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where are worker rights parades? why are we focusing on very limited issues?

All I see out there are gay rights, trans rights, whatever parades.
And people actually show up. like wth. given that it's 5% population max.

Where are the worker rights parades?
US workers are 80% of the population (sans elderly, kids and disabled).
Why is noone doing it? Why is noone organizing Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear"?

Why does US east coastline still owned by billionaires and we have to ask permission to walk on that sand?
Where is healthcare for all?
Where are bike lines?
Why dont we nationalize and own the oil fields in US?
Where are mandatory 1 month vacations? (even fucking China has them). ?

Lots of people would march for those demands.

Wt guys? just fucking why?

23 comments
  • Okay, it's a really complicated issue but you've got three big things that are all kind of working together here:

    1. Political capture: the US' first past the post electoral system basically guarantees that there's going to only be two main parties. They were always vulnerable to capture by the wealthy, but the Citizens United decision functionally guaranteed their capture by the groups with the deepest pockets. The democrats themselves are shit scared of any serious left policy because they know it'll scare off their big donors, and despite the fact that fundraising has not directly translated into winning for them, they're terrified that they're going to lose the support of the wealthiest and that'll guarantee election losses. At least, that's the optimistic interpretation.
    2. Cold war reaction: the US didn't just have one red scare, we've had two or three spread out over several decades. There was a huge cultural reaction against communism after WWII, and being an open communist during the Cold war would just get your ass disappeared (according to my now dead boomer dad, though I've seen no evidence to support it), beaten up or killed by locals, or shunned. A lot of folks were terrified of espousing left policies because they could easily be suspected of or painted as communist. While the cold war is passing out of living memory, the chill that it left on American leftism for the better part of 100 years is hard to overstate.
    3. Our intelligence agencies have consistently worked across all levels of government (local, state, federal) to harass, discredit, and sometimes kill left leadership and organizations. The CIA itself ran a very successful multi-decade campaign of overthrowing peaceful, democratically elected left-wing governments across the global south by directly sponsoring, aiding, and training right wing reactionary movements, and there's not really any evidence that they stopped. There's no reason to think that they're not still working hard today to prevent any serious left movement.
  • Have you ever noticed when you make a point there always someone saying well what about x, y and z? Or pointing out that something they personally relate to wasn’t directly called out so they’re being excluded? A lot of people would see something focused on workers rights/labor and go off on some tangent about how they’re unemployed so they’re being discriminated against or how it’s more important that we focus on trans issues or some other hot button identity politics issue and labor is just a distraction/you're purposefully trying to distract from other movements or the group that only wants to destroy because they don’t believe what we have is worth saving (these types are overwhelmingly abelist and don’t realize how much disabled people would suffer and die if we just threw the whole system out) we don’t have a labor focused movement because there’s so many voices that want center stage for their pet interests and they understand a large unifying movement that allows people they see as less morally righteous on the door is a threat to them and their imagined moral superiority

  • You ask a lot of legitimate questions there, causes that you and I could come to an agreement over. I would erase the starting point though. Pride movements and workers movements might both look like similar demonstrations. They are borne out of very different motivations. People might look down on manual laborers but you wouldn't have to fear for your safety in certain parts of your city for being one. LGBTQ+ folks can't say the same. Pride movements bring awareness that we have discriminated or are still discriminating against whole swaths of the population - mostly for silly reasons. That's different from a disagreement about how exploitative capitalism should be permitted to be.

    Another negative connotation is that this "why are there LGBTQ+ pride parades but not ...?" is the leading question of people who think straight people need to have a pride parade as well. Like you couldn't live a heteronormative life every day without fear of retribution. And I'm hoping that you don't think along those lines and therefore would not want to be this close to that argumentative train of thought.

23 comments