No

Biden and Dems pushed hard against immigrants and beefed up ICE.

OWS and BLM did not fail due to not having a concrete and focused list of demands. That was media spin intended to undermine the movements. There was a widely circulated list (or really very similar lists) of BLM demands, around 5. In cities, a given BLM group would have very specific and actionable demands and would attempt to leverage their occupations and other disruptions to achieve them. Nobody in City Hall would have any difficulty understanding them nor the general public when reading the ubiquitous pamphlets at marches.

But this idea is almost true, because the actual reason for failure was a lack of experience in organizing effectively. Both movements were reactive and massively decentralized. They wasted huge amounts of time and energy trying to figure out what to do via large, open debate spaces without particularly good political education, agreement, nor effective means of organizing like committees and commitments to act on committees’ recommendations. And because their spaces had a low average level of political education, they were easy to coopt by any savvy group of liberals with a bullhorn, e.g. the people that told BLM protesters to talk to cops or get themselves arrested for literally no reason.

They were also vulnerable to tokenization, e.g., “listen to what the black people tell you”. Which ones? Black people aren’t a monolith! The actual reality in these spaces is, again, whoever happens to be present at the time and has a bullhorn. They might have great ideas built on life experience, planning actions, and political education, or they might be someone with a cop uncle saying it’s time to debate whether ACAB is racist or something. White liberals are particularly vulnerable to tokenizing arguments and will listen when told to go home using such arguments, which has been the death of many an occupation. Behind the scenes, POC organizers are pissed and trying to figure out who the person with the bullhorn was and how they can stop that next time - 5-10 years down the road, i.e. there is a feeling that it is essentially too late to “fix” the situation, and those organizers feel bitter.

So if we step back and ask what the core challenges were, they amount to having far too little in the way of mature organizers and other politically educated groups to lead and educate during these kinds of events. The ratio between members of mature organizations, politically educated general public, and non-politically educated general public is incompatible with effective organizing. So all that happens is ad hoc re-learning of the same lessons every organizer has learned for centuries, just too late to be used for the current event. Or worse, most people not even understanding what went wrong or that thete was a failure in the first place.

So, the solution is to build mature left organizations that use effective methodologies and prevent liberal cooption. And to do it now, not just as a reaction to every new major event. This is not an easy task but it is one with historical precedent and a half-decent roadmap. A list of demands is not really directly relevant, it is just a tool for organizers to use and must always be crafted for the conditions and political questions of the moment by such the ground groups.

Vance would be more effective in carrying out the right wing agenda.

To quibble, housing isn’t just treated as a commodity, it is treated as a financial asset that will accrue value. This nearly always leads to a massive price spiral. The same applies to university loans, for example. Once financialized, pricing spiraled even faster than the cuts to funding that were passed on to students as tuition. Health insurance and healthcare have a similar dynamic because the insurance industry is similarly non-productive and can only make larger and larger profits by basically scamming: paying out less than they promised and investing their cash reserves.

Re: a successful strike, this requires having your workers on board and ready to hold a line for each other. They have to be ready for a fight and not backstab, undercut, or balk because they are afraid. And they need to be at the table in the first place, coordinated and ready to go. This would amount to a level of organization that is currently unimaginable in the US, where false consciousness is dominant. Most importantly, whichever material forces drive people to organize will shape their demands. When forming a union, you do research first to see which workplaces are good prospects and what they care about most, then roll that into a campaign. We don’t really know what forces may build to drive people to be ready to take some kind of action, nor do we know that left organizational capacity will be what that energy ends up feeding. The false consciousness in the US that has been so effective is marginalization. Chattel slavery, genocide of indigenous people, a temporary exploitation and then rejection of Mexicans and Chinese people. A temporary exploitation and then white-ification of Irish, Eastern Europeans, Greeks, Italians. Scapegoating women, black people, gay people, trans people, and do on. This is currently a stronger tradition in the US than left organizing and it is the society the Nazis took notes from when designing their racial conquest and empire plans (though they thought the US’ racial rules were too extreme to work in their region).

The real question is not what is an idealistic list of demands to address the contradictions of US capitalism, but how we could organize from the left to win out over these fascistic tendencies (really just the dark side of liberalism qua the political ideology of capital). The path taken to organize and the historical events surrounding it will determine any hypothetical demands of a hypothetical general strike.

So, framed another way: a more appropriate question is what will those reading this thread be doing to learn how to organize, to understand capitalism and historical currents, and to join, enlarge, and improve principled anticapitalist parties and organizations that can survive and win out over left liberal cooption (like many unions suffer fron today) and right liberal reactionary violence?

Check your local anti-capitalist actions and see if anyone needs help. Trust your gut or ask here if a given organization you’re thinking of joining seems off. But get involved! May Day, as in May 1, the true day of labor, will be here soon and is a good event for seeing what anti-capitalist organizations are in your area. The lead orgs doing the work for the events of the day are a good bet.

Start with a non-job so you can study while working. Then get internships relevant to your major once you know your direction.

A non-job is one with a lot of downtime and where they don’t care if you read. Parking attendant, small movie theater worker, custodian at a place that is well-staffed.

The conditions under which the US could carry out a coordinated general strike would not look like the current US. And the demands would be subject to those conditions. US organized labor is largely beholden to capital and has no principled sense of solidarity, certainly beyond US borders, but often even within them. That would need to be developed through struggle and creating organization where there is little. See the federal workers getting screwed with by the administration? A very large percentage are unionized but their union is weak and poorly organized. They have simply accepted the dictates of their employer that they are not allowed to strike and therefore they have no basic infrastructure with which to organize actions or even think of themselves as workers that need to be militant and fight for one another.

Under current conditions the closest thing you will get to a general strike is popular riots. Those are expressions of social pain and frustration and they require no organizing.

It might sound like I’m not really answering the question, but that’s because the question itself is wrong. It has flipped the problem on its head, which is to say, is too focused on what ideas would be good to demand under a general strike rather than how would you ever build the conditions for a general strike? Demands must be historically embedded, they must be relevant to the groups coordinating a strike, and they need to be clear-eyed about the capital strike that would occur adjacent to it. We cannot say what those demands would be other than they would not be about this administration. The US working class will lose fights over and over again under all administrations until it can be organized and directed with concrete and correct political analysis.

Re: “restore” the United States, why? The US is a genocidal empire currently help genocide Palestinians and enabling the prelude to the Armenian Genocide 2.0. We should seek justice, not a “return”. The past and the status quo of the US are not goid things, the narrative that they were/are requires white supremacist thinking.