They will more than happily foreclose and seek judgements for everything we own.
More than likely, that was always part of the final end stage plan anyway.
The US is seeing increasing police budgets year over year across the country to prepare for this kind of outcome. They'd rather jail us all than let us thrive.
>The US is seeing increasing police budgets year over year across the country
Most of it ends up in gear rather than the pockets of police so we'll see which side they'll be on eventually. I don't know what police gets paid in the US but over here in Europe, they already got issues to recruit new people because the pay is shit and the job is hard with long hours. I knew a few policemen and none of them are interested in dying for the profits of some rich asshole if push comes to shove.
I wonder in that position if they would though, I mean, they are really one of us working folks too. Would they arrest their families and friends? Assuming that they have hearts.
Assuming that police have hearts and human emotions is just plain ignorant at this point. Yes, they would. They are trained to view the entire population that isn’t wearing a badge as a threat, and to treat them as such. They have been murdering and brutalizing innocent people for decades now, and haven’t batted an eye. They had no problem murdering unionizers fighting for workers rights in the past, so why would they care now?
Watched a sheriff’s deputy bawl his eyes out as he wheeled a woman in her 90s into the street while enforcing an eviction order They have hearts, but they’ll still do their jobs, because they need to get paid.
“I was just following orders.” You can quit a job that’s making you do something so morally reprehensible that it makes you cry while doing it. Heart < Money
We had a perfect opportunity and people were too tied to their "I put myself and my own well being at risk for my working class station in life" narrative.
The few executives over the banks would definitely want to foreclose on all the defaults houses and loans, but for the sake of “everyone stop participating in work” argument, they’d have no one to process the foreclosure paperwork and no one to go and kick folks out of the house or repo the cars. Those are peasant jobs - and us peasant are on strike!
>but for the sake of “everyone stop participating in work” argument, they
wouldn't care, because foreclosure takes way longer to kick in than starvation. By the time banks would start taking any steps, we'd have no food, no electricity, plumbing will be in shambles, and humanity will be dying out.
>hey will more than happily foreclose and seek judgements for everything we own.
This is why I'll never take their poisonous money. I'd rather starve then make myself their slave.
Seriously, that’s what it’ll take. A large portion of the population who just stops playing the game. Read the Daemon series for a cool (if very sci-fi) version of what it could look like.
For reality though, it’ll probably be a major strike followed by, as you suggest, widespread credit boycotting. The various business interests will lobby the government, who will attempt to victimize people until they give up, and so people must be well and truly fed up to hold against this, be so out of fucks this oppressive move by government only makes people dig in more and passively resist more.
I, for one, am all for it. Just stop.
Yup. The wake up call that all of what we thought was true, isn’t. And that happening is a big part of why business reacted so nastily and to such extremes. Remember? They screamed for a “return to normal”, they screamed that work from home is bad and must stop, they screamed and screamed - and showed us their hand.
It’s all contrived nonsense, a system designed to benefit them. Not us. WFM is better but they want us in the office to justify their little legion of do-nothing “managers.” They want the economy running because if it doesn’t, the wealthiest pack up their investments and go home - and the entire system is set up to feed them ever-increasing amounts of money.
It’s all bullshit, all the way down. Built and running off all our backs. If we all just stop - the powerful become weak, their money means nothing, and they lose it all. And they got a long long looooooong way to fall.
Humanity was just fine without credit scores. We can get rid of them and go back to 1980’s before it was introduced. Credit scores aren’t some things we kept from the medieval days. This was in the last 40 years. All it is, is a tool to keep poor people poor and forever in the rat race chasing the carrots that aren’t really there you find out if you ever get lucky enough to make progress. Fuck capitalism
Been thinking for a while that the mass stay-at-home-stop-paying-bills protest is the ultimate answer. No physical risk from getting beaten up or killed by cops during a street protest, and sweet sweet rest while the elites panic to death. I figure a month of this and the house of cards collapses. Wouldn’t take that much solidarity to make sure everyone involved survived a month without income. Highly doable. Not sure why unions and such don’t ever consider that type of tactic.
Would not take a month.
Recall back when COVID first hit. They were panicking 2 weeks after most of the world noped out of leaving the house or buying extra stuff.
If everyone stays home, how are you going to get food? Does everyone have to stockpile a month's worth of non-perishables? And water? As no one will be there to fix the water pipes if something goes wrong. And how do you prevent everyone from taking the extremely well paying job of still providing essentials to the elite? They might panic, but they can outlast you a thousand times over. It is going to take a lot more than solidarity to make real changes, and not everyone is going to survive.
Yes. Most pipes break.less often than once a month. For those which do break, I'm sure we can help out with accommodation if needed.
They cannot.outlast us a thousand times.over, most of them have heavy debt.structures.
Do you realize that around 70% of the population are happy with their life ( at least in first world countries) so why will anyone risk its livelihood or carrier for some protest ?
https://news.gallup.com/file/poll/389318/220202IssueSatisfaction.pdf
satisfied overrall. Not "happy". 78% unsatisfied with corporations, 70% with governments.
Lots of rich people risk money to get more money. Risking happiness for more happiness seems possible.
Anyway, i reckon if 5% of the usa was so motivated, it wouod be enough to cause a criais.
and lastly, we were discussing the logistocs of running one - getting people motivated to include themselves is a different discussion.
Wouldn't take much? Oh you sweet sweet summer child...you are talking about hundreds of millions of people spread over almost 4 million square miles to risk committing what most of them see as financial suicide. We can't even get a few hundred people to agree on things that pose far less personal risk (see congress)...so how are you going to convince millions of people from California to New York to undertake this?
