It’s a serious question because the president is elected so it’s not just “hey you need to step down”.
- Definitely Musk shouldn’t be a part of things.
- Definitely the courts should be listened to (but what that means as a demand I don’t really understand)
- Definitely reign in the presidential orders, reduce their scope or number or SOMETHING
I mean, I’m not the guy to do this. But what exactly kind of things could be done to control this crazy ass situation?
EDIT: I’m taking about how we can restore and reform the United States, not visions for a new entity.
we should require the removal of trump from office. it could be done within days if congress wasnt willingly bent over a table letting him ass rape them daily.
Not just require his removal, but do to him what was done to mussolini
Without shooting him, I say.
Sure but it’d have to be with replacement.
theres already process for that. vance would be a lame president, but lame is better than ‘malicious narcissistic moron dictator felon’
No one in the American fascist party (GOP) is an acceptable alternative to Trump.
dude, you cant chase the perfect for the non-coup option. the gop arent going to just unilaterally all resign.
But I mean, ideally, the GOP and anyone associated with the party would all rot in jail like the Germans did with Nazis. Hopefully with some Dems next door.
Well as I said in another post, all of the government needs to be investigated for financial corruption. R’s and D’s. We are literally no better having Trump than anyone in the R’s because the party as an apparatus as well as a cultural institution has sold out to both capital and fascist foreign powers. But that doesn’t mean we need a Dem, unless it’s a non establishment Dem.
Ideally the new President would be a worker president coming from the general strike.
yeah, i agree with you but im also living in reality… you know, whats actually possible.
the reality is even with a general strike theres no way to just insert a new president without following process.
The reality is a general strike is unlikely to happen.
But if it does happen it happens with some organization.
Someone will gain popularity.
They can win an election with such an organized base.
They can then do what Trump is doing but x10 in the other direction.
But there’s always the better option that the general strike leads to some kind of mass conflict and Trump and his cronies get simply removed via coup.
The biggest mistake we made during the civil war was not hanging every confederate old enough to hold a rifle.
The biggest mistake we made with the Nazis was not locking every single one of them in their own gas chambers.
The biggest mistake we will make is letting anyone capable of fixing this off the hook after it’s over.
Same with the defeat of apartheid in South Africa. They let the monsters live and now fascism is being rebuilt in America.
J D would just continue with Project like nothing ever happened. Those guys are all in.
Vance would be more effective in carrying out the right wing agenda.
You need a small list of very focused demands. Occupy Wall Street and BLM failed because they started tacking on too many things.
Here are demands that will fix the core issues at the federal level:
- An expansion of the number of seats in the house and senate. At the federal level, each congress person represents far too many constituents. This is not unprecedented; the house has been expanded before.
- We must switch from first-past-the-post to proportional representation.
- The Senate’s role in passing legislation must be reduced to a time-based veto only. Meaning: a bill passed by the House must be vetoed by the Senate within 90 days or it goes to the president’s desk.
- An overturning of the Citizens United decision and publicly funded elections.
- Removal of the presidental pardon.
These five items must be implemented if our democracy is to survive. Everything else can be handled after.
These 5 things would be absolutely AMAZING, but even the biggest optimist in me can’t see this coming to fruition without the idiotic Republican voter understanding them and also coming out for them
“Make Congress Work Again”
This is going to require good branding and simplified explanations.
What we have going for us is that basically everyone agrees that Congress isn’t functional.
OWS and BLM did not fail due to not having a concrete and focused list of demands. That was media spin intended to undermine the movements. There was a widely circulated list (or really very similar lists) of BLM demands, around 5. In cities, a given BLM group would have very specific and actionable demands and would attempt to leverage their occupations and other disruptions to achieve them. Nobody in City Hall would have any difficulty understanding them nor the general public when reading the ubiquitous pamphlets at marches.
But this idea is almost true, because the actual reason for failure was a lack of experience in organizing effectively. Both movements were reactive and massively decentralized. They wasted huge amounts of time and energy trying to figure out what to do via large, open debate spaces without particularly good political education, agreement, nor effective means of organizing like committees and commitments to act on committees’ recommendations. And because their spaces had a low average level of political education, they were easy to coopt by any savvy group of liberals with a bullhorn, e.g. the people that told BLM protesters to talk to cops or get themselves arrested for literally no reason.
They were also vulnerable to tokenization, e.g., “listen to what the black people tell you”. Which ones? Black people aren’t a monolith! The actual reality in these spaces is, again, whoever happens to be present at the time and has a bullhorn. They might have great ideas built on life experience, planning actions, and political education, or they might be someone with a cop uncle saying it’s time to debate whether ACAB is racist or something. White liberals are particularly vulnerable to tokenizing arguments and will listen when told to go home using such arguments, which has been the death of many an occupation. Behind the scenes, POC organizers are pissed and trying to figure out who the person with the bullhorn was and how they can stop that next time - 5-10 years down the road, i.e. there is a feeling that it is essentially too late to “fix” the situation, and those organizers feel bitter.
