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/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

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Not reporting is bourgeois


File: 1754584044410.jpg (19.83 KB, 744x418, Eisenhower Matrix.jpg)

 

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 just because I understand that any meaningful left-wing movement would ultimately be capable of it, or have a serious plan to achieve that capability in the medium term…

I feel like you are deriving this out of fantasy

File: 1754587924567-0.png (140.93 KB, 1061x1549, ClipboardImage.png)

File: 1754587924567-1.png (92.47 KB, 259x194, ClipboardImage.png)

I'm going to shout out Alexey Safronov. A Russian expert of Soviet Economics. He has made many videos on the Soviet planned economy, and he has relatively recently released a book titled "The Big Soviet Economy". He the guy if you want to learn about the Soviet planned economy. [Of course you have to use a translator if you don't understand Russian].

>>2421467
>The Big Soviet Economy
Any way of getting a PDF of this?

File: 1754588860966.png (207.62 KB, 1039x1600, ClipboardImage.png)

>>2421468
>Any way of getting a PDF of this?
No. I can give a teaser. First image is Safronov laying out a summary that Kosygin's reforms empirically don't work.

>>2421427
The lack of successful left orgs (save a handful of fairly easy, internet facilitated media stuff) demonstrates the point. There's a lot of cliches about organising but no actual organisation of note.

gee whiz OP, it sure would be good if you pointed to explicit examples rather than vagueposting

>>2421468
>>2421474
any way we might convince him to translate it to English, or provide the source files (hopefully LaTeX) to someone who can? I tried emailing Safronov a while back but never got a reply

>>2421494
>any way we might convince him to translate it to English
No one idea.

Because planning and management is bourgeois

>>2421427
no, this is actually a really crucial insight

>>2421418
>Nobody operates with measurable goals, nobody adjusts the strategies that clearly haven't worked.
>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.

you are absolutely, 100% correct OP and ive seen this work very well in practice. i have advocated for this here in threads about organizing, about why THIS is the reason when you have a small group inexperienced in organizing, you start with manageable projects like community gardens, food/clothes dstribution, etc. people say snide shit like oh THATS your revolutionary activity heh heh? will often even say its a LARP, somehow, and then will feel really confident about how the important think is needing a good party line and ideological unity etc, etc.

the best cadre training in an org i ever took part of had us read business management strategy, with a critical eye but trying to understand the basic problems it was addressing and which solutions were genuinely applicable to organizing. this was not just speculating because we worked on community gardens and in tenants organizing and could TEST and become familiar through participation, and it turns out a lot of those organizational strategies absolutely are applicable and are addressing important points, even if you need to pull them out of the insufferable managerialese style of presentation.

im talking about the US context where there is at best very few even local socialist organizations (or locals of a larger org, there are a few DSA & CPUSA locals that have done this in SPITE of their national leadership and org culture) that has a base of good active cadre actively participating in measurable, scaleable projects.

if you think it is petty, useless hobbyism to get 10 american communists with minimal organizing experience (i.e. vast, vast majority of american "leftists") to organize a community garden, in my opinion and experience that is a huge tell that you have not been involved in any kind of goal-oriented org if you have even organized at all. it is HARD to get people to keep showing up at all, its hard to allocate tasks in an efficient and consistent way, it is hard to not have the work fall on a few more motivated and eager people who will inevitably burn out in 6 months to 2 years, etc etc. people need practical training in how to do the most basic organizational tasks. managing those tasks, delegating work, keeping meetings on track, holding people accountable in a productive way that doesnt make them up and quit, maintaining momentum when you get it, etc. if you havent done these, yes that means you as well will not be able to do them without actual practice. its not the hardest thing in the world but it requires commitment and humility to be consistently willing to spend the time and energy building those foundations. those foundations are the basic infrastructure of an organization, which will inevitably be trial and error done by people who are themselves learning how to do it and will have their own struggles and conflicts of interests.

