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Labor Day.
As for pride, it's because they were (still are) stigmatized, shoved into the closet, persecuted, beat up, and even killed. It's a moment for them to say we're here and we belong. Maybe we'll get to the day when no one cares.
As for the rest of the list, I think you're vastly overestimating how much political time (as in Congress and similar state) this gets. It's a parade, it's not trying to write new legislation.
They took International Workers' Day (May Day) away from us and gave us red hot dogs and Labor Day that isn't a paid holiday and most people don't get off work.
tl;dr Because that's communism.
Let's look at the history of labor movements in the US.
At first, yeah, you started with a pretty broad cross section of society (the Knights of Labor, for example), as well as some more radical elements. Then you had the Haymarket Affair, where people were protesting for an 8-hour work day, and the cops started killing protesters, and someone (possibly a provocateur) threw a bomb at the cops. The press went wild with it and it kicked off a red scare where many labor organizations kicked out and distanced themselves from Anarchists and Marxists.
Fast forward to the Great Depression, and you've got a new wave of radicalization because people are seeing the failures of capitalism, and that led to the New Deal. There was another red scare as the US and USSR became rivals, and that served as "the stick," while the New Deal policies served as "the carrot." The labor movement once again distanced itself from the more radical elements on the promise of a cooperative government. All the communists, who were more concerned with a broad movement of solidarity, got kicked out of groups like the AFL-CIO, and the unions were considered acceptable because they were (at least to a degree) narrowly self-interested.
These unions flourished in the 50's, 60's, and early 70's, during this post-New Deal, Great Society era. They weren't necessarily the most inclusive, but they worked well for their members. However, in the 70's an economic phenomenon emerged that was termed, "~~Shrink~~ Stagflation" - a period of high inflation and high unemployment at the same time. The Keynesian economic model (which had had a broad consensus up until that point) said that you deal with unemployment by having the government spend more money, and then when unemployment drops, you reduce spending to avoid inflation. It didn't have a clear answer for what to do when both were high at once, that wasn't really supposed to happen.
The Carter administration made the decision to focus on inflation instead of unemployment, which screwed over the labor unions. But this was a broad bipartisan consensus among the Washington elites, and when Carter was replaced by Reagan, he did the same and pushed it further. Under this new paradigm of "supply side economics," people's identities as consumers was emphasized over their identity as workers. Even having purged radical elements and having become relatively toothless, unions were vilified and blamed for making goods expensive, and they didn't really have the power to do much about it.
Question of economics were increasingly moved outside of the realm of public accountability and influence, being left to "experts" and both parties having broad agreement about things, but we still had to vote over something, and so we had the emergence of the culture war. Around the 90's you had some rather boring presidents and debates, because it was the height of "the end of history," where there was this idea that all the big questions and conflicts had been resolved and it was just a question of little tweaks here and there.
However, in the 2000's, as it became clear that conditions were declining and the wealth gap was growing, there has been a new wave of radicalization, on both the right and the left, which started to really manifest in 2016. But it is very much in its infancy, without a lot of experience or strength. It's been over 40 years since we had strong unions (and even those ones were defanged). Now, we're fighting against entrenched anti-union and anti-worker policies, practices, and beliefs. And progress is being made, but it's a long, uphill battle, and a lot of it is young people figuring things out from scratch.
Great writeup! I did want to mention that "Shrinkflation" is not the right term for the phenomenon of the 1970s, that is "stagflation" ("stagnation" + "inflation"). "Shrinkflation" is when the size of products shrinks while the price remains unchanged to hide the impacts of inflation. The reason it was so hard on the economy is that there is typically a positive correlation between inflation and economic growth. As inflation increases, the economy grows faster, and as it decreases, the economy shrinks. Stagflation, when the economy shrinks and inflation increases, removes a lever that the central bank typically has to get the country out of a recession because they can't increase inflation to encourage economic growth. The reasons that usually works are complicated and beyond the scope of a random Lemmy comment.
Thank you, brainfart on my part.
I’ll add one extra thing here: that no one in America identifies themselves as “a worker” or “working class.”
Perhaps Europe, with its historic class strata, is better prepared for this. Maybe people there know that they are working class and always will be. With that identity firmly held, they can find each other and agitate for their rights.
