US doesn’t have a social safety net for people to fall back on. So people here can’t afford to lose their jobs by being out protesting for weeks.
I wish I could upvote this more than once. Without social safety nets, the average American cannot do anything to jeopardize their job without losing health benefits or income - and most folks are living paycheck to paycheck.
If mass firings happen, and people realize they will literally be fucked unless they can force the government to listen, then maybe we’ll see wider scale protests.
I used to think that Americans are just too lazy and ignorant to protest, that it’s just excuses, but… when COVID hit and tons of people got either fired or just couldn’t go to work, suddenly there were protests everywhere. That made me reconsider my position in a big way.
That is precisely what a revolution is about. It is about forcing the government’s hand. If we worry too much about the idea of social safety nets while we protest, we will never get anywhere. Revolutions were never about being convenient or cozy. It’s about fighting for a better tomorrow for the benefit of all who oppose tyrannical strangleholds.
I don’t understand why people feel they should comfortably protest without worry of losing their jobs and everything. When, you’re going to lose them anyways one point or another and it won’t be your fault either.
I hear you, but there’s a material difference between
- if I protest, I could lose my job, family healthcare, and roof over my head
- I don’t want to protest because it’s inconvenient/discomforting.
There’s also a matter of critical mass. We’ve had it drilled in our head that unions are bad precisely to discourage group action. If I protest our use of AI at work, or if I want to raise a complaint against the local government, and I’m alone? That will 100% end with severe personal repercussions. If my team of 5 walk out, that’s harder to fire all of us, but absolutely doable.
If the entire division walks out, then we have some change leverage.
Now scale this out to the ~340M Americans, and you can see the problem.
Also, critical mass affects the area of effect - if utah loses their shit over something, how does that impact New York? Missouri? Answer, not really at all.
So you need something that will get a critical mass of 340M people, across 3.1M sq miles (8M square kilometers). Can that happen? Sure.
Sure it can.
That’s exactly why protests are needed.
It’s also a huge country that’s very diverse, so one region or state isn’t going to be aligned with others they don’t even know to have solidarity.
But there will start being hot spots for the same reasons in Europe. It’s possible the US has better tools to control and pacify any movements (with work dependence - money and healthcare, being one of them).
We’re also a settler colonialist state. We’re set up from the foundation as a society that respects property rights over human life. People get shot for knocking on someone’s door asking for help here. Our police torture and kill with impunity, and we imprison more of our population than any European country by far. It is hard to build strong working class movements but we have had some bright spots in recent history. But it’s also true that rioting in a few US cities wouldn’t have the same impact here as it does in France.
Ding ding ding. We can’t get healthcare if we’re unemployed, we’ve been broke for a long time, and we can’t pay the rent if we lose our jobs. Calling out to protest when our bosses can fire us for literally any reason means we’re inches from homelessness at any given time.
That just sounds like a very good reason to protest
This is more why you must protest and insist on change, than any possible excuse not to.
That’d be fine if I was alone, but I have my wife to worry about and there is no way I’m leaving her to be homeless.
I respect the position. Its up to each individual to decide for themselves if they want to be the slaves who keep themselves down or if you deserve and then demand better.
It’s a lot to ask people be homeless for “the cause” a cause with no defined leaders, demands, or support. Build a community where people know they’ll have a couch to sleep on, a meal in their stomachs and hope to be rehired once it’s said and done and you’ll get your revolution. Everyone wants to skip the build a community part and go straight to the uprising but it doesn’t work that way
It’s like we have to. Voting? People think voting is going to change things? Not when we’ve got an active tyrant looking to upset voting polls at the mid-terms or worse, the next general election. Especially when we have a political party that outright will not play things fair and square once they got power.
Voting is like a passive aggressive way of change. We’re past that point and we’ve been past that point.
You use the tools available to you and escalate as the situation demands. Voting is an imperfect, but important tool. Use it while you still can.
