OptionalChicago Mayor Issues Defiant Call For A General Strike
It’s never happened before because the working class has never been unified nationwide before. Soybean farmers in Utah are not connected to teachers in Boston or steelworkers in Pittsburgh or auto manufacturers in Michigan or nurses in San Diego. There’s never been a singular cause that affected all of those groups of people at the same time.
If it ever could happen, it would be because the President was a colossal dipshit who fucked every aspect of the economy across the country, except that would almost certainly cause the legislature to put an end to such rampant and corrupt tyranny.
Right?
no, the official party platform of the GOOP is “whatever Drumpf says”.
this party also controls the legislature
this party also controls the legislature
queermunist she/herYou think soy bean farmers are working class?
Rivalarrival“Farmer” has come to mean the corporate owner of fields in which crops are grown, rather than the people waking up at the ass crack of dawn to tend to the fields and bring in the harvest.
“Farm workers” are now the ones doing all the labor.
Small business owners do labor too, but that doesn’t make them working class. Workers don’t own shit, but these farmers own capital and land and directly profit from their own labor rather than being forced to sell their labor on the market.
It’s a social class, defined by their relation to the means of production.
I’m seriously curious, why do you imply they aren’t?
Being working class doesn’t just mean you perform work. It’s a social class defined by the relation to the means of production.
Soy farmers in the US own their fields, own their equipment, set their own hours, and directly profit from selling commodities on the market. They’re small business owners, they are not workers. Workers don’t own or control shit, they sell their labor to someone else who actually owns capital and land. Workers toil under a boss and soy farmers do not, they are their own boss.
Interesting. I can certainly see the distinction. Does that make them part of the middle class?
They’re basically small business owners.
But what class are they? Or are you saying they are a class themselves?
That said, most small business owners I know work way to hard and end up with very little in the end. It is hard to compete with the large corporations. But in the past, if the area they lived in experienced significant growth, they often made a killing on the business property alone. Farmers don’t really have that since they live on the business property.
Kinda feels like they should be their own class really. Though I suppose there is a big difference between farmers who own their land, and the ones where the bank essentially owns it… and they just pay rent with no real hope of wver paying it off.
In the past we’d call them wealthy landed peasantry, but under capitalism they’re just petite bourgeoisie.
Yeah, the guy who owns the farm that borders my yard is just some dude with a full time job. He spends a couple days driving a big tractor thing planting in the spring, and several more days in the fall driving a different big tractor thing around to harvest it. Soybeans and corn on rotation.
Farmers do plenty of work besides driving their tractor around, but class relations are defined by their relations to property and capital and profit rather than how much work they do. He owns the land, and the tractor, and reaps all the profit. He’s small business owner, and his politics probably align with other small business owners.
SamYeah, there's certainly a fair petite bourgeois population among farmers, but I think you overestimate its size. Many farmers might own the land... if it weren't still under morgage to the bank. The tractor is almost certainly also still on loan from the dealership since the same "trade in for new, better equipment" scam is as prevalent there as it is for personal vehicles. The corn and especially soybeans aren't something that can be sold directly at scale (farmers' markets can only support so much) unlike dairy which you can theoretically turn to regional groceries for -- you're selling to one of a small number of processors and aggregators, and if they decide they don't need as much as you sold them last year you're left scrabbling for something to do with a lot of worthless product. At the end of the year, most of the profit has gone right back to the financiers rather than to the farmer themself.
The evident situation is different for a farmer than for a factory worker, but tenant farmers are proletarian, and modern commercial farming is often closer to tenant farming than it's advertised as being. The financial systems nowdays (especially around farming) are set up to give the trappings of small business ownership, without the degree of self-determination that came with that status back when the foundational theory was being written.
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The evident situation is different for a farmer than for a factory worker, but tenant farmers are proletarian, and modern commercial farming is often closer to tenant farming than it's advertised as being. The financial systems nowdays (especially around farming) are set up to give the trappings of small business ownership, without the degree of self-determination that came with that status back when the foundational theory was being written.
re: @[email protected]
via @[email protected]
You’ve basically defined all business owners as working class if they rent their storefronts or owe money to a bank.
