In What is to be done?: Burning Questions of our Movement, Lenin lists four roles who contribute to fomenting revolution – the theoreticians, the propagandists, the agitators, and the organisers:
The theoreticians write research works on tariff policy, with the “call”, say, to struggle for commercial treaties and for Free Trade. The propagandist does the same thing in the periodical press, and the agitator in public speeches. At the present time [1901], the “concrete action” of the masses takes the form of signing petitions to the Reichstag against raising the corn duties. The call for this action comes indirectly from the theoreticians, the propagandists, and the agitators, and, directly, from the workers who take the petition lists to the factories and to private homes for the gathering of signatures.
Then later:
We said that a Social Democrat, if he really believes it necessary to develop comprehensively the political consciousness of the proletariat, must “go among all classes of the population”. This gives rise to the questions: how is this to be done? have we enough forces to do this? is there a basis for such work among all the other classes? will this not mean a retreat, or lead to a retreat, from the class point of view? Let us deal with these questions.
We must “go among all classes of the population” as theoreticians, as propagandists, as agitators, and as organisers.
Side note for Humpty-Dumpties: In this post I’m going to use “propaganda” in its current dictionary meaning as a collection of messages intended to influence opinions or behaviour. I do not mean the pejorative interpretation, somebody else’s propaganda that I disagree with. Some of the messages and calls below I agree with, others I do not.
Given this tool for understanding a movement, we can see it at work in the software industry. We can see, for example, that the Free Software Foundation has a core of theoreticians, a Campaigns Team that builds propaganda for distribution, and an annual conference at which agitators talk, and organisers network. In this example, we discover that a single person can take on multiple roles: that RMS is a theoretician, a some-time propagandist, and an agitator. But we also find the movement big enough to support a person taking a single role: the FSF staff roster lists people who are purely propagandists or purely theoreticians.
A corporate marketing machine is not too dissimilar from a social movement: the theory behind, say, Microsoft’s engine is that Microsoft products will be advantageous for you to use. The “call” is that you should buy into their platform. The propaganda is the MSDN, their ads, their blogs, case studies and white papers and so on. The agitators are developer relations, executives, external MVPs and partners who go on the conference, executive briefing days, tech tours and so on. The organisers are the account managers, the CTOs who convince their teams into making the switch, the developers who make proofs-of-concept to get their peers to adopt the technology, and so on. Substitute “Microsoft” for any other successful technology company and the same holds there.
We can also look to (real or perceived) dysfunction in a movement and see whether our model helps us to see what is wrong. A keen interest of mine is in identifying software movements where “as practised” differs from “as described”. We can now see that this means the action being taken (and led by the organisers) is disconnected from the actions laid out by the theorists.
I have already written that the case with OOP is that the theory changed; “thinking about your software in this way will help you model larger systems and understand your solutions” was turned by the object technologists into “buying our object technology is an easy way to achieve buzzword compliance”. We can see similar things happening now, with “machine learning” and “serverless” being hollowed out to fill with product.
On the other hand, while OOP and machine learning have mutated theories, the Agile movement seems to suffer from a theory gap. Everybody wants to be Agile or to do Agile, all of the change agents and consultants want to tell us to be Agile or to do Agile, but why does this now mean Dark Scrum? A clue from Ron Jeffries’ post:
But there is a connection between the 17 old men who had a meeting in Snowbird, and the poor devils working in the code mines of insurance companies in Ohio, suffering under the heel of the boot of the draconian sons of expletives who imposed a bastardized version of something called Scrum on them. We started this thing and we should at least feel sad that it has sometimes gone so far off the rails. And we should do what we can to keep it from going more off the rails, and to help some people get back on the rails.
Imagine if Karl Marx had written Capital: Critique of Political Economy, then waited eighty years, then said “oh hi, that thing Josef Stalin is doing with the gulags and the exterminations and silencing the opposition, that’s not what I had in mind, and I feel sad”. Well Agile has not gone so far off the rails as that, and has only had twenty years to do it, but the analogy is in the theory being “baked” at some moment, and the world continuing to change. Who are the current theorists advancing Agile “as practised” (or at least the version “as described” that a movement is taking out to change the practice)? Where are the theoreticians who are themselves Embracing Change? It seems to me that we had the formation of the theory in XP, the crystallisation (pardon the pun) of the theory and the call to action in the Agile manifesto, then the project management bit got firmed up in the Declaration of Interdependence, and now Agile is going round in circles with its tiller still set on the Project Management setting.
Well, one post-Agile more-Agile-than-thou movement for the avocado on toast generation is the Software Craft[person]ship movement, which definitely has theory and a call to action (Software Craftsmanship: the New Imperative, which is only a scratch newer than the Agile Manifesto), definitely has vocal propagandists and agitators, and yet still doesn’t seem to be sweeping the industry. Maybe it is, and I just don’t see it. Maybe there’s no clear role for organisers. Maybe the call to action isn’t one that people care about. Maybe the propaganda is not very engaging.
Anyway, Lenin gave me an interesting model.
