Unions are a product of people talking to each other, sharing grievances and deciding on collective action as the solution.

Your point was that education is the primary driver of labor activity. This is not education. This is people getting together to make a plan based on being oppressed by their boss, which is literally what I said here.

The former requires no education if you’re paid in scrip and working at the end of a bayonette. That’s literally what the history says.

Yes, the former absolutely requires education. People need to understand how class relationships work, how collective bargaining works, how effective organization works. Modern leftists who want to skip all that are deeply unserious.

Can you argue with yourself here?

Where do you think unions come from, they just appear fully formed out of thin air in your mind? Unions are a product of people talking to each other, sharing grievances and deciding on collective action as the solution.

I can assure you that they will just like people such as Fred Hampton, who did actual real world organizing instead of online trolling could.

This is a non-sequitor. My argument is literally it’s unrealistic that your labor base has a deep knowledge of theory as the basis to galvanize change in the modern era. Your counter to that started at actually Lenin exists, to actually Fred Hampton exists.

Wow a vanguardist movement had an intellectual vanguard? No way. What happened in 3 years after the emergence of that vanguard? Did everyone sacrifice gloriously for the vanguard and create the Soviet States of Chicago? Did they start a protracted people’s war?

Or was that vanguard murdered by the state? Were they scattered to the wind by kangaroo trials? Did their networks dissolve into nothingness within 5 years?

You’ve literally pointed to one of the exact fucking reasons why your theory of change is unrealistic in the modern world. It is literally not enough to have an intelligensia, it’s also unproven that it’s even needed given there are no successes, in fact most intelligensias are annoying and normal people don’t want to be around them. I’m self aware enough to understand that.

As far as your online trolling dig, I literally have several years of community organizing under my belt starting from college where I worked with Asian American communities, to direct mutual aid in my neighborhood where I spent $5k of my own money organizing community services for and feeding and caring for elderly residents living in Section 8 communities working directly with local care providers who were laid off between 2019 and 2021. And I can also tell you who wrote What Is To Be Done? but I’m not an example of anything.

Getting them to show up for what specifically?

• Your union meeting
• Your union card drive
• Your union ratification vote
• The right side of your union contract negotiation vote
• Your strike
• Your wildcat
• Your People’s Army recruitment
• Your civil war.

In that order, as it’s more difficult to actually win gains through “polite” society shit like voting and negotiations, you have to do things that require more sacrifice. And in fact the terrain isn’t an even gradient because union meetings and card signing has a lot more risk, than being represented by an existing unionized shop and showing up on the right side of a contract vote.

And yes, you are very much dealing with real genuine poverty and overwork in 21st century. Millions of people are struggling to make ends meet, working multiple jobs, and being stuck in debt.

If you are in any way thinking that the conditions in the 21st century US are equivalent rather that merely rhyme with the conditions in the 19th and 20th in Russia as much as you can take “What is to be Done?” off the shelf and use it as a playbook then there’s really no point in this discussion.

The reality of history is that labor consciousness developed through completely two different antithetical processes across the Atlantic. The creation of the IWW literally is the refutation of the core thesis of “What is to be Done?” that class consciousness cannot spontaneously emerge out of labor action with bosses. Lenin was right for his time in Russia, he is not universal. His further global success is based on the export of support and material from the USSR to movements, and that tactic effectively failed in China which lead to the Sino Soviet Split.

Your failure to actually describe realistically the terrain of the labor movement in the US in the 21st century is literally the first hurdle. We don’t have theorists in the US capable of this anymore. We don’t produce that as a society. Russia had a grand tradition of intelligensia where there were hundreds of people like Lenin writing.

And the violent labor action in 1920s wasn’t some spontaneous event that happened out of the blue. It was a product of many years of organizing which started with having public discussions about the conditions the workers were experiencing.

This is completely untrue because union participation rate went down in the 1920’s. If what you’re saying is true then unions went into firefights intentionally on the back foot.

It was the most violent decade because bosses started becoming more violent in reaction to union activities in the 1910’s. You can trace the most violent uprising in the US, Battle of Blair Mountain as a direct thruline of the escalations of the Ludlowe and Matewan Massacres.

One thing is a prerequisite for the other. You can’t put the cart before the horse here. Without general public understanding, no organized resistence to oppression is possible.

You’re conflating, we have to fight the boss for our freedom with we have to create a glorious workers movement to build communism. The former requires no education if you’re paid in scrip and working at the end of a bayonette. That’s literally what the history says.

I can assure you that people who are going to be radicalized and who will organize aren’t the ones sitting watching youtube. They’re the people who are feeling the exploitation through their personal lived experience.

