Biden and Dems pushed hard against immigrants and beefed up ICE.

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.

Vance would be more effective in carrying out the right wing agenda.

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.

Start with a non-job so you can study while working. Then get internships relevant to your major once you know your direction.

A non-job is one with a lot of downtime and where they don’t care if you read. Parking attendant, small movie theater worker, custodian at a place that is well-staffed.

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.

So who are you accusing of doing the wrong thing

I’m saying the FRG broke its own laws to annex the DDR. I haven’t said that this is inherently “the wrong thing”, I note it being illegal because liberals pretend to care about such things.

The government of the GDR or the FRG Government, because is it still illegal annexation if the country being annexed signs a legally binding contract that it will become part of germany without a plebiscite.

There is no provision for this in the FRG’s provisional constitution at the time. I linked to it and explained the two options already.

The first reunifucation document cites article 23, indicating that the GDR would enter as states (Laender) adhering to the FRG constitution, which was subject to article 29. The only other option for reunification provided for in the FRG constitution was a negotiated rewrite of the constitution, itself requiring a plebiscite, which they did not do. The “contract” does not mention article 29, but it is subject to the only two provisions in the FRG constitution for the reunification (accession if states via plebiscite and negotiated rewrite of the constitution, also requiring a plebiscite).

After the fact, liberals began coming up with explanations for why this blatantly illegal “contract” was actually fine, including things like the sourced document conflating general elections of parties with a plebiscite.

Can you please point out where in my source it states that it was the type of election you say it is because to me it seems to say they made public votes about the unification.

If you were interested you could read it yourself and look at the dates and what they are referring to with their proper nouns. Every election they listed was a general election of parties / candidates, not a plebiscite on reuniting.

“Bei der einzigen freien Volkskammerwahl am 18. März 1990 erzielte die Allianz für Deutschland, das Wahlbündnis für eine möglichst schnelle Vereinigung, 48 Prozent der Stimmen”

Do you know what Allianz fuer Deutschland was? It was a coalition of parties. When they refer to them getting 48% of votea, they are referring to their party coalition getting those votes. Liberals go on and on about this election, they even xall it the first free election in the GDR since the Nazis took over.

“Dieses Ergebnis wurde in den Kommunalwahlen am 6. Mai 1990 der Größenordnung nach bestätigt: Wieder wurden die Parteien der Allianz für Deutschland mit landesweit 35 Prozent am stärksten, hinzu kamen die Liberalen mit nun sogar 7,3 Prozent.”

This is the local elections in the GDR a little later. Again they are referring to political parties receiving votes.

“Die dritte Wahl fand am 14. Oktober 1990 statt, elf Tage nach dem Vollzug der staatlichen Wiedervereinigung. Die CDU errang teilweise zusammen mit der FDP in vier der fünf neuen Bundesländern die klare Mehrheit, die Einheitsgegner der PDS verloren leicht. Ein ähnliches Ergebnis brachte die erste gesamtdeutsche Bundestagswahl am 2. Dezember 1990.”

This is referring to elections after reunification day. This time at the state level and national. Again they refer to parties getting percentages of votes: CDU, FDP.

Maybe there is something lost in translation as I am reading the german version and you might not be or something else.

I can read German.

This is also the part I need a source for: That the elections were made out to be a vote about the unification process.

Your own source is saying exactly that. Its examples are all general elections for party representation in legislative bodies. Your own source calls this, “Im Einheitsjahr 1990 stimmte die Bevölkerung der DDR zweimal vor und zweimal nach dem Stichtag über die Wiedrevereinigung ab.” For those who do not speak German, this is saying, more or less, “in Unification Year 1990 the citizens of the GDR voted twice before and twice after the reunification deadline”. It says they voted for unificatikn four times but every example is a general election of parties.

The Article you stated from the GG just states what we already agreed on: That there was a vote to be held and if the vote turns out not in favor it will not happen.

No vote on the decision was held. None. Article 29 is quite cleae that the people must vote explicitly on the decision to join. It even says there cannot be more than 2 choices presented on the ballot.

Literally every single German old enough to remember life in the DDR that I know (which aren’t exactly few - I am German) recounts that time with terror.

Define “that time”. The DDR suffered a state and economic collapse shortly before it was annexed, due to general instability of the Eastern Bloc, particularly the liberalization of the USSR (which also caused its collapse). Anyone who was a teenager would have lived through something scary.

If you don’t know any East Germans who preferred life back then then you have likely only spoken to people who weren’t adults for any appreciable amount of time in the DDR. Or live in a very strange bubble. I have met plenty and I’m not even German.

