Not that these suggestions exclude other potential choices of engagement, on the contrary, this burgeoning of mass-action, this solidification of strong, class-based organization, this choice to coalesce rather than to divide, is exactly what permits an ever expanding circle of action and engagement. Lawsuits, legislative conferences, community congresses, grassroots classrooms and workshops aplenty, and coalitions undreamed of will emerge from the people's choosing, en masse, to stand and deliver.
The only issue, at some level, is whether people would prefer to complain or prefer to garner their goals and objectives, starting today. Put another way, the only issue is whether people will elect to act in concert as workers, or whether they will elect another false prophet who will disappoint and disempower them further. Lincoln intoned that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." The other side of the coin is easy to state and also true: "the people, united, will never be defeated."
ACORN Protesters at County Courthouse steps by Jacob Ruff
*We Have Nothing to Lose but Our Chains--There's a World to Win
The reasons are manifold that Americans have for the most part eschewed even a hint of conscious class-conflict. Many of the external prods to such actions that are so antithetical to self interest have appeared here: big-business mediation, profiteering schools, and the collusion of financial thugs with political opportunists, and more clearly split working people into little isolated collections, or into atomized aggregations of alienated and weakened individuals.
However, working people themselves constantly contribute to their own fractious disunity, and the attendant splintering of potential power that they might otherwise display. The most insidious of these behaviors that tear apart the chances to transform injustice and weakness and oppression is the notion that one set of workers is somehow above, or superior to, other members of the class.
Mexican toilers are the natural comrades of Americans; Black labor is the natural ally of White labor; skilled and educated wage-earners cannot advance, at least not as a group or for very long, if the common drudge who can barely read does not have a decent chance to grow and advance.
Whether workers will ever get this through their skulls is uncertain. What is certain is this. Folks will keep losing their houses; more and more people will face deprivation, or even actual hunger and want; wars will keep appearing as the natural order of life; and the most hideous vomitous will triumph in place of common sense, compassion, and decency, so long as working people around the State, around the country, and around the world look askance at each other and look for politicians and the wealthy to save their bacon.
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