Protests in the street are great but our real power comes from shutting everything down by not working. And by crippling the parasitic landowners by striking on our outrageous rents.
My rent has gone up around $600 a month over the last 8 years from $1200-$1800. It’s not some gigantic or nice place, though it’s not a slum either. All this increase of price and nothing has been done to warrant an increase. They didn’t improve this place. They just are allowed to starve us all.
Americans are not practiced in large enough numbers in protest, demonstration, civil disobedience, and solidarity for a large scale general or rent strike to be successful. There needs to be a ramp up period with increasingly more frequent and expansive demonstrations for that to become practical.
We aren’t there yet. If we get there it’ll take an inciting incident. An inflection point. Probably ICE killing a kid on camera or another Luigi. Grim.
I sincerely doubt that Americans will ever wake up to the realities of class oppression within our lifetime. It’s always going to come down to a matter of identity politics, and that’s the way the ruling 1% would like to keep it. “Be angry at them, not us.” But since there’s now a literal resurrgence of neo-nazism in the US I’d say it’s a bit late now to for seeing eye to eye with your fellow worker.
It’s unfortunately going to be a long, long time before there’s any organized action around rent increases while everyone’s worried that their neighbors might get disappeared for having the wrong skin color.
The general strike is, of course, not an agency that can be invoked arbitrarily on every occasion. It needs certain social assumptions to give it its proper moral strength and make it a proclamation of the will of the broad masses of the people. The ridiculous claim, which is so often attributed to the Anarcho-Syndicalists, that it is only necessary to proclaim a general strike in order to achieve a Socialist society in a few days, is, of course, just a silly invention of evil-minded opponents bent on discrediting an idea which they cannot attack by any other means.
Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-syndicalism: Theory and Practice
Still no rent strikes and general strikes?
Protests in the street are great but our real power comes from shutting everything down by not working. And by crippling the parasitic landowners by striking on our outrageous rents.
My rent has gone up around $600 a month over the last 8 years from $1200-$1800. It’s not some gigantic or nice place, though it’s not a slum either. All this increase of price and nothing has been done to warrant an increase. They didn’t improve this place. They just are allowed to starve us all.
Americans are not practiced in large enough numbers in protest, demonstration, civil disobedience, and solidarity for a large scale general or rent strike to be successful. There needs to be a ramp up period with increasingly more frequent and expansive demonstrations for that to become practical.
Okay, and where is that?
We aren’t there yet. If we get there it’ll take an inciting incident. An inflection point. Probably ICE killing a kid on camera or another Luigi. Grim.
I sincerely doubt that Americans will ever wake up to the realities of class oppression within our lifetime. It’s always going to come down to a matter of identity politics, and that’s the way the ruling 1% would like to keep it. “Be angry at them, not us.” But since there’s now a literal resurrgence of neo-nazism in the US I’d say it’s a bit late now to for seeing eye to eye with your fellow worker.
It’s unfortunately going to be a long, long time before there’s any organized action around rent increases while everyone’s worried that their neighbors might get disappeared for having the wrong skin color.