this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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Lefty Memes
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
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Okay, so a bunch of people organize and then the boss fires all of them for doing so. That’s not exactly a perfect system leading towards better working conditions
Who said "perfect"?
A bunch of people organize and then the boss fires them. Then the boss has no employees to do the work. Ideally this outrages enough other employees to go on strike and in a semi-functional country it would also prompt some oversight on their practices.
The more people organize, then harder it is to just fire them. The more publicly they organize, the harder it is to just fire them.
If they don't organize, the boss just gets to say what they do and for how much money, so that's definitely not a better alternative to organizing long term in terms of "leading to better working conditions".
So yeah, organizing is better. Every time.
Yeah man, but these are real people and not hypothetical worker drones in an internet comment. If they all get fired and don’t have money for food and rent, that’s really fucking bad. You can’t say “it’s always good to organize! Just take the risk of getting evicted from your apartment! Don’t let them boss you around!” And not expect the working class Joe in the factory to look at you like you’re the dumbest guy around
Organizing isn't "taking the risk". Not organizing is taking the risk.
Organizing is your only defense against arbitrary dismissals and lacking the right to push back against abusive practices (along with voting for leaders who will enforce robust labor laws). If you want to get randomly fired in retaliation for exercising your rights the safest way to get there is to have nobody who can leverage the ability of workers to grind production to a halt.
But hey, here's the fun part about collective bargaining and worker action: "working class Joe" doesn't need to take that risk, you just need enough people to set up and fight for Joe's rights regardless. If Joe feels he has to scab because he can't take the risk that's what picket lines are for.
Gotta say, looking at the context of your feed it's quite baffling to see someone go "Biden is too far to the right to vote for him, can't compromise my leftist ideology that much, so I'll go third party" and "unions are fine on paper, but you gotta be realist and let your boss step all over you, because losing your job isn't an ideological hypothetical".
After a while one may think that one of those strong stances is disingenuous when both are held at once.