[arghnoname]

Going back to Marx at the latest, it's long been understood that wage-laborers _as a class_ are revolutionary, in the sense that they have collectively enough power to overturn the existing world order, let alone an individual capitalist enterprise.

As a class. Individually they're absolutely powerless and class solidarity is very difficult to achieve, perhaps impossible. There's a reason labor movements tend to involve elements that physically coerce other members of the class (i.e., 'scabs') from crossing picket lines. Capitalists don't need very many specific members of the proletariat, they just need enough. Musk can fire his critics at will for a very long time without any real threat to his business unless his employees and any potential employees were to coalesce and oppose him en masse.

I doubt that they will do this. If I were in Musk's position I'd fire these people and I'd fire similar critics at twitter. Capitalist led enterprises are essentially monarchical. I don't like this but it is reality and it's best if everyone understands it. I prefer mask off to the alternative.

[WalterBright]

> monarchical

It's a free country. Workers are free to quit, form their own collective and run it as they see fit. It's perfectly legal.

[anigbrowl]

Maybe if Marxists stopped obsessing over their personality cult and congratulating themselves on the scientific nature of dialectical materialism they'd have time to catch up on 150 years worth of knowledge on organizational and collective action problems. An awful lot of leftists prefer historical LARPing in intellectual costumes to operating under existing conditions.

[lifeisstillgood]

Genuinely asking - any reading on the (scientific) understanding of organisations / collective action? (actually writing a book on software literacy and this is cropping up)

[anigbrowl]

Here's a paper and a thesis, both fairly recent, that I found useful and relevant. There's a whole rich field of network and statistical theory as applied to human social behavior if you want to explore quantitative methods, but that tends to have a very top-down perspective and involve a lot of abstraction. Hope this is helpful.

Collaborative organizational forms: on communities, crowds, and new hybrids https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41469-018-0036-3

Self-organization in Communicating Groups: the emergence of coordination, shared references and collective intelligence http://pcp.vub.ac.be/Papers/Barcelona-LanguageSO.pdf

[lifeisstillgood]

Oh man - catnip! Thank you

[arghnoname]

Yeah, the 'left' is an ideological mess. I don't see a lot there of more modern voices that hold sway and seem ideologically coherent to me. The irony is in their time at least up to 1917 the marxists examined and tried to update their theory to match their current conditions. It's like amongst some, everything has been frozen in amber from a certain point and among others, marxism has come to mean redefining class struggle as identitarian struggle. I imagine the historical adherents are really just objecting to the more modern more 'woke' invariants in a clumsy way.

There's never been much agreement on what marxism means. I believe Marx himself disliked the term and claimed to not be a marxist.

[anigbrowl]

The closest I've seen to having a modern take (in both theory and practice) are 'communalists'/'democratic federalists' into Murray Bookchin's ideas. There's also Kevin Carson, an anarchist theorist big on horizontalism and network economics, but I haven't read his work at length yet.

It saves a lot of stress to ask fired-up people what it is they're for (methodologically speaking) and not bothering to argue if they don't have a coherent or actionable answer.