Yes, you’re correct that people should band together through common interests but don’t. America is different than France for example where demonstrations happen frequently and Germany where unions work with management instead of management working against it. In China, they have thousands of demonstrations throughout the month with no news getting out about it. We have few here, like the one about to happen against Amazon, but just at one location. The government prevents national organization of an entire unionization at once and only through local chapters. That is partly due the racist nature of government where the original unionization law made in 1935 Wagner Act. The white conservatives cut out the vast majority of Black American workers in the Southeast, with those senators who controlled the region preventing them by saying “agricultural workers” and “domestic workers” could not form unions. At the time 79 percent of Black Americans lived in the Southeast where the vast majority were in those fields of work as migrant crop pickers, or on cotton plantations and other farms working under horrific conditions for almost no pay and only four months of school up until 8th grade. This was a type of law, rather than a national condition, imposed by the government and enacted in states differently. Whites, and some skilled black Americans outside the southeast did unionize, so the law was segregationist. That is what the maintenance means and that is the type of agency I was mentioning.
Everyone has agency and I was speaking on how that agency manifests from an unconscious level. in this case, white conservatives were then Democrats in 1934-37 and all those laws of The New White Deal has segregationist and racist restrictions in how the white conservatives wrote and implemented them. They were motivated to keep Black Americans in the Southeast poor and dependent on them. The gaslighting we experience today masks over the fact that the during this time the architects of the New Deal were not liberals, at all. The controlling block were white male conservative Democrats from the Southeast, where everyone of them from about 20 states controlled the committees and the language of the deal. The agency we are forced to believe is that FDR wrote them, which he didn’t, and only signed them, though he sided with this racist conservative block who were his deep allies. These were the first national racially segregating laws in American history, enacting not only labor segregation, but housing segregation through the government restricting banks from lending to borrowers who make the neighborhood “non-harmonious” meaning not white. The Farming Act allowed state governments in the South to take land from the few black farmers who did own their own land, and the Social Security Act was made only for whites, “managers” and “professionals.” It’s the maintenance of caste and racial caste through segregation by laws enacted with this intention by white politicians, conservative white men in both parties now, that keeps this division alive.
It is very hard to band together, and the working class definitely need to join together. It can work but it is hard. I stopped in the parking lot a couple months ago to lend my support to the Kroger workers trying to unionize outside the store. I told them to fight on and they are worth far more than they are getting.