I’m really impressed by the courage of the Amazon workers who are going on strike. I was thinking what if one of the conditions of the strikers is that Amazon stops funding Republicans. Then I realized more broadly what if workers in all companies went on strike and demanded that the companies no longer funded Republican candidates. What are your thoughts on this?
The difficult thing is that our entire society is set up to ensure that whatever we do, we end up funding capitalists. We’d need a complete alternate infrastructure to make it possible to survive without doing so. And any attempt to organize that will meet with resistance from the most powerful people. We have let it go very far before mounting any kind of resistance, and we’ve given the capitalists decades to put into place total surveillance and a very effective system of oppression to take down anyone who starts getting big ideas.
That’s not to say we can’t undermine it, but doing so will take time. We won’t be able to simply pressure the capitalists into changing their ways, and any direct confrontation short of a mass movement will fail. A mass movement takes time and skill to build, particularly when all the organs of the state, in every country, are determined to stop you building it.