This is War: Reclaiming the Collective and the Power of the General Strike

If you read any of my posts lately, you know I’m on a rant, but especially the one on our newly rebranded "Department of War" and the endless, unauthorized clusterfuck in Iran, you already know the deal. The system is not broken. It is working exactly as it was designed to. It is a highly efficient machine built to keep us isolated, broke, and staring at our screens. We’ve been totally convinced that the only power we have lies in choosing to vote between political parties that are both funded by the exact same corporate boards.

Let's stop pretending general politics can keep up. It can't. The legislative and judicial systems are locked in a pay-to-play loop, and we are holding a ticket to a game that was rigged before we were even born.

We need to stop the bleeding. We have to look past the political theater and realize that we are in a quiet, structural war. And our only real weapon is the one they have spent the last eighty years trying to make us forget: our labor and the general strike.

The Great Decoupling: The Math of Your Exploitation

We are constantly fed the classic "bootstrap" myth: if you just work harder, you will get ahead. It is a beautiful lie, but the cold hard numbers tell a much uglier story.

From 1948 until 1979, typical worker pay and productivity grew in virtual lockstep. As workers made the economy more efficient, their standard of living rose proportionally.

Then, in 1979, the corporate class decided they had shared enough. They intentionally severed that link. We can look at this decoupling through a simple mathematical formula where the divergence, represented as △ over time t, is the gap between net productivity, P_net, and typical worker compensation, C_typical:

Between 1979 and 2025, net economy-wide productivity grew by 90.2 percent. Meanwhile, typical worker compensation grew by a miserable 33 percent.

This means our current divergence has reached:

This 57.2 percent gap is the exact measurement of our exploitation. It is the massive transfer of wealth from our backs to their bank accounts at the top. If our pay had actually kept pace with the wealth we generated, the typical American worker would be making an additional $16.40 per hour today.

This wage deficit was not an accident. It was a coordinated heist. While the bottom 90 percent of us saw our wages drag, the top 1 percent saw their compensation skyrocket by 160 percent.

Doubling the Labor, Halving the Pay

But the theft goes even deeper than that. Look at how they exploited the household.

Since 1948, women's labor force participation skyrocketed from 32 percent to nearly 60 percent. Think about that. Think about what that means. The capitalist class essentially doubled their labor pool. They got twice the brains (ok, probably more than twice, let’s be honest), twice the hands, and twice the economic output.

Yet, instead of doubling our collective prosperity, they used this massive influx of workers to suppress wages across the board. Today, it takes two full-time incomes to afford the same basic middle-class stability that a single earner could secure fifty years ago. They doubled the work, pocketed the record profits, and left families drowning in soaring costs for housing and childcare.

And when women demand equal pay, they are met with systemic roadblocks. At the median, women's earnings are still only 84 percent of men's earnings, largely because female-dominated industries are systematically undervalued. We did not double the workforce to build a better society: we did it to double their margins.

Reproductive Rights as Class Warfare

Now they are tightening the screws even more. The frantic, constant, state-by-state push to recriminalize abortion is framed as a pious, moral crusade. But don't buy the BS theological packaging. It is a calculated economic bludgeon.

If you want to keep a working-class population compliant, you make sure they are desperate. There is no better way to trap a woman in economic insecurity than to take away her choice. What they really want? To block her career mobility, force her to accept low-wage, non-union labor and then continue to try to exert force over her by mandating her to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. It’s a raw tool of social control masquerading as spirituality, designed to ensure a steady supply of vulnerable, desperate workers who cannot afford to strike, organize, or say "no" to their bosses. Who can’t afford to lose the little bit that they will give.

Yesterday’s Shameless Looting: The Slush Fund and the IRS Pass

And before you go telling me I’m overly dramatic, just look at what happened over the past couple of days, culminating in May 19, 2026. The mask didn't just slip; they threw it in the trash and set it on fire.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who happens to be Donald Trump’s former personal defense attorney, signed a memorandum officially declaring that the Internal Revenue Service is "forever barred" from investigating the past tax returns of Donald Trump, his family, and 500 of his related companies.

It is a literal, executive-signed get-out-of-jail-free card. They settled a petulant $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed over leaked tax documents by permanently shutting down all audits into his family’s businesses. As tax experts have pointed out, there is not a single precedent in US history of the IRS agreeing in advance to permanently forgo the examination of previously filed tax returns for any specific person or business. If you are an ordinary taxpayer, the rules apply. If you own the executive branch, you get to do whatever you want…apparently?

But they didn't stop there. Oh no, of course not. We have to reward all his loyal subjects.

A day before the IRS waiver, the Department of Justice announced the creation of a 1.776 billion dollar "Anti-Weaponization Fund". This is a taxpayer-funded slush fund designed to pay out "compensation" to Trump's political allies who claim they were victims of "lawfare" under previous administrations.