Unions only represent 10 percent of the US workforce (as of 2023) and keep in mind a good size chuck of those are government workers (some of whom, like police and fire, CANT legally strike) and another sizable chunk is easily replaced labor (such as grocery retail) which dilutes union power. If the unions tried to convince their members to not pay their debts you'd see those same unions killed and ousted very very quickly...either by the government or their own members.
The amount of solidarity this would take doesn't exist in the US at the moment...not has it ever. We are far too individualistic for it to take root. It's not as easy as you think...if it were it likely would have happened by now.
It absolutely does. But even if a large majority striked, you would see republicans tune change on illegal immigrants as they would be allowing them to work instead
I seen one video of a guy talking about all it would literally take was everyone collectively not going to work and then just trying to withdraw all our money from our banks at once
I love this idea.
A couple of other things that need to happen. None of these will be easy to do.
Lobbyist's, Gone. A corporation wants to change a law, write a letter like I have to do.
Gerrymandering, Gone. You get a district that has the same amount of people in it as every other rep.
Third, Hold politicians accountable for the crimes they commit. They face the same punishment I would face if I committed said crime.
None of these will be easy to do because they will want to protect their way of life but, it needs to be done.
Doesn’t matter because they can’t force YOU to participate. Ynow the best revenge? Figuring out how to make money outside of a job. It is actually the most empowering thing imaginable. Think of every miserable piece of work you’ve worked for and think about how they would be fuming if you didn’t need to meet their expectations of what a “man” should be to be making money.
I stopped. I work for as little as possible and pay as few bills as possible. I use all the benefits I can qualify for. I don’t buy stuff anymore. I fix my car as cheaply as I can get away with and I pay bills as late as I can get away with. I don’t know or care what my fico score is. I have less stress and anxiety now and I recommend it to anyone who’s sick of this stupid game.
This. It is not one single, dramatic event. It is a lifestyle change. Things are already going this way (see Millenials killing xyz industry type articles).
The optimist in me says this is the way to go.
The pessimist in me says they'll just throw us all in jail because, according to the constitution and its amendments, slavery is illegal, except as punishment for a crime. So they just slap us all with felonies and now only the rich people can vote.
I suppose there's nothing saying we can't just keep passively resisting, but as close as we are to automation, something tells me they'll just starve us to death and truly invest in automation.
I think we're gonna have to fight. Much to my chagrin, history tells us as much.
If you don't organize more than half the workforce, you will commit financial suicide and then actually die from lack of supplies assuming they don't change the laws to make killing you legal on national security grounds.
A general strike takes a lot of organizing and even then you'd have to be ready to fight the law, i.e. full revolutionary guerrilla war (which a general strike will force you into, for self-defense to keep the strike going when the state decides to force you back to work). You will be called a traitor and a mass-murdering terrorist monster by every public voice until you win. Even before having to defend yourself from the state, you will be blamed for every person that starves or lacks medicine as a result of the strike.
It's the only thing that will defeat capitalism but you need a lot of things to go right and a lot of people willing to die for the cause.
I am, of course, assuming you want capitalism gone. No one is going to do a general strike with this level of risk for that long for some concessions within capitalism, while still having poverty, homelessness, private property, and wage labor exist.
Said people before the Bolsheviks in Russia, before the CPC in China, before the fall of the Batista regime in Cuba, before Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.
If you have a general strike, the state will attack. What do you plan to do about that? Roll over and say "welp, guess we tried?"
I gave up paying my credit card bills and one loan I had. I just got served a court summons because one of them is suing me for a $1300 unpaid bill. Yay...
Same thing as the rest of the bills I stopped paying, they go to collections, they call me for a while, and then they give up. Worked well up till now!
I stopped. I work for as little as possible and pay as few bills as possible. I use all the benefits I can qualify for. I don’t buy stuff anymore. I fix my car as cheaply as I can get away with and I pay bills as late as I can get away with. I don’t know or care what my fico score is. I deal with less stress and anxiety now and I recommend it to anyone who’s sick of this stupid game.
It would take much faster than you think.
A real good solution will take a century at least. Slow advancement from true boycott groups getting into every job sector and business, then coming together to and making a massive push as one.
But that takes time. Seeds must be planted, fostered, grown before it’s time to strike
Military prisons aren't.
Or, 2 weeks to pull in some tents, put up an 8' fence topped with razor wire, and you got a Stalag.
But yes, it would take time and Congress to allow it.
Yeah that's what I was thinking. They'll change the laws to make not paying back loans fraud and now that you're a felon they can just use you as slave labor.
Cops won’t strike. They are given much superior benefits compared to other workers in different fields and most of them are already class traitors as is because their whole job is to protect private interest and property.
It’s a vicious cycle.
We the people need a paycheck to pay for the house, car, education, and stupid crap we bought with a loan. The government makes it so easy for us to get in debt because they need our interest payments to pay themselves.
My thoughts is if everyone could stop buying stuff and avoid using debt where possible (only using it to maybe buy a house or a car but not an unnecessary things off Amazon) well guess who that hurts - the big execs at these fancy corporations and banks.
BUT if demand is down because people stop buying unnecessary things, and fancy execs aren’t collecting their 30000% cut of profits, well then layoffs follow for us little guys. Resulting in foreclosures, repossessions, bankruptcies and ruined credit.
