A lot of fun imo, its one of the more engaging city building type games ive played in a while. Its also kinda fun to overthink analyze the mechanics that go into the game from a leftish mindset, even though its not meant to really simulate real world capitalism at all.

I definitely get a colonial mindset from this, though probably inadvertently since the developers seem to make the Anno world a more sugar-coated and safe version of our world. For example: the Empire not being as ruthless, exploitative and openly genocidal as the ones in our timeline. When you increase technology you gain both ways to improve the livelihoods of people (represented in this case through luxury products and some service buildings like universities and member's clubs) and ways to improve the productivity of your industry (oil powered tractors and electrified factories). However, for the most part, the lower class Old World, the New World and Enbesa (Africa) only recieve improvements in the form of things that boost their productivity, while the high class Investors in the Old World receive the majority of the other session's luxury resources. High development just means the Obreros get to have nice tractors to make sure their cotton farms are efficient for Old World consumption and maybe some imported beer, while the upper class in Crown Falls gets their processed cotton, coffee, cigars, rum, oil, and gold. You even get a sort of 'brain drain' mechanic where the best and brightest of Enbesa leave their homeland to study and produce potent technology in the Old World. Most of the advantages of this expertise stays in the Old World too, with once again only the things going back to Enbesa being the items that gives the farms more yields.

The Trade Unions are kinda just buildings for boosting productivity, holding the advanced technology produced by the Old World (predominantly) to make factories crank out more goods per unit input. Your employees really don't get a say no matter what, except for making the occasional extremely feeble and easily dispersed strike. (At least their little worker's chant is pretty good)

I feel like the Anarchist DLC is just their way of doing a socialism bad thing that wont get em banned from socialist countries? Cult of personality stuff, propaganda from loud megaphones, dissenters leaving the bad working conditions of the anarchist leader's islands (ignore the fact that the workers in the literal slave owning empire and psychotic death cult AI characters don't send out dissidents at all for some reason, guess they're paradises compared to land of anarcho-soviet-dentistryism?). At least the items you get from him are pretty good. The "totally not Das Capital" item is one of the best things you can put in Town Halls for example, which i find kinda funny.

I could see you running your in-game faction in a method that puts the livelihood of your people first, though. Not really socialist as your workers are numbers on a ledger and not people that can offer their input in how their lives should be run, though potentially comfortable nonetheless. You don't get any in game score or benefit, but it would be very doable to try to make a run where you start out the game focusing on improving your productivity and industry only as much as needed and then, when the concerns of security and sustainability are met, you focus on making the Trade Union items that boost efficiency and lower needed workforce and pollution. As your industrial capacity improves, you put a focus on eventually setting the 'working conditions' slider on your people to be as lenient as possible while providing them only as much resources as need to be consumed by working people, rather than funneled into Investors or sold off to neutral factions.

Wouldnt be quite so easy IRL of course, in the game you don't really have market competition so your kindhearted company wouldnt have to be crushed like a bug by the more ruthless, exploitative and profitable corporations.