In America, if you are working class, first of all you’d never admit it. Everyone is “middle class” here, don’t you know. And even if in your heart you know you are working class, your aim is to get out of the working class, not make its life better.
No justifications here, just a description of American psychology on this topic.
You're right. I'll just add I don't even know what the difference is between middle class and working class. We're all having to work like animals to live.
I'm technically middle class I guess? But I call myself working class and I stand with labor 100% of the time, because the only foe any of us have is the billionaire class.
There's no black and white to these terms.
Suffice it to say, when a working class person, say, gets a DUI, it will literally ruin their life.
When a middle class person gets a DUI, it will ruin their year.
When you're upper middle class, that DUI fucking sucks. But you got it. Family is still going on vacation. Christmas isn't cancelled.
When an upper class person gets a DUI, it will inconvenience their evening, and maybe, just maybe, their public image. (gasp)
Yes I think “having to work” is definitely the boundary of upper class. We’re talking inheritances, investments, landlording, whatever.
I earn a great deal of money at my job - top 1%. But I live in a HCOL area and am raising two kids. We have no aspirations but to own our house someday and send our kids to college. If we go on a vacation once a year we are happy. I would lose absolutely everything were I to get laid off from my job. We still look for sales at Costco and cook at home instead of eating out, like everyone else. This still feels like “middle class” to me, whatever my wage is.
However I am seeing that even the basic components of the American Dream, a house and a family, are more than most can attain. I think that says that our working class is growing and perhaps getting pretty large. Certainly if you are living hand to mouth that’s working class. If you have no prospect of owning your home or sending your kids to college, that’s working class.
“Working class” has associations from when we were an industrial and manufacturing economy. People who work in an office don’t think “I’m working class” because they don’t wear coveralls and operate power tools. But we’ve transitioned to a services-based economy now for many years, so I think a LOT of people are working class without even realizing it.
And if you don’t even know you’re working class, how are you going to get fired up about a workers rights rally?
All I see out there are gay rights, trans rights, whatever parades.
And people actually show up. like wth. given that it's 5% population max.
Because the playbook to destroy democracies has already been written. You don't destroy a democratic nation by attacking it, you destroy it by getting it to attack itself.
Fascist know that if they can just turn the majority against a specific minority, then they have a foot in the door. You can't uninvite the vampire from your home, once you let them have their way with the minority, the rules have changed, and those rules will eventually be changed for everyone.
If you protect the neediest minority group that protection extends to everyone. If we ignore that need, then it's only a matter of time before everyone needs that protection.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't have workers rights parades. I'm saying that gay rights and trans rights are workers rights parades, because they are our fellow workers. I think a lot of modern leftist groups think of minority rights as vestigial or as a distraction. When in reality every trans rights parade should be protected by a sea of factory workers willing to stomp on some fascist for attacking the solidarity or the working class.
I'm saying that gay rights and trans rights are workers rights parades, because they are our fellow workers.
Exactly. LGBTQ+ folks are the current target for the authoritarians and fascists, but all of us non-billionaires are on the target list.
We will all be abused, beaten, broken and sometimes murdered, unless we push the fascists back into their holes.
We must stand together.
Hell yeah. When the right asks you which group's rights you want to sacrifice to save your own rights, you tell them to eat shit. They're going to come for your rights too, especially if they succeed in taking away those other people's rights. There is no sufficiently small in group for conservatism.
Disagree that it’s “5% of the population max” — I’ve seen estimates that around 10% of the population are lgbtq… but even assuming it’s 5%, in a country of 340 mil, that comes out to 17 million people. And a bunch of people at pride are straight, so it’s no wonder why they draw in such huge numbers each year.
Regardless… what does gay pride have to do with workers rights? Why does that make you mad — they’re not preventing anyone else from organizing? And from my experience, lgbtq folks are very vocal about workers rights specifically (given the discrimination they face in the workplace for being gay/trans/etc)
And unlike some other movements, there is a very rooted history of public demonstration by the gay/trans community given laws specifically preventing them from gathering in public. In many ways, pride parades represent gay/trans people reaffirming their rights to literally just be in public together without being arrested.
So yeah… I get that there should be more public demonstrations — I’m all for that. But leave gay/trans rights alone please lol
I feel like ever since the term shifted from "gay liberation" to "gay pride" it has hindered the movement in a lot of ways. Liberation tells you what this is about, pride tells you... You're proud? Good for you. Lots of people are proud, but not all people need liberation (or, at least, not everyone thinks they need it).