Yeah I agree, and I can assure you that those people aren’t going to be able to tell you what the Parenti Yellow Lecture is, or what What Is To Be Done? is or who wrote it.

In the modern era the problem isn’t “reaching people”. It’s getting them to show up. It’s the same problem of electoral politics dude.

If I am a McDonalds worker you have to convince me that it’s worth my time to go to your little meetings, time that I could be using to watch Mr Beast give someone a million dollars in return for the same kind of light torture I experience at my job.

Talking to leftists is the same as talking to Democrats sometimes. You just have to be “the smartest” while willfully not understanding that to a real life worker your hands look as empty as the lib next to you.

You’re not competing with 20th century poverty, you’re competing with 21st century dopamine rat poverty and the left as a whole hasn’t evolved to handle that.

Once again, worker power in 1930s didn’t just magically appear out of nowhere

Yeah it appeared specifically because the 1920’s was the most violent decade of labor action.

This entire thread chain you’ve kept saying, public debate and education is what drives the movement. You’ve effectively been shouting the cart is what drives the movement!

Until labor effectively and most likely violently confronts capital in this country and drives a continuation of wins and improvements in material conditions for a majority of Americans, nobody is going to sit through Parenti videos because they could be watching Mr Beast.

Education and public debate like the cart carries the bulk of benefits to the majority of people (the cart can run away on it’s own but it will eventually stop, like it did in the US), but it is nothing without the horse (effective and again likely violent labor confrontations of capital) that actually generates the motion and the direction.

If we woke up tomorrow and everyone understood Parenti, nothing would actually change until there was a demonstration of the willingness to truly fight, and the fruits of truly fighting. We’d all be sitting on that cart waiting for it to move, effectively the same thing we’re doing now without actually being in the cart. If the horse doesn’t show up we’ll all just go back to watching Mr Beast as the vice closes in on us.

The idea of education and vanguardism as a solution is kinda silly because. we’re still just playing a game of prisoners dilemma and in the US, why bother with that and instead just watch Mr Beast. You’re not a Russian peasant dirt farming for a share cropper, you’re a modern subject of capital with access to youtube.

Big Bill Haywood didn’t become interested in the labor movement because he was educated in theory. He became interested in the labor movement because he saw what happened with Haymarket Square Massacre and the Pullman Strike. He didn’t form IWW because after he joined the WFM he learned theory. He formed the IWW because the WFM failed to protect workers when bosses exploited differences in types of labor. In America there was no vanguardism in the labor movement, it was survivalism and blood.

The modern Big Bill Haywood doesn’t have the real motivation of blood. He has the de-motivation of youtube, processed food, and overall cheap dopamine. That’s what “education” is competing with. Until the left develops a way to actually compete with cheap dopamine, our only realistic answers is quite literally collapse into the previously understood problem of late 19th early 20th century conditions whether organic, manufactured, or accelerated.

You’re asking me for answers that nobody has, to a problem and set of conditions that the majority of leftists cannot actually even explain. We simply pretend they’re conditions of the past that we read in books while we plan for the glorious future in our mind palaces.

Even if I take at face value this comparison: 1935 had a union density of 12.5% which is 2.5% more than 2024. Your argument is that we’d have worker power comparable to 1935 if we just showed the entirety of the AFL-CIO and teamsters Parenti videos and increased frequency of union meetings?

Okay I’ll buy the ticket, lets take a ride:

There was plenty of public debate in 1930s.

Show me. Show me your 1930’s public debate. Show me how many “views” it got, and compare that to something unquestionably popular in the 1930’s. I’ll even concede to you the unrealistic expectation that a view = 100% conversion.

Then explain how that situation is equivalent to 2024.

since you continue to ignore my point, public debate serves as a way to educate people. Education does not happen magically out of the blue.

You know how sometimes it feels like you’re talking to a wall online? Yeah in 2024, “public debate” is talking to a wall. You have to meet people where they’re at and move them, not force feed them Parenti lectures.

I didn’t argue against the idea that public debate serves as a way to educate people. I have said the plain truth that it is ineffective in today’s society. In 2024 there’s hundreds of thousands of ways to educate yourself for free, you need to answer the question of why people don’t use them. Not argue about how technically public debate is educational.

Public debate is as effective as sending people marxists.org, youtube parenti library links or yelling at them to read theory over twitter.

Nice cherry picking there. What Parenti says in the speech is that it’s actually both. He gives examples, such as how Wagner Act was leveraged by the workers to start doing mass organizing, showing how the system can indeed be leveraged along side organization outside the system. His whole point is to use all the tools available and to dismiss simplistic analysis that you’re advocating for here.