But a small business owner that pays rents or loans is still not selling their labor to someone else. They own the full surplus value of their labor and then can use the profits they generate from their business to pay rents and loans. That’s the key difference. The fact that petite bourgeoisie are at the whims of the big bourgeoisie does not actually change the fact that their class interests align against the working class. There’s a reason farmers, like all small business owners, are so reactionary and anti-worker and anti-tax and anti-regulation and pro-business.
EDIT All that said? Your argument is actually the basis for Yanis Varoufakis’s technofeudalism theory. As he explains it, rents are triumphing over profits and so the feudalists (banks, tech firms) are able to capture business owners into loans and rents and feudal market places where they are unable to generate profits anymore. They’re still not working class, but more like wealthy landed peasantry paying taxes to their fief. That would actually open up opportunities for alliances between workers and farmers, because class antagonisms have changed.
I disagree. They’re petite bourgeoisie and their class interests are still aligned with the ruling class, and the “feudalists” are just monopoly capital, but it’s an interesting theory. I recommend reading the book, it’s not that long.
I'd say there's a bit of a difference in that a shopkeeper's goods don't depend on any particular storefront (or even any storefront at all with the internet -- or a traveller's cart/van), while a farmer's land is a crucial part of the means of the crops' production. I'm also not saying that simply renting is sufficient to be working class, just that it removes one measure by which someone could be pushed out of it.
I also wonder if we're talking past each other due to misaligned definitions. On one end of the spectrum you have large-scale agricultural business owners who spend their days in the office managing the people who do the actual labour; they're definitely bourgeois. On the other you have the farmhands themselves who do largely fall into the proletariat. The people I'm talking about are the small farmers in between, who don't have a boss per se but also don't employ anyone in turn (at most they enlist a grown child or a long-time friend for a day or two's parnership to rush the harvest in when weather begins building on the horizon); who only have the one or two fields stretching out behind their own house and who aren't in any position to consider expanding.
And given the widespread political illiteracy driven by teamerism I don't think we can rely on what any person or group of people supports to reflect their actual class interests. How much of the reactionary, anti-worker support is because of identifying with the party, as opposed to identifying with the party because of those beliefs? (Also, anti-tax and anti-regulation positions aren't uniquely bourgeoise ones, they can also be libertarian/anarchist and intended, even if wrongly, as part of a larger system that is just as focused on empowering the working class.)
Thanks for the book recommendation, I'll definitely check it out. It does indeed sound like something paralleling my position here. The feudal->capitalist economic distinction has always been a weak point in my understanding, and it'll be interesting to see how Varoufakis characterizes them both.
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I also wonder if we're talking past each other due to misaligned definitions. On one end of the spectrum you have large-scale agricultural business owners who spend their days in the office managing the people who do the actual labour; they're definitely bourgeois. On the other you have the farmhands themselves who do largely fall into the proletariat. The people I'm talking about are the small farmers in between, who don't have a boss per se but also don't employ anyone in turn (at most they enlist a grown child or a long-time friend for a day or two's parnership to rush the harvest in when weather begins building on the horizon); who only have the one or two fields stretching out behind their own house and who aren't in any position to consider expanding.
And given the widespread political illiteracy driven by teamerism I don't think we can rely on what any person or group of people supports to reflect their actual class interests. How much of the reactionary, anti-worker support is because of identifying with the party, as opposed to identifying with the party because of those beliefs? (Also, anti-tax and anti-regulation positions aren't uniquely bourgeoise ones, they can also be libertarian/anarchist and intended, even if wrongly, as part of a larger system that is just as focused on empowering the working class.)
Thanks for the book recommendation, I'll definitely check it out. It does indeed sound like something paralleling my position here. The feudal->capitalist economic distinction has always been a weak point in my understanding, and it'll be interesting to see how Varoufakis characterizes them both.
re: @[email protected]
The value these small farmers obtain is still derived from their labor. They aren’t passively owning a profit creating assets.
But they own their labor. They don’t have to sell their labor to someone else to access land or capital or markets.
A small business owner may derive value from their own labor but that doesn’t make them working class. The important thing is whether they own their own means of production, or they have to sell their labor and be exploited to create surplus value.
There’s never been a singular cause that affected all of those groups of people at the same time.