I vote we go back to calling it Liberation, and instead of bickering over why people are at the queer event and not a workers event, we start organizing monthly or bimonthly events, a queer/LGBT liberation event, a women's liberation event, a worker's liberation event, Hispanic Liberation event... Let's pepper the calendar with parties and parades and protests while drilling into people's minds that we are all deserving of respect, autonomy, and liberation.
Not sure how well I said all that. I'm about 5 boozy horchatas in, and I hate to do the "as a gay man" thing, but I feel like I should mention I am, in fact, a gay, and I quite enjoy pride and what it stands for
instead of bickering over why people are at the queer event and not a workers event
I see a lot of people in the thread interpreting OPs statements this way, but that just doesn't seem like what they're saying at all. They didn't say anything negative about queer events, and they're not asking why people are at them, or implying that those events should be less popular. They're asking why workers rights events aren't even more popular, considering their relevance to the vast majority of the population.
I don't think they're angry at pride parades, they're angry that there's no similar parades/demonstrations for workers rights, and using pride parade as an example to be emulated...
Op:
And people actually show up. like wth. given that it's 5% population max.
Their view of pride parades sounds pretty negative to me.
OP compares it to 80% of the population being workers, yet no-one is showing up for those rallys. I guess OP fails to see why workers do not feel the same urgency to attend rallys that lgbtq people do.
I see where OP is coming from. Workers are being treated increasingly worse, but there seems to be no collective response so far. Sure, workers are not being discriminated against and murdered (yet), but if that's the standard for protests, it's unreasonably high.
Hey go be pro-labor without trivializing gay rights. There is absolutely no call for that bullshit.
Labor organization and demonstrating happens all the time. The doo-doo ass in Chief just called in the fucking stormtroopers to deal with the now two-day long demonstration against ICE and mass deportation in L.A..
We've been seeing the slow rebuilding of the American labor movement, but it is a shell of its old self.
A lot of the established unions have been resting on its laurels and only narrowly protecting its members while new unions are in building mode, trying to get unions established.
But now it should be so much simpler.
We have internet, we have social networks etc.
I feel like there is 0 direction for labor rights
I know you're in the US so it's probably a lot more difficult, but find union activists...
Unions fight for these exact rights, and the reason most developed countries have vacations and healthcare are thanks to union action. Of course, America has fought very hard to keep these down.
Also, no need to shoot others down while you're at it. No one is free until we're all free, and this has always been a class war.
There is tons of worker right protests/riots, it as a thing long before pride, and untilcapitalist culture turned pried from riot to business friendly music festival. The worker protest were way more popular. I know that US are an outlier, but I am sure that even American do protest.
Most "Minority rights" aren't specific rights for minority but basic rights for everyone. If you can't dress as you like or be rejected for a job due to ryour private life it impacts more than just LGBTQ+
Read the news. There's loads.
Lots of social-cultural issues make for great distractions from actual economic measures while also ensuring infighting among the population! so they get nothing done.
The Nazis came after the communists and trade unionists before they came for the Jews. At least according to the original version of "first they came".
There's a specific order to how rights can be established. Workers' rights are dismantled before minority rights, and minority rights are to be protected before workers' rights can be protected.
Okay, it's a really complicated issue but you've got three big things that are all kind of working together here:
Political capture: the US' first past the post electoral system basically guarantees that there's going to only be two main parties. They were always vulnerable to capture by the wealthy, but the Citizens United decision functionally guaranteed their capture by the groups with the deepest pockets. The democrats themselves are shit scared of any serious left policy because they know it'll scare off their big donors, and despite the fact that fundraising has not directly translated into winning for them, they're terrified that they're going to lose the support of the wealthiest and that'll guarantee election losses. At least, that's the optimistic interpretation.
Cold war reaction: the US didn't just have one red scare, we've had two or three spread out over several decades. There was a huge cultural reaction against communism after WWII, and being an open communist during the Cold war would just get your ass disappeared (according to my now dead boomer dad, though I've seen no evidence to support it), beaten up or killed by locals, or shunned. A lot of folks were terrified of espousing left policies because they could easily be suspected of or painted as communist. While the cold war is passing out of living memory, the chill that it left on American leftism for the better part of 100 years is hard to overstate.