In my entire life, I have not met a single person alive back then who wants to go back to the DDR. There’s no notalgia, only painful memories.

The fact that you’re literally unaware of Ostalgie suggests you are generally unaware of anything about those who actually lived in the DDR. To have lived as an adult there for, say, 20 years, they would nedd to have been born before 1950. How many 70-90 year olds do you hang out with? How many who were kids and teenagers in 1985, i.e. now 50-60 years old? I had to make an effort to meet such people, who were younger when I did.

My source said that there were four equal elections in which the population voted in favor of the unification

Your source said that and then proceedes to list four votes of the type I had already described. They voted for parties for general elections. For national elections in the GDR, for local elections in the GDR, for new state elections, and then federal elections with everyone in the FRG as well (which makes even less sense but I avoided quibbling). I already explained this to you two comments ago when I went through how the bullshitting worked: the law called for plebiscite but they instead just claim the results of normal elections for parties counts instead.

You have also been bamboozled by this illogic. I said it was illegal, thos source clsims it was popular and there was a hand-wavy proxy vote, and they successfully convinced you to not question the legality.

although 55 percent thought it happened to fast, 80 percent were in favor.

Polling in the GDR was very poor and you should not trust any of the polls. Many of the attempts at polling showed supermajority rejection of reunification and you shouldn’t trust those, either. Funny enough, this is actually one of the practical benefits to having a plebiscite on these kinds of questions: you don’t have to guess.

I need sources because we are talking about facts in history that you claim to be false

Again, for what topica do you need sources? Which things can you not look up on your own and would prefer me to grab for you? Your source was just the things I was already saying happened, it did not add anything to the conversation, though people with Reddit brain always get excited by a link and some quotes.

You can review Article 29 (the one used to absorb the GDR) here. From this translation:

“(3) The referendum shall be held in the Länder from whose territories or parts of territories a new Land or a Land with redefined boundaries is to be established (affected Länder). The question to be voted on is whether the affected Länder are to remain as they are or whether the new Land or the Land with redefined boundaries should be established. The proposal to establish a new Land or a Land with redefined boundaries shall take effect if the change is approved by a majority in the future territory of such Land and by a majority in the territories or parts of territories of an affected Land taken together whose affiliation with a Land is to be changed in the same way. The proposal shall not take effect if, within the territory of any of the affected Länder, a majority reject the change; however, such rejection shall be of no consequence if in any part of the territory whose affiliation with the affected Land is to be changed a two-thirds majority approves the change, unless it is rejected by a two-thirds majority in the territory of the affected Land as a whole.”

Though again, you:

have

not

told

me

what

sources

you

need.

Di you understand now?

Do you have a source for what the elections were because I provided one.

The one you provided supports what I said. You do not seem to be understanding what I am saying. Please ask for clarification if you are having trouble understanding.

Also in representative surveys after the unification 90% of east germans were happy about it, which indicates that it was in favor of the east german population. Source: the article above

And? Doesn’t make it legal.

I think your point doesn’t really have power if there is no proof of there not being the public votes.

I think it does because liberals are all about feigning belief in rules and the rule of law. Right until they don’t.

I will reply to you as soon as you have sources for your claims

What sources would you even need? Do you know how to talk to other people and ask them questions when you want to know something?

I think it’s representative of my friend network. Perhaps I misunderstood what you were asking. This was a response to “how many leftists do you know?”

And what was that in response to?

No I have not read Sakai yet. This topic is not new to me, I just disagree with you.

These are somewhat contradictory statements.

But very well, I am glad that we have reached the mutual agreement that it is not an appropriate word for non-indigenous people in general, which was my original point that you responded to:

Reading this reminded me about another unpopular opinion: I think “settler” and “colonizer” are poor terms for non-indigenous people broadly.

As I see it, it turns out we both agree. I misunderstood your initial response to that statement as one that was intending to be a counterargument. So, sorry – I really didn’t mean to straw man you; I legitimately misunderstood what your point was.

I introduced the use of the term. When you started talking about your own understanding, I told you I was talking about something else and explained what it was twice and with examples and context. So far as I can tell that was entirely ignored in order to seek conflict. This is a tendency many of us have at the beginning, but we must train it out of ourselves because it is highly counterproductive.

Like, all my friends are leftists. When we talk about politics, they sound like leftists, they say leftist things, and espouse leftist values. My friends are all leftists because my friends’ friends are leftists and I make friends with my friends’ friends.

Why would you think this would be in some way representative? It’s just your friend network.

