General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Is revolution the only way we can elicit change? [View all]Chathamization
(1,638 posts)10 people and being the only one who cleans up. When you ask others to help clean, they tell you that it's no use because the house stays dirty no matter what and if it could be cleaned it would have by now. You can probably imagine the words you'd be trying to swallow after that. Time and effort have to be taken into account when judging these things. If you go on a diet and exercise for 6 weeks and get into shape, then stop for 6 months and get out of shape, it doesn't mean that dieting and exercise are useless. There's a lot of political work that's effective when enough people do it, but just doesn't get done by enough people most of the time.
For me - something like a strike focused on political change doesn't make much sense. Elections really are the low-hanging fruit; it doesn't take that much work to get people to be quasi-aware of what's happening and spend an hour voting once or twice a year. Referendums as well. And if you get enough people to show up (not even that many, especially in primaries), you get definite results. If you lose, you lose a bit of time. A strike, in contrast, takes a lot of time and is a much, much larger sacrifice for those involved. Even if you manage to get everyone on board, there's a good chance you won't have any success and will lose a great deal.
An app could be really useful for organizing, but one big obstacle would be getting people to use it. Though maybe there'd be an opportunity for that with 2016 coming up - if you (for instance) worked with Sanders supporters and had them use the app for organizing, it might give it the visibility it needed. Something similar happened with Dean supporters and Meetup in '04.