Right now, people keep asking, “Why don’t Americans go on strike?” And even more Americans keep giving common excuses:

Fear. Fear of losing housing, healthcare, a job. Fear of losing the little stability they think that they still have. But the question that no one is asking is: “who taught us that not acting was safe?”

While fear isn’t irrational, it is political. Under capitalism, survival is individualized. Housing is private. Healthcare is tied to employment. Food and safety are commodified, so risk feels personal instead of collective.

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

When people are forced to survive alone, they begin to think alone. Which is absolutely not human nature, but rather a system producing obedience.

This is why some of the most defeatist arguments come from people who still think they have something to lose.

Lenin identified this contradiction: He wrote that layers of relative comfort inside capitalism often produce hesitation rather than resistance. Because the insecurity is masked. This is a hostage psychology.

This is also something that Marxists call silent compulsion or mute compulsion. Workers not held in place primarily by force but by contradictions that punish resistance automatically.

When you lose your job, your healthcare, your housing, the system disciplines you without needing soldiers on the street. And this is exactly what makes people say “this will never work” before it even begins.

But history contradicts defeatism. This is where this sort of American amnesia becomes dangerous. Let’s talk about Seattle, the city that I live in.

You may notice this poster behind me at times, commemorating the Seattle general strike in 1919, the very first general strike in the United States, where over 60,000 workers shut down the entire city.

Transportation and businesses stopped, workers organized food distribution and essential services. There were no modern labor protections, no unemployment insurance, and a real threat of military intervention.

They knew this and they did it anyways. And the only reason it ended was because leadership lacked consensus on how far to escalate it when the National Guard was sent in.

In retrospect, Anna Louise Strong said this (please pay attention, we must learn from this!):

"As soon as one of these workers was put on a responsible committee, he also wished to stop “before there was riot and blood”.

The general strike put into our hands the organized life of the city - all except the guns.

We could last only until they started shooting; we were one gigantic bluff."

The workers had the power, but many were not yet prepared to use it fully.

We learn from this. We do better next time.

We also ignore that strikes built modern America. Almost every protection working people still have in the United States exists because workers did strike. These gains were not gifts from the states, but concessions extracted under threat. Our threat.

And then globally, workers have not just improved conditions, but reshaped entire governments. All organized responses to unbearable conditions.

And across that history, workers have mobilized under conditions worse than those we face now. No protections, no guarantees, constant open violence. They weren’t striking because it was safe to do so, because there was a backup plan, something to fall on.

They struck because doing nothing already killed them. It got them where they are.

We can’t let fear have the authority. Are we going to let them get that far? That’s what we’re doing by sitting back and saying “Uh, we could never do it. It’ll never happen. I might lose my job.”

You’ll lose your job when they kill you anyways!

What we’re living with today is alienation, loss of third spaces, collapse of unions, erasure of that working class history, and an ideology that tells us survival is personal responsibility.

Antonio Gramsci gave us the clearest framework for this moment:

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

Revolutionary optimism is not pretending that things are easy. It’s recognizing that keeping what little crumbs we have under these conditions guarantees our loss.

We are already losing what we’re afraid to lose.

And right now, I’m speaking mostly to the privileged who are only just now fearing realizing they could lose something. Many before you didn’t have anything to begin with.

So, are we going to lose the crumbs we have quietly? Or together, with intention, with memory of the past, with solidarity with one another?

We need to transform our conditions and become something greater. We deserve better. Don’t give up. Don’t give in to nihilism and defeat.