My brother in Christ we (the US) are the bad actors.

修正主义者

I love you in Chinese is 我爱你. 发射导弹 is I do.

Zelenskyy literally cannot advocate for negotiated peace. The Right wing nationalist elements of Ukraine's coalition will effectively murder him if that becomes his position. It remains to be seen what will happen to him when he's forced into it by the reality of the war and the waning of international support by his patron states.

Michael Parenti, Richard Wolff, Chris Smalls, Michael Hudson, Claudia De la Cruz, just off top of my head

If you're looking for a Lenin, Parenti is your closest but he's dead. Smalls is a good union organizer but has really just organized a single Amazon warehouse and fell off.

De La Cruz got less than half the votes Debs got in his weakest run, when the population of the US was minuscule compared to now. De La Cruz wasn't even on the ballot in her home state. You might as well say Bernie Sanders if you're gonna say De La Cruz because their theories of change are literally the same and are proven failures.

Wolff and Hudson have one foot in the grave as 80 year old men they're not leading anything.

Capital is running up the board as the Globetrotters and you're fielding a team that's playing worse than the Washington Generals.

And my point is that these people don’t matter. They’re not the demographic that’s going to drive any change.

Oh boy, "lets ignore the lumpen proletariat" is literally the most Democratic Party brained take a socialist can make. Weren't you just singing Chairman Fred's praises 5 seconds ago, and now this???

In practice our society is amazing at making lumpenproles, the vast majority of people are lumpenproles by the Marxist definition (not the Engles or Leninist one where he gives them the old Kulak treatment).

And in your opinion the demographic that is going to drive change are unpopular people who are subjects of news discussed on this site and this site only.

This shit is silly dude, there's no clear theory of change here, not even an analysis on a theory of change. Just bromides.

That’s what debate, discussion, and education means.

At this point you might as well do a joke of Jordan Peterson style reasoning where you wriet debate = discussion = education. You keep using these terms interchangeably and they seem to mean whatever the hell you want them to mean in the context. Sometimes they mean that someone knows theory, sometimes they mean that someone has talked to someone else about how the boss is annohying, sometimes they mean you're planning a violent wildcat labor action.

What I said is that there is real poverty in the US, and people are struggling to make ends meet. Nowhere did I suggest there’s going to be some sort of a proletarian revolution in the US as there was in Russia at the start of the 20th century.

My point is "real poverty" means different things across time dude. How do you not understand this? The aspects of "real poverty" in the 21st century quite literally invalidate 20th century communist thinking and strategy. The whole point is that when you're cornered you rely entirely on quoting and throwing theory at people without explaining how that theory practically applies to the modern day.

Also, there are plenty of highly intelligent and articulate people in US who explain the problems in clear terms.

Name one. Literally name one.

The problem in US is that most people don’t think they need to be educated, and want quick and easy solutions to difficult problems.

Hmm....... It's almost like uhh they'd rather watch Mr Beast on YouTube which is quite literally my point.

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.

I’m going to stop here because it’s clear that we’re not getting anywhere convincing each other of anything. I’ve said all needed to say here.

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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.

The West is in complete denial that the Houthi movement is one of the most battle hardened and effective factions against US style war tactics in the World. Their ability to procure, build, and strategize and their experience fighting US tactics in sea and air they're punching heavily above their weight limit. It's seriously impressive.

Part of this denial is the heavy investment in the military industrial complex which has effectively destroyed war economics from the US point of view, but nobody wants to admit that it's more expensive field an $11M Aegis launched SM-3 vs the Quds-3/Quds-2. While the Quds-3/Quds-2 has no public dollar amount that I can find, it's unlikely to cost more than a Iranian produced Zolfaghar or Qadr missile which western analysis peg at $0.5 to $1.5 million dollars.

Oh and you launch multiple interceptors per ballistic target if you want to intercept, so the economic comparison is for perfect interception with no backup.

The US likely loses more money by having war ships in target range of the Houthis than the Houthis spend yearly on their weapons production.

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.

it is quite literally a prisoner's dilemma across the working population of the country.

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.

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.

You cant mine without reliable spaceflight, which is whats being proven now.

The following interplanetary flights to Mars: Sojourner (1997), Spirit (2004–2010), Opportunity (2004–2018), Curiosity (2012–present), Perseverance (2021-Present), and Zhurong (2021-2022) weren't enough to "prove out reliable space flight" for you?

You need MarsCoin to do it?

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?

If you think corporations are going to outlay the capital to develop a realistic extra-planetary mining technology soup to nuts and in comparable time to public investment, you should be licking Elon Musk's boots.

Let them burn their cash on r&d

Damn if only we could use that cash for something else, which is the whole point.

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.