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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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That’s really the fundamental issue, isn’t it? There is absolutely no democratic processes on the federal level. We get to pull a lever once every two years, and that is supposed to be a meaningful democratic participatory process.
There's a lot you can do besides voting.
Candidates need volunteers and money. There is organizing to do. Papers which need letters to the editor, and state and federal officials who need to hear from you.
I don’t think that organizing within a private corporate party apparatus counts as participating in the democratic process more generally. Especially one that has admitted it has no obligation to follow its own rules. There needs to be a direct democratic process on a federal level. The majority of the population, regardless of party affiliation, support measures such as universal healthcare, but our process doesn’t empower collective change, rather it empowers minority interests over the majority, as evidenced by the legislation pushed and policy positions held by the federal government. Even good representatives can’t do anything because they’re hamstrung by an inherently partisan political process. Let the people speak. Where they are allowed to speak, we have seen big changes, (legalization of cannabis, ending of qualified immunity, bail reform, etc), but where the only avenue for change is through elected office, we have stagnated for decades behind the rest of the developed world.
Organizing within the system is exactly how we've gotten as much as we have.
The alternative is to roll the dice with revolution, and that's about as likely to end up in a much worse place than we'd otherwise get. That's really only a rational choice when you don't have other avenues to change policy.
I suppose that depends on what era you’re referring to. It wasn’t working within the system that won the right to unionize, it was work outside the system that provided the necessary pressure to coerce concessions out of the government.
Unionization started as an outside-the-system thing, but really took off under FDR because of legal changes made by supporters of it who were elected to Congress. You can get started on the outside, but actually getting to where we need to be means holding power.
Union growth was at its strongest in American history during the period between 1900-1920. There were already millions of union members decades before FDR ever took office. It was a 50+ year battle starting in the 1800s, I don’t think I’d call that starting. I’d call FDR the results of that movement, if anything.