/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

When I first started working in the tech industry, I didn't understand the point of Scrum. I couldn't recall a single time when I thought that our daily meetings actually mattered. It wasn't long before my attention was captured by the horrors of writing mountains of documentation that would never be read, living through Jira hell, and nearly going mad from the pointless rituals of test-driven development and eXtreme(ly shitty) Programming.

The story I was sold is that all these big ideas are bigly necessary because big complex systems need big complex teams, which in turn need these big ideas. This struck me as a big damn lie. All you really need is good code, which needs good developers, which needs good teamwork - duh, right? But what follows is a bunch of bullshit boilerplate, standards and methodologies. Why? Because they serve to obscure the root of the problem: people giving a shit about the shit they're doing so that they can do it well.

If you're hiring people to maintain some voodoo code written by an overworked and disgruntled codemonkey ten years ago, or refusing to hire junior devs because you need "real talent" to maintain your Kafkaesque SaaS nightmare, then problem runs a *lot* deeper than just "not being agile enough" or whatever the hell other coping mechanisms we use to repress the problem. These insane business practices that drive insane development practices are literally insane, because they do the same thing over and over and over again - fixing the problems created by fixing the problems created by fixing the problems.

What the professional commentariat - the business gurus and glorified cultists, the chattering classes who preach incessantly on such matters - avoid mentioning is that the crux of good management involves _protecting the workers from such pathologies so that they can do their damn jobs._ The workers can learn to direct and motivate themselves if they want to, and they will if they have the freedom to do it. In one sentence: *They need to be given tools and techniques, not pizzas and parenting.* This has nothing to do with "agile processes" or "servant leadership" or whatever other perverted corporate ideologies that are being peddled to the successfully incompetent - it's a working-class reality.

Pathological business processes that exist solely to paper over the fact that people don't care about their work enough to do it right will inevitably create more problems than they solve, because they pile on even more reasons to not give a damn, and _giving a damn is the ONLY way to create a quality product._ But these firms obviously don't exist to create a quality product, but to create profits, and creating profits in a world where the appearance of productivity matters more than anything else - because it is rewarded with profits more than anything else - can lead only to either enshittification or the mass production of shit.

People won't eat the same shit forever, especially when it's being endlessly repackaged and made worse each time, unless they have no other choice. Our lives are too short to accept this. But our superiors don't view it this way - they apparently live in an eternal present and can't tell the difference between the long-term and the short-term anymore. They've unironically begun to believe that a successful business model resembles Cookie Clicker.

Mark Fisher coined the term "market Stalinism" to show how post-Fordist capitalism seems to have adopted a Stalinist obsession with the symbols of productivity over the real process of production, but I claim that he didn't go far enough. It isn't the case anymore that firms merely value the appearance of achievement more than actual achievements. Now, the moment they actually achieve anything at all, they stop seeking out actual achievements altogether. You already have the product, so why bother making anything new when you can just leech off of it forever? This isn't "market Stalinism" but Cookie Clicker Capitalism.

If I gave Stalin a laptop and asked him to play Cookie Clicker on it, what would he do? Maybe he'd start by setting some quotas for cookie output and creating elaborate bureaucratic processes around it. Maybe he'd make a plan to have this many cookies and that many grandmas by the end of the month, and order some associates to watch over the grandmas to ensure that they aren't trying to sabotage cookie production, only to replace them when they find no sabotage despite all the quotas being unfulfilled.

But I'm pretty sure that what would actually happen is that he would take one look at the game and tell me to piss off. "What is this nonsense, comrade? Stop wasting my time." At best, he'd seize the laptop and let some dorks at Gosplan take a look at it.

In other words, Stalinism's obsession with appearances was ultimately driven by some real interest in material progress. Stalin's approach was in many respects monstrous, but it wasn't meaningless. It had a pioneering logic to it - crash industrialization, planning, statecraft, a communist future - even if that logic relied on paranoid terror. In contrast, "market Stalinism" has turned into Cookie Clicker Capitalism, which has no logic beyond endless repetition. Imagine a mouse clicking on a human-shaped cookie, forever.

It's not like we can't have infinite growth - or at least a couple of million years of growth. The universe has a whole lot of stuff in it, more than we can even imagine. But this actually requires thinking about the far future and carefully planning for it. Cookie Clicker logic can't function when the universe is made to be so small. Yet, the successfully incompetent have managed to delude themselves into believing in a contradiction - a fantasy of infinite growth within a microscopically small fantasy world. Hell, even the "degrowthers" use the same logic! What we end up with are maniacs arguing over whether or not to keep clicking on the same damn cookies, instead of playing a different game.

So, if Mark Fisher were still alive, I would ask him an obscene question: What Would Stalin Do? (WWSD?) A capitalist Stalin might end up being a "market Stalinist" of some sort, sure, but I highly doubt that he would ever become a Cookie Clicker Capitalist. Why? Because Stalin - and Stalinism - was still animated by the spirit of socialism.

So, perhaps we should reclaim this spirit of socialism by flipping "market Stalinism" on its head. To combat the capitalist market economy inversion of the dominating aspects of socialist ideology, we need a socialist planned economy inversion of the liberating aspects of capitalist ideology. We need "planned Reaganism" to defeat "market Stalinism."

The rhetoric of Reaganism revolved around a desire to return to free-market fundamentals to combat the crisis apparently caused by the excesses of Fordist Keynesianism. He attacked the inefficiency and harsh overreach of "big government" and believed that American foreign policy consistently failed to combat the immorality that the USSR (as the "evil Empire") and its supposed leftist sympathizers stood for. He championed an optimistic vision that appealed to "common sense" over out-of-touch elitism, posing individual liberties and moral virtues as the true engine of economic progress.

We should argue that democratic central planning is not "big government" but the opposite - an antidote to an inefficient plutocratic oligarchy that generates mountains of bureaucratic waste to prop up a decaying capitalism and entrench the authority of its elite servants. Our moral outrage should be directed towards the "evil Empire" that is the global system of capitalist political economy as a whole, which cheapens and degrades morality by exploiting it for geopolitical theater and glorified PR stunts that obscure the mass suffering and resentment it causes. We needn't worry about out-of-touch elites when the common person is allowed to truly exercise their common sense through the responsibility of governing. Concepts like individual liberty and moral virtue can only flourish within every individual when it is given a stable foundation of collective material support.

To take this very serious joke even further: if the endpoint of "market Stalinism" is Cookie Clicker Capitalism, then the endpoint of "planned Reaganism" is Smash Bros. Communism. Rather than the trivial and autistic repetition veiled in shallow aesthetics that is Cookie Clicker, Smash Bros. Communism is the vibrant and dynamic confluence of individual agency and meaningful depth with a collective experience that is fun and accessible to all.