Regarding “settler,” I think it’s a motte-and-bailey tactic you’re using. The motte – the easily defensible position – is that settler refers to people who are bigoted. The bailey – the hard to defend position, but which is easily equivocated for the motte – is that it refers to any non-indigenous person. […]

You’re wrong in your attempt to identify a fallacy and are doing your own one at the same time (straw man). I have explained at least twice that being a settler is a psychology derived from settler colonialism. Someone else suggested that you read Sakai. Have you done so before trying to contradict and lecture? Have you asked questions about a topic that is clearly new to you?

You keep belaboring this straw man that it means anyone non-indigenous. I think I was pretty clear on this, so can you explain why you are pretending otherwise?

I don’t deny that it’s a useful verbal weapon against bigots. I would merely like it to be well-understood that a verbal weapon is what it is intended to be.

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

How was it an illegal annexation if the rulers of the country signed a contract that was literally about uniting with western germany.

I just explained how. You can review the articles governing West Germany to verify this if you’d like. Are you being obtuse or did you just not read what I said?

I will ignore everything else you said until you clarify.

Edit: actually I will reply quickly to the rest because it is just quotes from one article doing the bullshitting I mentioned. They play fast and loose right off the bat, saying the peolle voted four times for reunification, twice before and twixe after. Let’s look at their examples.

1. The one I alreasy described to you and that you are obtusely avoiding thinking about: the vote for members of their analog of a parliament. This is not a plebiscite for joining West Germany.

2. The exact same thing but for local elections.

3. The exact same thing but for newly entering state elections.

4. The exact same thing but for the whole of Germany.

Given that you don’t organize, how many leftists do you know? The people I know ran quite the gamut before winding up coherently left.

I don’t know why you’d be astonished at the term being used dismissively. Generally it’s when someone is being white supremacist, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, etc. They may not even realize it at first because it’s normalized for them, but when they respond negatively to correction well guess who’s digging in their heels about being shitty. That’s exactly who you don’t want to cater to. They will eat up all of your time and fight you the whole time because they have not developed basic humility.

The settler mindset has long outlived the immediate settler colonists that were genociding the natives or otherwise assisting it by stealing land (with extra steps). Nobody who uses the term has that meaning. We are referring to the settler colonial psychology that persists, and particularly its US version that is merged with white supremacy and national chauvinism.

You can also recognize it in other Euro settler colonists like the Afrikaners and “Israelis”. They tell the same stories about deserving the land, of doing a better job with it, of blaming the colonized for fighting back or “bringing up the past”, they seed conversations with racial supremacist implications and sometimes just overt racism. Are cowboys the good guys? Is it cool to be a cowboy? If you picture a cowboy in your head, are they a white guy? Most cowboys were brown and a substantial minority were black. American settler psychology has in some ways moved beyond those examples, however, as the “settlement” is nearly complete so they can entertain performative actions like cynical land acknowledgements while never supporting Land Back or even just basic material improvements for natice people. They can temporarily “feel bad”, but not so bad as to need to actually do anything, because the national genocide doesn’t warrant doing even one tangible thing per year.

I have not gotten too deep into the material basis of the settler mindset, but it is also prevalent and the most important. The fundamental fact of free or almost free land (stolen land) led to an economic base premised on it that has been slowly closing up. It acted as a release valve for social pressures that advanced in Europe, it could create profits from essentially nothing and be a carrot dangled in front of the face of generations that told their kids and grandkids that you could just work hard and go be a farmer. Two depressions resulted from the loss of the material basis for this but not the culture, as The New Deal and associated red scare then coincided with the US firmly taking over as prime imperialist, propping up the welfare of white people of settler culture via neocolonial exploitation. Pineapples on tables and virtual guarantees on jobs and cheap houses for a few generations. Not so much for black or brown people.

These are things in living memory. They color all of our experiences, ambitions, cultural references, and attitudes towards one another - and what we think we owe each other (usually nothing per this mindset).

Re: knee jerk reactions, yes of course, it is supposed to be dismissive when you call someone a settler to their face. It is usually an irrefutable fact and they don’t know how to deal with it because they don’t understand it. Is it always wrong to be dismissive? I think it can carry important emotional content so as to agitate others. Maybe the audience isn’t the centrist settler, or is otherwise someone they think it would be a waste of time to try and convert directly. Most of the time they are going to be right about that. A “centrist” sharing their opinion already lacks humility and that’s rarely the place a person can improve from.

Poland being part of germany and east germany are very different things.

Not based on what parent said. Their simplistic rationale was that it was somehow legal and fine because it used to be part of Germany before WWII. That applies equally to both.

There is a much larger gap between poland being part of germany than east germany being part of united germany.