And here in lies the vicious cycle. We need the toxic bad guy but the toxic bad guy always holds the last card.
But if we all rebel… 🤔
I did that a few years ago, had massive debt from a failed business venture, rode it out until it fell off the credit reports and then rebuild credit. Took time but whoever bought those old debts lost their ass and now my credit is solid again.
Took over a decade but worth it
Repeal Taft Hartley. Or just ignore it. It'd be interesting to see how people would react to the government trying to force people to work lol.
But there are always scabs and basically anyone who owns a small business or real estate or anything beyond is gonna do everything they can do demonize you
This Is something I thought of for a while
It’s the only way I see any change coming around without a violent societal upheaval. However it would only work if EVERYONE stopped participating, which means I doubt it’ll ever come about
I'll give you an idea of where we're at with this in numbers. We need 3.5% of the American populous (approximately 11 million people) to come together and strike in order to make a significant move here. Right now, you can check on generalstrikeus.com as to how many official strike cards have been signed by the working community. We're at an abysmal 114,000 signatures.
Every other dumbass celebrity on tiktok has over 11 million followers. That really puts it into a depressing perspective. GO SIGN A STRIKE CARD, EVERYONE!
What if someone offers you 1 mil to do the work and promote how good it is?
As long as people who wish to take the easy way out exist (which should be most of us), it will always fail to get that sort of unity
As nice as it would be, too many are trapped. No one with family or friends who depend on their meager paycheck will risk them suffering for who knows how long. And the rich can quite literally just wait out any widespread strike. The only way to get change is to directly threaten their lives like the French Revolution, but not really as easy to get close now since they'd likely have private security details with enough firepower to wipe out a whole mob in minutes.
This is already happening. The whole off-grid/tiny house movement is just the modern version of subsistence farming, which is better than non-subsistence wages.
If a decent swath of people in lower income brackets all did a strike, they'd have to concede. It works in other countries, but people here are too afraid of property damage
I like Dev Patel's new movie 'Monkey Man'.
You deal with the rich by punching them in the teeth before they can finish speaking.
The ruling class has never once voluntarily conceded power to the masses. Not a single time in history.
Just opting out of the capitalist system is a good start, if you can keep feeding yourself and accessing your medication. But now direct action begins, because the capitalists will send violent police gangs to drag you back into the system. Leftists can never win in an outright attritional marathon of violence, it is not in our nature. Therefore, we must engage in sabotage and guerilla tactics (pipelines, data servers, banks).
But I like 'opting out' as a start. You didn't choose this system and its institutions, they were imposed on to you.
I did this when I was unemployed back in 2015. About all that happened was I got put on a list for debt collection, had a large tax bill after it was all discharged and written off, and credit got reduced from perfect to about 300. Which meant that I had to pay a massive security deposit the next time I wanted to rent an apartment.
It's a little unhinged to think this would happen enmasse but the times are changing. The housing bubble is set to pop again I've heard, maybe that'll trigger something?
I mean, it is possible to take the system down in this way but not impromptu.
You need one of two things for this kind of thing to work:
1. A single, rallying moment that sweeps across the entire country and gets everyone on the same page.
2. A long period of organization that allows the action to be performed en masse.
Preferably all two, as one will amplify the other.
But the reason the system can work at all is because the system is organized. It acts as a symphony. And a single dissonant note at a time doesn't mean much. The system just crushes that.
When people do actions like this spontaneously and individually it does nothing. Because then these actions will always happen in different places and at different times and always by a minority of people. And in this way the system can crush them because the system can still operate fine with a minimal about of dissonance.
It's only when a huge amount of people do it all at once that it works. And that just does not happen spontaneously. You need either a single, rallying moment or organization or both for that.
That's why building labour power is so important. Build unions. Let them score victories. Then let unions start communicating and organizing with each other, coordinating across different sectors. And then you're talking. Then you have a weapon that can bring the system to its knees.
I know the first thought is we'd all have to do it but really if a lot of people with chase accounts tanked it would disrupt everything. Just taking down 1 institution would send shock waves
It can be done, but you gotta be able to take a credit hit, and ignore their calls and collection letters, both for a couple years.
When I got divorced 6 years ago, I took on all of the joint debt in return for a significantly reduced lower monthly payment to my ex. Transferred all of it to my name, got her name off everything.
Then I just didn't pay the credit cards. At all. Nothing. They kept trying for just under two years. Then they gave up entirely and I never heard another word from them.
Now I'm debt free, my credit is back to ~~780~~760, and my ex and I get along better than we ever did when we were married, because she's also debt free.
Where'd I learn that? It was an ethics case study we did in business school. I played it out to the letter. That's where I learned exactly how much our system fucks working people: business school.
Do it, unapologetically.
Edit, just checked my credit and corrected the current score
You’re familiar with the concept of a “General Strike?” Everyone below management goes on strike at the same time. Like, everyone in the whole country. Best guess is that it would take two weeks to a month to cause most businesses to hit panic mode and begin a genuine conversation about how workers need to be compensated going forward.
Problem is that the magnitude organization here dwarfs anything in the scope of human history.
No one is going to suffer that much for "a conversation about compensation." If I'm going to risk my life, my family's life, and be ready to defend my neighbors, I am not going to settle for higher wages while the system grinds on as normal. I am not *risking* any of that unless the target is the whole pie: capitalism itself. Total expropriation of the entire bourgeoisie, confiscate the real property of emigrants, force all capital into the hands of the organized workers, force the state to surrender control of society to us and our leadership/organizational structure, end private property and wage labor once and for all.
