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/

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.

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 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.

Can you please let me know how often I should post such that I am neither terminally online nor suspiciously off-line?

It’s strange to me that being responsive to questions, regardless of the amount of social clout someone has, is somehow spun as a bad characteristic about Roderic here.

there’s an email listed on the RedSails “contact” page: https://redsails.org/contact/

Just a quick correction, this isn’t written by Day. As noted in the forward, it is by JW Mason:

J. W. Mason is Associate Professor of economics at John Jay College, CUNY and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

While obviously capitalism sucks for art, it’s not clear to me that a LToV-based system would allow you to make the type of art you want to make without consideration of what the people who use the art will value.

Maybe you find this essay has some useful ways to think about it: https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

It quotes from mainstream media sources to support the charge that the communist party keeps their reins on the billionaires in a way that just doesn’t happen in capitalist countries, with an eye towards long term goals.