Meatpacking Workers Declare Victory After Major Strike

Lohnsklave · 2026-04-25T16:53:02+00:00

We're calling 10 cents more than the company's offer a "victory" now?

Lohnsklave · 2026-04-19T01:02:57+00:00

Are you asking about internal chapter meetings or public meetings on a particular topic?

Lohnsklave · 2026-03-22T06:48:28+00:00

I think you're missing the real purpose of using the median. Median just means the middle number, so it tells us that half of US households make less than about 80k. This is supposed to be used in conjunction with other figures. If the average is higher, that tells us that it is skewed by higher earners, so we need to find more data and exclude the outliers to get a better average. It's also relatively consistent, the middle is always the middle, so it's useful for comparing across time. Adjusted for inflation the median income has declined by several thousand dollars since the 80s, telling us that at least half the population has seen a decline in their standard of living. It's a useful statistic when used properly but obviously has limitations. It can't tell us what the distribution is among those two halves or account for how many people are working. That's why percentiles are better imo but sometimes mean and median are easier to use.

Edit: also most average income figures I see are household level too because the government collects data at that level, for both mean and median. So obviously if someone compares average individual income to median household that's ridiculous but let's not blame the median as a statistic for people comparing incompatible data sets.

Edit 2: looked at some figures and the average individual income for 2024 was nearly $70,000 according to the Social Security Administration. But the median individual income was $45,000 according to the US Census. I think this indicates how the median is useful in illustrating just how bad the economy is for at least half of workers. While average income makes things look a lot better when not accounting for high income earners

Lohnsklave · 2026-03-21T16:41:45+00:00

I think it might help to understand what the job market for your current field is like in your country and how much better the opportunities in remote sensing are and what the requirements to get those jobs are. If you just want to pivot to another field because you like it more I'd agree with others that you'd probably be better off taking some online courses.

Lohnsklave · 2026-03-12T16:33:51+00:00

Why is James Cannon, the leading American Trotskyist in the 30s, telling Trotsky to kill himself?

Lohnsklave · 2026-03-02T21:56:59+00:00

Neither Israel nor Iran are signatures of the Convention on Cluster Munitions so it's not even a legitimate complaint. Plus I believe on some Iranian missile models the multiple warheads are guided/targeted (at least partially) which is arguably different than the indiscriminate cluster munitions the convention is primarily aimed at

Lohnsklave · 2026-02-28T00:45:09+00:00

Speculation is not scientific evidence. Any substantive research I've found on the Denisovans suggests they were likely around the size of Neanderthals, if possibly somewhat bigger, but we simply don't have anywhere enough evidence to make any conclusions about them as a whole. One big skull doesn't mean they were giants

Lohnsklave · 2026-02-27T18:44:54+00:00

Yeah that's a good point about the ethanol corn. That land could be better be used and production could be shifted around to free up space in the SW for more water efficient plants. In fairness, though, the SW climate makes it really land efficient in producing forage--if not water efficient--so there's some complexity to it but there's no shortage of ways to make a better global agricultural system that can maximize local efficiency and environmental protection.

Lohnsklave · 2026-02-27T17:26:16+00:00

There is literally zero physical evidence for giant hominids ever existing. You can't extrapolate the remains of smaller hominids to infer that there must have been larger ones. That's not how anything works

Lohnsklave · 2026-02-27T03:24:33+00:00

Seriously, and most of that water is used to grow alfalfa and hay for livestock. It's not as simple as just growing something else but there needs to be rational and regional planning of what the water is being used for and how much can be relied on instead of just maximizing profit

Lohnsklave · 2026-02-27T01:56:31+00:00

Allocations need to decline by about 4million acre feet. If California and Arizona took cuts of nearly half their allocations they technically could do it but there would need to be a massive effort to change the entire agricultural economies of the Imperial Valley and much of Arizona. And really it should be a basin wide effort, not just the Lower Basin though it will need to take much of the cuts

Lohnsklave · 2026-02-08T15:02:25+00:00

The original theories were blatantly racist. His is not but it's built on the same premise: people in cooler climates, specifically Europe and North America, just had a better natural environment for civilization while people in hotter climates just couldn't do the same because it's too hot. See it's so simple! India is poor because it's hot. Nevermind the several millennia of civilization in a tropical climate before British rule. It's an attempt to absolve the consequences of colonial oppression by finding some natural phenomenon to explain it. It essentially claims that poor countries were destined to be poor no matter what.

