Socialism significantly lowered internal competion between people and as a consequence they became more trusting. If you look at Soviet leaders who were born and raised pre-revolution, they were very far from trusting the West.
This is an interesting theory. Is there any literature on it?
I was going to say Parenti touches on this in Blackshirts and Reds.
You also don’t get this problem with China lol. China has always been suspicious about the West due to their semi-colonial history and everything is transactional with the West, nothing more, nothing less.
This is true to a fault. Almost all their economists are western trained or trained on western capitalist theories. Although “marxism degrees” have been rising in Chinese universities lately, I don’t think it’s Marxian economics. Xi is said to be a devout marxist leninist, but he hasn’t taken too many steps to actually promote the core of the movement - the economic systems that are supposed to replace capitalism.
Socialism with chinese characteristics describes how to accumulate productive forces in a capitalist world (within a county controlled by socialists), and you know what? It may very well be their plan to focus on one thing at a time, and it will evolve to be more communistic once they get closer to their goal and study the new conditions. It’s just difficult to have that much faith into the future when so many of the advisors are aligned with western thinking even if they don’t trust the westerners. Would these economists be nationalistic / communist enough to shift gears towards socialism when the time is right, or will they be too entrenched in capitalist thought and resist?
The purge removed a lot of good communists, and lobotomized political science departments in most universities. We can talk all day about the necessity of the purge but this was undeniably one of the outcomes
kruschev fucked everything up afterwards, making fixing anything basically impossible
It’s the failure of the Soviet education system. If we can characterize the Soviet people, it is that they are far too naive.
Eh. They were in a bad spot economically due to Saudi market manipulation at the behest of the west, a military defeat in Afghanistan, a space-race posturing/propaganda. They definitely could have held out longer but they were on the back-foot and were opting for a peaceful/graceful loss rather than forcing a military loss. This worked for the West also as they didn't want to involve their direct military which is why they extended a "peaceful" option for ending the cold war. The icing on the cake was Gorbachev was an intelligence asset (someone linked evidence for this here once, I lost the bookmark apparently; if he wasn't then he was the only truly naive Soviet citizen).
lmao, how does that reddit nimrod think it should work?
If everything suddenly goes up for sale, only the wealthy are really going to be buying it. And since your own country has probably already redistributed much of its capital, only outside parties are going to be wealthy enough to react rapidly
Fuckers think that the primordial frontier capitalism is the default state of capitalism and constantly get blindsided by the entrenched interests that already went through primitive accumulation and wealth consolidation.
I enjoy all the people in the Reddit thread basically repeating this at the poster.
The bones of the game are great.
Edit: So another user pointed out they now have a private construction queue. I checked and this was released just after the last time I did a 20 hour binge of the game so I just missed it. What I said below isn't relevant anymore but I'll leave it there as an example of the type of thing the game was missing for a long time after release and why it has the framework to eventually be a complete and very complex simulation and it's heading in the right direction to achieve that.
The biggest flaw I found was that even under capitalist systems the player was entirely responsible for developing industry and growing the productive forces of the country. Every new industry or expansion of an existing one must be queued up by the player or using a very basic auto-expand and added to a country-wide construction list.
If I'm using a capitalist system I should be having to fight the interests of the bourgeoisie in terms of what and where to expand. They should be forming a private construction sector and focusing on businesses that maximise profit with minimal regard for worker welfare. Instead I can focus on industries that rapidly increase the standard of living and productive forces of the nation with the consolation that they will be privately owned until the working class is empowered enough that I can swap to collective or state ownership.
They have released a bunch of DLCs that I haven't been able to look into yet so they might have begun to address this.
If I'm using a capitalist system I should be having to fight the interests of the bourgeoisie in terms of what and where to expand. They should be forming a private construction sector and focusing on businesses that maximise profit with minimal regard for worker welfare. Instead I can focus on industries that rapidly increase the standard of living and productive forces of the nation with the consolation that they will be privately owned until the working class is empowered enough that I can swap to collective or state ownership.
there are private building abilities, they can take like 50 percent of your build power and just build random shit all the time
Despite its flaws, this game is probably the closest you can get to a "materialism simulator"
I have been looking for that exactly so I'll have to give it a shot
