Getting there – laborist organizing
Many Americans were depressed by our last election, where it was quite clear that rich and powerful forces controlled the election system and didn’t care about working Americans. People on social media wrote about needing a revolution to take back power for the people. Historically, revolutions generally end up killing some of the people who previously held power, and then the people supporting the revolution say “Oh, now what?” Bloodthirsty people with big egos and a desire for power take over, the rich people who managed to avoid the guillotine gradually emerge and take control again, and the whole thing proves to have been pointless.
But in America we already had a revolution, in 1776. We won. We were lucky enough to have Jefferson and Madison, really smart guys and good students of history who designed a system that the people could use to keep the result of the revolution from decaying. They knew how difficult that would be, though. Jefferson predicted exactly what has happened:
The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless... From the conclusion of this war [the Revolution] we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to affect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.
Our revolutionary founders had to risk their lives and homes to win the power to govern themselves, but due to their good work we don’t need to do that now. We just need to get off our couches and do some work. We need to pay our respects to our founders by taking a little time out from focusing on making money and instead uniting to force due respect for our rights. We need to use both the new tools of technology and the old tools of talking to people. We need to free our minds and hearts, shrug off the distractions that the financiers have used to keep us down, and work with each other.
Step 1 is to free your mind. Recognize that most of what you hear or read in the corporate media is propaganda designed to make you a good little servant of the financiers, and to make you fear and fight your fellow members of the productive class. Recognize that it is OK to step away from that propaganda and to think about other things and ask other questions. Recognize that it is OK to question authority. If you don’t, if you just assume that the propaganda must be obeyed, then you create the evil world that the financiers want you to make. If the corporate media and social media1 say that what you think is stupid or crazy, recognize that that likely means that you are smart and sane. Truth is out there, and we just need to be good at looking for and thinking through the evidence for different views.2 Laborism makes sense, and as later posts will show, it is well supported by the evidence. If we are attacked for our views, that is not something to feel uncomfortable or embarrassed about; it is a badge of honor.
Step 2 is to spread the idea of laborism. Write in support of it on social media, blog about it, e-mail everyone you know with links to laborist material. Write letters to the editor or editorials. Show the laborist symbol on t-shirts and buttons and bumper stickers and banners to let others know that they have fellow supporters and can feel strength in numbers. Sign up as a supporter.3
Talk about it. Talk about it at your workplace or university, in church groups, in union halls, in neighborhood meetings, at the VFW or lodge, at block parties, in the hair salon or barber shop. Talk about it with people who aren’t like you and with people who are. When somebody asks about the laborist symbol you’re wearing, take time to educate them.
Talk with your family and friends and neighbors and encourage them to talk with their friends and families and neighbors. The point is, if we try to just rely on the media to discuss laborist ideas without us forcing them to, we can expect results some time after hell freezes over. The single most effective strategy of the financier media has always been to just not talk about things that the financiers find inconvenient, and to only bother attacking them if the people challenging the financiers make so much noise that the media can’t ignore them. We need to cut media out of the middle and communicate person to person. Doing a post on X or Bluesky and hoping it will be promoted to a wider audience is probably a false hope. Communicate in ways where you are reaching people directly.
Step 3 is where the fun starts. When I have enough potentially interested subscribers, I will activate the laborism.org website. Followers will then be able (if they wish) to register as supporters tagged with their political districts. When enough supporters have signed up in a district, then it becomes worthwhile for organizers to get out in their blocks and neighborhoods and recruit people to attend laborist caucus meetings.
In Minnesota, where I reached voting age, the Democratic Farmer-Laborites and Independent Republicans (my family caucused in both) had live party meetings in churches or meeting halls where any voter could show up and participate. A given precinct had the right to elect X number of delegates to the next level. So, say you had the right to elect 20 delegates and 200 people showed up for the caucus, so that 10 votes equaled 1 delegate. People announced that they wanted to form a group, which could be based on pushing for a particular issue or a particular candidate or both, like Environmentalists for Jerry Brown. If 10 people joined your proposed group then you could sponsor a delegate; otherwise you’d give up and join some other group. If a group got 30 people, they’d be able to sponsor 3 delegates. You would talk within your group, people who wanted to be delegates said so and explained why they would be a good choice, and you would vote. The people elected as delegates would go and do the same thing at the district level, and so on. This is direct democracy, selecting people at each level that you meet, talk to and quiz. Regular working people can participate successfully.
Laborism will use this concept to select candidates for office from among caucus participants. If you wanted to be considered for city council or mayor or state senator or Congress or President, you would say so at your local caucus and ask to be a delegate to the level that chose that type of candidate. If and when you got to that level, you would put your name forward and explain your qualifications and goals and the delegates would choose who they wanted. You would not have candidates chosen for you by some corrupt party elite. Candidates would not have to prove to the newspapers and networks that they could raise enough money from rich donors to be considered a “serious candidate”. You would not have to be a tried-and-true political hack. You would just need to persuade your fellow working people that you would be an honest, hard-working representative of their interests.
