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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because it's become obvious to many people that these problems of climate and class-based wealth accumulation, cannot techohopiumed out of. Space exploration did lead do useful technology and scientific advancement, but in our current era our relationship to space is no longer star trek, it's snowpiercer in space. The average person no longer has a positive view because they are crushed under a capitalist class that seeks to leave them behind, hence the comic.

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.