“Fuck the managers. Fuck this company. Fuck this position,” yelled Shana Blackwell, 19, overtakes a Walmart intercom Last year. “I fucking quit!” She called staff “racist” Sexist Then she walked away from the job. Her eyes lit up like fire as pride and defiance filled her cellphone video. Her Tweet was the most viral tweet in 2020.
Blackwell’s Quit-Heard-Round-the-World was followed by Beth McGrath in September 2021, Who also commandeered a Walmart intercom, railed against poor treatment, gaslighting and ended with a heartfelt, “Fuck this job.”
Rising worker rage fills headlines. September alone, Over 4.4 million Americans quit. Strikes rattled Companies from Kellogg’s To John Deere. Labor Requirements Higher wages, better benefits, more vacation and retirement. The living conditions are still very good. WorkersThese were Fighting for what you believe in can be won or lost beyond the picket line. Washington, however, D.C., where President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Corporate Democrats are removing the bill from the House.
Workers need a win. Workers need affordable housing, child care, and health insurance. — All of these are included in the stripped-down bill. One of the obstacles is the greedy paid-off Democrats. The other is the lingering neoliberal It is an ideology frames Build Back Better as an “entitlement” or an “investment”; it’s neither, it is just the beginning of The long overdue wealth distribution owed to the working classes.
Build Back Your Business
Imagine yourself waking up in a home that you can afford, taking your child free daycare, and then kissing an elderly parent as the nurse arrives. Imagine it. Working Union job building electric vehicles Taken while taking A free class at your local college Finally, You return home and look around at the dinner table. Your child says that she learned that at school. Greenhouse gas emissions Atmosphere Are falling to safe levels You feel again hope.
The first $6.5 trillion Version of Build Back Better, which was introduced by Bernie Sanders, Independent Vermont Senator, was comprehensive and passed in the House. It made union jobs that were well-paid and available to all. It was reduced to half by the Biden administration after negotiations. $3.5 trillion To pass the bottleneck of corporate Democratic Senators Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Kyrsten Silema of Arizona. As the bill nears its final stage, they further reduced it. $1.75 trillion.
The House will be open on November 19. passedBuild Back Better, 220 – 213. The version that was passed earmarks nearly $400 billion for universal prekindergarten, affordable child care programs, and extended child tax credit. It also puts aside $200 billion to provide paid family or medical leave beginning in 2024. It makes Obamacare more affordable and allocates $150 billion towards affordable housing.
The Senate version of the bill was void. family leave. The vision and dental wires were removed. Free community collegeIt was also cut. Tax credits for electric cars were eliminated. Lower prescription drug prices were eliminated. The question is why?
“I don’t believe we should turn our society into an entitlement society,” said Senator Manchin. He summarised patrimonial capitalism’s ideology in one sentence. These ideas are far more important than his. payoff by the coal industry, or Senator Sinema’s $750,000 Virtual bribes from pharmaceutical companies and many more GOP Donors to her campaign
Even venal greed requires ideology to justify it. So, when Manchin invoked “entitlement,” it connected to a conservative mythos from center-right warnings of runaway Inflation and “big government” to far-right nail-biting over “socialism.” It implicitly tapped into the imagery of the undeserving poor, a staple of Republican rhetoric from former President Ronald Reagan’s racist stump speech on “welfare queens” to former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s lament about “lazy” inner city (read Black) men.
Conservatives regularly misinterpret imagery of New Deal-style workers and policy. They see it as the beginning of something. “New World Order” Where the state seizes guns and flags, and where freedom is threatened. In the 1990s, The Republican Party fear-mongering its base with stories of Democrats ceding U.S. sovereignty The United Nations Whose black helicopters would land in suburban lawns like the sequel? Red Dawn.It was during the Barack Obama years. “death panels” where “big government” health Care would determine if grandma was alive or dead. Today, It is the Republican Senator. Rand Paul from Kentucky warning Fox Viewers about Build back Better: “every time [socialism has] been tried in world history it always ends up with state-sponsored authoritarianism and violence.”
In lock-step with the image of “big government” is the “worker,” who is not “entitled” to the basic standard of living in a modern world. Precarity is seen as a positive aspect of mobility in neoliberalism. You can achieve the American Dream if you work in unstable hours or do gig economy work. Jay-Z made Jay-Z famous by doing this when he rapped Follow the track “Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix)”: “I’m not a businessman / I’m a business, man.”
Further right, it seemed former President Donald Trump ushered f populism to the stage, but the Republican Party’s tax cuts union-busting show a pattern closer to the “Mudsill Theory” in slaveholder James Hammond’s 1858 speech, “There must be a class to perform the drudgery of life…. You must have such a class or you will not be able to have the other classes that lead progress, civilization, refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society.”