The attorney general's office has already confirmed that this money will likely go to fund payouts for January 6 insurrectionists that the orange idiot pardoned on day one of this presidency. Patty Murray was completely right: this is a sitting president looting the public treasury to pay off his personal, violent enforcement arm. Even Jacob Angeli-Chansley, the QAnon Shaman himself, called it "blood money" and an abuse of power by a would-be king.

We are actively funding the protection racket of our own oppressors.

The Demonization of the "Other"

How do they keep us from burning this whole system to the ground? They run the oldest play in the imperial playbook: they point at the "other".

They tell us our problems aren't caused by the billionaires looting the treasury or the corporate attorneys capturing the courts. They tell us our resources are scarce because of the poor, the undocumented immigrant, and the non-Christian.

They demonize marginalized groups, using state-sanctioned violence and militarized border spectacles to manufacture a state of constant fear. They purposefully keep us terrified of each other. They ensure we never look up from our manufactured culture wars long enough to notice who is actually pulling all the puppet strings. They turn our want for safety into a weapon of division, ensuring that a disjointed working class can never unite against them.

Powell’s Blueprint: The Strategic Hijacking of the Courts

This did not happen by accident. The billionaire class played the long game, and they played it beautifully.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, corporate America was panicking. They were losing legislative battles on environmental protections, consumer rights, and labor safety. In response, corporate attorney and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. drafted a memo for the US Chamber of Commerce on August 23, 1971.

Powell’s memo was a literal call to arms to the elite. He warned that the free enterprise system was under "broad attack" from universities, the media, and religious pulpits. He argued that corporate America must end compromise, cultivate raw political power, and deploy it aggressively.

The Powell Memo became the blueprint for the modern corporate lobby. It led directly to the creation of ultra-wealthy, coordinated networks like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute. All the right-leaning “think tanks” that are all designed to manufacture consent and normalize the rule of the rich.

But Powell’s most dangerous advice was his "Neglected Opportunity in the Courts". He recognized that the judiciary was the most effective instrument for economic and political change.

Once Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court, he began delivering on that promise. This decades-long project eventually gave us Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and Citizens United in 2010, rulings that declared corporate spending is "free speech" and opened the floodgates for unlimited, anonymous dark money in our elections.

By March 2026, Idaho became the 25th state to pass a resolution begging Congress for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. But while the states beg, the corporate cash machine keeps spinning. The 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race cost a staggering 90 million dollars, making it the most expensive judicial election in US history. Our democracy has been bought, paid for, and gift-wrapped.

Educational Redaction: Erasing the Resistance

To keep us from rising up against this captured system, they had to make sure we forgot we ever had the power to stop it.

A comprehensive report by the Albert Shanker Institute surveyed the most widely used high school US history textbooks in the country, published by giants like McGraw-Hill and Pearson. 

The findings were devastating.

Our textbooks have been systematically changed to distort, downplay, or outright ignore the labor movement. They present labor organizing as inherently violent and disruptive, without looking at the very non-violent examples. They also completely ignore giving credit to unions for winning the social protections we take for granted: child labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and weekend rest.

This historical erasure is highly organized. The Texas State Board of Education, representing districts with low-turnout off-year elections, uses its massive purchasing power to force publishers to sanitize textbooks nationwide. In 2010, the Board’s conservative majority approved standards that mandated the study of conservative icons and the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Of course, they also downplay systemic inequality. Huh, shocker isn’t it?

This curriculum manipulation is so severe that a McGraw-Hill geography textbook actually referred to the Atlantic slave trade as a "migration" of African "workers". I’m sorry, what? A migration? If that’s what we call a “migration” can we start doing this to some of the people we’re talking about here and see how they like it? 

This is seriously a modern version of the United Daughters of the Confederacy's "Lost Cause" campaign during Reconstruction. Through pamphlets like the 1919 A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, "Miss Millie" Rutherford successfully blacklisted any textbook that depicted slaveholders as cruel or secession as a war for slavery.

When they control the curriculum, they control the collective memory. And a population with no memory of collective struggle is a population of perfect, compliant workers. Just how they like it.

The Myth of Meritocracy and Billionaire Worship

This educational erasure is reinforced by the neoliberal "myth of meritocracy". We have been taught to believe that upward mobility is easily accessible, and that if you are struggling, it is simply because you aren't working hard enough.

But there’s a harsh reality that isn’t talked about. What about the fact that intergenerational class mobility in the United States is among the lowest in the industrialized world. Half of a father's relative income advantage is directly inherited by his son. Yes, you read that right, his SON. Only 8 percent of children raised in the bottom 20 percent of the US income distribution ever climb to the top 20 percent as adults. In Denmark, that figure is nearly double.

We have internalized the "tyranny of merit," blaming ourselves for our own exploitation. And yet, here we are practicing a bizarre, religious hero worship of billionaires. We pretend these oligarchs earned their fortunes through grueling personal labor. Is that really it? Can they, and we, ignore the millions of teachers, nurses, and warehouse workers who work themselves to the bone and will never see a fraction of that wealth.