That’s starting to feel by design.
US only has safety nets for the wealthy, gambled with large sums of other people’s money on stupid shit and lost it all and fucked up the stock market for everyone and started a recession, there there, here’s sone public tax money to pick yourself up
We pulled it off with occupy wall street
Did we??
I mean in some respects, occupy Wall Street was successful. It changed perspectives and raised class consciousness in a lot of sectors , including normies. It raised a lot of today’s political actors in the US.
In its stated goals, it was more a failure than success.
Why would European riots/protests spill over to America? That’s not how this works.
Americans have been protesting. Rioting, not so much. Those are much more rare in the US than France.
Mass movements spring from the ground up, and the American working class quite famously doesn’t see themselves as part of the global working class. Solidarity protests are few and far between.
Americans have been picnicking at unprecedented scale.
I saw a thread about it where someone asked “Ok, but what are our demands this time? All this turnout is useless if we don’t do anything with it”.
The answer given? Vote.
… That was all. …
They won’t
Apart from the valid things that have already been mentioned in this thread: police violence in the USA is a thing. Hell, you can get shot for helping a fellow protestor. Yes I know, police != ICE, but if a real riot breaks out, I can imagine sending in the most ruthless (and psychopatically trigger-happy) shock troops to quell them.
Police violence isn’t just a US-specific problem.
Yes ACAB sure, but there is much less accountability. One of my friend works on a think tank that advices governments, hidden sources of protests and recommendations.
They’ve stopped taking US city clients. Let me explain why.
they’d have list of 15 recommendations, on how to deal with protest, top 10 generally aimed at addressing root cause and then maybe 5 or so for addressing issues with protests, like containing them in certain areas and for legal liability reason one recommendation has to be “arrest destructive protestors”.
How this is interpreted in Europe is arrest someone who breaks a glass window and what ends up happening is police then beat up someone suspected of doing this. Sometimes suspect gets maimed, I don’t think any have died for protest that the think tank covers.
How it happens in US is that think tank’s recommendation is quoted in courts as justification for trying to arrest a “agitating protestor” and then slightest hint of refusal just get arrested, the protestor gets shot. In 2024 alone US cities used think tanks recommendations in court 3 times. 7 protestors killed across 5 cities. Most don’t even make the news if protests are few hundreds in a small city.
I helped with formating of the presentation my friend used to convince board of think tank to stop taking US clients.
Anyway point being, there is difference between US police brutality and European one.
No it isn’t and I am not saying that it is. Actually, our media are doing their best to downplay racist police violence in one of our biggest cities.
To return the whataboutism: in the US, as a toddler, you can get killed by the police because your mother alledgedly stole some groceries (and because you happen to have the wrong skin color). If that is the bar for police violence, I can only imagine what will happen during an aactual riot (as in looting stores etc).
Americans when their country is overrun by fascists:
Actually i would like to see it reach Russia first.
Folks in the US are both comfortable enough and unsteady enough that they will not move. It was Zizek about a week back who said it, people are not desperate enough yet to get to this stage. *** sniff! ***
Ask me after the midterms.
I honestly think it’ll hit Canada first. Our population is smaller than France’s. Not that I’m advocating for it or anything
Having grown up in the US, I don’t see anything substantial happening short of civil war unfortunately. And even then it won’t have clear borders, it’ll be scorched earth class war
The US had the perfect opportunity on Halloween with the “de Flock” movement and that appears to have gone nowhere.
How many flocks did you remove?
0, I was working.
So you are the person you’re complaining about?
Nope, one person is not a movement. The movement failed.
50 years.
They are waiting to be rescued by the Europeans. They will await, with the guns beside them.
They don’t even reach all of Europe
they won’t. our capitalist owning class has ensured the workers are far too tired, depressed, poor, and infighting.
Speak for yourself.
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Cops are going to go ape shit if their supply of cans of Pepsi gets cut off.
