alicirce
RedSails editor. she/her.
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.
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.
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.