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.
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.