making it work in spite of those challenges is extremely productive and excellent training. and the good news is that this form of cadre training and building up of org infrastructure IS ALSO getting you into contact with the community in your base area. call it mutual aid or call it volunteering, it doesnt matter, its fine if its volunteering because the primary strategic objective for the organization at this time is to have projects that serve as training and team-building for your membership. the major secondary gain is that by doing so you will develop contacts and sympathies within the communities youre working in. once you have a stronger, more experienced membership, the priority can shift to the point where the primary strategic objective is to develop projects for the explicit end of creating strong links to the community, and training cadre becomes a simultaneous activity in which they can be put on projects with more experienced members that can teach and mentor them. this should always be done simultaneous to a relatively barebones level of political education regarding marxism and class struggle, but its important that its always understood that the best teacher of marxism and class struggle will be the practical application of those lessons through integration into the base community through these projects

this is not a secret recipe for immediate success, it is hard and takes a lot of work and ive seen it threaten to fall apart and eventually atrophy. ive also seen it make massive progress and build a strong foundation, measuring success by amount of successful projects that became self-sustaining. every other organization ive been involved in has measured success by the metric of number of members and fundraising, even when those members and funds never went to doing anything useful. you can do infinitely more with a core group of 15-20 people adopting the strategy im talking about here than you can with 100 people who are only trying to recruit and fundraise for its own sake. another good side of that is that when the group of 100 people splits or atrophies, usually nobody has learned much of anything besides the ~5% of members who did the majority of the coordination due to poor management practices, and more often than not they burn out and what they learn is that this is not a good use of their time. even if and/or when your 15-20 person group using abovd strategy falls apart or atrophies, the silver lining is that those people now have serious practical experience with organizing

i feel my org is doing this very organically. there are the simple, menial organizational tasks that have been done a thousand times over by more experienced cadres that new members can easily get into, get some practice and confidence to organize; there are political and ideological discussions of the big picture where everyone participates and can form an opinion, and there are the heavy and difficult tasks that in time you're able to handle even if it means new members sit out on the side while the more experienced break the ice. quantities to qualities or something. you really can't do it differently but to start small, locally, branch out, network, connect. networking is a big part of it as well, every meaningful interorganizational meeting should have a resolution or statement that at least formally binds orgs. another thing - the nitty gritty work of calling meetings, organizing meetings, leading meetings, writing and organizing minutae, mapping out people - all important skills to know.

>>2421524
that sounds very good. only suggestion i'd make is to try and introduce some kind of effort to formally make note of whats working and why, even if its as simple as the summary you gave here. when things do get rocky its likely people will attribute it to all kinds of things, whether individual blame, political confusion, etc., which may all be part of it but it helps to have an explicit account of what DOES seem to be working, what the explicit goals are, etc, that can be referred to when things dont seem to be working anymore

>>2421512
>Dude bro communists just need to start their own businesses and become bourgeois
Welcome back Haz

>>2421535
ik very likely joke/bait bc spurdo flag but for potential clarity of lurkers that arent reading walls of text, neither me or OP are talking about starting businesses at all. we are talking about critucally studying management strategies that work for businesses/NGOs etc whatever, which are the enemy, who is nonetheless faced with the same issues of needing to consistently organize people and do have effective strategies on at the very least the bare minimum components of that

>>2421475
can't be that there is the whole state apparatus to undermine and destroy such orgs. must be le stupid leftists cannot into management

>>2421512
>you start with manageable projects like community gardens, food/clothes dstribution, etc. people say snide shit like oh THATS your revolutionary activity heh heh?
To all Iron felix built fedposters and adventurist crashouts I ask this:
can you get 10 or more people to sit down once a month for a hour long meeting

>>2421530
>only suggestion i'd make is to try and introduce some kind of effort to formally make note of whats working and why
oh of course ! we have regular 'reflection' sessions where we weigh the pros and cons of current praxis and theory, if it still holds water for the given conditions. we have (proportionally to the # of members) a lot of writing, thinking, debating. it is something that you must do if you want to even start doing organizing 'scientifically'.

i just remembered another important thing to note. an organization must have a history. you must write the history of your organization otherwise it cannot stand on its own. you must have this thin red line going back to understand where you are going. i feel a lot of orgs drop the historization and replace it with mindless action, just to say, we did something.

>>2421551
anon it can be, and is, both. there is an extreme lack of inter-generational experience, communication, and mentorship specifically because the state has so actively and mercilessly crushed any halfway effective means of proletarian organizing in the US.

