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Today’s strike was fun (for a lack of a better word). There were 7000 people present at the march in my city which was honestly more than we excepted, so that’s good. Several thousands of people in other cities around the country as well. I assume many more people striking but not going to a protest.
I spoke to many different people, also from different communist parties. Mostly Trots though but still interesting to see what they are up to. Being anti-China was one of those things which I thought was funny coming from a party in the margin (duh).
I did however like their wish to become a bit more radical with the protests because holding up some quirky signs every month will probably not save our rights and our own party is not doing much different (insert Lenin’s What To Do quote).
The sun was absolutely blasting though so I feel a bit woozy from walking in the sun all day.
On the way home I got stopped by this girl working for a charity who asked me to donate. She was very passionate about the case which I thought was cool. Upon getting home however I saw that I subscribed to a monthly thing and I don’t want that given how many things I already am active for or are paying for, so I called the org to stop it so that I can make a one time payment. The lady on the phone said ‘okay, I will send a mail to the girl you spoke to to cancel it’ and I found that quite sad lol. I at least asked the lady to tell her in the mail that I still donated though so that she would not feel too bad.
but isnt it more than just a protest, because its also a strike? the way to make it more radical would be to hold an indefinite strike, but that is something for the unions to decide
Well I guess so, it was a strike. But the Trotskyist members were there on their own account instead of striking it seemed so their vision of it might be a bit skewed.
Personally I am all for (a version of) an indefinite strike but I doubt ABVV and ACV want to do that given their ties to Vooruit and CD&V so as to not jeopardize their positions on the negotiations. I also don’t feel like there is a party ready to back the unions, able to provide the neccessary context to the working class people apart from PVDA-PTB but even then I´m not too confident in how they will handle that with no allies apart from the unions. Vooruit will never back PVDA and neither will Groen I´m sure.
yeah exactly, it seems like things are not bad enough for unions to completely turn their back on the government and burn all bridges, same with greens and socialists
The thing is that there are some really serious things that are being proposed that they cannot ignore I think, otherwise people will be royally fucked in the coming years and-or decades. And simply remaining idle with some accepted strikes in between is not going to solve it, so at some point they would have to do something more serious.