This article explains what organizing is and where some of the confusion in terms comes from: https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2024-06-06-what-is-organizing/

I also like gramsci’s essay here on building the institutions that will replace the bourgeois state: https://redsails.org/democrazia-operaia/

Gene Sharp. This is a good overview: https://redsails.org/marcie-smith-gene-sharp/

Exactly. And this is true of all aspects of our lives, too:

No matter if you’re passionate about cooking or basketball or videogames, if you pursue your passion thoughtfully and honestly enough, you eventually develop a serious awareness that capitalism is making everything worse for the sake of profit. (source)

I think the trick is to recognize that the solution is to move past capitalism into a collective model of ownership, and not bemoan some idealized past where small creators were able to create good game — a reactionary, petty bourgeois fantasy. As you highlighted, indie games are not above the pressures of capitalism.

Nearly everyone in the west is online. There isn’t a “real life” and a “fake online life.”

Creating the tools to build community is important. Having places to share information and resources and experiences outside of spaces controlled by big tech is important and could become even more so if communism really threatens the status quo. That makes tools like lemmy useful.

However, it’s also on the community to treat these alternative spaces as valuable, as something that can be that resource for people, and as a community that matters. Dessalines and others might have built the tools but it is on us to put them to use.

My experience as a scientist is that to do good science, you need to be thinking dialectically. I think a lot about why more scientists are not Marxists; people who are good at thinking about the interconnectivity and changing nature of things in their science turn to eclecticism in their political beliefs/philosophy. Part of this is that I think we treat science and politics as such disparate things that must never interact.

A lot of the “business” of science is very undialectical, and that’s where you see the failures of the field manifest. For example, assessment of a scientist’s contributions based on first authorship, journal prestige, etc, encourages bad practices with respect to collaboration and sharing results.

You might enjoy this article by Bernal, a Marxist scientist: https://redsails.org/the-social-function-of-science/

Already we have in the practice of science the prototype for all human action. The task which the scientists have undertaken — the understanding and control of nature and of man himself — is merely the conscious expression of the task of human society. The methods by which this task is attempted, however imperfectly they are realized, are the methods by which humanity is most likely to secure its own future. In its endeavour, science is communism. In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements. Each one knows that his work depends on that of his predecessors and colleagues and that it can only reach its fruition through the work of his successors. In science men collaborate not because they are forced to by superior authority or because they blindly follow some chosen leader, but because they realize that only in this willing collaboration can each man find his goal. Not orders, but advice, determine action. Each man knows that only by advice, honestly and disinterestedly given, can his work succeed, because such advice expresses as near as may be the inexorable logic of the material world, stubborn fact. Facts cannot be forced to our desires, and freedom comes by admitting this necessity and not by pretending to ignore it. These things have been learned painfully and incompletely in the pursuit of science. Only in the wider tasks of humanity will their full use be found.

It’s interesting to note that the household survey tracked the revised numbers more closely than the preliminary data (final graph in report). There has been a lot of handwringing about why people are unhappy with the economy while economic indicators look good, and perhaps this sheds some insight.

I think dota has a lot of avenues for better understanding communism and dialectics.

As one example, the way the five roles fit together in the balancing of their power spikes and the harnessing of their skill sets towards a common goal, it makes me think of this Che quote:

One acquires in the face of work the old joy: the joy of fulfilling a duty; of feeling important within the social mechanism; of feeling oneself a cog that has its own unique characteristics, that is necessary — although not indispensable — to the production process. And, moreover, a conscious cog. A cog that has its own engine, driven further and further every time, in order to bring about to happy conclusion one of the key premises of socialist construction: the availability of a sufficient quantity of consumer goods for the entire population.

I’m at a loss for what you think I think management is because it certainly isn’t “a single manager to solve problems” nor “top-down” nor excluding of employees from reporting or decision-making. Perhaps we agree but use language differently:

These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

Of course, we should increase education for everyone. It enables better workplace democracy and efficiency. But as per the article I linked in my last comment, specialization and division of labour (required for efficient production) means some workers will also specialize in management, i.e., become managers.

I’m curious what “current dogma” you’re thinking about that says managers will become obsolete.

I think you are very narrowly defining manager as a manager of capital (i.e., seeking to maximize profits without care for what products are being made). I think you should read this: https://redsails.org/the-relationships-between-capitalists/

As Marx later emphasizes, one consequence of the development of management as a distinct category of labor is that the profits still received by owners can no longer be justified as the compensation for organizing the production process. But what about the managers themselves, how should we think about them? Are they really laborers, or capitalists? Well, both — their position is ambiguous. On the one hand, they are performing a social coordination function, that any extended division of labor will require. But on the other hand, they are the representatives of the capitalist class in the coercive, adversarial labor process that is specific to capitalism.

It is only the last part — the coercive, adversarial role played as representatives of capital — that will become obsolete. The coordination part of management (which includes coaching and motivation and conflict resolution) will remain.

My experience with organizations, from families to RPG groups to community associations to capitalist enterprises, is that in a management void, some people will take on management responsibilities. Since these roles require skill and entail responsibility for certain tasks, it’s better to formalize it and train people for it. Do you not also see this in the organizations you are part of? Or could you be underestimating the amount of labour others are putting in to managing your community?

