Why does the left completely lack people with any understanding of planning or management, even at fairly basic levels?
The average microparty cult barely reaches the organizational complexity or success of the average small business, and the average small business fails within a year.
Entire lifetimes are spent debating whether or not we'll have coca cola under communism or whether the Soviet Union imploded because of revisionism or because of not revising enough, or on which children's entertainer on youtube is more revolutionary. Nobody seriously sits and plans out the necessary tasks to perform if we're to bring communism closer, then sets off to do them. if they do, they'll usually find some nagging detail, like the first step for any westerner being a boring program of raising class consciousness back to a level where trade union membership starts increasing again rather than the fun bit where they get to send missives to the comintern, and they'll revert to LARPing. Nobody operates with measurable goals, nobody adjusts the strategies that clearly haven't worked. Christ, even if your aim is just to
LARP the CPSU, these organizations are failures: Given a year, even a mediocre capitalist could set up a more popular communist party than any extant English-speaking communist party.
Making people do things is not an impossible task: Look at McDonalds, look at Linux, Look at fucking
Wikipedia, it's eminently possible to organize people to get things done, even without paying them. The task is hard, not impossible. Why, then, is the left so terrible at it? I'd half-confidently suggest that ChatGPT could do a better job.
For all their nonsense, cliches and flaws, I believe every communist should be forced to learn modern business management theories and techniques. Left-org management is so dismal that it could only be improved, even if ultimately any communist movement will need to go beyond them. Baby steps - if you can run a communist party better than your local bakery runs its affairs,
then maybe we can talk about some Apollo Project level management skills…
My main answer is incentives. LARPing is fun, management ain't, and nobody's getting paid for this. Hell, I'm only writing this because I find the problem interesting and the lack of other people writing on the same subject unusual, I'm not going to go out and start Leftist-Walmart myself juPost too long. Click here to view the full text.