Only about 35 years or so. East and West were split from the end of WWII to 1990. You seem to be exaggerating and drawing an arbitrary line.

So anyways, by your logic you think it would have been legal and good for Germany to annex the parts it lost to Poland so long as it did so before 1990? Are you sure you’ve thought this through?

Also, the GDR literally agreed to the unification contract so it’s not an annexation.

Incorrect. There were two process options:

1. Carry out the creation of a new nation via negotiations between states and the draftinh of a new constitution.

2. Absorb states into West Germany if their populations produce a majority vote in favor.

They “chose” the latter and then didn’t do the vote. They did the usual annexer thing and just fudged some bullshit to claim that the GDR government following its first Western-style (and massively Western influenced via cash and NGOs) counted since it was a ruling coalition and therefore represented the majority. Again, this is just inventing some bullshit to get what they wanted. This is somewhat like voting for a pro-Brexit party that says they want to start the process of Brexit and then, lo and behold, they are forcing an immediate and unfavorable Brexit that you would not have supported and against the law of both the EU and the UK. Only the result is that instead of breaking treaties, you no longer have a country or basically any of your laws, you are simply annexed. So you cross your fingers and hope the Western propaganda is true and your previous state’s was false (spoiler: it was the opposite).

Now, generally speaking, I am not a “but the rules say otherwise!” nerd. But liberals do think of themselves this way and their propaganda tells them that everything they do against the authoritarian commies is actually for democracy and the rule of law. So when they see a basic fact like this, they either go into denial mode based on vibes, twist themselves into a pretzel (like the official legal logic), or acknowledge the reality and start to question their assumptions.

I would agree. Both are just a standard Hero’s Journey where they build a team and increase their power to then resolve the major conflict. And both use East Asian culture essentially as a fantasy element to entertain a Western audience in a relatively respectful way. Most audience members don’t get most of the references because they aren’t familiar with the narratives or traditions to which they are referring. They just understand it as “other” and don’t see a deeper meaning. In that sense they are both somewhat exploitative, though these examples are very far down on my list of grievances against capitalist entertainment media.

The settler mindset is taught to basically every American either through school or wider social conditioning. It is an ongoing challenge to left organizing and has to be unlearned so that one can take liberating actions rather than explicitly oppositional settler ones. It is a mixture of white supremacy, colonial chauvinism, national chauvinism and myth-making, and some other reactionary ingredients that many have trouble observing because they are so normalized. And indigenous people can have this same mindset to varying degrees just like a black American can internalize anti-black racism.

The core precepts taught about US history are fundamentally a lie to benefit this mindset. As Marx said, the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. A bit of seemingly harmless Americana like [fruit] picking, a little farmhouse that sells [fruit]-based goods. Well, about 100-200 years ago you can usually bet that land was native. Not much folksy history to draw on. Not much tradition, aside from what was imported and normalized by waves of settlers for which whiteness was invented by ruling class interests to mollify the newly white people and further exploit everyone else. An identity that rationalized the theft of that land, of “settling” it for the imported culture’s definition of stewardship, of extraction for [fruit]. The history of that place is told as a “family farm for 7 generations”. Its crop is picked by underpaid workers, many of them undocumented: the labor underclass established for the modern settler mindset. Wage slaves and sometimes actual slaves, something considered perfectly normal in the settler mindset. An actual horror and overt injustice often just a few meters away and yet everyone is not up in arms demanding equal treatment. Instead, they respond to the ruling class’ demands to blame the marginalized for the bourgeoisie’s harms, they call for cruelty and deportation or they call for the status quo in response. Rarely do they call for liberation or equal treatment. The idea of open borders is used by the far far right to ridicule the far right that also wants closed borders. The idea itself is considered absurd by the mainstream settler mindset, as they are told it is absurd because it is against settler interests. “Imagine having to make just as little money as a Spanish-speaking brown person!”, they internalize. They pick the [fruit] by the pretty white farmhouse and talk about how nice it would be to own their own place just like this. So long as they eventually own a house - or believe they will - they tend to not organically question the system that benefits them, surrounded by a system that discourages or coopts such thinking.

It is a potent force to overcome and it is why a full socialist education in The West takes so long. So much to unlearn. So many potential pitfalls. So many places where you are basically asking a person to have empathy for others and not interpret this as a form of self-hatred and get all defensive. Because to understand US-based oppression is to hate it. To be revolted. To reject all forms of settler thought as best you can, as you refuse to ever intentionally celebrate genocide or chattel slavery or the crushing of entire nations’ simple dreams of sovereignty, food security, intact families, and limbs.