It’s not cherry picking. Parenti is describing politics moving in a liberative direction. Your meme is describing politics moving in a oppressive direction. When politics moves in an oppressive direction “public debate” stops mattering at a point. Your meme is arguing for life near 1910, not near 1935. Public debate only matters if you can move politics into a liberative direction, AND you maintain that underlying political power that has been effectively destroyed by the Democratic party jettisoning unions and union membership dying in the late 20th.

Nobody is going to sit thru a Parenti lecture unless they think you can change their material conditions.

If you’re arguing about the Wagner Act’s impact you’re about a time past literal height of achievement for ideological militaristic labor organizatoin (IWW) in this country. By the time of Wagner act the US IWW was dismantled into AFL style corporate unionism. Sure they could do strikes, which was the polite thing compared to literally class warfare of the IWW.

You’re advocating to use tactics derived from a strategic position you are not in. We are not in 1910 or in 1935 regarding union power and action.

We are in a time where we have:

• We have ~1900’s union participation rates.
• Worse than 1920’s wealth inequality
• And union bases and leadership that have been ideologically dismantled by AFL style unionism since the late 1920’s, broken by global competition, broken by NAFTA

Nobody wants “public debate”. They’re burned out on “public debate”. People just want change, but they’re also unwilling to risk the minor comforts they have to get it. If you’re using Parenti as a model, we’re at the start of the story except instead of getting kicked out of town for public speeches, nobody is listening.

Public debate is the labor leftist version of the electoral leftist pipe dream of 3 years ago of “force the vote” on M4A.

It’s not a completely different statement though. A society is fundamentally a social construct based around common ideology. That’s what the government derives its legitimacy from. An organized labor movement is a path towards revising the social contract.

The social contract that you exists under derives its legitimacy from bourgeoisie elections not labor voluntarism. There has never been a long lived stable society in the modern era that has derived its legitimacy from labor voluntarism. You are arguing about fiction.

As I pointed out above, worker organization doesn’t come out of thin air. It requires education of the masses, which involves public debate. If you study any effective social movement throughout history then you’ll see that it always starts with public debate.

Your own link to the Parenti lecture disproves this. There was never “public debate” at the comparable time in history. There was underground education and labor actions. Public debate was quashed.

11:08

In 1920s when the iww went into townships in the in the early 20s you know in most towns in America in the 20s there was no free speech for syndicalists anarchists socialists wobblies Communists Union organizers of any kind you went into that town you started speaking speaking and organizing the sheriff in his and his and his goons would come and bash your head in a new end and you ended up spending a week in the slam and then driven out of town.

You are conflating the world which you live in, the world you want to live in, and how you think we can get there into one mess that doesn’t actually explain any of the 3 concepts well.

Public debate has meaning, it’s not “people be talking”.

The less debate there is on these issues the easier it becomes for a tyrannical regime to act with impunity. This lecture from Parenti is relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlFuxIzD240

Also just some off topic dunking, Parenti literally contradicts this in the speech

12:10 Speech fights percolated and shook the nation for a while and that’s what percolated up to the Supreme Court and it was then that Oliver Wendell Holmes and those guys sitting up there in the black robes started saying that uh time uh overthrows many a fighting faith and there must be change and we must tolerate these uh these kinds of things and the right to dissent blah blah blah it was when they got and felt the impact the power of people mobilized and organized and directed against their establishment that they knew they had to give a little it’s when people develop that power that they gain some modicum of freedom

It’s not debate it’s organized material opposition.

Also, if you bothered to watch the lecture then you’ll see that it’s discussing how workers in US struggled for rights. It doesn’t talk about USSR at all.

This

I’m not saying the system can be changed by liberal means like voting every four years. The change comes from people organizing and building a worker movement that can take tangible action like doing general strikes, mass protests, and so on.

Is a completely different argument than this:

At the end of the day, society is a social contract with people at the top deriving their legitimacy from having the consent of the public. The less debate there is on these issues the easier it becomes for a tyrannical regime to act with impunity

Especially to a liberal.

This

I’m not saying the system can be changed by liberal means like voting every four years. The change comes from people organizing and building a worker movement that can take tangible action like doing general strikes, mass protests, and so on.

Says that political power comes from material leverage and its logical ends are the Mao quote “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun”.

This

At the end of the day, society is a social contract with people at the top deriving their legitimacy from having the consent of the public. The less debate there is on these issues the easier it becomes for a tyrannical regime to act with impunity.

Says that political power comes from the public simply voicing their agreement / disagreement and the ruling class enacting that opinion.

