#GeneralStrike2026
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Or goto the capitol and kick them out… Vs wasting time.
While I wholeheartedly agree with both your sentiment of anger and who that anger should be directed toward, I must point out that what you propose is not realistic. We’re just not at that point, nor is there sufficient political will to do so. Protests/walkout aren’t a waste of time since they are actionable steps to growing movements that enact systemic change. The point of these demonstrations isn’t to enact direct change, but to bring people together to organize.
Besides, how would you get enough people together to do as you suggest if getting people together to organize is “wasting time”?
- So is mass abduction of people not at that point? Is massive corruption not at that point? Is the millions who will die due to removed aid and health care not at that point? What about the genocide they support, the countries they’ve have and are planning to take over not enough?
- People can organise at home, on the internet, at community meetings… They don’t need to make token efforts every few months.
- There is a million to 1 people in the US. There is enough people within driving distance of DC right now.
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Your solution of overthrowing the government isn’t as simple as “bad thing happen, people mad, people march”, there are a whole lot of steps that you skipped in addition to not considering a ton of other factors. There are lots of awful things happening, sure, but this still isn’t nazi germany. The cost of revolution is very very high and the outcome is very uncertain, we’re nowhere near the point of the cost and risk being worth it. On top of political will of the people being near zero, there are still plenty of mechanisms for people to access to enact change. The fascists haven’t won and we’re not doomed.
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Agreed that there are other avenues of organization that should be in addition to these protests, visible and loud protests like these aren’t mere “token efforts”, but a very popular platform for calling people to action in organization. It signals to others that they are not alone in their dissatisfaction, it signals to opponents that the movement has both popularity and energy, and it’s many people’s introduction to actual organization. Would you consider the sit-in protests and marches of the civil rights movement “token efforts”?
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As to this particular objection, I think AnchoriteMagus did a great job of illustrating the logistical issues that would need solving in order to pull off such an effort. I would emphasize the point made that you would need people to have the will to overcome armed opposition to a government overthrow. That just doesn’t exist. Like AnchoriteMagus and I have both pointed out, you need the organizations built up over time from demonstrations like what the post suggests. You don’t just up and build the logistical infrastructure to overthrow a government overnight, nor do you build it with that being the goal from the start. You build these organizations to enact change and escalate appropriately when the options of action narrow.
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Who provides shelter to a million people converging on a city?
Do you know what winters in the US are like? How do you keep those people warm enough to continue protesting in 10° (-12°C) weather? You can’t just say “people will have to figure that out for themselves”, people will literally freeze to death if you do that.
A cold winter was instrumental in defeating the Nazis in Russia, wasn’t it? Everyday civilians are not trained soldiers, are not accustomed to spending long periods in freezing cold, and for the most part don’t own the proper equipment that would even make such a thing possible.
Are you going to equip them? Feed them?
These things don’t just come together overnight or without a huge amount of planning and logistics. The fact that you think it’s as easy as “driving to the capitol and staying there” just goes to show how little you’ve actually thought about this.
Edit - just for context, there are roughly 115,000 hotel rooms in the DC Metro Area. Even with illegal double occupancy, that’s 800,000 people living on the streets, underequipped, in winter.
I never said you need a million people, I said million to 1… As in there are so many people that getting enough is trivial.
Protests we’ve had in cold weather were supported by local charities, people who brought equipment because for obvious reasons you don’t goto a protest without preparing first.
Overnight… Well Americans have had almost a year to plan… Not too mention many many protests to organise apparently.
Driving was again mentioning how many people are within easy transport distance.
Again… People don’t go to these events without preparation.
Ironically, logistical questions become much easier to answer if We the People are willing to rebel instead of merely protest.
Revolutions are essentially all or nothing; anyone who picks up weapons should be prepared to appropriate the food, clothing, housing, medicine, etc. needed to keep it going. Essential goods and services can then be distributed by the revolutionaries themselves (e.g., food/clothing drives, car pools, communal daycare, skills training, weapon’s training, etc). Not only does this mutual aid allow us to fulfill our own needs: it allows us to build solid networks of trust. Lastly, the revolutionaries must stay on the offensive to keep the state on the back foot. The moment they are put on the defensive, the state will capitalize on its overwhelming advantages (organizational, logistical, informational) and the revolutionaries will be ruined.
On the one hand, you’re correct on all counts.
On the other, you’re the only person in this entire discussion framing things in terms of open revolt. Collective action is NOT that, and presupposing the necessity of armed conflict could needlessly get innocents killed.
