• Maeve@kbin.earth
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    15 days ago

    The whole article is worth reading, but this is especially worth knowing:

    Poe: There’s a very specific reason we don’t have organizing in the South on any scale. And that’s because, after the Civil War, the plantation families in the South basically cut a deal with Wall Street imperialists, and part of that deal was that plantation families get to treat workers in the South exactly how they want. We will keep wages low in the South, lower than the rest of the country. That’s a way to maintain this sort of racial capitalism and equilibrium. We’ll allow unions in the North, and every once in a while we’ll have this massive migration of workers from the South to maintain wage balance.

    What we’re seeing now is late stage capitalism. In a place like Eastern Kentucky, there literally aren’t enough jobs to facilitate labor organizing at any sort of scale. At the same time, you have this mass exodus of working class people leaving the Democratic Party. So it’s very hard to run structured campaigns in a place where unemployment is that high, where literally you have surplus population, at a place where the only economy is really a prison economy and a service economy. Meanwhile, everyone is having a housing issue. Everyone is experiencing displacement. There are usually two or three corporate entities behind that. So this is a place where tenant organizing is—I’m not going to say the only option for a structured campaign, but definitely the most powerful option.