AOC Promotes Workers Strike as 30 Million Americans Are Out of Work

The GOP War Room distributed a video on Tuesday of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) promoting workers across the nation to take part in a “general strike” reminiscent of labor strikes in the past as some 30 million Americans are out of work. 

“You know there’s a lot of people saying, you know, call for a general strike,” Ocasio-Cortez said in the video. “The majority of Americans don’t know what a general strike is.”

“And so our responsibility is to talk about it, expand consciousness about it, and to actually create the conditions in which working people can generate and really exercise their own power — the power they already have for themselves,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

According to the leftist website Vice, the current health crisis is an opportunity to put leftwing agendas in place:

Coronavirus is bringing a strike wave to America, if it hasn’t already, and there is the feeling that it is snowballing into something more, which the U.S. hasn’t seen for 75 years: a general strike that encompasses everyone, not just workers at one company or industry. As Instacart strike organizer Vanessa Bain told us: “Bosses and CEOs across sectors and industries have failed to act, so workers are taking matters into their own hands. The time for a general strike is now.”

“The concept of a general strike emerged from early-20th-century leftist thought,” the Vox owned The Cut reported. “In 1906, Rosa Luxembourg wrote in The Mass Strike, her seminal text on the subject, ‘It is absurd to think of the mass strike as one act, one isolated action. The mass strike is rather the indication, the rallying idea, of a whole period of the class struggle lasting for years, perhaps for decades.’ The general strike can take different forms. It might be one large action — like Seattle’s weeklong general strike of 1919 — or it might be a series of continuous actions, like France’s recent nationwide strikes over the government’s plan to reform the country’s pension fund system.”

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