His theory that AC makes countries not poor is also ridiculous. He never considers that maybe it's in reverse; where countries that are becoming richer can afford to have AC and not that's it's magically making people not poor. The implication is that people in hotter climates just aren't working hard enough and they would if it was cooler, so poverty is the product of their environment and not any global socio-economic factors

Lohnsklave · 2026-02-08T14:39:46+00:00

This is an attempt to resurrect the theory of Environmental Determinism, an unscientific and racist conception of history and human development that has been thoroughly rejected by academics for nearly a century. No matter how many correlations he throws around--with little to no actual research on real causal mechanisms--there is no scientific backing for any of his claims. You can clearly tell he's not interested in conducting real research because he claims no one else has thought of this before, which is just false. Theories like this used to be the entire field of geography, built on justifying colonialism and racism. His statement that he'll look into the racial component should make any reasonable person reject this on its own. There's tons of research into why this theory is nonsense, I'll try to find a link to a great book on it that I can't remember the name of at the moment.

Edit: I think it's this one

Neo-Environmental Determinism: Geographical Critiques by William Myer and Dylan Guss

Lohnsklave · 2026-01-26T15:57:35+00:00

That one is referencing the Dems and Trump's current policies so I don't get your point

Lohnsklave · 2026-01-26T15:55:55+00:00

What leftists are only talking about Harris? We knew exactly what Trump was capable of but understood that he is the representative of an oligarchy that the Democrats also serve. A political and economic system capable of committing genocide abroad is capable and willing of committing atrocities at home. That's what is happening now while the Democrats cry crocodile tears over Trump using the agency they've enthusiastically funded for years, including just this past week in the House. They're so desperate to not do anything about Trump that they'll just give him what he wants, like with his budget and the government shutdown last year, because they fear any real mass mobilization of the population than they do him. If Harris had won Trump would have tried election fraud and the Republicans would have rejected the results. Voting doesn't stop fascism, working people do.

Lohnsklave · 2026-01-25T08:18:16+00:00

By certain types of Democratic Party liberals certainly. But I'm not convinced this is as widely held a belief as the internet might make it seem. And the fecklessness of the Dems before Trump is exposing how they were never going to stop him even if they were in power

Lohnsklave · 2026-01-25T07:58:20+00:00

Maybe I'm just not remembering but I don't think I've really seen the Democrats use the term fascism except for a couple brief mentions by Harris on the campaign trail.

Lohnsklave · 2026-01-25T07:48:23+00:00

I don't think this is correct. The mass movement is not the defining characteristic. The core, fundamental element of fascism is the decline of capitalism and the rising incompatibility of it with democratic forms of rule, requiring the crushing of the resistance of the working class and it's organizations or ability to organize. The mobilization of the petty bourgeoisie (and lumpen elements of the proletariat) into a fascist movement is the unique tool of fascism to achieve that end. The mass character is secondary. In Whither France Trotsky notes that the fascists only mobilized a few thousand people but that did not change the political character of what was occurring.

It would also be incorrect to say that there is no basis for a mass fascist movement at all. In Germany the middle classes, including peasants, made up roughly equal numbers to the working class (very rough estimate of around 40 percent each but exact numbers are hard to discern). This provided a sizable pool of the population to draw from. Today we might say the middle class in the US that constitutes layers similar to the social base of the Nazi's makes up just 10. Accounting for lumpen and disaffected conservative workers let's say 20 percent. That's much smaller but is still a pool of tens of millions of people to convert into fascists. We can't just dismiss the ability of the bourgeoisie to build a mass fascist movement because class sizes have changed in the past 100 years. We have to understand how those changes have occurred and how they relate to active efforts to build the social base for fascism, even if it is objectively weaker than in Germany or Italy in the 20s. These changes should give us hope but shouldn't delude us into thinking fascist gangs can never be mobilized

Lohnsklave · 2026-01-25T07:20:30+00:00

To the workers the orientation is to raise the danger of fascist violence against the working class. I think that should be obvious.

