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The Collective of Embodied Dialectics focuses on developing practical, actionable tools and methodologies to advance class struggle and build a cooperative, ecologically viable society.

Who we are
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We are a collective dedicated to expanding current methodologies and researching new forms of class struggle (see GOALS). To that end, we develop practical tools, structures, and strategies for both groups and individuals. We are fully committed to building a healthier, compassionate, ecologically viable, and rational society and reject reformism in any form. A guiding principle of our collective is that observable practice matters more than declared intent. Because an organization proves its value through how it operates, not how it describes itself, we dedicate our work to building applied, actionable tooling .

We take a scientifically informed, practice-oriented approach. Beyond developing strategic frameworks, we actively share our findings through workshops, partnerships, and open-access materials (work in progress). What matters to us is what actually works in practice. Because we know we don’t have every answer we are constantly refining and developing our materials through application and research. We focus on the concrete problems of the organizations that contact us, helping them put solutions into action. We share our knowledge openly in several languages.

What we offer
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If your organization is serious about building a cooperative, liberated, society based on solidarity get in touch. We provide free consulting, training, workshops, and practical materials. We also offer mentorships. That is working alongside members of organizations for knowledge transfer. Let’s collaborate and forge the tools we need to dismantle capital together!

Who we are NOT
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We are not a political platform, we do not coordinate political action across different organizations. We are also not a political party. We hope to offer the means that organizations can start organizing and coordinating between each other without a mediator. Again, we enable individuals or their organizations.

Where we come from
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The origins of this collective date back to 2023. A chance meeting of two heterogeneous leftists. A vague accumulation of shared questions, views, frustrations and notions would shortly after begin to coalesce into a mostly coherent whole of theory and practice, into this collective.

This ain’t working…
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We were disheartened and perplexed by how little impact left organizations are having, despite strong commitment and uncountable hours. There is also a high overturn. Few members would stay active for long, turned away by lack of success or lack of energy. A lot of effort for flimsy gains, if even. We also observed that this lack of effectiveness was evenly spread across all “flavours” of class struggle. No particular way of translating that struggle into action seemed at fault either… or all at once in their own ways. What was clear to us is that the current ways aren’t working.

We focused on the how, not the what.
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That is why we wanted to take a step back and first concentrate on matters of the organizations themselves. What makes any organization successful? How must people organize in which situations? Are current leftist organizations organizing to effectively adapt to their current contexts? What does it mean to be “adapted” as an organization? We set out to draw from every source of information we could think of, be it past or current socialist experiments or scientific literature. We feel it necessary to commensurate all types of insights to move class struggle methodologies forward. We are aware that some might find the use of empirical research “positivist”. We think that we must remain practical. We must consider whatever advances our cause, provided we do not ignore its methodological or epistemological flaws. See our LINKTOSECTION section for a deeper discussion.

Vast seas of knowledge.
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There is a vast corpus of scientific literature that studies humans and the organizations they form. We identified and incorporated what we think is useful. Specifically, practices in business and industry can be repurposed for our needs. For decades those profit-seeking institutions have improved on techniques that streamline information flow and exchange. Many are still plagued by too many meetings of course, but some improvements have been made. Also, many studies have been conducted to determine which organizational form is best depending on the external pressures. Contingency Theory is the main example. Part of our work consists in interpreting those findings in light of the academic, reductionist contexts that produced the research as well as the mostly business-oriented organizational focus. That means, we are carefully translating and re-purposing those findings to our particular needs.