The attack on Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both pretty unifying. The former had an immediate and unambiguous opponent with Imperial Japan. 9/11 took weeks and months to figure out what happened and who did it, so it didn’t have as immediate a response.
For sure, there have been events that affected all Americans in various ways, good and bad, but the context of the conversation is events that would encourage a general labor strike. The moon landing, world wars, the Macarena, big things happen. I probably could have been clearer by saying that nothing in history has unified the American working class as a singular political group to use our power as a labor force to exert pressure to stop oligarchical abuses by means of a general strike, but that seems overly pedantic.
The last time people across the country organized general strike of sorts the government went into action to make a law that made it illegal for unions to organize such a thing.
And with this corrupt Congress and this idiot president and this ridiculous SCOTUS, I think it’s likely they will worm their way into making a law that makes it illegal for any citizen to strike for any reason.
Trump already illegally outlawed government unions. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was done about it.
The people strike.
Congress says: that’s illegal now!! Go back to work!
Why the fuck would we? Literally what could possibly convince people that the gov is going to arrest a million people for striking? Genuinely, how braindead are people that that is a concern?
I would suggest you not underestimate just how unbelievably stupid our current president is and how likely he is to actually use the United States army against its own people regardless of how legal or illegal it actually is. Not to mention his sycophantic Congress that will blithely stand by and let him do whatever the fuck he wants. This is what corruption looks like.
ZachariahSummoning people of all backgrounds to unite and take a stand against President Donald Trump’s “tyranny,” the “ultra-wealthy” and corporate greed, Johnson said, “We are going to make them pay their fair share in taxes to fund our school, to fund jobs, to fund healthcare, to fund transportation.”
“Democracy will live on because of this generation,” he proclaimed. “Are you ready to take it to the courts and to the streets?”
It was an audacious declaration from the mayor, who has risen to the top of Trump’s list of enemies as he resists the vicious immigration operations and arrival of hundreds of National Guards currently shaking Chicago.
ThunderWhiskersIt’s really needed at this point
There’s no way this will happen at any level that will make a difference. And it’s too bad, as this is probably the only way to cripple his regime.
LasherzI’m dubious that a general strike is possible in the US. All of the other countries that have had massive strikes affecting large chunks of the market were driven by large unions. Our unions don’t have that sort of sway and they rarely help others to maximize their diminishing bargaining power with the ongoing degradation of workers rights. Importantly this also happens on the supply side, the consumer side will just buy it tomorrow instead usually. A day of no productivity has much bigger consequences.
That being said, I’ll definitely participate.
The article says that a 1947 law makes it almost impossible for unions to organize a general strike.
ProdigalFrogIt’s preferable to break that anti-labour red scare law if it means avoiding the country getting to the point where civil war happens instead.
Most strikes were illegal by polit definitions. Teamsters got into pitched club battles with cops and mob organized strike breakers.
Had guys with guns on standby in case of escalation too.
And they won, circa 19teens.
Just corporate dictatorship things…
Anything that would cause real economic damage and put power back in the hands of workers will be treated as “illegal” regardless of what the books say. But what could they realistically do, arrest everyone in their homes who didn’t go to work that day?
Wildcat strikes are “illegal” in the sense that your employer is allowed to retaliate with firing you or docking pay if you do so. I highly doubt someone’s going to prison for not showing up at a regular job.
The UAW was planning a general strike for May 1st 2028. I don’t know how willing they’d be to start a wildcat general strike, but they may join one.
May Day 2028
After the historic success of the Stand Up Strike in 2023, UAW President Shawn Fain called on the rest of the labor movement to join our union in preparing to strike on May Day 2028. May Day is the international worker’s day, and it’s our opportunity to create a crisis for the billionaire class to win more for all of us. We know that when workers align their fights to the same timeline, we have more leverage than we do alone. What if we didn’t just do that in a corporate chain or one union, but across the country and the labor movement? Now is the time to get ready to create that crisis for the bosses.
What is the point if scheduling a strike so far in advance? Also, aren’t UAW leadership aligned with Trump?
The point as I understand it is that they’re allowing other unions to set their contract expiration to the same date, which increases the potential for pain during their next negotiations and makes for a quasi general strike across all unions who participated. It’s a pretty good idea all in all.
