I feel like i’ve been seeing a torrent of photos depicting signs announcing a stores entire staff quitting in protest of their shitty working conditions. Nobody seems to be talking about it but are Americans starting to experience class consciousness?
are Americans starting to experience class consciousness?
probably not in a real sense given how stunted and blocked leftist ideas are in the US but i do think people are reaching the breaking point with being paid wages that have stagnated for literal decades. (almost half a century now if you think about it.)
The other day while my landlord’s realtor was showing the house to the next prospective tenants I was talking to her candidly about how much shit was wrong with the house when we first moved in and she said to me “Well for what you pay for it, it’s not gonna be perfect.”
I pay fucking 1500 a month for this shit box. It’s asinine that 1500 is nOt EnOuGh MoNeY to live in a house that isn’t all fucked up. That’s a lot of money for most people, hell thats almost more than my gf makes a month. I think people are really sick of shit like that.
real “any price the market dictates by definition will be fair!” shit
edit: but landlord rant aside it’s also a critical moment for a lot people to build class consciousness tho bc people are feeling the effects of contradictions. They have the brainworms and propagandized ideas about how life in our liberal democracy is supposed to go and lived experience that counters that, that’s a powerful starting point for building consciousness the problem is they have a lot of poison in their heads and basically have to be deprogrammed before they can really be class conscious, and different people of course will need different levels and different amounts of time to get over that hump.
water just pouring out
almost 10 years ago when you could get a 2br apartment for less than 1800 dollars in my area my gf and I lived in an apt in the center west part of town that was about … i think 11-1200 dollars.
Several times I’d be chillin and hear water pouring in… it basically pooled in our ceiling and eventually broke and poured into the bathrooms, this happened at least 10-15 times over the year that I lived there. I tried to go upstairs and tell the dipshits living there to stop using their water if they could bc it was pouring into my apt but they were dumbass 22 year old stoners and didn’t give a shit, what can you do lol.
But yea it was a nightmare I had to stay up all night several times changing pots and stuff over.
ALSO they hoodwinked us and showed us an apt with a washer and dryer which is why we were moving there in the first place and then at the last moment changed us over and put us in one without any so we had to deal with that for a year.
Fuck rent seeking
The HVAC unit in my 2br (no amenities, $1k/month, Appalachia about 20 minutes from the nearest metro area) just leaked. It would freeze over and overflow with water. Like gallons of rusty water just flooding my apartment occasionally. It also rarely worked. I was overheating (almost 95°F) and felt the carpet slosh like a waterbed. Literally 8 sqft of space was just straight up flooded and pouring into by downstairs neighbor’s apartment.
Lived there for 4 years and it happened about 6 times per summer.
80% of my income for that shithole.
Your edit is the most correct and best post I’ve seen on this site in some time.
IF YOU ARE ON THIS SITE READING THIS AND TRULY BELIEVE IN SOCIALISM YOU NEED TO BE OUT THERE RAISING THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE WORKERS. Whether you’re in Amerikkka or anywhere else in the world, it’s the most important thing to be doing right now. Laws of historical development are a thing, but that doesn’t mean you just sit around and wait for a revolution.
Lenin wrote that for a revolutionary situation to develop and succeed you need not just objective conditions to be manifest (weak capitalist power structure, extremely heightened contradictions, etc.) but also the subjective conditions, i.e. a working class that is class conscious, that has become “a class not just in itself but for itself” to quote the manifesto. Potentially revolutionary moments are wasted when the working class is not ready to act, and the first step on that road is actually creating a working class, versus a bunch of disparate workers.
Join your local party, if you don’t have one or it sucks start a party, if nobody else around you is a socialist try to activate your friends and co-workers, put up propaganda posters at night, hand out pamphlets or stick them in random books at the library or leave them in public places/public transport. Anything you can do to advance the goal of socialism. A person might tell you to fuck off in person, but in a weeks time they might get shat on by their boss, or get some bullshit bill they can’t afford, or get harassed by a cop, or have a family member die because of fucked up medical bills, and somewhere in their brain is the pamphlet you handed to them saying “CAPITALISM IS THE REASON YOUR LIFE SUCKS”, and maybe for 1 in 100, 200, 1000 people that light switch flicks on and they think “fuck it maybe I should watch that YouTube video, maybe I should read that article”, and you have a potential new comrade. This isn’t glamorous work but in a lot of places around the world it’s the work that needs to be done right now.
any price the market dictates except when the supply of labor drops, then it’s a problem.
edit though: my statement is sort of a facile argument because while some of the drop in labor is due to conditions, it is also because there’s now actually a safety net for some people with expanded unemployment, which is not itself among the mystical free market forces. Of course, having that position of security is a very good thing for workers and I’m happy for this, but it’s important to note this factor. This is not the only time the supply of labor has dropped however, and we do see a similar response from capital in all cases, no matter the cause. This is an interesting situation and, inshallah, workers more broadly will be able to take advantage of their momentary advantage to extract some concessions to keep them in the fight to come.
there is for sure something happening and you’re right that type of article is buzzing around everywhere right now. I wouldn’t be the least bit shocked it’s related to increasing the min wage discourse and that fake as fuck idea that people are “JuSt liVinG oFf GoV HaNd oUTs” and shit. Could even something like the Cato Institute is attempting to push on top of everything else. The thing is, almost all of those jobs are extremely low paying, bad or no benefit service/food type jobs. After the pandemic hit people realized really quick how low they were on the totem pole and I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to go back to work in those places. It’s a thankless, highly underpaid job and many of those places are making hand over fist in revenue.
It’s not the calamity they’re trying to make it seem, obviously. And right now should theoretically be when the market forces meets the demands of labor, but we also all know that is a fairy tale used to convince people that this capitalism shit actually works like they say on paper. I just reallllly fucking wish we could build a bigger, diverse labor coalition and demand more and actually get something out of it. There is also serious problems right now (worse than usual) at the border and for work visa immigration so now farmers are posting sad stories how no one wants to work on their one step above plantation for peanuts.
good post btw, lots of good comments here.
exactly. it’s sad and tragic but at the very least it did at least make more people, especially people who haven’t worked those jobs how utterly insane it works right now. Some people wont ever truly get it or benefit from not admitting to it, and i’m not going to go as far as to say it created actual class consciousness in most people unaware of that concept, but at the very least *some * people finally got why we need both a higher min wage and better social services to kick in. The UI and rent moratorium were absolutely crucial in making sure the country didn’t actually enter in a chaotic, deep depression. I mean we could easily argue we never left the depression, especially after '08, but it could always be worse!! The other thing is we’re not out of the clear yet, there is plenty of ways it can go south as shit reopens more and more, even with our high vaccine rates.
it’s still absurd how they called medical staff heroes and that was it. Not advocating for permeant wage increases and stop making them work 12+ hours and the completely artificial and manufactured doctor shortage.
Thank you for your service :sankara-salute:
I’ve heard about that subreddit before. Is there a reason that Kohl’s of all places has such an active forum? Is it somehow worse or different from other retail jobs?
You’re living through the largest resurgence of labor and class consciousness in the US for the past 50 years if not the past 100 years. Enjoy and get organizing if you’re not already
The breakdown in ability to manufacture consent is really evident on anti-china posts on Reddit. Tons of people are calling them out for the bullshit they are now, and ever since people started doing so a couple months ago they’ve been hitting the front pages of Reddit far less often
