A general strike requires organization, but US society is completely atomized.
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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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 👏 👏👏 👏👏 👏👏 👏
Do a working class revolution
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.
Strikes are organized through unions not hashtags.
We don't have unions anymore. Reagan busted them.
All we can do is rebuild.
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General strikes don't require you to be in a union. They do require a larger amount of organizing than simply having a lot of the workforce in unions though so...
Strikes require unity across a workforce.
If some workers in a local context work instead of participating in a strike, then the business is not pressured to acquiesce, and the sacrifice is in vain.
Striking in any case results in lost pay, which promotes fear and threatens survival. Solidarity improves morale and saves lives.
Fostering unity and solidarity is among the essential functions of a union.
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Next nationwide 50501 protest is a national walk-out on Jan 20th.
We'll see you there, right?
I'm my own boss. It's never an issue. Thanks for the tip. Just joined my state's 50501 group.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anytime I see posts talking about a general strike I equate to "thoughts and prayers".
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As you look outside in the US on the first Monday after a holiday and see the countless millions of people driving to work, going grocery shopping, dropping off and picking up their kids, you need to ask yourself if you really think the bulk of the money-spending, child-feeding, bill-paying population of the US is ready to sacrifice weeks of services and food for an outcome that they don't actually want or understand.
You know it's not going to happen, but the next best thing is political organizing and getting social and making people more aware in REAL LIFE about issues in their community that impact them, and the people who represent them. Volunteer to get petitions, sign up for Progressive Victory, use that energy to help the systems already working to mitigate or even reverse damage being done to our nation.
We can still turn this boat around with traditional politics, but it takes actual humans getting involved with other actual humans. Since capital has successfully turned most of our socialization muscles to mush, it will be uncomfortable at first, but far easier to pull off than trying to get several hundred million comfortable people to break their own system.
They've cultivated this culture where nobody can afford to do any kind of direct action like a general strike. There's a reason why nearly everyone in America works paycheck to paycheck and has essentially zero savings.
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In the USA health insurance is tied to work; if you're fired "with cause" (like from general strike) you don't have health insurance or any "unemployment".
They don't make these laws without reason, they know what they're doing. The USA is a plutocracy designed to squash unions, and does a pretty good job of it
So this means you need to go all-in or simply watch it all burn from your couch. No in-betweens
You should go all-in and show everyone how to go all in.
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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"?
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January 20 at 2pm local time
I wonder if it's a coincidence that Jan 20th is the day our boss required us all to show up for a special training required 8 hours that day, and this is extremely rare, like randomly once a year do we have a mandatory training event like this.
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.
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General Strike? My friend, we aren’t even in unions right now! It will take years to build that kind of power.
Let’s focus on building a new mass political party that does not exist in the wilderness, then we can work to that point.
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