this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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I think what matters is what public finds acceptable. 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. This lecture from Parenti is relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlFuxIzD240
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:
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.
I think you misunderstand me here. 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. However, political education is a prerequisite for such a movement. People need to agree on what the problems are and what the necessary action to solve these problems is. That's where ability to discuss things is important.
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
Is a completely different argument than this:
Especially to a liberal.
This
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
Nowhere did I talk about any labour voluntarism. You're misrepresenting what I'm actually saying.
There was plenty of public debate in 1930s. Perhaps you have a different definition for public debate that you're using?
I'm not doing anything of the sort. You're just putting words in my mouth here instead of engaging with what's actually being said to you.
No, public debate means people discussing problems to gain common understanding of what the issues are and how to address them. If you think this step can be skipped somehow before any meaningful action can be taken then you're frankly delusional.
Okay I'll buy the ticket, lets take a ride:
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.
What do you think was happening in union meetings exactly?
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?
Once again, worker power in 1930s didn't just magically appear out of nowhere. Seriously, read up a bit of history on how the US labor movement actually originated. Also, still waiting to hear what specifically you're proposing here aside from whinging.
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.
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.
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.
The fundamental problem is exactly the same, and education and vanguardism remains the solution. The mechanics of organization may be different, but the underlying principles remain the same. Movements need leaders, organization, and a common set of ideas that people rally behind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you argue with yourself here?
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, 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.
Also just some off topic dunking, Parenti literally contradicts this in the speech
It's not debate it's organized material opposition.
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:
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.
Parenti is describing what effective political action and organizing look like. I'm going to repeat this again, 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.
You've written walls of text in this thread, yet it's not clear what it is you're actually proposing. How exactly are you planning to reach people if not by talking with them?
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.
Getting them to show up for what specifically?
Again, people need to understand what it is that's being proposed and why it's in their interest to participate. If you can't even articulate that here, whom are you going to convince exactly. 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.
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.
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 how are you going to convince them to show up to that union meeting exactly. Perhaps you might even have to talk to them, to have a conversation where you convince them that showing up for a union meeting is in fact in their interest. That's what debate, discussion, and education means.
Weird straw man since nowhere did I say that. 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.
Also, there are plenty of highly intelligent and articulate people in US who explain the problems in clear terms. Russia doesn't have some unique tradition of grand political theorists. 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.
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.