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> no 'true communist countries' Communism works... at small scales. It just doesn't scale up to country size. Every business with more than a few staff member

> no 'true communist countries' Communism works... at small scales. It just doesn't scale up to country size. Every business with more than a few staff members is a communist dictatorship. Employees don't vote in their boss. Business are not democracies. Employees don't own their own means of production. They share a communal shared pool of capital resources, which is the very essence of communism. Every functional business is a success story for communist dictatorships. Where it breaks down is at large scales. Too much bureaucracy and misaligned incentives degrade the efficiency until it's worse than a bunch of competing organisations voting in a democracy. I'm saying this because Agile is similar. It too works. Just... not in the way that people try to apply it, at huge scales to large inflexible enterprises that say they want Agile but insist on implementing it using every step of the waterfall process, just renamed. Agile works, Communism works. Just not everywhere.

papichulo2023 2y ago
You could argue that almost everything works at small scale where you can constrain the context to perfectly fit your model. (This works*****)
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  "I tried your fancy antiobiotics, but it didn't cure my flu."
Filligree 2y ago
See, the 'true communism' is a democracy. Certainly if you go back to read Marx' book you'll find that's what he was going for. There's an interesting conversation here -- the governance of the countries where it was tried didn't change very much; new tsar, same as the old tsar -- but my main takeaway was that while you might be able to change the economic system, changing the governance requires deeper changes to the underlying culture, which is usually infeasible. Scandinavia, especially Norway, are IMO closer to marxist communism than the USSR ever was; last I checked around 40% of the economy is state-run. It seems to work pretty well, and it's democratic. But it's been democratic in one form or another for the last twelve hundred years. Even when it was ruled by Denmark or Sweden, there was local democracy. I suspect it would still be democratic even if it were explicitly communist. = And so we come back to Agile, which I think is similar: You get the qualities that are already inherent in the team, implementing something like Agile doesn't make a huge difference one way or the other. Except if you're heavy-handed about it, in which case you can absolutely destroy what's already there.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head. You can dictate a policy all you want, but you can't (in general) force a change the culture of a large group of people.

papichulo2023 2y ago

You could argue that almost everything works at small scale where you can constrain the context to perfectly fit your model. (This works*****)

jiggawatts 2y ago
"I tried your fancy antiobiotics, but it didn't cure my flu."

Filligree 2y ago

See, the 'true communism' is a democracy. Certainly if you go back to read Marx' book you'll find that's what he was going for. There's an interesting conversation here -- the governance of the countries where it was tried didn't change very much; new tsar, same as the old tsar -- but my main takeaway was that while you might be able to change the economic system, changing the governance requires deeper changes to the underlying culture, which is usually infeasible. Scandinavia, especially Norway, are IMO closer to marxist communism than the USSR ever was; last I checked around 40% of the economy is state-run. It seems to work pretty well, and it's democratic. But it's been democratic in one form or another for the last twelve hundred years. Even when it was ruled by Denmark or Sweden, there was local democracy. I suspect it would still be democratic even if it were explicitly communist. = And so we come back to Agile, which I think is similar: You get the qualities that are already inherent in the team, implementing something like Agile doesn't make a huge difference one way or the other. Except if you're heavy-handed about it, in which case you can absolutely destroy what's already there.

jiggawatts 2y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head. You can dictate a policy all you want, but you can't (in general) force a change the culture of a large group of people.