I’m really impressed by the courage of the Amazon workers who are going on strike. I was thinking what if one of the conditions of the strikers is that Amazon stops funding Republicans. Then I realized more broadly what if workers in all companies went on strike and demanded that the companies no longer funded Republican candidates. What are your thoughts on this?
In general, people have got to stop voting with just their wallets and start voting with their labor.
Guess what, if Amazon had no workers, it couldn’t generate money to donate to Republicans.
I’ve been saying this for years and always get the “they’re just people trying to get by!!1” responses, Literally one degree removed from “i was just following orders.”. No dude, you’re taking an active, voluntary role in building the most destructive machine in human history. The workers are not immune to criticism of the company they choose to work for
The whole argument about why capitalism is bad is that it can arbitrarily remove your access to the basics of life by requiring you to sell your labour to survive and then by maintaining a reserve of people without work in order to keep the rest fighting for what there is.
With that in mind it is self defeating to chastise people for choosing to work at amazon over starving or losing their home,
Yes, this is the crux of the matter.
If you give a person a choice between starving or screwing over the rest of society, they will choose the food nearly every time. Change the first part to “starve their children” and it basically becomes an absolute.
I agree with you. Imagine if people built a mutual aid network designed to sustain people for maybe 6-12 months and the country just went on strike. People stop showing up to work everywhere in protest of the oligarchy.
Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck, or close to it. A side effect of the top 1% holding 99% of the wealth.
Also a ton of Americans are scared shitless of anything that even sounds remotely like socialism or communism while knowing nothing about either. Like paying billions of dollars every year for insurance which is exactly that, just privatized.
Regarding living paycheck to paycheck that’s why I mentioned the mutual aid network. I know most people can’t stop working for very long, that’s why there would need to be some kind of group to support this.
Regarding labels like socialism or communism, I’m not advocating for that. I just hope for better wages, working conditions and less corruption in politics.
A mutual aid network kind of falls apart if people can’t work for 80% of companies
This is the problem with the dystopia. Where do an overwhelming number of jobs exist? Companies like walmart, amazon, target, mcdonalds, etc. you stop working for them en masse and all of sudden you have tens of millions of people unemployed. Mutual aid is great in theory but how do you overcome this? In practice it’s already terribly difficult to fund things like mutual aid networks because people don’t have much money they are willing to part with. Then you create an absolutely enormous demand on such a network? Doomed
Even if you coordinate and target one company, eg amazon, all that will do is cannibalize their business and allow another company like walmart to fill the gap
Your last sentence made me realize something. You’re right that if you target one business they will go to another but that’s a feature not a bug. The goal is it’s a negotiation. Demand better working conditions and stop funding corrupt politicians and then we will return back to work. The company won’t want to go out of business so hopefully they would agree.
A mutual aid network is a type of socialism. It’s no different than a union having a war chest to pull from for strikes formed from union dues, or a country having various social safety nets like unemployment for citizens. They’re all the same idea, just a matter of size.