The importance of camaraderie.

The wage-earners are a democratically significant group.

The employers are not a democratically significant group.

But the employers control almost all media. They try to create division.
Between have-jobs and have-nots. Between high-earners and low-earners.
Between young and old.
Between even slightly different demographics.

If we, in general, get suckered into that, we're just handing power over to fascists.

Fascism is a movement for employers to get wage-earners so deeply infected with hate for other groups that they will start voting agains their own best interests to spite the Others.

The only antidote (apart from crowd-sourced and Union-supported media) is solidarity.

An engineer who earns 10 times what you earn is not your enemy, nor are you hers. That split is artificial, created by her employer and yours, working in perfect unison.

Don't be a sucker. If you are a wage-earner, have solidarity with all wage earners, because you have common interests and you need to work together to get them covered.

Also: Have solidarity with the unemployed, because their situation is being used to pressure you into giving up your rights - if the unemployed are OK, that's more power to you.

Have solidarity with all groups, whether ethnic, racialized, age-based, location-based. Animosity with the next town over is the most basic kind of the divide-and-conquer plan.

But do not appease the ones who have fallen into fascism.

Turn them around if you can spot a chance to do so, but otherwise shut them down. Don't fret over losing a few, they have been poisoned and if the best you can do is keeping them from doing more harm, so be it.

Be a comrade, even if you are not a communist or anarchist or even particularly opposed to commercialism, even if you're naturally cranky, even if you are oppressed by people who should be your ally - the very first step is to not fall for it yourself.

#Solidarity
#bluecollar
#whitecollar
#divideandconquer
#employment
#unemployment