Also, it’s complicated who Sean Fain aligns with. He’s pro-tariff and praised Trump for incentivizing cars to be made in the US, although it seems like that’s the extent of it, and I wonder how he feels about it now that it’s been fully unmasked to just be market manipulation by Trump’s circle of billionaires. Sean’s speech still hit most of the socialist talking points of pro labor even though it was to a bunch of Republican donors, leading to the funniest and most revealing awkward silences after sections about how the working class is who provides all of the value in an economy.
Pro-tariff makes sense purely from a “protecting American labor” point of view. The ideal of them is to encourage internal markets to favor domestic production. However, that first requires domestic production to exist, and it also needs to be done in a way that doesn’t harm domestic production. The Trump tariffs aren’t this, obviously.
Historically, what the UAW wants isn’t necessarily good for the rest of us. The “chicken tax” that pushes larger and larger trucks in the US was done as part of LBJ negotiating with the UAW. The result was that foreign small trucks couldn’t possibly be profitable, and thus had no competition for domestic manufacturing to make the largest trucks possible and nothing else.
What they are doing is asking all unions to set May 1st 2028 as the expiration date for their next labor contract. They aren’t actually scheduling a strike, just laying the groundwork.
It was planned before the election, and they likely didn’t anticipate Trump would win again.
From what I’ve seen the UAW leader is fairly left leaning.
Basically letting the turnip destroy the country for nearly 4 years…
When the economy falls we can organize enough to strike to hit critical mass, not yet.
I fear that the average american can’t afford to strike, because of the lingering threat of poverty from losing employment and getting crushed by outstanding debt. But this is a sign, that there are already not enough worker’s rights.
From far away it looks like a construct.
leadore
TropicalDingdongFinally some political leadership. Now get UAW and teamsters and longshoremen on board. The teachers and nurses. The rest will fillow
The UAW I could see getting onboard, but the Teamsters are so full of MAGA members and Trump loving leadership, I’d be astonished if they did.
I think you misunderstand teamsters. Why do you have this perception?
I have this perception from:
I’d love to see those right-wing members come to their senses and vote to join a general strike, but I just don’t see it happening. They even voted not to strike while negotiating their UPS contract, which resulted in (IMO) only modest improvements, and couldn’t even secure AC units to be retrofitted to their trucks to prevent people dying of heatstroke.
Teamsters Union president addresses the Republican National Convention
Sean O’Brian trying to cozy up to the republican party by speaking at the RNC
See I knew this would be the first one coming. Sean O’brian took the time the RNC afforded him and delivered possibly the most progressive speech in the history of US political conventions. Not one of the most, but possibly the most progressive* speech of all time, perhaps even eclipsing Roosevelt. They were offered a platform, they took it and did what they wanted with it, uttered not one iota of support for Trump or Republicans. He literally called corporation’s economic terrorists.
Since it happened there has been a bad faith interpretation on the part of some “leftists”, especially here, that because he took an opportunity afforded to them, it makes them “bad person”, because they utterly lack the curiosity to find out anything more than what their initial, team-sports reaction is. The reaction you are demonstrating says nothing about Sean O’Brian; it says everything about you.
As well, the Teamsters went on to not endorse Trump, even though it was the Republican convention they were invited to.
Teamsters President Sean O'Brien's UNBELIEVABLE Speech Rocks the RNC
You didn’t address any of my other points.
I’m basing my opinions on repeated examples of Teamster leadership failing to fight back against the establishment, not ‘sports-team’ reactions.
When asked about Chavez-DeRemer’s stance on the right-to-work section of the PRO Act, O’Brien said that he is working with senators such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) to come up with a version of the PRO Act that “may not include that.”
“That’s the beauty of having conversations with people from the other side, where you can collaborate and actually find out what works for that state, what doesn’t work for it—but more importantly, what’s going to work for the American worker,” O’Brien said.
In the same Fox News interview, O’Brien also said the Teamsters do not want to see anyone losing their job, but that “[Trump] thinks he’s within his right,” when asked about the personnel-slashing Department of Government Efficiency and the Trump administration’s widely decried deferred resignation program for nearly all federal employees. Multiple federal employees unions are currently battling the Trump administration in court over its actions targeting federal workers and federal agencies.
