I have to flesh it out but I keep being struck by the contradictory nature of American elections and how frankly nonsensical it all is and it returned me to this (from Wikipedia)

Gallup principal economist Jonathan Rothwell concluded, in a 2020 analysis and economic impact study of the PIAAC results collected during 2012 - 2017;[55] commissioned by the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy,[56] that the United States could increase its annual GDP by 10%, adding $2.2 trillion in annual income, by enabling greater literacy for the 54% of Americans reading below a sixth-grade level nationwide.[57][58] The analysis noted that, of the 33 OECD nations included in the survey, the U.S. had placed sixteenth for literacy, and surmised that about half of Americans surveyed, aged 16 to 74, had demonstrated a below sixth-grade reading level.[55]

If this and similar studies are accurate it means a significant number of Americans can read what’s on a page and repeat it back to you, but couldn’t tell you what it means or draw anything from it. If it is the case that people can read but not understand than no wonder Americans are so clueless - they’re thinking at the level of twelve year old children.

I think coming out of this election one of the things we should be doing is organizing for the collective education, both political and general. It’s no wonder that communists of yore prioritized workers schools, study groups, newspapers, etc. Illiteracy is a tool of the imperialist because it allows people to wallow in ignorance and uncritical thought. We should be organizing study groups (and schools where possible) for the people in our lives to study, appreciate, and create not just theory but also art, music, literature, etc. of both the expressly political and seemingly apolitical varieties. As long as we are engaging with people and challenging them to think for themselves they will come closer to socialism.

These groups can also serve as the basis for actual organizing which is the second thing that we as a society need to learn. We must make change if we want it, politicians and bureaucrats will not do it for us. This is especially true in the workplace where workers have come to rely on government intervention or legal contracts for far too long into a time when capitalists do not care and will only respond to actual labor action.

Somewhere between forty and seventy percent of American adults do not demonstrate comprehensive English literacy meaning they can technically read and write but the ability to recall, analyze, reference, or think critically about text is at or below the level we expect twelve year olds to read at. This is not a matter of them being able to read words on a page, it’s a matter of them being able to think. America makes a lot more sense when you realize this.

Final tallies aren’t in but it seems like significantly over half the population also did not participate in this election.

I’m kinda curious how badly the CPUSA has burned its bridges with the international community around this issue with their continued support for Democrats. The IMCWP was supposed to meet in Beirut last month and now the CPUSA’s Lebanese and Palestinian comrades are being slaughtered while they unconditionally support someone who has pledged to continue the carnage.

Very much social democratic with a revolutionary veneer. They run Organizing for Power which promulgates the organizing model of “don’t do anything unless 90% of the workforce basically already agrees with you”.

Yeah I agree that most of the union workers in the US are not particularly well off. Unions like NEA and UFCW are massive, business-oriented, and many of their members are dirt poor. I think the issue we run into as leftists is that we just sorta dogmatically look at unions as a good thing (or at least Lenin’s century old formulation of them as useful forms of proletarian organization) or we go ultraleft and reject them as colloborators in colonialism and genocide (which isn’t to say they aren’t) with very little insight into the internal contradictions of a union, how they came to be this way, or what a union even is. The lack of democracy and the outright hostility to workers self organizing within the big unions fucks their members over just as their protectionism or militarism fucks the global proletariat over.

Near where I live for instance there are union members in mills who are frequently ordered to work 24 or more hours in a row and their local has been outright hostile to any sort of strike or activity to fight it. Idk what their contract looks like or how well they’re compensated but they’ve had multiple members killed in car accidents driving home and many more injuries on the job after working for a day straight. These are the “good union mill jobs” everyone’s grandparents had.

There are of course union workers in military contractors and such that are directly benefiting from Imperialism or other forms of exploitation, but the reason the big unions suck is because they are one degree from state institutions designed to choke out proletarian revolution and democracy, not because their members are all living rich off the blood of the global south and have democratically decided to keep it that way. White collar non-union workers in email jobs are much more likely to be true labor-aristocrats that produce nothing than a UFCW grocery clerk or an NNU Nurse.

Actually, some of the people this address was given to would go on to create the SPD and Marx and Engels would support them. The SPD, though it contained a conservative wing, would remain the party of the German proletariat until it split over supporting the first World War and the Bolsheviks in Russia.