there is also the fact that people have genuinely became more atomized, less involved in even completely apolitical (or reactionary or bourgeois or any kind of) community life that would familiarize them with the practice of getting people together to do things on a regular basis outside of work or school. even purely recreational activities with a minimum of commitment are very hard to make happen consistently. have you ever tried to organize weekly games of basketball, tabletop, etc.? people live too far apart, work too much, are used to only going out in spontaneous bursts to drink with friends, etc, or whatever reasons are unused to and/or unwilling to just make time to regularly hang out with friends if it requires a minimum of effort (which isnt to say people are just lazy or shitty or w/e, in many cases it is at least in part because its genuinely difficult to make time in a life where everything makes it much easier and more desireable to just stay in when you have the time)

we keep having to start from 0 with this shit and learn it all over again in large part BECAUSE the state rips up the foundations every time we lay it down. why is it almost every org today is largely full of young adults and college kids, who usually come to politics from the internet? where are the mentors and experienced cadre whove seen it all? theyre around, here and there, and im lucky enough to have worked with them. but most of the older people you see organizing are old trots that have never been in an even locally halfway effective org in their life so theyre just on autopilot and arent discouraged by being in useless microsects. i love them for their lifelong commitment in spite of that, but theyre not inheritors of the efficacious proletarian organizations. the real movement elders you meet around are old panthers, random SDS splitters who saw highs and lows of an organization they put their hopes in fall into nothing, etc. and during their own time they also had to start from nothing, because the CPUSA, SPA, IWW, etc etc were all to some extent or another crushed, compromised, or otherwise torn apart.

we need to lay the foundations again & we need to try and do it better, because as much as it was state repression that destroyed the orgs we inherit the struggle from, we need to take that state repression for granted and try to find a way to protect from it being fatal. for my part i think the best shot at that involves a first step of building up active, involved, politically educated cadre embedded in proletarian & "lumpen" communities where they develop a base of sympathy, interest, and draw membership from.

>>2421633
fantastic glad to hear it

Do you have any recommendation for reading OP?

>>2421537
have you any doc to share summarizing the lessons you learned and effective strategies?

File: 1754614890063-0.pdf (2.68 MB, 255x144, Strategy.pdf)

File: 1754614890063-1.pdf (1.31 MB, 255x144, Critical thinking.pdf)

File: 1754614890063-2.pdf (6.15 MB, 255x144, What is power_.pdf)

>>2421666
i do, sort of. i still have some introductory materials from cadre training. i dont want to doxx myself or anyone else so i can only share some of the bare minimum stuff. if you read keep in mind this is meant to be extremely basic introductory groundwork, these were not just classes for people as familiar with and opinionated about things like logical fallacies etc that most of us internet poisoned leftoids are, it was at least half people who became interested through projects we carried out in the ghetto and did not have much formal education. also these are extremely barebones because they were basically notes for a spoken presentation

i also still have some of the assigned readings & supplementary material saved, which is more directly relevant and less basic introduction:

https://fs.blog/a-primer-on-strategy/
https://fs.blog/mental-models/
https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking

bump due to site wide spam

>>2421835
some relevant excerpts from some of these corportate leadership articles:

>Good strategy is not just “what” you are trying to do. It is also “why” and “how” you are doing it. … Good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does.


>Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership, “vision,” planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors. A leader’s most important responsibility is identifying the biggest challenges to forward progress and devising a coherent approach to overcoming them. In contexts ranging from corporate direction to national security, strategy matters.


yeah, this guy is talking about CEO's and national security. this is not an ideologically pure way or learning, this is the bad BAD way of learning where you learn what the enemy does right. /leftypol/ has asked what fascists do right for the decade or so we've existed, but the standard line is still that fascism is capitalism in decay. why do we want to imitate capitalism in decay? i dont quite think thats what fascism is but thats not here or there, i think it is both a constantly vicious attempt at early 20th century corporatism that was ultimately usurped by a mid & late 20th century corporatism that is only slightly less, but meaningfully & tactical less, vicious

either way, its helpful to learn how to organize, even if we are learning from our enemies. but its not about reading it, its only useful if you actually try this out as a communist or whatever else you call yourself.


Cooperatives!

>>2423064
no, i dont think those help.

i think they potentially have a place in a DotP as a loyal opposition that should be minimally appeased. i understand, appreciate, and would critically support (as in actually help despite my reservations) formation of coops among workers i knew, if they decided to push for it as a means of improving their immediate situation. its worse than unionizing but better than retarded grindset class traitoring.

ultimately i dont think there is really a way forward besides organizing as communists. i absolutely support unions, unionization is objectively historically progressive in the american context, not least of all bc even most american proles have been successfully brainwashed to hate unions now. IWW would be a nice thing to try to bring back if it wasnt mainly a weird furry thing now

>>2423071
>its worse than unionizing
Explain your position please

>>2423073
every time i have seen a cooperative form, they abandoned class struggle. it worked ok for them. every time ive seen a union, theyve been furious that well-established unions didnt bother with them because they already had theirs. were talking about twice in terms of coops and three times in terms of unions, each times small businesses and/or franchises. im not saying this is universally applicable, but thats what ive seen


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