So if we step back and ask what the core challenges were, they amount to having far too little in the way of mature organizers and other politically educated groups to lead and educate during these kinds of events. The ratio between members of mature organizations, politically educated general public, and non-politically educated general public is incompatible with effective organizing. So all that happens is ad hoc re-learning of the same lessons every organizer has learned for centuries, just too late to be used for the current event. Or worse, most people not even understanding what went wrong or that thete was a failure in the first place.
So, the solution is to build mature left organizations that use effective methodologies and prevent liberal cooption. And to do it now, not just as a reaction to every new major event. This is not an easy task but it is one with historical precedent and a half-decent roadmap. A list of demands is not really directly relevant, it is just a tool for organizers to use and must always be crafted for the conditions and political questions of the moment by such the ground groups.
Demolish the senate as undemocratic, and empty the Supreme Court. Somehow end gerrymandering in the house. Federally fund elections and re-establish bribery as one of the worst felonies in our government. Put election of all positions directly in the hands of the popular vote. Allow any person in any position to be replaced at any time with referendum. Appoint a special department beyond any judicial, federal, or state authority with the sole purpose of investigating and prosecuting active representatives for unconstitutional activities. Arrest representatives for the very appearance of misconduct, frequently and constantly.
And I guess end advertising and corporate ownership in journalism so we can get actual news again.
Rank choice voting to end party dominance.
Sorry the USA basically needs to be replaced for anything to get better
CGP grey has some great videos on gerrymandering, and according to him there are 3 options to combat gerrymandering:
- Politically independent commission of appointed experts or judges to draw the boundaries (not ideal)
- Mathematically: shortest split-line method of drawing boundaries (can occasionally skew results, probability based)
- Intentional gerrymandering (benevolent) to try to make the representation as proportional as possible (odd)
I’m sure there are other options but to me the best is probably #2 paired with a single-transferable vote.
You shouldn’t change the gerrymandering, you should be changing the voting system that makes gerrymandering possible in the first place.
I agree! What voting system doesn’t make gerrymandering possible?
You can just not choose representatives based on districts.
Yeah I guess that would work! Do you know of any countries that currently use that system?
China lulz
I don’t know if they’re the best example considering their elections are almost definitely being manipulated like a lot of the world’s superpowers
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Musk and Trump are symptoms.
- end citizens united
- nationalize health insurance.
You want nationalised health care, fuck an insurance based system.
U.S. capitalism has hijacked basic needs like housing and healthcare, and these problems aren’t accidental—they’re built into the system. Housing is unaffordable because banks and financial institutions treat it as a commodity, locking people into debt. To fix this, we’d need to devalue real estate as an asset and limit speculative loans. The same goes for healthcare: the system isn’t broken, it’s designed to profit off human need, so true reform means nationalizing healthcare and removing corporate control.
The demands for a successful strike should include: • Housing as a right: End the financialization of housing and limit speculation. • Universal healthcare: Nationalize the healthcare system and eliminate private insurers. • Living wages: Set a living wage for all and drastically reduce the pay gap. • Job security & union rights: Real worker protections and job stability. • Progressive taxation & wealth redistribution: Tax the ultra-wealthy and corporations fairly. • Environmental justice: Transition to a green economy that prioritizes workers.
Real change requires systemic transformation, not reforms that merely patch up the existing system.
To quibble, housing isn’t just treated as a commodity, it is treated as a financial asset that will accrue value. This nearly always leads to a massive price spiral. The same applies to university loans, for example. Once financialized, pricing spiraled even faster than the cuts to funding that were passed on to students as tuition. Health insurance and healthcare have a similar dynamic because the insurance industry is similarly non-productive and can only make larger and larger profits by basically scamming: paying out less than they promised and investing their cash reserves.
Re: a successful strike, this requires having your workers on board and ready to hold a line for each other. They have to be ready for a fight and not backstab, undercut, or balk because they are afraid. And they need to be at the table in the first place, coordinated and ready to go. This would amount to a level of organization that is currently unimaginable in the US, where false consciousness is dominant. Most importantly, whichever material forces drive people to organize will shape their demands. When forming a union, you do research first to see which workplaces are good prospects and what they care about most, then roll that into a campaign. We don’t really know what forces may build to drive people to be ready to take some kind of action, nor do we know that left organizational capacity will be what that energy ends up feeding. The false consciousness in the US that has been so effective is marginalization. Chattel slavery, genocide of indigenous people, a temporary exploitation and then rejection of Mexicans and Chinese people. A temporary exploitation and then white-ification of Irish, Eastern Europeans, Greeks, Italians. Scapegoating women, black people, gay people, trans people, and do on. This is currently a stronger tradition in the US than left organizing and it is the society the Nazis took notes from when designing their racial conquest and empire plans (though they thought the US’ racial rules were too extreme to work in their region).
The real question is not what is an idealistic list of demands to address the contradictions of US capitalism, but how we could organize from the left to win out over these fascistic tendencies (really just the dark side of liberalism qua the political ideology of capital). The path taken to organize and the historical events surrounding it will determine any hypothetical demands of a hypothetical general strike.
So, framed another way: a more appropriate question is what will those reading this thread be doing to learn how to organize, to understand capitalism and historical currents, and to join, enlarge, and improve principled anticapitalist parties and organizations that can survive and win out over left liberal cooption (like many unions suffer fron today) and right liberal reactionary violence?
