killed by measles in American Samoa, but now that it’s white kids in the metropole he changes his tune…
I am in the streets every chance I can get, and have been for more that 2 decades.