The demands we listed are not complete, nor were they intended to be detailed or totally comprehensive at this point. We tried to represent the broad interests of the multinational, multiracial working class, but the small forces that initiated this call can’t do that. We are encouraging organizations and individuals to support the demands that they can, add what you think needs to be added to suit your positionality and context, and act with as much unity leading up to, on, and beyond a General Strike.
Unity Without Uniformity
Mutual Aid
We are asking everyone to provide as much direct material and political support as possible to frontline workers, frontline communities, and those at severe risk in the prisons, detention centers, homeless shelters, nursing homes and assisted living facilities and at large in our communities.
Protect the Workers,
Protect Our Families,
Protect Our Communities,
Protect Each Other
We are asking organizations and individuals to amplify each other’s needs and actions in this time of crisis and transition to the greatest extent possible with all of the means at our disposal. This calls for supporting the various actions and initiatives being called by all the forces in motion in a non-sectarian manner. We ask everyone to agitate and build towards the General Strike as space where we all stand and act in unity to defend us, advance a prompt response to the crisis, and create the new institutions and social norms needed to create a society that can adequately address the pandemic at hand, the economic crises that will follow, and the other crisis that are clearly emerging on our horizon.
The Call
People’s Strike: Fighting for Our Lives, Forging Our Future
Take Action, First of Every Month
The COVID-19 pandemic has starkly revealed the inequalities and injustices that daily plague the world.
The triple crises of viral plague, systemic economic breakdown, and the failure and/or unwillingness of Governments to provide necessary protections, especially for the poor and people subjected to white supremacy, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and misogyny has thrown us into a fight for our lives.
The “Free Markets” that right-wing political figures like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, and others are seeking to protect and rely upon to address the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to produce chaos and needless suffering for millions of people. The economic nationalism and imperial rivalry we see on full display in the midst of this pandemic magnify the threat of war.
In the U.S. we are fed a steady stream of lies and authoritarian posturing. From Palestine to South Africa to Brazil to the U.S. and beyond, oppressive regimes are actively sacrificing vulnerable peoples and communities and treating frontline workers as utterly disposable.
We say ENOUGH! It is time to stand up! It’s Time To Strike Back – For Our Lives and Our Futures!
Join the Movement on the 1st of Every Month!
In recent months we have witnessed people throughout the U.S. and the World taking direct action in defense of their lives. We saw wildcat strikes, work stoppages, sickouts, protests, plant conversions, occupations, and worker takeovers at workplaces. We saw prisoner strikes and immigrant strikes. We saw rent strikes and housing occupations. We saw caravan demonstrations and physical distancing protests. Everywhere people are in motion, fighting back against the forces of reaction and irrationality that are trying to sustain a system that puts profits over people.
In order to avoid the needless deaths of millions of people and keep corporations and authoritarian governments from stealing our collective future, working and oppressed peoples need to stand together in solidarity, mutual aid, cooperation, and joint action. Together we can build a new world, a better world, one world that puts people and the planet over profits.
Collective Action is the Key. Determined mass, non-violent direct action conducted in a coordinated campaign can transform the institutions of governance and upend the power of the banks and the multi-national corporations and can address the immediate needs of workers and peoples throughout the world.
Since May 1st, we have seen hundreds of actions in the U.S. and internationally. Take action and join the growing movement of resistance as we fight to forge a radically different future.
#NoWork #NoShopping #NoRent #NoMortgage #NoEviction #NoDebt #NoSchool #NoPrison #NoDetention actions. Let’s send Trump and Wall Street a clear message: #WeWontDieForWallSt #PeopleAndPlanetOverProfits
Our Demands
- Institute the Human Right to Housing starting with making all the vacant and uninhabited housing stock available to those who need it now, and proceeding to make land once again a public good rather than a commodity and instituting the democratic and social distribution of housing based on need and ecological limitations.
- Decarbonize the Economy, End Fossil Fuel and Extractive Industries Now! Institute a Green New Deal based on a program of repairing damages frontline and fenceline lands and communities, the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and the protection and transitioning of workers in petrochemical, nuclear, and extractive industries.
- Institute Food Sovereignty Policies and Practices Now and put and end to the industrial food and animal warehousing conditions that stimulate the germination of viruses like COVID-19, contaminate our water supplies, deplete our soils, and institute local food growing policies based on agroecology or permaculture techniques that preserve and expand biodiversity and soil preservation.
- Democratize the Means of Production and convert corporations and workplaces into cooperatives to institute democracy in our workplaces, eliminate growing income inequality, insure greater equity in society and job security for workers, and enable the production of what we need and distribute equitably according to need.