Check your local anti-capitalist actions and see if anyone needs help. Trust your gut or ask here if a given organization you’re thinking of joining seems off. But get involved! May Day, as in May 1, the true day of labor, will be here soon and is a good event for seeing what anti-capitalist organizations are in your area. The lead orgs doing the work for the events of the day are a good bet.
Okay, but Trump isn’t going to do that. So, what do we demand to fix our current, URGENT situation?
Which of the issues above is not a current, URGENT issue?
If you have a “successful” general strike, the strike continues until the demands are met, that is the measure of success. If Trump (or the current system) is not going to do that, clearly he (or it) will not be in place when the strike ends.
A general strike isn’t the end goal - it’s just one tool in a larger movement for a fairer society. Without deep structural change, any victory will be temporary, and moderates will be swept aside just like in the Russian Revolution.
The real fight is against a system that: • Turns housing into feudal lodgings • Keeps workers powerless through debt, low wages, and job insecurity • Uses healthcare as a profit engine instead of public infrastructure • Pushes every aspect of life toward privatization and financialization
A successful movement won’t just demand small fixes - it will challenge the entire system that allows exploitation to continue.
Okay and I’m trying not to be contentious here but the question itself was if we have a general strike and it’s successful what will be the demands?
This was not a general question about what is needed in the USA. It was a specific question about the end goal that a general strike would have.
I was asking people to answer that question.
I do think the government agencies need 3rd party auditing. Anyone who has worked for them or with them (private contractors) knows how much unchecked spending there is. “It’s not my money” attitude.
HOWEVER, how DOGE is going about it should be absolutely illegal. There needs to be checks and balances on both sides.
Doesn’t answer your questions but I also don’t think we just not look into the ridiculous amounts of money we spend on running the government either. Yeah, it takes a lot to run it but I know how much waste there is just in private companies too.
I have wanted a bunch of serious auditors for a long time, especially in the Veterans Administration. The thievery going on there is reprehensible, and so many veterans are among our homeless, alcoholic, and PTSD afflicted populations because of their service.
We owe them.
The conditions under which the US could carry out a coordinated general strike would not look like the current US. And the demands would be subject to those conditions. US organized labor is largely beholden to capital and has no principled sense of solidarity, certainly beyond US borders, but often even within them. That would need to be developed through struggle and creating organization where there is little. See the federal workers getting screwed with by the administration? A very large percentage are unionized but their union is weak and poorly organized. They have simply accepted the dictates of their employer that they are not allowed to strike and therefore they have no basic infrastructure with which to organize actions or even think of themselves as workers that need to be militant and fight for one another.
Under current conditions the closest thing you will get to a general strike is popular riots. Those are expressions of social pain and frustration and they require no organizing.
It might sound like I’m not really answering the question, but that’s because the question itself is wrong. It has flipped the problem on its head, which is to say, is too focused on what ideas would be good to demand under a general strike rather than how would you ever build the conditions for a general strike? Demands must be historically embedded, they must be relevant to the groups coordinating a strike, and they need to be clear-eyed about the capital strike that would occur adjacent to it. We cannot say what those demands would be other than they would not be about this administration. The US working class will lose fights over and over again under all administrations until it can be organized and directed with concrete and correct political analysis.
Re: “restore” the United States, why? The US is a genocidal empire currently help genocide Palestinians and enabling the prelude to the Armenian Genocide 2.0. We should seek justice, not a “return”. The past and the status quo of the US are not goid things, the narrative that they were/are requires white supremacist thinking.
Unfortunately with my last post, a real general strike needs like a 2 word rallying cry, or a vanguard party which is dangerous. Those are just my ideas.
I’d rather we not have to go vanguard but holy shit the rich will not stop and they are so brash about it
I know I really think we need to unify on the fact you literally don’t need to be even socialist to realize we need to eat the rich in America.
After that we can argue over what next
Trouble is defining “The Rich.” Like, definitely billionaires, but there’s only a thousand of them, and you can do a lot of damage with half that. 1% are people with something around $10-15M, and that doesn’t really feel like buy-your-way-out-of-murder money. But even millionaires are probably pretty well insulated from concerns of rent and the price of eggs.
If it were up to me, “Rich” would be somewhere in the 8-figures region, but I’m one of those privileged, ‘comfortable,’ oldere people.
From a class perspective the rich are those who hire labor rather than laboring themselves. But we could start with billionaires.
I was thinking the same thing and tbh, I have no fucking clue. I sure as hell didn’t go to law school and I’m not going to pretend I know better. If it were me that got final say, I would completely wipe out the entire 2 parties and replace all the old people that have had no real conscience in modern society for a while now. I’m sure given recent events, people would say that’s illegal but desperate times call for certain measure. Oh, also just get rid of capitalism and add in a month of federal holidays. Also flex time for work if that stills applies. All legally mandated. Also rail/trains. Can you tell yet I failed civics 101?
Almost everyone in office today is a serious criminal, usually for financial crimes. We really just need to get the FBI to stop being controlled by the president and scared to prosecute sitting reps.
