this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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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.