With those statements, O’Brian is publicly stating that he still thinks he can reason and plead with an out-and-out proven anti-labor party that just destroyed federal unions. That makes him either naive or an idiot, and for his sake I hope it’s the former.
We need all unions to come together as one movement to effectively fight this dictatorship from taking power, but based on previous evidence, a significant portion of the Teamster membership are unlikely to want to join that fight (obviously, some will, but they will be in the minority).
You’re ignoring that a majority (60%) of its membership are conservative, and not endorsing Trump doesn’t make it much better, since that lack of endorsement of Kamala (whom I don’t even like, but clearly was the harm reduction option) only speaks to the fact that they have so many right-wing members, the leadership had to fence-sit in fear of not getting elected again by their pro-Trump members.
If you’re a left-wing Teamster trying to steer your brothers and sisters away from MAGA, then more power to you. But don’t delude yourself that the Teamster leadership or right-wing members are going to be the ones leading the charge against this regime.
I would love to be proven wrong, but at best I could see them hopping on the bandwagon if the winds change and the regime begins to implode on itself.
You didn’t address any of my other points.
Because they were stupid points and not worth addressing, so they were dismissed. You’re mad because someone didn’t put on a jersey and cheer for your team, but that team had voters.
Alternatively, If the Democrats wanted to get the teamsters endorsement: why didn’t they do more to show that they would be a pro-labor, anti-capitol party, as O’Brien laid out in the speech he gave (which you seem to be entirely ignoring the contents of). This same argument applies to the Muslim vote, to the progressive vote, to all the blocks that the Democrats failed to make appeals to in this election cycle because the they thought they needed to run on was “Trump Bad”, while constantly silencing criticisms of their own inadequacies.
What you are doing here is just repeating the same, failed logic that handed Trump 2024. And instead of blaming the people who actually had the power to change things, you want to blame “someone else”. Democrats could have invited Sean O’Brien to the convention, since they hadn’t endorsed, and see what they had to say and asked what it would have taken to get the Teamsters endorsement. Likewise, they could have given Palestinians a voice at the convention and asked them what it would take to keep them in the fold. And we can go on down the line.
But reality is that Democrats are the failure here. Not any other party is to blame other than the Democrats themselves for the outcomes of the election of 2024. If they wanted the Teamsters endorsement, they needed to do more to show up for it, and they chose not to.
And that knee-jerk, team sports, emotional response was exactly what I had hoped you would put on display, and it makes it all the more clear we should be dismissing voices that are only in this for their own validation.
Voters do not owe the Democratic party jack fucking shit, and the Democratic party owes its voters, literally everything. If the Democratic party, and the card carrying Democratic party member, have not gotten this through their thick, Blue No Matter Who skull, the Democratic party will never be fixed.
As I said in my previous response, I’m not fan of the Kamala, nor the democratic party for the very reasons you mention. But to frame it as the Teamsters withholding their endorsement for the same reasons that leftists refused to vote for Kamala is disingenuous.
If the Democrats wanted to get the teamsters endorsement, why didn’t they do more to show that they would be a pro-labor, anti-capitol party
Democrats are neoliberals, they’ll never be anti-capital (hence their failure), but they certainly weren’t as anti-labor as the Republican party.
You keep trying to paint my views as a simplistic sports team analog, but it doesn’t hold up. I’m pointing out real gripes with Teamster leadership and the depressing state of the membership, which I wish weren’t the case. I am not randomly smack talking them because I’m on some other team (do you think I’m in the UAW? I’m not).
you want to blame “someone else”
I’m not blaming anyone. I doubt an official Teamster endorsement would’ve made a difference in the election. I’m pointing to it as a prime example that the base of the Teamsters is conservative enough that taking an overt leftist stance is likely political suicide for Teamster leadership.
The guy is a mayor, and finds himself on the national stage. He is now a target of trumps. Staying in the public eye is self preservation. Not saying it can’t lead in the right direction.
That said, the major unions are run by poloticians as well. And laws don’t favor them on this. So they will stay out of it unless you get some new little guys who get elected to leadership by claiming they will do these things. But trump supporters are common enough in such unions that it would be challenging for that to happen. It’s more likely the unions unofficially join in after critical mass is achieved. Thier leaders don’t want to go to jail.