Seeing Like a State:
If we consider the vanguard party, as Lenin did, to be a machine for bringing about the revolution, then we see that the vanguard party's relation to the working class is not much different from a capitalist entrepreneur's relation to the working class. The working class is necessary to production; its members must be trained and instructed, and the efficient organization of their work must be left to professional specialists.
There was a Small Findings episode in which I talked about Lenin’s surprising distrust of regular workers. Back then, I was like, what a hypocrite. I don’t know what to think of this right now. How Democracies Die made a strong case for gatekeepers, at least gatekeepers that act to preserve democracy. (They’re probably why we didn’t have President Henry Ford.) And hearing about the
Son Q. Lot in the French Revolution does not fill me with confidence in the “whatever’s popular will work out” way of doing things.
There’s no working pure systems in programming. Maybe this is a similar sort of thing where 90% of it can be pure functional code, and then you have to just have a bit of imperative if/then here and there.