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?
There’s an effort to do a general strike with similar aims: https://generalstrikeus.com/strikecard
What if corporations weren’t allowed to fund politicians to begin with? Corporations can’t vote, so why do they get such influence? This kind of funding should come out of voters pockets, not corporate cash that belongs to employees and shareholders.
That would be amazing! Yes, that’s better than what I was thinking.
Citizens united?
You’d need the workers to not be Republicans themselves, in which case the GOP would never win an election.
Probably about half of the workers are Republicans (even if it isn’t actually in their best interest), so I doubt they would ever put up this condition.
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,
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.
Even if they stopped funding Republicans today, they would be back to funding them in the run up to the 2026 elections.
Everyone company that stopped funding Trump after Jan 6th went back by November 2024.
For the demands of the strikers they could include a time period for example no funding of Republicans until 2034 as an example.
We need to stop funding capitalists.
The difficult thing is that our entire society is set up to ensure that whatever we do, we end up funding capitalists. We’d need a complete alternate infrastructure to make it possible to survive without doing so. And any attempt to organize that will meet with resistance from the most powerful people. We have let it go very far before mounting any kind of resistance, and we’ve given the capitalists decades to put into place total surveillance and a very effective system of oppression to take down anyone who starts getting big ideas.
That’s not to say we can’t undermine it, but doing so will take time. We won’t be able to simply pressure the capitalists into changing their ways, and any direct confrontation short of a mass movement will fail. A mass movement takes time and skill to build, particularly when all the organs of the state, in every country, are determined to stop you building it.