I’d much rather show up for a protest and have to deal with tear gas than show up expecting to assault the city and give them an excuse to meet us with tanks instead.
Edit - not to mention that a wave of people stripping the country bare of supplies and equipment as they move towards the capitol is going to do absolute wonders for the public perception of any rebellion. You’ll have Mr and Mrs Public screaming for it to be put down, hard.
I don’t mean to reduce collective action to open revolt; rather, the former is insufficient. Historically, unions, strikes, civil disobedience, and violence were all employed in order to win concessions from the ruling class. Civil rights and workers rights were won in blood. But these concession were clearly temporary because we are not addressing the root of the problem.
armed conflict could needlessly get innocents killed.
The perpetual violence of the state–both domestically (e.g., against protestors) and abroad (e.g., Venezuela, Palestine) – and the violence of our institutions (e.g. healthcare, prisons) already result in countless preventable deaths. Innocents are quietly dying every day and will continue to do so until we address the problem.
Have you ever been shelled? Or fired upon by a member of an enemy army who’s trying his level best to kill you?
I have. It’s not an experience I’m anxious to repeat. I think you’re drastically under-estimating the average person’s aversion to physical violence and the lengths the vast majority of people will go through to avoid ever being in proximity to it.
Successful rebellions start with demonstrations and build. The escalation of protest and response is necessary to build the kind of commitment a sustainable campaign of violence will require. You can’t just conjure a willingness to run into gunfire for people who haven’t been trained to do so, and thinking that you can just jump past the slow brewing of rage you need in the general population is idealist at best and naive at worst.
So are you gonna pay for my cross country travel cost or are you going to keep wasting time?
Well you would need strong unions and a non apathetic population to pull off a general strike.
*A non-exhausted population.
From what I see? People are too tired to care.
From what I see most people really don’t give too much of a shit. Sure in leftists circles where people care deeply about other it might be just exhaustion. But to your average person? They don’t really care as long as they come home from work, and zone out to netflix while the mindlessly scroll tiktok for hours.
Maybe if they consider themselves liberal they will like a couple posts about how bad trump is or maybe even make a quippy tweet, but that’s about itm
If I “strike” i.e. don’t go to work today, I won’t get paid and I won’t be able to buy food or pay my bills or survive, and I will die. And I suspect many other people have the exact same conundrum.
I work in the care industry, my clients need support 24/7 and there are only so much staff around. Should I leave my clients to their own designs‽
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Some leftists talk about a general strike like its the rapture. You need the ground work done. We’ve done none of the work broadly to make something like that feasible. Strikers need economic and legal leverage, they’d have basically none if they tried.
You have to walk before you run.
Anytime I see posts talking about a general strike I equate to “thoughts and prayers”.
Yes, but also its worse. They are demanding people shoot themselves in the crotch and saying we’re cowards for not shooting ourselves in the crotch.
A general strike would need to be huge to work. And yet we see folk bitching that the No Kings rallies “did nothing”, as if.just getting America to stand up wasn’t an accomplishment.
It may have been a accomplishment, but it was not even nearly enough. Nobody was impressed, least of all the fascists. If you want to hurt trump, hurt the moneys
And it’s sentiment like this that makes it clear that the people clambering for people to “just do a general strike” or “just take up arms” have given no thoughts to how to do that without wasting the resources or lives of the people they demand take action. If you take part in union organizing, you learn that you have to make all of your attempts count, otherwise you’re blowing your chances and making it harder in the future by alerting the bosses. Yes, you have to impact their money, but just like “vote with your wallet” is an empty phrase if there’s no mass movement around a specific product/company, to actually deal with the structural issues that billionaires and the companies they represent present, individuals have to band together to create structures that can contend with them. Otherwise, it’s just proposing individual actions to address structural problems, and that plays enough into the hands of these tyrants that they’ll say that’s the “right” way to deal with the problems they cause.
It’s not that I haven’t thought of that, and of course I understand that people still need food on the table
I also understand that it’s Americans that got us here in the first place. Had this been made Germany 1930-ish, I would have told Germans the same because well, we all know where this ends if nobody is willing to do something
And mind you, we don’t have extermination camps yet, but so far this US government had been more than willing to copy from their predecessors, I would not rule out anything at this point
Point is: had Americans bothered to show up voting, we wouldn’t be here. Yeah, I know, voting has already been made hard because Republicans only win if fewer people show up because they’re basically a minority, but they are vocal and dedicated. They vote. That’s why they won. Had Democrats or just plainly more Americans back then bothered to vote, we wouldn’t be here.