The obstacle in front The The real key to the working class achieving real benefits is not Manchin and Sinema’s personal greed or pretentious antics. It is the atmosphere of ideas that makes it possible. like cracked and dirty prisms, distort the reality of workers’ Lives into Hell
Fighting for Democracy
After the Recent November elections shook Democrats, leaving Virginia’s governorship in GOP hands and New Jersey’s Democratic squeakerOf a Fear further spilt liberals, progressives if you win
A New York Times editorial advocated inching right, to the “center.” On CNN, Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger from Virginia said, “Nobody elected [Biden] to be FDR.” Meanwhile, The Nation Jacobin Taken the Left line that Democrats failed the working class to meet their material needs. Panicked at the prospect of more losses Democrats The bill for infrastructure worth $1.2 trillion was quickly passed. Progressives fear they are losing their way leverage To push the $1.75 Build back Better Act, If so, workers will have a chance to live better lives. lost For a long time.
The question that determines the gamble for each position is: What do people want? In poll after pollYou will love the Build Back Better pieces. Yes, tax the wealthy. Yes, Medicare covers vision and dental care. Yes, to provide care for the elderly. Yes, clean energy jobs. Despite the fact that workers feel deeply their daily necessities, some people are misguided. D.C. neoliberal ideology — a distrust of “big government” — That’s it! Until they feel the benefits.
“You need the New Deal times two,” said economic professor Dr. Richard Wolff in a Truthout interview. “The U.S. hAs had a Public crisis before the Spanish Flu of 1918 or the Great Depression. However, they should not be done simultaneously. We need a government response adequate to the size of the problem.”
When asked why, Wolff noted that Left finds it difficult to push Build Back Better or social democracy in general. To The result of decades of neoliberalism. It Hardened a worldview that favors market fundamentalism, privatization and the destruction of welfare gutting unions — All of these left workers with a generational false consciousness.
“The left has been in decline for 60 years,” he said. “The percentage of unions in the private workforce is 7 percent. We’re at a historic low of organizing. Sixty years! We are a culture that holds the line. But there is something more: We’re shaking off the old ways. Look at the strikes at Kellogg’s, Starbucks, John Deere and Amazon.”
Wolff looks at the COVID wreckage and sees a break in the past that has accelerated an upward turn. “People look at the world differently after trauma,” he said. “For 18 months, 82 million people experienced Some period of unemployment. It was a traumatizing experience for them individually and their families. It is impossible to predict the outcome of any one event. The context will determine it. One solution is to become zombies. Another option is resistance. You can see it in the historical wave of quitting. Another is the number of strikes; these are the workers who to make their lives better.”
The problem is Wolff: Employers will react to the new labor militantism in order to recoup lost profits — say, By hiring three workers to do four jobs, new hires will end up working more for less. “What the Only thing left to do is to point out the problem in the system If you quit this job, it will be your last. Even a strike victory can be immediately diluted. You’re caught in a system.”
Wolff’s decades as a Marxist economist gave him a vantage point to map where we came from and where we’re going. What’s clear is that the U.S. Worker went through trauma; family and friends became sick. COVID, more 700,000 died; personal debt Increased; frontline workers risked the lives of patients and staff to keep the country going. It profoundly changed our lives. Now Workers no longer think This is You can live a decent and happy life if you don’t have any other priorities. “entitlement.” It is a debt that you owe. The ruling class.
Working-Class Heroes
“Heroes.”
The word was stapled on workers like a medal During the pandemic. Heroes. We saw in the media that nurses with faces bruised Back-to-back shifts can save lives. We saw bus drivers and flight attendants put themselves in harm’s way to keep the world from totally falling apart. The selfless acts of the working classes are an inspiration Opening in Neoliberal ideology as a basis for a new type of politics. One that can alter the balance of power during Striketober und the negotiations over Build Back better.
Today’s workers look like the post-World War II image. II, when the modern European was born welfare state was being built on the rubble. The soldiers who returned were hailed as heroes and. as in Philip Zec’s famous cartoon,The war-time suffering of masses was pushed Social Democrats and All labor parties in the To establish national welfare in Britain and Africa. The devastation caused by COVID The global economy’s quarantine coma has created a similar moment in human history, with frontline workers and the masses demanding better conditions and reparations.
For decades, neoliberalism was the dominant political ideology. It is being dismantled by workers striking and quitting. The quicker the left can channel labor militantism into a fight to Build Back Better, we can exorcise those last remnants that claim the working class must suffer silently exploitation for the mediocre delights of bourgeoise lifestyle. Karl Marx wrote that everything in the universe was made by workers. Communist Manifesto that, “They have a world to win.”