At the end of the day if your way to fight back against the ruling class is through material leverage, public debate simply doesn’t matter, worker organization sublimates that.

The less debate there is on these issues the easier it becomes for a tyrannical regime to act with impunity.

This is a position you can no longer seriously hold in America in 2024. Public debate on these issues does nothing. You can look at the public attitudes towards plenty of policy positions that when polled have an overwhelming majority of support across the country but have been politically nonviable at the federal level:

• legalized marijuana
• medicare for all
• access to abortion
• over policing
• a fair economy

We can have open debate till we’re blue in the face. We can march until we wear out our shoes. The liberal tools have failed us completely in actually moving the political dial. These tools have been defeated in the modern era by experiments at the imperial periphery. I suggest you read If We Burn by Vincent Bevins.

Legitimacy is not a real discussion point in this country, it is assumed. If it were we’d constantly ask why is our democracy legitimate when the government is not actually picked by a majority of our population. Democrats in their racism are blaming Latino men. The percentage of Latino men that voted for Trump is a minuscule percentage of Latinos that can vote in this country. The overwhelming majority of Latinos didn’t vote in the previous election. The president is picked by 1/5th to 1/3rd of the population eligible to vote. If you were to boil that down to a friend group you’d have a social intrigue movie in the style of Bodies Bodies Bodies.

If we liken this to the problem of consent with sexual relations, the US rules on tacit consent at best, and generally coerced sexual assault and when those don’t work outright violent sexual assault. If legitimacy was a real issue the US would rule on enthusiastic consent. But it doesn’t.

Parenti’s lecture is meant to disabuse tankies of advocating for censorious democratic centralism of the USSR. It does not work in the context of the US because the system of control is completely different. If a country is a boiler that you need to keep from exploding, the USSR worked by creating the most armored boiler possible. The US works by having a minority or impoverished person or some other type of scapegoat put their face in front of a pressure relief valve and open it. The end result in the context of ruling a country is the same, the architects of the boiler are well insulated from its negative effects.

This still doesn’t make any sense:

pay taxes for everyone’s health care

This was never up for debate until let’s say 2003 when Conyers introduced medicare for all. Then it was up for debate in pockets of years, and it really matters specifically what you mean by who’s debating in that window. Politicians or news media.

So roughly these are the open Overton windows for universal healthcare

follow international law

This was never really up for debate until 2001. The US simply just broke international law when it saw fit prior, and after.

not do extrajudicial killings/imprisonment

This is essentially the same as above. See our various policing actions in the modern era. MOVE, Japanese Internment, Mexican “Repatriation”. Lynchings. Pinkertons. No real debate to be had here, America just does it and then does paperwork to justify it.

not be personally or institutionally racist

This has essentially been debated since the start of the US. So it’s been “in the window”. But in practice the position has always been right wing even to this day.

I would argue that the stage where a society starts to openly embrace its crimes is the one to be really worried about.

Open embrace of crimes is worrying sure, but in practice it’s not practically better than doing crimes, denying you do them, and pretending you’re good. Because in reality, what you can see on the left as “open embrace of criminality” on the right is seen as “being the good guys”. So the open embrace may qualify as an increase in magnitude but not a change in direction. I’d love to see this actually proved out, rather than just said.

This also pretends that the causes of these shifts are not a change in material realities, but rather a change in attitudes ex nihilio. When every empire thinks its fading it does this kinda shit, because this is the kind of shit that builds and maintains empires. It’s not because the “bad guys” are in charge.

A large portion of the reason that these things never came into debate until the 21st century is because the US was cruising off of the compromises made as part of reconstructing the rest of the modern world post WW2. Those compromises started being untenable in the 70’s and have created these debates in the 2000’s, 2010’s, and 2020’s solely because they are crumbling.

The most important of these debates happened behind closed doors before most of us were even born. The Overton Window shifts rightward not because it’s a nerdy window function, but because it’s a marble on a table long enough so that it takes the marble a century to traverse, and that table was set up a century ago to be tilted to the right. The ratchet effect is because Democrats defend the core compromises made in 1945.

fight the centrists

Centrists are literally the people that often have the majority of backing from the very people and institutions that allow these problems to fester and grow. Their solutions are often the most unworkable in the real world and their outcomes are often right leaning simply because of how politics works in capitalist societies. Centrists have power in our political system not because of brokering any good compromise, it’s because Centrists are often the best fundraisers because they can appeal to a wide array of rich donors.

It’s a silly take if you think Centrists can be allies to any semblance of Left. The Kamala Harris campaign is literal proof of it. Raise $1.1B, spend $1.120B on literal Centrist trash positions and political strategy like paying celebrities and sending Richie Torres to Michigan, while telling everyone how you’re the smartest people in the room.

