Strike Wire is a curated news aggregator - there is already so much good reporting, it seems more useful to organize what's out there! We aim to provide a graspable daily digest of relevant news and a referencable catalog of all reporting documented here (that's on the main page, plus more - plus news sorted by country). Still, this can be overwhelming, so we have a briefing page dedicated to breaking down the basics of various developments in the US and around the globe, with references to the reporting and pointers to relevant sections. Capitalism is destroying our world, and this destruction is only enabled by utopian idealism from politicians and powerful people ("the free market will find a solution!"). It doesn't take anything more than reading the news to see this. It isn't enough to simply observe the failures of this system though - we must join ranks with those fighting for the weekend with the family, for a vote in the workplace, for a vote in their republic, and for the security of our shared planet. We must stand together and see that from Tehran to Texas, those standing beside us are not our enemy - our enemy is the system which empowers the few, which enforces stark wealth inequality, deprives us of our dignity, pushes millions into hunger, and is dragging us to climate disaster.
United We Bargain, Divided We Beg
To understand why things are the way they are (and why things happen), it's important to understand who has control over the sources of power, and why ("are there structural reasons people tend to have such control?"). Only with power is it possible to win and change the system. In today's world, where everything is privatized (ie those with money can buy, control, and subcontract nearly any asset, from your retirement fund, your healthcare, your roads, your nation's military industrial complex, etc), those with power are those with money - that is, the capitalist ruling class (ie the people who get to decide what to do with profits). The working class labors, producing, moving, manipulating, organizing goods and services, and creating value (ie revenue). But because the capitalists control the corporations and businesses as a junta of dictators, they get to decide where the profit goes - not the workers. And so they use the profit to entrench their control - buying out the media, buying politicians, funding think tanks and organizations to slowly take power of courts, backing coups, threatening to move out of town if the mayor wants to hold them accountable, and so on. Hey, why do they get to move jobs overseas for cheaper labor? Why is it if you try to hold them accountable, they either smear you in a political campaign, or move out of town? Capitalism already concentrates power into the hands of capitalists, but our current neoliberal system endows them with further power, as the concept of "public services", especially in the United States, has nearly been wiped out in a sort of Orwellian amnesia.
While this lobotomization happens at the scale of whole economic sectors, decimating regional economies (greetings from the Rust Belt!), it also happens in the workplace - work doesn't suck because working sucks. Work sucks because you only get scraps of the value you generate, and the rest falls apart from there.
Fighting Back ("Organize, Don't Just Bitch" - Jane McAlevey): So if you want to reform the system, or even just your workplace, to make it better, you need power to fight the capitalists. They want to keep the same power structures which generate income disparities, pollution, climate destruction, and extensive social despair (what's up with the crime wave? What's up with the Fentanyl wave? It's not because people are living happy, healthy lives! See my post on why "crime politics" is misleading), so we're going to need lots of power to win (side note: maybe you've noticed, the problem isn't immigrants, "degeneracy", "government social spending", or other poor people - those are distractions from the capitalists to keep you pacified and "in your place"!). There are many strategies to fight capitalists that have come to light recently, such as the formidable indigenous activism that has slowed down fossil fuel expansion. However, the big one I will point out is one that contests capitalists control over the economic source of power - organized, rank-and-file democratic labor unions.
As I mentioned, workers produce the value of the economy - did the Apple board invent the iPhone 70, or did engineers design it, sweat shop workers produce it, and salespersons and marketers make it big? Yet who gets ALL of the power at Apple? There is a way for workers to have power though - since they generate the value at a company, if they are unhappy, they can organize and collectively make demands - maybe better wages, better hours, better healthcare, higher staffing ratios, ending two-tiered pay systems, etc. And if those demands aren't met? They withhold their labor, striking! The company grinds to a halt, and the source of power for the capitalists starts to run dry. While capitalist corporations are dictatorships, workers can force a proto-democracy on them via collective bargaining and striking. This is called "rank-and-file industrial labor".
What happens when workers do this? Most obviously, it improves their quality of life (getting a raise and better hours is nice). But second, when workers across a country unionize and join together, they can get A LOT done - and there is A LOT of history to support this, which we seem to have forgotten in our Orwellian amnesia. In the United States, things like overtime laws and pay, child labor laws, food and drug laws, workplace protections, the minimum wage, and social security are all the products of a militant labor movement which pushed politicians to implement these changes, especially in the New Deal era. The feminist universal suffrage movement (giving women the right to vote) and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement also found strong allies in organized labor (although this is not to take away from the powerful "rank-and-file" organizational efforts of those movements, themselves lessons for how to challenge power). We didn't get these because everyone simply "voted for the good guys", we got this because workers threatened the flow of the economy unless the system helped us out. Or look at Sweden and other Nordic nations, typically held as golden standards for successful social democracy. These nations got to where they're at not because they're "small" or "smart" or whatever - they got there because nearly the whole labor force was unionized, and the labor confederation could stand toe-to-toe with the capitalists. While they're in a weaker position than before the 70s, they can still credibly challenge the ruling class. In fact, Sweden nearly broke the capitalist stranglehold with the Meidner plan, but the economic turbulence of the 70s, and the subsequent neoliberal onslaught, has done much to stymie this. Still, note that their "failure" is the current gold standard of governance - not bad (but we can aim higher)! Liberal democracy (ie what the US Consitution represents) is great and all, but it's insufficient alone to challenge power and fight for a better world, one that doesn't work for the profit of the few, but for the benefit of all (One of those benefits, btw, is a livable planet).
Support democracy. Fight tyranny. Don't be a Benedict Arnold.
Right now we are hurdling towards a climate disaster, driven by the greed of capitalists. Water sources will dry up, land will burn, farmlands will go barren - and millions of refugees will have to march. In the wake of this desolating poverty, crime WILL go up (poverty begets crime). Right-wingers will (and do) spout that our woes are being driven by these poor (and foreign!) masses - it's not climate change you should worry about! That is fundamentally wrong - they are treating cancer with snake oil. While we must show up to the ballot box to keep the fascists and their enablers out of government (people who the greedy capitalists will and can work with, as opposed to reformers and unions), this alone is a losing battle. There is a way you can stand up to the robber barons, to fight against their greed, to fight for a better life - that is to organize in the workplace in rank-and-file labor unions, fighting not only for better hours, better conditions, better pay, but establishing a counter-weight in how the world runs. United We Bargain, Divided We Beg.
See here for some notes of nuance regarding the site and this perspective.