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:
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.