yogthos

stay mad

Nobody was talking about time being ripe for any revolution. The point of the meme is that voting is a very limited form of political participation that can't solve underlying problems on its own. How has the strategy of voting for lesser evil been working out for you.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Not what it says at all, but not surprised that's how libs who have been doing this would interpret it. How's that been working out for you by the way?

Seeing you seething and coping publicly really makes my day little buddy.

a lost redditor appears

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

💯

I kind of look at normalization in terms of the Overton window, as in what topics are up for debate politically. I completely agree that there is always a gap between how a society sees itself and how it actually behaves, but I would argue that the stage where a society starts to openly embrace its crimes is the one to be really worried about.

It's polyworking now, get with the times!