First of all, I do want to congratulate everyone who participated in No Kings Day.
Good for you guys. You showed up. At the very least, you did the bare minimum. You walked out in public. You said openly that you do not accept this government and the direction this country is going. In a country where people are constantly trained to stay passive, distracted, and isolated, that matters.
But we also have to be real.
This is the third No Kings Day protest. In the beginning, a lot of people were angry about immigration, inflation, healthcare, education, and the general direction of this administration. Now you are watching this country slide into another foreign military conflict with Iran. The situation is escalating. The crisis is getting worse. And that also proves something important.
This kind of protest, by itself, is not enough.
Because this kind of protest does not create leverage.
It gives you visibility. It gives you connections. It gives people a chance to talk, compare experiences, and maybe understand the system a little bit better. That part is useful. I have seen communists, socialists, and democratic socialists doing outreach at these protests, talking to people, explaining how the system actually works. That is good. That is necessary. Most people do not become class-conscious by reading theory. They get there through contradiction, disappointment, and their own life experience.
But none of that changes the real limit here.
There is still no leverage.
The White House saw the protest. The reactionaries saw the protest. The right-wing Republicans saw the protest. Did they care? I do not think so. Why would they? You marched. You held signs. You shouted. Then you went home.
That is not pressure.
That is not pain.
That is not something that forces power to respond.
And that is the real problem.
If the system can ignore your protest, it will. If your protest does not interrupt anything, then power can simply wait for it to pass.
That is why May Day matters.
May 1st is the real Labor Day. It is the real International Workers’ Holiday. The whole world knows that, except the United States and Canada. And that is not an accident. That is political.
May Day came out of the working-class struggle. It came out of the fight for the eight-hour workday. It came out of the 1886 labor movement in Chicago, where workers were fighting brutal conditions, long hours, and open exploitation. It came out of sacrifice. It came out of class struggle. And that history scared the ruling class.
That is why they moved Labor Day to September. They took something born in struggle and turned it into something soft, harmless, commercialized, and politically safe. They stripped away the class content. They stripped away the memory of conflict. They turned a day of struggle into a holiday you can consume without remembering what it meant.
That is ideological warfare.
They wanted workers disconnected from their own history. They wanted workers disconnected from socialism, communism, and class struggle. They wanted you to celebrate labor without ever understanding labor as power.
And let me be clear.
A cardboard sign is not enough. One day of marching is not enough. A protest that does not disrupt the machine is not enough.
What actually creates leverage is labor action.
A real national general strike. Not just for one afternoon. For days. For weeks. Maybe longer. Because when workers stop, profit stops. And when profit stops, the system finally feels pain.
Now, I understand the risk.
A lot of us are living paycheck to paycheck. One missed paycheck can be one step away from disaster. You cannot just stop working without serious consequences. That fear is real.
But here is the other side of that truth.
If we do not do anything now, if we do not make sacrifices now, then it is going to be our children. The next generation will inherit something worse. More debt. More instability. More war. More decline.
So that is the choice.
You either accept endless deterioration, or you start building something that actually has leverage.
That is why I am not mocking No Kings Day. But I am also not romanticizing it. It can be a beginning. It can be a bridge. But by itself, it is not enough.
If it stays at the level of marching and going home, the system will absorb it.
If it becomes something deeper, something organized, something tied to labor, then it becomes more serious.
If this made sense to you
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