I’m not sure what specific names the German petty bourgeois were organizing under in 1850 but at the end of the Communist Manifesto they discuss a number of trends in German politics that would include the petty bourgeoisie.

They were talking about the German petty bourgeoisie who they thought would betray the revolutionary proletariat once a bourgeois republic was established. 70 years later the Social Democrats put down the proletarian revolution in Germany to protect the Weimar Republic, inaugurating the reaction in Germany.

Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled.

-Marx and Engels, March 1850

The big unions are all corrupt as fuck and absurdly top-down and undemocratic. (edit: also a lot of people in the labor movement are grossly incompetent and gullible) This is because they’ve been shaped that way since FDR. The NLRA was designed to turn unions into state sanctioned and controlled institutions and then they were purged of anyone who had ideological commitments to democracy or socialism. From there they were allowed to collect dues from employees working under their contracts even if those employees were not members of the union which meant there was no material reason for them to actually do anything more than win an NLRB run election and a single shitty contract. Then they could embed themselves like ticks in job sites.

Today most unions are sitting on billions of dollars in pension and insurance funds. Union officials regularly make six figure salaries for nothing while their members make poverty wages. They are blatantly undemocratic institutions in which the members have so little say that the federal government consistently intervenes in elections. The unions do not have any obligation to recruit, educate, agitate, or organize their members. Most of the unions are only interested in getting Democrats elected primarily to fight right to work so that they can continue to extract dues from non-members. The unions also frequently suppress the self activity of their members and make it harder for them to organize and will even collaborate with management to remove problematic workers. When strikes or other actions do happen they happen at the whim of union leadership, not the members. They have been shaped this way by decades of opportunism and US government interference.

Unions do not have to be this way though. There’s no actual obligation to go through the NLRA process. There’s no obligation to work under the boots of the big unions. We should aim for strategic militancy not timid super-majorities. We should exercise working class power and democracy, not legalistic state power. We should fight like guerillas, not like liberals. Communists in the US should focus more on workers and sow our roots deeper into job sites, but among the 90% of American workers that are not organized in any sort of union who are generally the most proletarian workers, not among the 10% who are in unions. We should not seek to join bigger unions that will stamp us out. We and should replicate the successes of the CIO ninety years ago. If we are in the big unions already we should be organizing within them as communists, forming caucuses along our political orientations and tactically supporting reform efforts.

I like to try and believe most people are fundamentally good but your median American is probably casually racist and misogynistic (and all around an ignorant bigot). They don’t want to vote for a woman or a POC even if they might not feel comfortable saying that out loud. To their right only gets worse and the population of voters skews right.

Of course the Democrats have no real strategy to get around this issue besides running women or POC with further and further right politics which doesn’t seem to be working.

As leftists we recognize that the solution is building a proletarian class that can either correct the politics of the average proletariat here or crush the proletariat’s enemies here. There’s no magic candidate we can run that will attract masses of workers because there are very few people who self identify as workers in any meaningful sense.

It always surprises me how few deaths or major injuries happen in retail environments. There’s relatively few hazards but holy shit I’ve never seen people take their own safety and the safety of their employees so unseriously for the laziest reasons.

American fascism is unique from its European manifestations in that it has firmly consolidated itself in the bourgeois state apparatus and civil society. When European fascism seized power it needed a paramilitary force, dictatorial strongman, and violent purges of “undesirables” because the regime had not consolidated power.

In US society that consolidation happened long ago though. The US regime keeps its “undesirables” in a constant state of precarity, ghettoization, and incarceration and only occasionally ramps up the genocide to mass killings. It’s paramilitary base has been incorporated into the state as it’s police force. The US regime allows a carefully controlled facade of Democracy because it does not need a strongman. The US regime allows limited leftist ideas to proliferate and act as long as they do not constitute a threat.

Many leftists who claim to worry about the “threat of fascism” are actually worried about the existing fascism burning hotter than it currently does - and they’re not necessarily wrong to do so - but any analysis that worries about some incoming fascism on the horizon without realizing the disease is already here will be fatally flawed.

The first big question is if you’re public sector or private. If you are public employees then you do not have collective bargaining rights under Texas law which means there would be no union certification election or contract. This doesn’t mean you can’t take action and win changes, but it will not be easy and will require strong solidarity and militancy.

