Will the Dream of Debs, written by Jack London, ever come true? I think that it could happen or some version of it will occur. The dream was the Holy Grail of labor, which is a general strike over all of the United State.
Step one was that labor stock pile enough food and necessities to outlast the 1 percent; sort of like what the Mormons teach their followers to do: stock pile food for a year. Then the union members have to save enough money to pay their bills for when union go on strike. In the past, strikes were usually lost because members ran out of food and money.
The unions would have to be self-sufficient to shut down everything at once or to do a rolling strike planned to take place at different places to stay ahead of the corporations trying to neutralize the efforts of the strike, such as tying up the docks. Then tying up the trucks, shutting off the fuel at the refineries, followed by the railroads and power plants, and with the communication we have today, this could be achieved.
The goal is to obtain a living wage for all who wish to work, along with healthcare, pensions and a safe working environment. We have planted the seed, now we need to start to prepare. It might take some time and we need not to try to hide what we are planning, in fact, we should tell the 1 percent to read Jack London’s “The Dream of Debs,” it is only Page 31 pages. This book shows labor has nothing to hide, except the times and places of these planned operations. Like the “Art of War” says, we will pick the time and place.
Labor has nothing to lose for the “Iron Heel’ (another Jack London book) is already standing on the necks of the “have nots.” In the dream, the only flaw was leaving behind the “have nots.” If labor engages in a general strike or rolling strikes without warning and wins, we will then represent all of the 99 percent. And we will know where the opposition is and the 99 percent can beat the 1 percent no matter how much money they have.
In 2012 more than a quarter of all political contributions came from just 30,000 people who represented the 1 percent of the 1 percent, 90 percent who spent the most won. Today, we are an experiment in either a democracy, which started in 1787 or an oligarchy, which is winning. The nonunion people, like Trump and Musk, have most all the tools in their pockets to destroy our unions. They have money, they have the courts, they have law enforcement, they have the media, and 50 percent of workers that don’t know this don’t know the history of the working class people. This is the perfect storm to lose all the gains workers have made whether they’re union or not, even our Social Security and Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. So, now we will have to go way back to the late 1920s and ‘30s and dig up the old labor party books. One book, written in 1964, has the information, The Rebel Voices, an IWW Anthology by Joyce L. Kornbluh, educator, activist, and advocate. The history of our labor...
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