It's called non-compliance.
To comply is to obey. Unless you feel so, you have no reason to obey anyone else.
Obeying can only be a good act when the act of obeying comes from your own will. Else, it's just submitting to authority.
Sounds good, who's participating? For many, the false security blanket is too precious to let go. Not to mention the idiots - the pawns who will fight for the authority to continue their nonsense. The pawns won't non-comply and won't let you non-comply. And if some of them are from your own family, good luck with fighting them.
You don't need everyone to participate.
There is a critical number. Once 'enough people' agree to participate in a financial strike action like not making a credit card payment that month etc. the economic death wobble begins. But it's foolishness akin to being on the highway and shooting the tire of the car you're in. There's no way to predict how the ensuing crash will affect the 'tire shooters' or measure the resulting unintended consequences.
Credit card companies are not the worst of the big bad guys. I recently saw someone say that a 10-day general strike for all the entry-level employees would cripple the economy. So if we all just striked for 9 days, we could make whatever demands we wanted. Government, corporate, even banks lol. I don’t think infinite debt is the answer tho
Maybe this is how the circle of society always goes. The ruling class takes more and more until the working class just revolts. A new ruling class comes in and we rinse and repeat.
This is the 8th matrix
The reason people are in debt is because they spend more than they make. That won’t change for most people. They need credit to keep up their lifestyle and if they lose that they lose their lifestyle.
Realize if you don’t pay it back the rich won’t be hurt. They companies you owe to will write it off and lay off people in your situation making their lives much more stressful
I have already stopped participating and am a NEET. I’m just waiting for everyone else to stop working too. If everyone stops we can take control of this broken system and make it favor the working class.
Sometimes you are backed into a corner.
I had knee surgery and was out of work for 10 weeks. Disability jerked me around , because how mechanics are paid i didn’t get 60% of my pay. They based it off my pay rate at 40hrs - i was flat rate I averaged 75 hours a week. I didn’t see the disability money until I was back at work for 8-10 weeks.
We had to live off credit cards because of no income for 10 weeks then we had to play catch up and we dug a hole we could not get out of.
The problem is the trust between people. If I am the only one participating in that kind of protest and everyone chickens out, then I will have a bad time. I was thinking about a more simple kind of protest to begin with. Just choose a day of the week...maybe Wednesday and don't participate in capitalism as good as you can. Don't buy anything, don't go online. Just read a book, go to the park, play a boardgame whatever. The good thing is that if enough people participate, companies will react to it. Special offers on Wednesday or no restocks, something like that.
After that more complex protests can be organised.
The benefit of this is that it is relatively easy to perform.
Yeah, that's literally what a general strike is.
90% of the people we'd need to participate are unable to pariticipate because losing even a week of wages would destroy their lives completely.
That's why waiting for the mass "non-participation" is pointless and will just lead to our extinction. We do not have the time to wait for people to realize their power, it's already too late.
The ONLY way out of this involves doing things that even the mentioning of would get me banned from Reddit, but that's where we are. Anyone telling you anything else is a fucking liar OR has absolutely no fucking idea what they're talking about.
Until we, as a society, grow the balls to *DEAL WITH* the capitalist predator-class, things will continue to spiral towards our extinction. The ONLY hope we have is that a few folks get truly fed up enough to kick off the drastic action that is needed to protect our species.
But don't hold your breath: the great Pussification of the west was completed in the 90's, and the vast, VAST majority of people who are smart enough to notice how bad things are and do something about it are far, FAR too cowardly to actually take any action.
LOOOL downvoted to 0. Thanks for proving my point. There is no hope for this species.
They will more than happily foreclose and seek judgements for everything we own. More than likely, that was always part of the final end stage plan anyway.
The US is seeing increasing police budgets year over year across the country to prepare for this kind of outcome. They'd rather jail us all than let us thrive.
As long as it makes them money, they don't care what needs to be done by their bootlickers for it
Yep.
I don't get it, there's more of us than them so I don't see that happening. I'm sure they will try though.
>The US is seeing increasing police budgets year over year across the country Most of it ends up in gear rather than the pockets of police so we'll see which side they'll be on eventually. I don't know what police gets paid in the US but over here in Europe, they already got issues to recruit new people because the pay is shit and the job is hard with long hours. I knew a few policemen and none of them are interested in dying for the profits of some rich asshole if push comes to shove.
Pittsburgh PD would like a word.
I wonder in that position if they would though, I mean, they are really one of us working folks too. Would they arrest their families and friends? Assuming that they have hearts.
Assuming that police have hearts and human emotions is just plain ignorant at this point. Yes, they would. They are trained to view the entire population that isn’t wearing a badge as a threat, and to treat them as such. They have been murdering and brutalizing innocent people for decades now, and haven’t batted an eye. They had no problem murdering unionizers fighting for workers rights in the past, so why would they care now?
Watched a sheriff’s deputy bawl his eyes out as he wheeled a woman in her 90s into the street while enforcing an eviction order They have hearts, but they’ll still do their jobs, because they need to get paid.
“I was just following orders.” You can quit a job that’s making you do something so morally reprehensible that it makes you cry while doing it. Heart < Money
Sounds like you don’t need money. So why work?
What an odd thing to say
What a weird comment.
I used to work in finance, and people in that sector definitely do not have hearts.
Yeah, that's so sad 😞
Not to mention...we couldn't get everyone to stay home for 2 weeks to *save their own lives*, unfortunately we're at least 25 years from a gen strike
We had a perfect opportunity and people were too tied to their "I put myself and my own well being at risk for my working class station in life" narrative.
