:yes-hahaha-yes-r: :marx:
Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.
—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx's Capital
0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.
- Harry DuBois, Disco Elysium.
This is weirdly close to how I describe the horror of Das Kapital. I demand to know why my ideas are not fresh and new 😡
This reads like leftist :wat: :rust-darkness: and it completely slaps (in a bad way in that it's sadly 100 percent relatable)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/cafiero/1879/summary-of-capital.htm
I didn't know there was a succinct version of it. Yee howdy.
It will reach back in time an erase from existence those who did not help it come into existence
Games have long been seen as a potentially one of the most effective avenues for getting people to truly understand capital. Roleplaying as capitalists to understand what's happening to you/pivotal points in history. Wehrlegig games' John Company 2nd edition and Pax Pamir 2nd edition are phenomenal contemporary examples. Guy Debord's The Game of War. I know its a tired talking point by now, but even Original Monopoly. IDK. I think it's a thing more leftists could care to think about since we also talk about agitprop and education.
CK2 was instrumental in my understanding of Marxist material view of history as a series of class struggles dominated by people pursuing their rational interests at any given point in time. It removed the fluff and veneer of Feudalism and monarchy, and showed how a kingdom is nothing more than a rich guy with a private army, mostly interested in pursuing control of more resources, and maybe other things, but mostly that (by the nature of being a Lord to begin with.)
And a Stellaris mod was instrumental in me realizing what Socialism actually was: a civic for Socialism described as "The means of production are owned and controlled by the people who use them. If you don't use it, you can't profit from it."
Something that simple broke through decades of "socialism is when the government does stuff."
Kaiserreich helped a lot too. A shit ton actually. Comparing the focus trees for Labor/Socialist/Communist parties versus the focus trees for Liberal parties is quite the eye opener.
And a Stellaris mod was instrumental in me realizing what Socialism actually was: a civic for Socialism described as “The means of production are owned and controlled by the people who use them. If you don’t use it, you can’t profit from it.”
It makes it especially pathetic how the vanilla commie civic, Shared Burdens, was basically just "Government distributes everything to everyone equally".
Kaiserreich helped a lot too. A shit ton actually. Comparing the focus trees for Labor/Socialist/Communist parties versus the focus trees for Liberal parties is quite the eye opener.
Something that's been an educating experience is taking a look at the Kaiserreich fanbase. There are so many "democracy-loving" shitlibs who unironically stan the Entente and Reichspakt, two god awful colonial blocs, over even wholesome 100 big chungus libertarian socialist states (which are objectively the most democratic countries at the start) without the "icky" things assorted with gommulism. It really opens my eyes as to the pure ideology distilled into Westoid minds, given that Apartheid South Africa, Mittelafrika, and National France (ran by a Nazi-collaborating sack of shit) aren't "deal breakers" for them but states that abolish or even just severely limit private property are.
Also, out of any of the sides of the American Civil War, only the socialists destroy racial segregation in its entirety. Really makes you think.
Also, out of any of the sides of the American Civil War, only the socialists destroy racial segregation in its entirety. Really makes you think.
It really, really does. :curious-marx:
You look at their SoL being like 8-9 and my average SoL is 15. Why shouldn't I kick in their door and force indoor plumbing, radios, and luxury clothes onto them? I'M DOING YOU A FAVOR, STOP RESISTING! XD
I regret to inform you that :reddit-logo: continues to be bad. Above quote is from thread OP.
I am ALSO trying to do my nation a favor, so cooperate and just die already!
-Sepoy revolutionary
Some sort of civilising mission in a game where that's a gateway technology to increased colonialism :cap-think:
Me, forcibly unifying the new world and removing colonizers: "Congratulations! You are being rescued. Please do not resist."
Huh....I'm reading the first comment and I realize I may be a monster.
In Stellaris the moment I was able to I built a world destroyer and went around destroying planets in the nations that kept trying to vassalize my own (they kept demanding it). At this late point in the game my empire was as powerful if not more powerful than an awakened empire that had decided to play the galaxy's good guys, but when you're fighting a war on three fronts, one of whom is almost comparable in power to your own, it gets kind of hard to just focus on planet irradiation (I went with irradiation rather than planet cracking so my robot race would still be able to take those planets; in hindsight I think I would've preferred planet cracking) while an awakened empire is using their own planet 'destroyer' to lock your robots on their planet with no hope of escape.
I still managed to wipe out 90% of their population only to realize they'd expanded on their Southern border and my empire would not be able to protect the world destroyer to the few remaining planets. All the while I was basically grinning ear to ear with every successful planet eradication; meanwhile folks on reddit are having a crisis of conscience, lol.
My run with a robot race was monstrous, everything prior to the world destroying was also horrific, even though I really did try to be nice (but as it turns out, everyone will sour against you if you close your borders and forbid travel into and through your territory).
I've already come to terms with the fact that I am inevitably an awful, genocidal empire in every Stellaris game - managing all those diverse species is just a pain for a start.
That being said, I still think the coolest world-destroying mechanism is the impenetrable barrier. Something about not destroying a world, just.. encasing it in a permanent shield that can never be breached, feels like the humane and poetic side of terrible.
Honestly, Victoria 3 is a genuinely good learning tool. As a long-time leftist, I'm learning a fair bit, both about how economic domination can force other countries into indefinite poverty, but also how and why economy links into and drives military decisions, and how that links solely into capitalist interests. See: all of US's deadly deadly oil excursions.
In addition, one of the most best things the devs did in this case was not make uncolonised areas 'empty wasteland', but just 'decentralised nations' who can and do fight back against colonisation. It makes it suddenly a lot more real that the grab for resources didn't just dehumanise Africans/Australians/etc, but basically made them non-existent in the eyes of the state solely because of the organsation of their societies.