Workflow optimization and employee morale will still be important under socialism.

Workflow optimization is just management of people/resources/timelines (and is present in non-repetitive jobs too): what processes aren’t working well together, what were the root causes of issues we encountered, how do we fix these problems? This, too, gets better with experience and study and some workers should specialize in this sort of management.

Employee morale (and other aspects of emotional work) will also still be a relevant question under socialism: how do you balance a specific worker’s development interests with the needs of the job, how do you manage interpersonal conflict, how do you build consensus for or mediate disagreement raising from decisions the group needs to make? Straight-up boring old motivation questions also do not disappear just because workers have a stake in the fruits of their labour.

It’s not clear to me why management would become obsolete. Good management (the coordination of people, resources, and timelines) requires skill and is a science, and the efficiency we get from division of labour/specialization suggests workplaces would be better off if some workers specialized in management roles.

See, for example, Krupskaya:

We, Russians, have hitherto shown little sophistication in this science of management. However, without studying it, without learning to manage, we will not only not make it to communism, but not even to socialism.

https://redsails.org/the-taylor-system/

After you read it, you might like this essay: https://redsails.org/maoist-and-daoist-dialectics/

It looks at the influence of Daoism and The Art of War on Mao’s dialectics, and compares this eastern development of dialectics with the branch of dialectics that evolved in the west (eg Hegel, Lenin). (Though obviously these developments weren’t fully independent.) It was a really helpful essay for me for understanding dialectics.

Tao Te Ching by Laozi (there’s a translation by Ursula Le Guin, and many others besides) — 4th century BCE

Maybe also Art of War, by Sun Tzu (5th century BCE).

Both very influential works in Chinese philosophy and literature.

I agree with another poster that more recent writers can be easier entry points into theory because the authors translate it in ways that highlight ML theory’s relevance to today and recent history. As the other poster mentioned, Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds is good on breaking through cold war nonsense about the USSR, there’s a couple chapters online here. Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter history dissects the dominant ideology of our time. There’s a short summary of that book by the author here.

No one here has yet tackled the question on how important it is to read Capital: I think it’s crucial. There are so many concepts it lays out and arguments it refutes that it makes reading other theory much easier. I think of Lenin’s Imperialism as a sequel to Capital, so it makes sense to me you find it challenging to read. That said, Capital is also challenging to read and it might help to familiarize yourself with some of the concepts it covers before you tackle it. Here are some (mostly short) essays for that purpose.

• Labour & Labour Power
• Commodity Fetishism
• Communist Self-confidence (history of capitalism from feudal era to now and why the working class is revolutionary)
• Social Classes: Necessary and Superfluous by Engels, why were classes historically necessary and why are capitalists obsolete.
• A Fair Day’s Wages for a Fair Day’s Work by Engels, on how political economy has traditionally treated wages and why communists must focus beyond wage increases.

I’ve posted a lot of links from RedSails because it was started for this purpose: to make theory accessible and demystified and relevant for today. If there’s a topic or author you want to read more on, it has curated articles for those ends.

I’ll end with my favourite Lenin, which I think highlights why we can’t “go back” to some better time before capitalism but must go through capitalism to socialism.

Yes, exactly.

She did! https://redsails.org/winged-eros/

Briefly, Kollontai promotes “Winged Eros”, which is a multifaceted connection between people, and not “Wingless Eros”, which is sex without friendship or emotion. But on the other hand, she also denounces the bourgeois ideal of love, which is possessive and centered around the economic unit of the married couple, and which denies the multifaceted nature of love.

The essay covers more than just that though: she starts by tracing how ideals of love change as socioeconomic systems develop, and she ends with a discussion of what proletarian ideals of love could be. It’s a great essay.

Accusing someone of being “brainwashed” isn’t, as far as I have seen, so rhetorically effective that I think we need a drop-in replacement like “hate-passed.” If “you’re super licensed” sounds silly it’s because “you’re super brainwashed” is also silly.

What about:

“Do you actually believe that nonsense or does it just give you license to discount the incredible social progress China has made?”

I think the post earlier in this thread used it well. They’re not defining the term, they’re explaining the phenomenon. Because it uses a familiar term, it is easy to understand and doesn’t read jargony:

I think this is better understood as licensing American settlers to unleash their preexisting white supremacist worldview onto a politically acceptable target.

Rejecting the term “brainwashing” means not only improving our understanding of how propaganda works but also improving our rhetoric.

I know I’m really late on this one, but Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? is said by many to be the book that most sparked the 1917 revolution, and it’s about love. Vera is living in kind of an oppressive family that want her to marry well, and befriends her brother’s tutor, who tries to help her escape. The novel is about the importance of equality in a relationship for true love, as well as more obliquely (due to censorship) about the need for economic equality for a thriving society.

If romance isn’t crucial, but you want a breezy but clever book about revolution/decolonization with a bit of a Hogwarts-y vibe (in the least transphobic, most positive sense), RF Kuang’s Babel is fun.

What do you think is lacking from the term used in the essay, “licensing”?