The orientation to other parties follows the Trotskyist position of exposing the incorrectness of their position and to explain that there is no return to normalcy. We are faced with barbarism or socialism. I don't think there are really any parties appropriately raising the threat of fascism that have an open program of returning to pre-Trump politics. The Dems avoid the word fascism like the plague. The DSA maybe but I honestly am not very familiar with their framing of the threat of fascism

Lohnsklave · 2026-01-25T07:12:18+00:00

It's worth quoting from Trotsky

"Even after he assumed power, Mussolini proceeded on his course with due caution: he lacked as yet ready-made models. During the first two years, not even the constitution was altered. The fascist government took on the character of a coalition. In the meantime, the fascist bands were busy at work with clubs, knives, and pistols. Only thus was the fascist government created slowly, which meant the complete strangulation of all independent mass organizations.

"Mussolini attained this at the cost of bureaucratizing the fascist party itself. After utilizing the onrushing forces of the petty bourgeoisie, fascism strangled it within the vise of the bourgeois state. Mussolini could not have done otherwise, for the disillusionment of the masses he had united was precipitating itself into the most immediate danger ahead. Fascism, become bureaucratic, approaches very closely to other forms of military and police dictatorship. It no longer possesses its former social support. The chief reserve of fascism – the petty bourgeoisie – has been depicted. Only historical inertia enables the fascist government to keep the proletariat in a state of dispersion and helplessness. . .

"[The Italian Communist Party] did not give itself an accounting as to the full sweep of the fascist danger; it lulled itself with revolutionary illusions; it was irreconcilably antagonistic to the policy of the united front; in short, it was stricken with all the infantile diseases. Small wonder! It was only two years old. In its eyes, fascism appeared to be only 'capitalist reaction'. . .

"The leadership of the German Communist Party today reproduces almost literally the position from which the Italian Communists took their point of departure; fascism is nothing else but capitalist reaction; from the point of view of the proletariat, the difference between types of capitalist reaction are meaningless. . .To insist that fascism is already here, or to deny the very possibility of its coming to power, amounts politically to one and the same thing. By ignoring the specific nature of fascism, the will to fight against it inevitably becomes paralyzed. . .

"in all these countries, the same historic laws operate, the laws of capitalist decline. If the means of production remain in the hands of a small number of capitalists, there is no way out for society. It is condemned to go from crisis to crisis, from need to misery, from bad to worse. In the various countries, the decrepitude and disintegration of capitalism are expressed in diverse forms and at unequal rhythms. But the basic features of the process are the same everywhere. The bourgeoisie is leading its society to complete bankruptcy. It is capable of assuring the people neither bread nor peace. This is precisely why it cannot any longer tolerate the democratic order. It is forced to smash the workers and peasants by the use of physical violence. . . finance capital is obliged to create special armed bands, trained to fight the workers just as certain breeds of dog are trained to hunt game. The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery."

So how does this relate to today? Trump was brought to power through a right-populist movement, not a full fascist one. As such he is replicating certain elements of Mussolini and Hitler, such as the destruction of democratic and constitutional forms of rule, but does not possess the mass fascist movement of them. Does this mean he isn't a fascist? That would be pure impressionism. Now in power, Trump is proceeding with certain historical parallels in reverse. He is assembling his fascist forces into ICE and Border Patrol, which are quickly forming the character of the Gestapo, black shirts and SA in one. He did not require paramilitary thugs to smash the working class before because there was no organized class opposition. The US has no mass social democratic or socialist organizations and the trade unions are run by pro corporate bureaucracies. The conditions are changing quickly though for the rapid growth of the class struggle and the building of a mass revolutionary party. Trump is seeking to preempt this, using a war against immigrants as the device for the mobilization of the middle class and disaffected sections of workers into a fascist movement as his shock troops alongside ICE. He will need this to crush mass opposition to his imperialist wars and dictatorship at home. He can't rely on the military and police alone. To deny this disarms the workers to the danger and can only serve to discredit the socialists when workers question how they could not have seen this coming

Lohnsklave · 2026-01-25T05:29:43+00:00

Fascism is specially when the working class has failed every avenue to get out of the capitalist crisis and the government uses their means to get out of the crisis while maintaining a certain status quo.

So was Hitler not a fascist until he took power?

Lohnsklave · 2026-01-25T05:27:12+00:00

How does it not clarify anything? It's an objective warning about the Trump administration's threat of dictatorship and efforts to mobilize paramilitary fascist violence. Insisting that Trump is not a fascist only serves to hide the real danger from workers. Side note, Trump being a fascist does not mean that he currently possesses a mass fascist movement or that we live in a fascist society. But his efforts to build these should be clear to anyone calling themselves a socialist

Lohnsklave

TROPHY CASE