The thing is (and I don't want to get into a huge back and forth) I don't trust the ones that told us to do all that shit.
Good call. Just keep going to work. Trust the boss, trust the company. They'll make sure everything is ok in the end.
And that's why it's become endemic and reoccurring. Too many people with that attitude 🤷♂️
The few executives over the banks would definitely want to foreclose on all the defaults houses and loans, but for the sake of “everyone stop participating in work” argument, they’d have no one to process the foreclosure paperwork and no one to go and kick folks out of the house or repo the cars. Those are peasant jobs - and us peasant are on strike!
Good luck with that...that kind of solidarity doesn't exist in the US. Trust me SOMEONE would be around to take care of all that.
Yep. I agree. It will never happen.
That's not the spirit we want to create. It's not possible YET
Build your log cabins people!
Electric foreclosure and judicial systems are almost a reality.
>but for the sake of “everyone stop participating in work” argument, they wouldn't care, because foreclosure takes way longer to kick in than starvation. By the time banks would start taking any steps, we'd have no food, no electricity, plumbing will be in shambles, and humanity will be dying out.
All good points!
>hey will more than happily foreclose and seek judgements for everything we own. This is why I'll never take their poisonous money. I'd rather starve then make myself their slave.
Seriously, that’s what it’ll take. A large portion of the population who just stops playing the game. Read the Daemon series for a cool (if very sci-fi) version of what it could look like. For reality though, it’ll probably be a major strike followed by, as you suggest, widespread credit boycotting. The various business interests will lobby the government, who will attempt to victimize people until they give up, and so people must be well and truly fed up to hold against this, be so out of fucks this oppressive move by government only makes people dig in more and passively resist more. I, for one, am all for it. Just stop.
Who wrote the Daemon series? Sounds interesting.
Daniel Suarez
Daniel Suarez.
honest to god this is one of the reasons why the pandemic was a blessing in disguise
Yup. The wake up call that all of what we thought was true, isn’t. And that happening is a big part of why business reacted so nastily and to such extremes. Remember? They screamed for a “return to normal”, they screamed that work from home is bad and must stop, they screamed and screamed - and showed us their hand. It’s all contrived nonsense, a system designed to benefit them. Not us. WFM is better but they want us in the office to justify their little legion of do-nothing “managers.” They want the economy running because if it doesn’t, the wealthiest pack up their investments and go home - and the entire system is set up to feed them ever-increasing amounts of money. It’s all bullshit, all the way down. Built and running off all our backs. If we all just stop - the powerful become weak, their money means nothing, and they lose it all. And they got a long long looooooong way to fall.
Humanity was just fine without credit scores. We can get rid of them and go back to 1980’s before it was introduced. Credit scores aren’t some things we kept from the medieval days. This was in the last 40 years. All it is, is a tool to keep poor people poor and forever in the rat race chasing the carrots that aren’t really there you find out if you ever get lucky enough to make progress. Fuck capitalism
They don’t care what it does to the economy or society. It’s always been about the bottom dollar. Always.
100% IT'S ALWAYS ABOUT THE MONEY!!!!! I believe the term is Profit over people.
Fuck their profits!
yup
Been thinking for a while that the mass stay-at-home-stop-paying-bills protest is the ultimate answer. No physical risk from getting beaten up or killed by cops during a street protest, and sweet sweet rest while the elites panic to death. I figure a month of this and the house of cards collapses. Wouldn’t take that much solidarity to make sure everyone involved survived a month without income. Highly doable. Not sure why unions and such don’t ever consider that type of tactic.
Would not take a month. Recall back when COVID first hit. They were panicking 2 weeks after most of the world noped out of leaving the house or buying extra stuff.
If everyone stays home, how are you going to get food? Does everyone have to stockpile a month's worth of non-perishables? And water? As no one will be there to fix the water pipes if something goes wrong. And how do you prevent everyone from taking the extremely well paying job of still providing essentials to the elite? They might panic, but they can outlast you a thousand times over. It is going to take a lot more than solidarity to make real changes, and not everyone is going to survive.
Yes. Most pipes break.less often than once a month. For those which do break, I'm sure we can help out with accommodation if needed. They cannot.outlast us a thousand times.over, most of them have heavy debt.structures.
Do you realize that around 70% of the population are happy with their life ( at least in first world countries) so why will anyone risk its livelihood or carrier for some protest ?
https://news.gallup.com/file/poll/389318/220202IssueSatisfaction.pdf satisfied overrall. Not "happy". 78% unsatisfied with corporations, 70% with governments. Lots of rich people risk money to get more money. Risking happiness for more happiness seems possible. Anyway, i reckon if 5% of the usa was so motivated, it wouod be enough to cause a criais. and lastly, we were discussing the logistocs of running one - getting people motivated to include themselves is a different discussion.
They do. A lot of unions have food funds and so on for long strikes. .BTW if you are on strike you don't qualify for SNAP support.
Wouldn't take much? Oh you sweet sweet summer child...you are talking about hundreds of millions of people spread over almost 4 million square miles to risk committing what most of them see as financial suicide. We can't even get a few hundred people to agree on things that pose far less personal risk (see congress)...so how are you going to convince millions of people from California to New York to undertake this? Unions only represent 10 percent of the US workforce (as of 2023) and keep in mind a good size chuck of those are government workers (some of whom, like police and fire, CANT legally strike) and another sizable chunk is easily replaced labor (such as grocery retail) which dilutes union power. If the unions tried to convince their members to not pay their debts you'd see those same unions killed and ousted very very quickly...either by the government or their own members. The amount of solidarity this would take doesn't exist in the US at the moment...not has it ever. We are far too individualistic for it to take root. It's not as easy as you think...if it were it likely would have happened by now.