If you are private sector then you can go through the NLRB process if you choose, but you are not obligated to.

The big unions you would want to talk to are the National Educators Association (or a local thereof), The AFL-CIO (who will probably put you in touch with American Federation of Teachers), SEIU, or the Teamsters. If these unions were to work with you they would probably urge you to take less militant routes, but will have lots of resources that they might dedicate to your campaign.

Alternatively you could reach out to a smaller more radical organization like the IWW, United Electrical Workers, or EWOC that would be more supportive of radical action but wouldn’t really be able to dedicate much to your effort.

Ultimately the resources a large union contributes mean very little to a union effort compared to the organization, solidarity, and militancy of the workers and their community though. All of the lawyers in the world will not win your demands. The best thing you can do right now is form a small committee of the coworkers who most seriously want to organize and interview with these organizations and democratically pick the one that feels best. Don’t be scared of going independent either if your committee is unsure of who to work with or if these organizations refuse to work with you.

I think the clearest indication of how weak the left is in the US is the incredibly superficial understanding of the labor movement in this country and the contradictions within it. Just total ignorance of how the big unions constantly fight each other, fuck each other over, and screw over the broader working class, oftentimes for the pettiest nonsense. They’re all more than happy to sell out the most vulnerable and isolated workers if it means a slightly quicker deal with bosses and the collection of dues money.

This doesn’t even touch on the fact that a lot of these unions are full of white collar workers that we would probably condemn individually as social fascists but then they go on strike and we celebrate it for some reason.

I’m sorry you got screwed by this. I hope you can find decent work somewhere soon.

To add to what the comrade said, there is a centuries long history in Europe of Jews being accused of dual loyalty as an excuse to stir up antisemitic fervor and terrorize Jewish populations. The idea only really became common in Africa and the Middle East after the proclamation of the state of Israel and the Nakba which led to the expulsion/fleeing of most of the Jews in these countries who had lived in them relatively peacefully for centuries.

That’s what it already is except they just execute you in the street and then get a paid vacation.

Speaking as a former DSA member, I would probably now advise against joining them. The org is split between right wing opportunists operating in bad faith and guileless leftists who constantly get run over by the right. If you were to join I’d say don’t give dues to the national, join Red Star, support the IC, and push for open hostility towards the right wing of the organization. The one thing DSA has got going for it is that they’re big and can probably connect you to work you’re interested in (until the NPC steamrolls you for not being a lib).

PSL seems cool from an outsid perspective. My one problem with them is they don’t seem to have a great analysis of the US labor movement but there’s basically no organization in the US that does so it can’t count against them too much. PSL split off of Workers World which I personally think has a much better news site/paper but doesn’t seem have as much of a presence on the ground. Both organizations seem to have similar politics in the Marcyite vein though.

IANAL nor do I know the specifics of Texas’s laws but I would encourage her to only communicate about it over encrypted channels whose designers will not comply with Texas’ laws and delete any communications about it that are not encrypted. She should do her research on where to go with a VPN. She should make sure her phone or any other device is not tracking her location. She should tell nobody and lie to anyone she needs to provide a justification to. She should pay in cash for as much as possible. If they’ll need her medical records she should have them printed off and deliver them herself. Afterwards she should destroy all physical and digital evidence that she can. She should also never talk to law enforcement without her lawyer present.

My guess is that they aren’t actively hunting people who leave the state for reproductive care but if she does all that it would awfully hard to convict her even if they were aggressive about it.

Never admit anything to your boss or the police. If you’re drinking at work you are an alcoholic and you should get help though.

In the US more people than any any other state in history (save for the worst period of Nazi Germany) are kept as basically slaves in jails and prisons on drug charges and they are loaned out to capitalists. A significant section of the underclass is held down by drug use where they are sedated both personally and politically, forced into the worst jobs, or the reserve army of labor.

This isn’t a conspiracy though. Like the prisons aren’t conspiring with the cartels. It’s all just capitalists trying to make money by screwing someone else over and seeing both extremely vulnerable drug producers and drug users and taking advantage of them. Capitalism rewards this so it’s reproduced until it isn’t possible to squeeze any more juice out of it.