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?
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.
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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.
that shit is inexcusable. There's so much shit we have to eat dealing with landlords bc the only alternative is being homeless which they go out of their way to make hell as well. all the fees and bullshit and demeaning processes just to live in a place you can't even feel safe in or that your belongings won't get fucked up in bc of some bullshit like that.
Long over due for some serious mass tenant union shit or something.
I tried to organize one at the beginning of the pandemic, but my pamphleting campaign was intercepted by the class traitor super who got $8/hr and rent discounted 50%.
minor handouts and double crossing your fellow proles, the dead end of many a class struggle in america.
good on you for trying tho comrade :kim-salute:
That's not even a handout, that's indentured servitude.
Also it's apparently illegal to try and organize a tenant union here lol. They were threatening legal action if someone tried again.
well i mean the 1/2 off rent but fair point 8 buck is nothing.
also jesus christ what an absurd law. if i ever wanted to point out how capital controls the system thatd be a good place to start.
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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.
yea wages are one thing that are curiously not allowed to be free in the free market. Not like the bosses could just ..idk stop being leaches and pay their employees better wages, that'd be crazy talk
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.