You've got nothing to lose but your chains. Oh, and the coal. You could definitely also lose the coal.

Alternative title: Trotskyite gets put in charge, tries to push communism button, finds out the material conditions of a fucking ice age may not be conducive to declaring a final victory of the 5th internationale over Stalinism in a videogame.

My favorite quote in the article

Everyone was incredibly happy with me and all my kept promises right up until the coal ran out, which I'd kind of stopped paying attention to as I got ensnared in a thicket of political manoeuvring and ideology. I wasn't overwhelmed—the game does a good job of not bombarding you with too much information and mechanical complexity, and Stokalski says it's a conscious effort by the devs to make sure you're never "doing notes, doing maths on the side just to not die"—I'd just gotten wrapped up in ideas without paying much heed to material reality.

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    6 months ago

    For a bit. You've got to give me this: Things actually went real well for a while there. Sure, the equal pay law kicked off a chain of events that saw my city's more managerial and bourgeois elements grumble and mither, but people were—mostly—quite happy under the new order.

    Writer thinks socialism means everyone gets paid the same. picard

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
      ·
      6 months ago

      Wage flattening was a persistent talking point in Soviet politics and IIRC was one of the hair-brained things Gorbachev tried to implement after he ran out of Andropov's policies to continue and before he started hanging out with revisionist liberals and enacting their anticommunist agenda. It's just apart from Gorbachev Soviet policies were generally more grounded in material necessity than idealistic gestures, so even though it was a thing that was talked about no one else was foolish enough to actually try it.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        6 months ago

        Gorbachev was a comprador liberal so I take any batshit thing he tried to implement as intentional sabotage to divide the population and push towards reform.

    • Alaskaball [comrade/them]A
      ·
      6 months ago

      Inexplicably, none of them were keen on building the Fifth International. The laws I wanted to pass would ensure that everyone in my city got access to basic necessities regardless of whether they worked or not, and that everyone who did work would earn the same pay, from the garbagemen to doctors.

      Ergo me poking fun at them for their silly idealisms