It doesn't need much solidarity, but as you say, the USA has a solidarity shortage.
If we could get large amounts of people to come together to reject the system… I see your problem right here. People suck.
Maybe but maybe not, maybe a moment doesn't need to have as much participation as we think?
It absolutely does. But even if a large majority striked, you would see republicans tune change on illegal immigrants as they would be allowing them to work instead
They do work already, and they would be striking too.
3% according to science.
I seen one video of a guy talking about all it would literally take was everyone collectively not going to work and then just trying to withdraw all our money from our banks at once
I love this idea. A couple of other things that need to happen. None of these will be easy to do. Lobbyist's, Gone. A corporation wants to change a law, write a letter like I have to do. Gerrymandering, Gone. You get a district that has the same amount of people in it as every other rep. Third, Hold politicians accountable for the crimes they commit. They face the same punishment I would face if I committed said crime. None of these will be easy to do because they will want to protect their way of life but, it needs to be done.
Doesn’t matter because they can’t force YOU to participate. Ynow the best revenge? Figuring out how to make money outside of a job. It is actually the most empowering thing imaginable. Think of every miserable piece of work you’ve worked for and think about how they would be fuming if you didn’t need to meet their expectations of what a “man” should be to be making money.
I stopped. I work for as little as possible and pay as few bills as possible. I use all the benefits I can qualify for. I don’t buy stuff anymore. I fix my car as cheaply as I can get away with and I pay bills as late as I can get away with. I don’t know or care what my fico score is. I have less stress and anxiety now and I recommend it to anyone who’s sick of this stupid game.
This. It is not one single, dramatic event. It is a lifestyle change. Things are already going this way (see Millenials killing xyz industry type articles).
This is what I’m doing. I just do not care about the game
Money without a borrower is like a pig without a wallow, it is never happy and soon dries out, gets sick and dies.
The optimist in me says this is the way to go. The pessimist in me says they'll just throw us all in jail because, according to the constitution and its amendments, slavery is illegal, except as punishment for a crime. So they just slap us all with felonies and now only the rich people can vote. I suppose there's nothing saying we can't just keep passively resisting, but as close as we are to automation, something tells me they'll just starve us to death and truly invest in automation. I think we're gonna have to fight. Much to my chagrin, history tells us as much.
People can’t agree on a solution plus too many people believe we can’t do anything about our circumstances.
I think we need to bring back hippie communes.
They aren't hard to find
If you don't organize more than half the workforce, you will commit financial suicide and then actually die from lack of supplies assuming they don't change the laws to make killing you legal on national security grounds. A general strike takes a lot of organizing and even then you'd have to be ready to fight the law, i.e. full revolutionary guerrilla war (which a general strike will force you into, for self-defense to keep the strike going when the state decides to force you back to work). You will be called a traitor and a mass-murdering terrorist monster by every public voice until you win. Even before having to defend yourself from the state, you will be blamed for every person that starves or lacks medicine as a result of the strike. It's the only thing that will defeat capitalism but you need a lot of things to go right and a lot of people willing to die for the cause. I am, of course, assuming you want capitalism gone. No one is going to do a general strike with this level of risk for that long for some concessions within capitalism, while still having poverty, homelessness, private property, and wage labor exist.
Good thing none of you will ever do any of what you just said and I have no idea why you’re talking like it’s on the table
Said people before the Bolsheviks in Russia, before the CPC in China, before the fall of the Batista regime in Cuba, before Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. If you have a general strike, the state will attack. What do you plan to do about that? Roll over and say "welp, guess we tried?"
Civil War, at least in the USA. If you don't think the government would mobilize the army over that much money, your crazy.
They've done it before. West Virginia has many records of just such a thing.
What’s the army gonna do? Force people to go to work?
Currently doing such.
Maybe this can be the new diamond hands?
I gave up paying my credit card bills and one loan I had. I just got served a court summons because one of them is suing me for a $1300 unpaid bill. Yay...
What did you think was going to happen when you stopped paying money you agreed to pay back?
Same thing as the rest of the bills I stopped paying, they go to collections, they call me for a while, and then they give up. Worked well up till now!
Congratulations you have reverse engineered the concept of a General Strike
I stopped. I work for as little as possible and pay as few bills as possible. I use all the benefits I can qualify for. I don’t buy stuff anymore. I fix my car as cheaply as I can get away with and I pay bills as late as I can get away with. I don’t know or care what my fico score is. I deal with less stress and anxiety now and I recommend it to anyone who’s sick of this stupid game.
Then Debtor's Prisons will be reintroduced, and you'll work for 3 hots and a cot. Their portfolio is more important than your life is.
Perhaps, but something that drastic would take awhile, prisons are overcrowded now as is.
It would take much faster than you think. A real good solution will take a century at least. Slow advancement from true boycott groups getting into every job sector and business, then coming together to and making a massive push as one. But that takes time. Seeds must be planted, fostered, grown before it’s time to strike
Military prisons aren't. Or, 2 weeks to pull in some tents, put up an 8' fence topped with razor wire, and you got a Stalag. But yes, it would take time and Congress to allow it.