Our intelligence agencies have consistently worked across all levels of government (local, state, federal) to harass, discredit, and sometimes kill left leadership and organizations. The CIA itself ran a very successful multi-decade campaign of overthrowing peaceful, democratically elected left-wing governments across the global south by directly sponsoring, aiding, and training right wing reactionary movements, and there's not really any evidence that they stopped. There's no reason to think that they're not still working hard today to prevent any serious left movement.
While the cold war is passing out of living memory, the chill that it left on American leftism for the better part of 100 years is hard to overstate.
The Cold War ended in 1991, what are you talking about?
Basically, the cold war was already starting to wind down in the 80s and late 70s. We were comfortable enough that we'd won the Cold war that Reagan embarked us on the 40 year project of strip-mining worker benefits and social welfare programs. The most culturally aggressive aspects of the cold war happened during the mid-60s.
Toxic individualism has killed any sense of social responsibility Americans ever had.
People feel no social obligation because they no longer feel connected to anything. Membership in civic institutions and community organizations has fallen off a cliff. Urban planning has turned suburbs from walkable mixed-use communities into car-centric ghost towns. Rampant inflation and cost disease have destroyed affordability for many. Homeowners have become some of the worst ladder-pullers with extreme NIMBYism slowing housing construction to a crawl.
5% of the population is probably the max that would be interested in a parade/march
Feel free to organize one.
Then you will have insight into why there are few. Or you will kick off a whole thing.
Organizing things is hard. I am sure there are lots of reasons.
This ain't now stinking Europe. We don't like doing much thinking and such. Identity politics and beating our heads on the wall is our cup of tea.
We’ve been convinced to slap fight about identity politics, many times necessarily so because unfair pressure is being applied via abuse by those in power
This results in blocking any dialogues about class consciousness
At the same time there is propaganda that goes against class consciousness: labor unions have been utterly destroyed both literally and from an optics standpoint (many Americans distrust the concept), consumerism runs deep in our blood to push the idea that we need more capital and glorify excessive “baller” lifestyles, poor is pushed to be seen as a moral failing, etc
A couple reasons:
There are other reasons too, and none of them are 'good' reasons, but they are all realities.
Have you ever tried getting multiple leftists to agree to the time of day let alone actual concrete, feasible policy and a plan for implementing and enforcing it? More pertinent, have you ever tried getting multiple workers from different industries to agree to anything either?
The right is looking for the stinkiest turd and don't care who gets nominated as long as they stink. The left is looking for a unicorn and will not compromise for a horse that will eventually grow a horn.
God forbid the left nominates candidates that do things one step at a time but are guaranteed success. Everything needs to be done correctly now.
Have you ever noticed when you make a point there always someone saying well what about x, y and z? Or pointing out that something they personally relate to wasn’t directly called out so they’re being excluded? A lot of people would see something focused on workers rights/labor and go off on some tangent about how they’re unemployed so they’re being discriminated against or how it’s more important that we focus on trans issues or some other hot button identity politics issue and labor is just a distraction/you're purposefully trying to distract from other movements or the group that only wants to destroy because they don’t believe what we have is worth saving (these types are overwhelmingly abelist and don’t realize how much disabled people would suffer and die if we just threw the whole system out) we don’t have a labor focused movement because there’s so many voices that want center stage for their pet interests and they understand a large unifying movement that allows people they see as less morally righteous on the door is a threat to them and their imagined moral superiority
Oh, maybe you missed it but it's because there's an asshole in office.
You ask a lot of legitimate questions there, causes that you and I could come to an agreement over. I would erase the starting point though. Pride movements and workers movements might both look like similar demonstrations. They are borne out of very different motivations. People might look down on manual laborers but you wouldn't have to fear for your safety in certain parts of your city for being one. LGBTQ+ folks can't say the same. Pride movements bring awareness that we have discriminated or are still discriminating against whole swaths of the population - mostly for silly reasons. That's different from a disagreement about how exploitative capitalism should be permitted to be.
Another negative connotation is that this "why are there LGBTQ+ pride parades but not ...?" is the leading question of people who think straight people need to have a pride parade as well. Like you couldn't live a heteronormative life every day without fear of retribution. And I'm hoping that you don't think along those lines and therefore would not want to be this close to that argumentative train of thought.