Systems science for the win!
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While trawling through classical organizational research, we took note of very promising literature that was more in line with our non-reductionist views than the business-oriented material we worked with up to date. Frankly, we were blown away by the volumes of non-reductionist, systemic literature. See the theoretical frameworks section for more details, but below a short overview of what we found:

  • Strategy and Tactics formulation from military doctrine, intelligence agencies and counterinsurgency handbooks (all publicly available). The focus lies on how to translate goals into Lines of Effort (can be understood loosely as strategy) and tactics. Exercises of systems thinking and day-to-day tactical hygiene.
  • Stafford Beers Viable Systems Theory (VST), a cybernetics-inspired management theory that conceptualizes organizations as living systems. It provides alternative organizational forms to the typical “hierarchical vs. flat” or “central vs. peripheral” dichotomies. Stafford Beer was also instrumental in Project Cybercyn, Salvador Allende’s attempt at a “socialist internet” in 1972 to automatically gather and process production data across Chile for near-instant decision-making.
  • Cognitive Institutions, part of philosophy of mind and 4E cognition, a non-mainstream theoretical framework in psychology, markedly systemic and non-reductionist. It treats organizations as an informational extension and context for human thought, describing the interaction between individuals and organizations.
  • Wolfang Weidlich’s Sociodynamics framework. Expression of organizations or other social phenomena as dynamical systems and how organizations influence its constituent individuals. This helped us understand further how individuals and organizations might interact.
  • Robert Rosen’s Relational Biology and the use of category theory offer the theoretical foundations for our framework. Marxist Systems Theory as initiated by Georg Klaus in the GDR offers a re-interpretation of marxist analysis from systems theory perspective.
  • The adoption of cybernetics in the Soviet Union offers additional inspiration.

At this point, it might be of relevance to clarify our stance on past and present socialist, communist and/or anarchist endeavors. We have written about that aspect in our core principles section.

It seemed promising enough.
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So, over the span of way too many coffees or other had-to-be-haves we were ready to convince ourselves that we had drafted the outlines of a coherent framework of systemic, holistic class struggle methodology, which we coined “Embodied Dialectics”.

We organized content along two spheres of knowledge: practical and theoretical. We are developing them simultaneously. For every practical component, we ask questions like “What effect does it have on the organization? How is information flow facilitated?”. We aim to build a catalogue or repository of practical exercises, see GAST and LINK for more details. To systematically capture the effects of the exercises, we build a theoretical model of organizations. See LINK for more details.

So much work, so little time.
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We understand that our endeavour has roughly the size and shape of a small research programme. That is when we stopped trying to do this all on our own and decided to first clearly flesh out this project and put it out there. We figured that outside perspectives and collaborations are essential to develop and mature our ideas. We drew inspiration from the collaborative model of collectives like Dialectical Systems , CIBCOM , New-Comm , and journals like Marxism and Sciences or Cosmonaut Magazine . Independent researchers sharing ideas is valuable, but where those efforts remain largely academic or theoretical, we focus on practical application. Our primary focus is empowering organizations, though we welcome partnerships with academic actors to refine theoretical foundations (see projects ). We develop actionable frameworks and facilitate knowledge transfer to ensure useful tools reach organizers, build capacity, and deliver real-world results.

Where we want to go
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Our vision is a diverse but coordinated, self-organized left. We want to see a coalition of effective movements that can integrate complementary strategies for building real alternatives, and create a society that fulfills everyone’s needs. Our work specifically addresses the systemicity of this challenge: how revolutionary organizations and networks can optimize their internal structures and inter-group communication/coordination. By providing these operational frameworks, we aim to contribute to overcoming the paralysis that has hindered the broader left for too long.

Help is welcome!
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Systemic thinking benefits from many different perspectives and interdisciplinarity. If anything on this website resonates with you, we invite you to reach out. Unsure how you might fit in? Review our tooling overview to see our work processes and tools. For those looking to contribute directly to our theoretical models or offer practical, on-the-ground insights, check our theoretical frameworks page and see if the topics interest you or the projects page for specific ways to get involved. We all have blind spots, making fresh viewpoints our most valuable asset. We need voices from every corner of society: scientists and artists, programmers and poets, locals and migrants, the formally educated and the self-taught. Tell us what systemic problems you face, what your ideal organization looks like, and what kind of movement would actually empower you. To ensure the safety and integrity of our collective, please note that we must verify all prospective collaborators through an active organization they are currently affiliated with.