cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24783048
I put together a quick flyer for us to print out for tomorrow’s Good Trouble Again protest. (Find events near you on the map at their website!)
It was made in Krita (Scribus probably would’ve been better, but I didn’t have time to learn it), using graphics from old IWW pamphlets.
It recommends:
- Collective action and Unionizing with the IWW
- What a General Strike is
- Building community with a link to the Food Not Bombs website (probably the weakest section)
- A section on Solarpunk with text from the manifesto, along with a link to slrpnk.net!
- Ends with imploring readers to talk to the people around them at the protest and form connections.
The flyer is 2 pages designed to fit on a standard US Letter in landscape orientation to enable 2 flyers per page, and intended to be printed double-sided in long-edge mode.
You can create a PDF of the 2 pages for easier printing in Libreoffice Draw (go to Page > Page Properties > Enable Landscape Orientation, and reduce margins to 0.25")
Page 1 Double Flyer:
Page 2 Double Flyer:
If the double flyers aren’t working out for you, I also have a single page version. (without the section imploring reader to talk to the people around them)
Page 1 Single Page:
https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/48eb821d-c3c7-481f-8cbb-029989fb18c8.png
Page 2 Single Page:
If the intent is to get people started down a good path, then it should focus on first steps, which is community organising.
The people who are already open to unions are already in them. Because of 50 years of neo-liberal shite people do not understand class consciousness and view themselves simply as isolated, powerless, consumers.
You can break that view of themselves through community efforts - like gardens, allotments, etc - because they demonstrate their own abilities to themselves, and how working together benefits us all.
And then, you can start pushing for more official efforts and organisation.
That’s precisely what the second page mentions, as well as information on how to find a local Food Not Bombs chapter. These topics are also discussed often on Slrpnk.net, which I encourage readers to take a look at and join, in the hopes of exposing them to more in-depth discussion of those topics and people who they can talk to about it.
Again, in my personal experience in my area, I have met an astonishing amount of people who genuinely have no concept of what a union or general strike are, so for them, the lack of knowledge is most certainly a big barrier.
Sure, I don’t disagree with that.
What I’m saying is you’ve structured this like an instruction manual, but have the steps in the wrong order.
In my experience with local organising (I’m a trustee of the local foodbank) doing the actions in the order you’ve laid out would cause the vast majority to disengage immediately, and I live in an area with higher than average unionisation and left wing tendencies.
You know that for a general strike to be successful it has to be massive - 10s of millions of workers - and in effect for a very long time. For that to be possible, people need to be secure in their housing, their access to food, and to heat. If any of those fail, the strike fails.
For those to be a success, parallel power structures - mutual aid, etc - need to already be in place.
So, if you want to structure this as a 3 step instruction manual, my recommendation is that it’s
If I had time to redo it, I do think that revised order would be more ideal.
I would be pretty surprised if the current order will render it completely ineffectual at informing people of those concepts, and any who do flip it over and read the poorly named step 3 will find that it recommends building community for a general strike to be successful.