Americans caused this, can they PLEASE not rely on the rest of the world to fix their problem, this time?
You’re just airing your frustrations with this response. None of this is actionable advice about what Americans should actually be doing that takes in mind the advice of the person you are responding to.
Point is: had Americans bothered to show up voting, we wouldn’t be here. Yeah, I know, voting has already been made hard because Republicans only win if fewer people show up because they’re basically a minority, but they are vocal and dedicated. They vote. That’s why they won. Had Democrats or just plainly more Americans back then bothered to vote, we wouldn’t be here.
You may want to recalibrate how you think about the 2024 election. Yes, it had a lower turnout than the 2020 election, but that was a high point of the past half-century in terms of voter eligible population turnout. And as much as an impact that Uncommitted voters has on the Democratic primary, if we presume they all failed to vote in the General, they still would not have been enough to overcome the margin of victory. And given the way that the Electoral College is set up, unless we have geographic data on where those people who didn’t vote are, they may have simply contributed to the overvote that leads to elected presidents who did not win the popular vote (and demoralized voters).
Understanding that there is a concerted propaganda effort financed by billionaires to prop up conservatives across all borders (if you’re not in America, you should be paying attention to the rise of Trump-style politics in your country, too) is vital to addressing the situation. It’s not just people are disengaged, people are being advertised constantly that these billionaires have the common person’s best interests in mind, or, worse, that this cruelty is good and just.
And as much as I’m working to organize in my community and put a stop to this, the rest of the world really ought to be sitting up and taking notice of Venezuela (or the litany of transgressions already committed) and making their own plans on how to address this (and hopefully not deciding to support the tyrannical stooges in their own countries). For whatever reason, the organizations that claim they stood against the forces we’re seeing are not seen to be stepping up now that the moment is here, and this sort of tyranny has no respect for the structures and limits that were supposed to prevent this.
Getting white liberals to congratulate themselves for their good intentions on a Saturday is very much NOT an accomplishment.
Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I presume you mean that it was an exercise in preaching to the choir.
But the way you put it seems to denigrate the white liberals themselves. Are you actively scorning valuable supporters?
Prior to the protests, there was a lot of discussion about how people of color, and especially black Americans, were always the ones putting their neck on the line for progress in this country and that they felt particularly vulnerable and that it was time for white people to stand up. I heard that line repeatedly. So why are we criticizing them for standing up when we told them to stand up?
How about you try to be inclusive and encourage as many people to join your cause as possible?!
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Not “my” cause. I’m sure it will be at some point, when your inaction ends with this shit at my country’s border, but no, right now this isn’t my fight.
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I will stop criticizing them when they do something.
No, having a cute little parade doesn’t count. It’s hilarious that you call them “valuable supporters.” They’re do-nothing cowards at BEST, and fascist enablers at worst.
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It was impressive we managed to get so many of our lazy as fuck countrymen to stand up and do something.
It was still a fraction of a fraction of the size it needed to be. Didn’t accomplish anything at all and basically was a massive waste of time in the pursuit of change.
If we could pull something off of that scale every week, and grow it. Then it would mean something. Till then it’s little more then hot air.
And if we want a general strike to work it would need to be sizeable, far larger then what no kings was.
Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, or keep working towards it. But we need to focus on the working towards it part more and not try to skip steps.
There are active psyops preventing us from developing these things. The leftist vs liberal thing for starters. The two groups have a lot in common. Even conservatives/libertarians you could ally with on specific things.
Do a working class revolution
“The most vulnerable should pay for the revolution.” People aren’t just stupid, liberals have spent the last century implementing anti-popular-labour-action measures. A general strike would require people who cannot afford to survive to risk what little they have, mutual aid networks and consequences for those in positions of power must exist in order for that risk to be minimized.
I’m all for it but I feel that a large population of the country is just not gonna care enough to get activated. I would love to be proven wrong, this needs to be massive to the point it makes the no kings protest look like a farmer market.
I’m gonna end up committing sui before the general American populace does a gen strike.
No one should be buying from Amazon. Start with one big company, simple yeah? No, because post Christmas season now, the amount of people who still use amazon has not changed at all. For me sure, the general populace? They’re fucking morons. Consume consume consume. I’m gonna consume myself from the inside out. These rat bitches only care about themselves. American individualism is a cancer.
I’m struggling to exist in this. I cannot tell you how much these assholes don’t care.