The most celebrated Centrist policy of the 20th century is the ACA (note all the other ones that were celebrated before it are not so much celebrated now because of what they actually did see NAFTA, TANF, etc). The only “left” positions in the ACA is 100% coverage of preventative medicine, mandatory contraception coverage, and making preexisting conditions an illegal qualification. In reality the real mark of the ACA is that instead of going bankrupt for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in medical debt, Americans are going broke for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical debt. It’s literally a debt regulation that keeps private healthcare a viable and profitable system because the game of musical chairs that is our healthcare debt system was running out of chairs. 10% of Americans owe medical debt, thanks to the ACA it’s thousands to hundreds of thousands, if it wasn’t for the ACA it would be 10x larger.

Who had the most benefit from that policy? It certainly wasn’t people, who still struggle to pay for healthcare, still carry medical debt, and still are going bankrupt. It was the corporations who could continue this extractive grift because the government essentially brokered a deal between the entire market to reset the scale of the economy and no one corporation felt like it was losing out compared to the others.

You can even look at the majority of legal opposition to the ACA isn’t based in it’s left positions. For contraception you have Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania. That’s it for opposition to the left positions, the rest is about how the market is regulated under ACA:

• National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and other lawsuits were about the individual mandate, which was effectively ruled a tax.
• King v. Burwell was about using federal subsidies in states without exchanges
• House v. Price was about cost sharing and transfer payments between insurers
• United States House of Representatives v. Azar was about cost sharing reducation payments and how they were allocated in the budget
• California v. Texas was again about the individual mandate as a tax
• Maine Community Health Options v. United States was about risk corridor payments and appropriation.

Where is the opposition to the left here? It’s not really there, because there’s not a lot of “left” policy. This is centrist infighting about who has to hold the bag (and how much bag they have to hold) for this fucked up system that extracts money from people’s health.

That’s what centrism is, market brokerage.

I hate the term “normalization” because it doesn’t mean anything to most people. The closest approximation of it’s meaning to most people is “stuff (usually negative) is happening”.

Please point me to the time in American history where it was normal to:

1. pay taxes for everyone’s health care
2. follow international law
3. not do extrajudicial killings/imprisonment
4. not be personally or institutionally racist

Spoiler you cannot. These times literally do not exist in any meaningful way, they only exist as ephemeral pockets of modernity that you personally have experienced. Many of the arguments that you can make in favor of these points of time, suffer greatly from the just world fallacy. When you look a little too hard at those pockets of time, you’ll find that your feeling was just a feeling and it wasn’t even true.

This meme may be good at convincing libs their world view is fucked, but it’s not an accurate depiction.

first class languages

So like Racket/Scheme and like maybe Ruby?

Factory factory…n is literally just creating an OOP closure for when your language doesn’t support first class functions, closures and/or currying.

Also metaprogramming and abstraction is literally the only way to actually manage and deal with the capriciousness of your stakeholders.

It’s not simple, because it’s literally not that simple. It’s Conway’s Law. That’s what being a programmer in the industry is. I run a platform team, and I get paid because I can organize and deal with technical risk and contingency better than anyone else at my company. You bet your ass I do metaprogramming.

Also my product itself is a factory factory factory. Users create processes to author content, author content, and that content is delivered to other users. All in the same system. Managing complexity is extremely important if you want to work on interesting things.

“And this is the way everyone is doing it now? Everyone is using a general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory now, whenever they need a hammer?”

I’ve had this exact conversation with a programmer who was retiring. He was complaining that I ask too much because I told him that he needed a more generic way to represent the logic that encodes how our end-users traverse the content that our authoring users create and manage. He literally said something to the effect of the above quote to me, but as complaining contempt.

The business explicitly doesn’t want to spend money crafting individual code bases and products and unique logic. Our system lives and dies by our ability to service our internal clients and meet their needs in a dynamic manner. We need manage each factory layer carefully because very often different clients want two different things at two different times, and so each decision needs to be encoded in a way that allows us to make future platform changes without having to sell the business on refactors.

Sure you’ll run into people who overuse things when it could be simpler from the business perspective. But the reality is that most programmers in the industry have never stepped foot into a well run shop. Most programmers in the industry haven’t actually launched a product tip to tail.

It’s very easy to criticize patterns when you don’t actually have to use them, you’ve never seen them being used properly, and you don’t know how and when to implement them.

You don’t know how many times I’ve had to explain what two phase migration means and how to do them across multiple dependency links in the chain.

It’s not about serving assets it’s about hiding telemetry from adblockers, dns filters, ip lists, etc.