Once candidates were selected, supporters would receive an official communication from the movement advising on the names of the candidates selected. What then? The laborist movement does not seek to create a new political party. The Uniparty has gotten good at making life difficult for would-be third parties to get on the ballot. Further, the financiers have trained American voters to be scared to death of voting for third parties. They have largely been convinced that if they vote for a party other than the two favored by the financiers, then they will split the vote and effectively just hand the election over to Truly Horrendous Candidate B rather than their preferred Moderately Horrendous Candidate A. If we had commonly had a system of ranked choice voting in this country it could help to reduce that fear, but we don’t. But as a practical matter we don’t need one, because the laborist solution will work perfectly well without one.
With sufficient popular muscle, laborist organization can simply hijack the major parties and eject their insider candidates. That is how the laborist Nonpartisan League did it when they took power in North Dakota a century ago. We will hijack whichever political party is dominant in the relevant district, getting the laborist candidate nominated by petition and elected in the primary through laborist support. Filing for the party nomination by paying a fee or filing petitions is generally not very difficult. For example, here in Texas 500 valid signatures will do the trick for a candidate for US Representative. Come the general election, nobody will need to fear splitting the vote. We will have dumped the insider Horrendous Candidate and replaced them with an excellent laborist candidate with enough laborist votes to win.
Laborism is designed to get past all of the divisive fake “issues” that the devious financiers have designed to keep working people from seeing their common interests. Laborism will never capture the hearts of 100% of working people. Many people have been hopelessly programmed by the financier propaganda and won’t be cured by any amount of facts or argument. Many others just love being critics, thinking that being an extremist critic will impress people of their preferred gender and enjoying the fact that they don’t have responsibility to design policies that actually work. But we don’t need 100%, and we won’t screw up our program trying to get it. If we can get 60% of voting working people to support the laborist platform, then we can completely transform America into the country it was always meant to be.
Notice what is NOT involved in this process. No big campaign donations. (Small-donor support would be needed for operating expenses.) No commercials. No trying to fool people with meaningless promises or fake issues. No rejecting any policy that can’t be reduced to a bumper sticker slogan. No buy-in from the corporate media who ignore any candidate that doesn’t receive large donations from financiers. No blessing from “superdelegates” or other insiders. All that is needed is talking with each other, reading the official e-mails, and getting out to caucus and vote. In fact, watching political ads and listening to political horse-race commentary from the corporate media would be best avoided as a waste of time that rots our brains. We have heard enough lies and propaganda from the tools of the international parasitic financiers and speculators. Now we should spend our time listening to each other instead.
This is entirely doable. It can be done within the system we have. It has been done before in certain places. All it takes is will and effort. Are you willing to make an effort to make this the country it should be, for yourself and your children and grandchildren? Will you work to restore what our revolutionary founders fought and died for? Or will you just sit on the couch while capitalist America collapses around you?
Social media is largely populated by agents of PR firms working for financiers, whose whole job is to make it uncomfortable for anyone to speak the truth. The government and the companies have worked hard to try to suppress voices that they disagree with, because they know that Americans are notoriously unwilling to stick to a viewpoint that they think most people reject.
Recognize the “men in black” tactic that the financier media uses to suppress truth. The concept is named after the rumors of men in black who show up and do weird things when someone has seen a UFO, so that the person will sound crazy when he talks about it. Any time the government or other powers can’t contain a truth, they go ahead and let it out, but they mix it with some hard-to-spot lies and some clearly crazy lies. That way, anyone who discusses the true thing can be fooled into repeating the hard-to-spot lies (which are later shown to be false) or linked to the crazy lies, so that they seem foolish. That traces back to the very old practice of the agent provocateur, who joins anti-establishment organizations and do crazy and unpopular things to discredit them. So, when you read about something, be aware that parts of it may be wrong or silly, but parts may still be true. Think about each fact on its own merits.
https://substack.com/@laboristmovement This is my substack site. Until I manage to get a dedicated website established, becoming a free subscriber is the best way to record yourself as a potential supporter (no commitment, and aside from e-mails of new posts you won’t get spammed. When it is time to activate an organization, I will post about that with instructions for anyone who is interested, and you can register then if you wish.) In time I plan to enable members to communicate with each other by legislative district using communication that won’t be spam laden, but I won’t make that significant investment until we reach a critical mass of interested people. Nobody will ever get an instant message saying “we need you to send us $20 for an unprecedented 5-to-1 match”.