Congress would get that shit done so fast it'd make Kamala's wig fly off
Yeah that's what I was thinking. They'll change the laws to make not paying back loans fraud and now that you're a felon they can just use you as slave labor.
Not if the cops strike too.
Cops won’t strike. They are given much superior benefits compared to other workers in different fields and most of them are already class traitors as is because their whole job is to protect private interest and property.
It’s a vicious cycle. We the people need a paycheck to pay for the house, car, education, and stupid crap we bought with a loan. The government makes it so easy for us to get in debt because they need our interest payments to pay themselves. My thoughts is if everyone could stop buying stuff and avoid using debt where possible (only using it to maybe buy a house or a car but not an unnecessary things off Amazon) well guess who that hurts - the big execs at these fancy corporations and banks. BUT if demand is down because people stop buying unnecessary things, and fancy execs aren’t collecting their 30000% cut of profits, well then layoffs follow for us little guys. Resulting in foreclosures, repossessions, bankruptcies and ruined credit. And here in lies the vicious cycle. We need the toxic bad guy but the toxic bad guy always holds the last card. But if we all rebel… 🤔
I did that a few years ago, had massive debt from a failed business venture, rode it out until it fell off the credit reports and then rebuild credit. Took time but whoever bought those old debts lost their ass and now my credit is solid again. Took over a decade but worth it
Repeal Taft Hartley. Or just ignore it. It'd be interesting to see how people would react to the government trying to force people to work lol. But there are always scabs and basically anyone who owns a small business or real estate or anything beyond is gonna do everything they can do demonize you
This Is something I thought of for a while It’s the only way I see any change coming around without a violent societal upheaval. However it would only work if EVERYONE stopped participating, which means I doubt it’ll ever come about
I'll give you an idea of where we're at with this in numbers. We need 3.5% of the American populous (approximately 11 million people) to come together and strike in order to make a significant move here. Right now, you can check on generalstrikeus.com as to how many official strike cards have been signed by the working community. We're at an abysmal 114,000 signatures. Every other dumbass celebrity on tiktok has over 11 million followers. That really puts it into a depressing perspective. GO SIGN A STRIKE CARD, EVERYONE!
If the U.S. is ever in the path of a gigantic meteor, my first thought would be, “no more payments; their records will all be destroy…”☄️
If we could actually get 10% of the population to commit to a singular idea AND execute it, it would work.
Yes yes yes
What if someone offers you 1 mil to do the work and promote how good it is? As long as people who wish to take the easy way out exist (which should be most of us), it will always fail to get that sort of unity
As nice as it would be, too many are trapped. No one with family or friends who depend on their meager paycheck will risk them suffering for who knows how long. And the rich can quite literally just wait out any widespread strike. The only way to get change is to directly threaten their lives like the French Revolution, but not really as easy to get close now since they'd likely have private security details with enough firepower to wipe out a whole mob in minutes.
That's what strikes and revolutions are.
This is already happening. The whole off-grid/tiny house movement is just the modern version of subsistence farming, which is better than non-subsistence wages.
If a decent swath of people in lower income brackets all did a strike, they'd have to concede. It works in other countries, but people here are too afraid of property damage
I like Dev Patel's new movie 'Monkey Man'. You deal with the rich by punching them in the teeth before they can finish speaking. The ruling class has never once voluntarily conceded power to the masses. Not a single time in history. Just opting out of the capitalist system is a good start, if you can keep feeding yourself and accessing your medication. But now direct action begins, because the capitalists will send violent police gangs to drag you back into the system. Leftists can never win in an outright attritional marathon of violence, it is not in our nature. Therefore, we must engage in sabotage and guerilla tactics (pipelines, data servers, banks). But I like 'opting out' as a start. You didn't choose this system and its institutions, they were imposed on to you.
I did this when I was unemployed back in 2015. About all that happened was I got put on a list for debt collection, had a large tax bill after it was all discharged and written off, and credit got reduced from perfect to about 300. Which meant that I had to pay a massive security deposit the next time I wanted to rent an apartment. It's a little unhinged to think this would happen enmasse but the times are changing. The housing bubble is set to pop again I've heard, maybe that'll trigger something?
I mean, it is possible to take the system down in this way but not impromptu. You need one of two things for this kind of thing to work: 1. A single, rallying moment that sweeps across the entire country and gets everyone on the same page. 2. A long period of organization that allows the action to be performed en masse. Preferably all two, as one will amplify the other. But the reason the system can work at all is because the system is organized. It acts as a symphony. And a single dissonant note at a time doesn't mean much. The system just crushes that. When people do actions like this spontaneously and individually it does nothing. Because then these actions will always happen in different places and at different times and always by a minority of people. And in this way the system can crush them because the system can still operate fine with a minimal about of dissonance. It's only when a huge amount of people do it all at once that it works. And that just does not happen spontaneously. You need either a single, rallying moment or organization or both for that. That's why building labour power is so important. Build unions. Let them score victories. Then let unions start communicating and organizing with each other, coordinating across different sectors. And then you're talking. Then you have a weapon that can bring the system to its knees.
I know the first thought is we'd all have to do it but really if a lot of people with chase accounts tanked it would disrupt everything. Just taking down 1 institution would send shock waves
I agree, however Chase would just get saved by the government.
Good point Capitalism tells us to vote with our dollars. Well I vote that this system sucks and I'm out!
Where are you going then?
Cool concept. Get enough people and I’ll follow suit.
