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‘I can’t believe we’re having this conversation’: the states pushing for 14-year-olds to serve alcohol
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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politics
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Someone told me the other day that the US/Canada and Europe should become one federal entity and that this would benefit everyone living in it. My response was that having america be the largest economic entity in that block imposing the "american values" of restoring child labour, lack of healthcare, removing abortion and the complete and total eradication of worker protections on Europeans absolutely would not benefit us. Maybe if america had a left to speak of things would change.
While I agree that a forced union would be a bad idea, it might actually help to empower our genuine leftwing movements to fight back against the extremists in the south and Appalachia. It helps to think of the US not as a single country, but as a coalition of a dozen or so vague regional groups, all fighting over one government.
The US has to build its own left it can't just import ours, I think most of the european left would be rejected and called "tankies" too anyway in the latest red scare shit.
Frankly the idea is absurd though and the right wing in Europe would never let it happen anyway, take the UK for example, if it happened here the left would move into nationalism and we'd suddenly have every frothing at the mouth red faced gammon standing by us on the riot barricades screaming INGLIIIIIIIN as we seek to liberate the country. Which is precisely why the right wouldn't let it happen.
While you're correct in that the American left must be it's own movement, I am suggesting that it cannot truly do so, due to the various groups being so geographically isolated from one another by the stranglehold conservatives have over the center of the continent. Despite all the problems that a massive multi-continent union would create, it might give prospective socialists a stronger political fulcrum with which to unseat the reigning capitalist establishment.
It won't achieve that without unionisation efforts. And we are not capable of doing that work. Any european travelling over there would stand out like a sore thumb and get picked up as a salt by internal sniffers. The primary work that the US needs is unionisation work. One of the things that stands out to me is how much positivity for unions I see in online spaces like this one but I think that 90% of the americans in these spaces writing pro-union things are themselves not unionised or not actively working to create a union. It's like they all expect someone else to do it for them.
This attitude of "someone will do it for me" comes from the electoralism spewed by the liberals. This obsession they have with their political involvement being ticking a box once every few years and that being the extent of it creates a mindset in which they defer any and all political power to a "representative" and expect that to be that. They all carry this mindset into everything else. It creates inaction, none of them take any responsibility for the lack of these things. Nobody else will build it for them, nobody else can, they MUST be chastised into building it themselves. They clearly already support it, but they're not doing anything to take part in building it.
With unionisation increases and real radical leadership you would very very quickly see a landscape change in politics, as these union leaders would carry significantly more influence with the workers they represent than the local politicians. The pressure this would place on local politicians to engratiate themselves to the union leaders would be significant, you would rapidly see concessions occur.
I'm going to sidestep much of what you posted, not because I don't think it's a valid argument (in fact I agree with most of what you've written), but because I think it points to a fundamental misunderstanding of American work culture.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to assume you're European. It is often forgotten, even by Americans, that the American government almost went full fascist in the late 1910s under President Wilson. This devastated unions and the labor movement as a whole. Conditions worsened throughout the 20th century as Walmart brand politicians successfully brainwashed millions into believing that labor unions were secret fronts for communist spies and cut any protections for unionized workers. Businesses began raising prices, cutting wages, and laying off workers whenever they tried to unionize. Fast forward to today and vast swaths of the population have been conditioned to associate unions with hard times and financial abuse.
Outside of specific regions like New England, unionizing is career suicide. People who act supportive of labor protections of any kind are ostracized pushed out, and God forbid you actually to start a union. A few people tried to at my old job, and they were all "cut due to budgetary reasons" the week before the first negotiations. A few people who were friends with them got sacked too, just to make the message clear. A man at another job tried to start the conversation and he was stonewalled and mocked by our coworkers until he quit. Mix that with a near complete lack of a social safety net or unemployment benefits and it becomes nearly impossible to get any kind of workers' movement off the ground.
That's not to say we don't try. My brother is studying labor law and I'm moving to a different state that has some semblance of workers rights because I refuse to give my labor to one that doesn't. I support labor movement everywhere I work, but sometimes I would rather not risk becoming homeless.
Ultimately though I have no objections with anything you've said, I'm just a sad American socialist pining for better days.