Billionaire fortunes are not generated by hard work. They are captured through "unearned income," money derived from the mere ownership of assets like corporate equity and stocks rather than direct labor. It’s created by sociopathic tendencies to not care for anyone other than themselves. It’s made by exploiting others. 

It is a system designed to concentrate wealth upward, extracting the collective value produced by millions of workers and converting it into political leverage to weaken public systems.

The Legal Cage: Making Solidarity Illegal

To protect this upward flow of wealth, corporate interests have built a legal fortress designed to break our most powerful tool: our labor.

The foundation of this cage is the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. This was passed over the veto of President Truman. Enacted after an unprecedented postwar strike wave of nearly 2 million workers, Taft-Hartley was designed to strip labor of its teeth.

The act outlawed secondary boycotts, wildcat strikes, solidarity strikes, and political strikes. By banning secondary boycotts, where workers at one company strike or picket in support of workers at another, they successfully fractured working-class solidarity. They isolated our struggles within individual employers. They made sure we could never act as a unified class, standing together.

The chilling effect of this legal cage was cemented during the 1981 PATCO strike. When 13,000 air traffic controllers walked off the job to demand safer working conditions, Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 of them, banned them from federal service for life, and used military personnel to break the strike.

This was a massive turning point. It gave public legitimacy to the permanent replacement of striking workers in both the public and private sectors. The fear of losing our jobs en masse totally annihilated labor militancy. The annual average of major work stoppages in the US plummeted from 289 in the 1970s to just 35 in the 1990s, permanently widening the inequality gap.

The Modern Precariat: Gig Work and Antitrust Weaponization

Today, the corporate class has evolved past traditional employment altogether. Under the banner of "flexibility," digital platforms have built a modern precariat of gig workers, classified as independent contractors rather than employees.

Now, let’s be honest, it’s a brilliant legal shield. Because independent contractors are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, they have no legal protections against retaliation or termination for organizing.

Even worse, if gig workers attempt to organize a collective work stoppage or negotiate for standardized rates, they pretty much can’t. If they do, they face potential antitrust prosecution under the Sherman Act. In the eyes of the law, a group of food delivery drivers striking for living wages is treated as an illegal price-fixing cartel. All of a sudden they are now potentially exposed to federal court injunctions and treble damages.

The Federal Trade Commission has recently issued guidelines trying to shield gig workers from antitrust liability, but this guidance is legally fragile. And, let’s face it, if ever attempted to be enforced would have immediate challenges in the courts. We are entering a new era of "Government by Injunction," where the law is used as a blunt instrument to keep us disorganized and subservient.

Rebuilding the Sanctuary: Persuading the Public

So, how do we break the cage? How do we persuade a public that is terrified of losing their healthcare, missing rent, and being labeled "illegal strikers" that a nationwide general strike is our only way out?

First, we have to stop treating the law as a moral authority. The law is not neutral. As labor scholars point out, the boundaries of the law are simply the temporary lines drawn after a historical encounter between different classes. When workers are pushed to the brink of exhaustion, the law becomes secondary to survival.

Second, we must look to historical precedents like the 1919 Seattle General Strike. For five days, 65,000 workers completely shut down a city of 315,000 people. They didn't do this by waiting for permission. They did it by building a parallel, worker-led infrastructure of survival :

• Logistical Administration: The Seattle General Strike Committee operated cooperative kitchens that served 30,000 meals a day, ensured hospitals received clean laundry, and kept milk deliveries running for babies.
• Alternative Information: They bypassed the hostile corporate press by publishing their own daily paper, the Seattle Union Record, to keep the public informed and counter the "Bolshevik plot" propaganda.
• Community Public Safety: An unarmed force of labor's "War Veteran Guards" patrolled the streets to maintain order, resulting in a strike that was completely free of violence.

A general strike cannot succeed if it is treated as a single, chaotic day off. It has to be an organized, community-supported withdrawal of labor - prolonged until the point is not only made but listened to and acted upon. We have to build mutual aid networks to distribute food, water, and healthcare outside corporate supply chains. We must ensure that striking does not mean starving.

Third, we have to have a common framework around this struggle. Universal demands that bypass the narrow, divisive theater of modern politics. This is not a strike for one specific union contract. This is a collective demand for the baseline requirements of a humane society:

• Universal Healthcare that is decoupled from employment.
• True Living Wages that reflect our actual productivity.
• A Real Social Safety Net that treats the vulnerable with dignity.
• Heavy Taxation of Wealth to fund our public infrastructure.
• An End to Profit-Driven Wars that extract our taxes to fund corporate campaigns.

The corporate class has spent decades dividing us into isolated, precarious units, making us believe we are completely on our own. But their power only exists because we continue to show up to run their machines, pack their warehouses, and deliver their food.

The moment we realize that our coordination is the only thing keeping the world spinning, the architecture of isolation falls apart. It is time to stop playing by their rules. It is time to pull the emergency brake.

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