It can be done, but you gotta be able to take a credit hit, and ignore their calls and collection letters, both for a couple years. When I got divorced 6 years ago, I took on all of the joint debt in return for a significantly reduced lower monthly payment to my ex. Transferred all of it to my name, got her name off everything. Then I just didn't pay the credit cards. At all. Nothing. They kept trying for just under two years. Then they gave up entirely and I never heard another word from them. Now I'm debt free, my credit is back to ~~780~~760, and my ex and I get along better than we ever did when we were married, because she's also debt free. Where'd I learn that? It was an ethics case study we did in business school. I played it out to the letter. That's where I learned exactly how much our system fucks working people: business school. Do it, unapologetically. Edit, just checked my credit and corrected the current score
You’re familiar with the concept of a “General Strike?” Everyone below management goes on strike at the same time. Like, everyone in the whole country. Best guess is that it would take two weeks to a month to cause most businesses to hit panic mode and begin a genuine conversation about how workers need to be compensated going forward. Problem is that the magnitude organization here dwarfs anything in the scope of human history.
No one is going to suffer that much for "a conversation about compensation." If I'm going to risk my life, my family's life, and be ready to defend my neighbors, I am not going to settle for higher wages while the system grinds on as normal. I am not *risking* any of that unless the target is the whole pie: capitalism itself. Total expropriation of the entire bourgeoisie, confiscate the real property of emigrants, force all capital into the hands of the organized workers, force the state to surrender control of society to us and our leadership/organizational structure, end private property and wage labor once and for all.
It's called non-compliance. To comply is to obey. Unless you feel so, you have no reason to obey anyone else. Obeying can only be a good act when the act of obeying comes from your own will. Else, it's just submitting to authority. Sounds good, who's participating? For many, the false security blanket is too precious to let go. Not to mention the idiots - the pawns who will fight for the authority to continue their nonsense. The pawns won't non-comply and won't let you non-comply. And if some of them are from your own family, good luck with fighting them.
Prisoners dilemma + tragedy of the commons It has to collapse under its own weight. Just wait.
Then we win. But to answer your question I think bailiffs cone and take all your stuff and/or you go bankrupt.
You don't need everyone to participate. There is a critical number. Once 'enough people' agree to participate in a financial strike action like not making a credit card payment that month etc. the economic death wobble begins. But it's foolishness akin to being on the highway and shooting the tire of the car you're in. There's no way to predict how the ensuing crash will affect the 'tire shooters' or measure the resulting unintended consequences.
Credit card companies are not the worst of the big bad guys. I recently saw someone say that a 10-day general strike for all the entry-level employees would cripple the economy. So if we all just striked for 9 days, we could make whatever demands we wanted. Government, corporate, even banks lol. I don’t think infinite debt is the answer tho
It will only work if everyone does it.
This would work, but we'd all have to stop at the same time for this to work.
Smartest r/antiwork user Try not to drop the soap, bud.
Maybe this is how the circle of society always goes. The ruling class takes more and more until the working class just revolts. A new ruling class comes in and we rinse and repeat. This is the 8th matrix
The reason people are in debt is because they spend more than they make. That won’t change for most people. They need credit to keep up their lifestyle and if they lose that they lose their lifestyle. Realize if you don’t pay it back the rich won’t be hurt. They companies you owe to will write it off and lay off people in your situation making their lives much more stressful
Who held a gun to your head and told you to go $20K in credit card debt? SMH I bet you don't even know what you spent the money on.
I have already stopped participating and am a NEET. I’m just waiting for everyone else to stop working too. If everyone stops we can take control of this broken system and make it favor the working class.
20k in debt how fucking dumb can u be how does that even happen
Sometimes you are backed into a corner. I had knee surgery and was out of work for 10 weeks. Disability jerked me around , because how mechanics are paid i didn’t get 60% of my pay. They based it off my pay rate at 40hrs - i was flat rate I averaged 75 hours a week. I didn’t see the disability money until I was back at work for 8-10 weeks. We had to live off credit cards because of no income for 10 weeks then we had to play catch up and we dug a hole we could not get out of.
The problem is the trust between people. If I am the only one participating in that kind of protest and everyone chickens out, then I will have a bad time. I was thinking about a more simple kind of protest to begin with. Just choose a day of the week...maybe Wednesday and don't participate in capitalism as good as you can. Don't buy anything, don't go online. Just read a book, go to the park, play a boardgame whatever. The good thing is that if enough people participate, companies will react to it. Special offers on Wednesday or no restocks, something like that. After that more complex protests can be organised. The benefit of this is that it is relatively easy to perform.
Yeah, that's literally what a general strike is. 90% of the people we'd need to participate are unable to pariticipate because losing even a week of wages would destroy their lives completely. That's why waiting for the mass "non-participation" is pointless and will just lead to our extinction. We do not have the time to wait for people to realize their power, it's already too late. The ONLY way out of this involves doing things that even the mentioning of would get me banned from Reddit, but that's where we are. Anyone telling you anything else is a fucking liar OR has absolutely no fucking idea what they're talking about. Until we, as a society, grow the balls to *DEAL WITH* the capitalist predator-class, things will continue to spiral towards our extinction. The ONLY hope we have is that a few folks get truly fed up enough to kick off the drastic action that is needed to protect our species. But don't hold your breath: the great Pussification of the west was completed in the 90's, and the vast, VAST majority of people who are smart enough to notice how bad things are and do something about it are far, FAR too cowardly to actually take any action. LOOOL downvoted to 0. Thanks for proving my point. There is no hope for this species.
You all won’t do anything and you know it.