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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

"Nonviolently showing up"? I might or might not agree but let's face it, most of us won't even bother to show up at a voting place on election day. People just don't care. Maybe they'll kvetch to their acquaintances about how bad the other side is, but overall there's a lot of complacency. Similarly, you don't need to arrest corrupt politicians, you just need to not vote for them. Support a primary challenger if they're incumbents. That kind of thing. But of course that's not going to happen either.

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> Similarly, you don't need to arrest corrupt politicians, you just need to not vote for them. Support a primary challenger if they're incumbents.

Most of the time, the alternatives aren't any better. That's why some people are apathetic.

That's one excuse.

I think the problem in the current US political system is that a tiny majority of votes wins you everything. If this won you the 49% you deserve, then things would be different.

This is why you should simply strike. 10% of the US population striking would exert immense power and make the ruling class crumble.

10% of the US population is currently unintendedly striking. I don’t see the ruling class crumble yet.

They are unemployed, not striking. Being unemployed means they are not needed by a corporation, thus them not working does not damage the profit of any corporation by disrupting its function. But when you are employed in a corporation and run its functions, then you can strike and exert pressure by disrupting its flow.

If we consider this striking, it would appear that a large portion of the population (I don't know the actual percentage), composed of all walks of life, has decided it's of the utmost important to union bust and push people back to work without really making any attempts at resolving anything, and even with the knowledge that forcing people back to work will result in additional loss of life. "Sure, the mine is collapsing on people and giving you all black lung, but if you don't get back in there the town will shut down".

Doesn't really bode well for any future mass action.

I don't think you can categorize layoffs as unintentional striking. Businesses are capable of laying off a lot of their workforce without crumbling, they just wind up running leaner and pruning some of the growth they had in the last few quarters. Striking means you organize enough of the employees that once they're gone the business cannot operate, no work gets done and there's an active effort by the strikers to advertise that the business is not operating in order to put further pressure on them.

The difference is purpose, and intent. The people not at work right now have been judged non-important, and have no purpose.

If the 10% was distributed differently, in the intent of maximum damage instead of minimum damage, and if they had a clear goal of overthrow, the ruling class would be fucked and the stock market would be at 0.

Of course, having a "strike" where everyone is willing to go back to work and only non-essential people are striking will not do much of anything as far as power relations. That much is obvious to anyone.

A two party system is literally a failure mode of democracy.

People don't show up because they don't think it will work.

Voter turnout was over 50% in 2016 and 2018, even after the effects of voter supppression.

And you don't need 100% turnout for an election to work; you only need a nearly unbiased sample.

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