[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.