It’s classic prisoner’s dilemma from game theory. Will my participation matter against the millions of people who won’t ever care? Realistically no. But participating will hurt me financially because it takes away a low-cost alternative. There’s a ton of stuff I can’t buy locally at any cost, or can but at a much higher cost. If I go buy these things on individual websites, I’ll pay shipping, negating savings. So, why would I hurt myself financially to affect no change, when others will take advantage of the system without ever caring? It just gives them an advantage over me on an individual level. Even if I convinced 1,000 people to act like me, meaningful change to the system isn’t affected, only weakening of our group. And honestly that means 1,000 people who have less resources to affect OTHER change with.
Prisoner’s dilemma doesn’t mean that the prisoners are bad or evil, it just means there are too many individuals acting in self-interest. We are too big a country. Too big a world population.
The solution is top-down, we have to elect leaders who then make rules we ALL abide by for our own benefit at the macro level. That’s the only way problems of this scale can be changed anymore. And the systems themselves know this and factor it in, locking us out. Late stage capitalism is called “late stage” for a reason, it’s too late for a cure.
Target’s last several quarterly earnings reports say otherwise.
You don’t need amazon. You can go without. A conversation I heard in a waiting room this morning between two women sharing what they did for thier holiday, “oh we bought this 25 day activity book thing off amazon, we did most of them but some days we just did our own thing”. You don’t need that. You don’t need these things.
You need food, shelter, and love.
All I hear when people say “but there’s no cheap alternative” is “I care about my comfort more than anyone else’s.”
Brick by brick it get’s built. It would make a difference if we all participated. Fuck prisoners dilemma, your comment reads of learned helplessness and it’s exactly why the states won’t see a general strike. It’s frankly pathetic and why I feel so helpless/hopeless for the future. Just say you don’t care the oligarchs rule the world and you like the hierarchy. It’s much more concise. “Be a good consumer and do nothing to help”.
I’m struggling with the same type of thoughts and feel suicidal every day now. Every headline I read is another reason I dont want to live anymore. You’re not going crazy, the world is. I know it might seem counter productive to not stay in the loop of things, but I try to take a break from all social media and news every once in awhile to keep my sanity. I love lemmy and the progressive ideas that are shared on here on a daily basis, but the news you read can make you feel powerless and over these big societal issues that don’t have an immediate solution.
I really hope you feel better soon, your hearts in the right place. The fediverse is the only real place where I can reliably find empathic people looking out for one another. I wish I could have offered more sound advice as I can barely keep it together myself too, but make sure you have people you can talk about this in your life. Unfortunately I can’t afford meds or therapy so I’ve been depending on my friends and family to help keep me sane. Stay safe!
This is beautiful, the wave of dread has past, at least for now. It is tough to keep sane, but it is important to remember there are empathic people out there who care, who try, and even folks who we can rely on for our support systems. I hope you are feeling okay too, stay strong dear
What’s wrong with an Amazon? The products do t break the bank and the 2 day shipping is really nice to have, plus they have a fairly generous return policy in case anything goes wrong.
Those cheap products and that fast shipping comes at a cost. The products are cheap because workers aren’t paid enough to live. The shipping is fast because locally-owned and operated supply chains have been dismantled to make way for their logistics network.
Piss bottles, for one. You should listen to the workers who have gone on strike at Amazon. You’ll hear it direct instead of some talking head.
Your opinions of companies shouldn’t end at how much spit they put on your knob as a consumer. These companies do real damage to the world around you - regardless of their saccharin smiles when you’re looking to give them money.
This isn’t corporate social media, you can say suicide there’s no algorithm to punish you.
Fair. I didn’t write it like that for algorithm sake or whatever. I’m just so familiar with the term I shortened it lol “to commit the sui”. It’s just dark humor/play on words. Fuck the algorithm
After the holidays would be a hilariously well timed general strike.
A general strike requires organization, but US society is completely atomized.
Next nationwide 50501 protest is a national walk-out on Jan 20th.
We’ll see you there, right?
nationwide 50501 protest
That isn’t all. There is the Tax Strike that many MAGAs are pushing. There are “Stop the Trump Takeover” events. There are also other actions to rein in the dictator.
Thank you!
All events that deserve and need support.
Thanks for this. I’m in
I’m my own boss. It’s never an issue. Thanks for the tip. Just joined my state’s 50501 group.
Just want to pop in and thank all the trolls in this thread for pushing to the #1 active post three days after I created it. Give yourselves a hand 👏 👏👏 👏👏 👏👏 👏
