mya

Entirely Normal Girl

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last.fm listening

"Mya is some sort of collective mania." - Álvaro Barredo


Beancatte
@Beancatte
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sleepmode
@sleepmode

Yeah there was a bit of a stink among players of Victoria 3 because they found out that socialist organisation of society led to unequivocally the best and most efficient distribution of resources and led to less workers dying or being miserable, from memory


IkomaTanomori
@IkomaTanomori

All the socialist styles beat the capitalist and feudal styles hands down, and syndicalism combined the anarchist relative indifference to the stability stat (an annoyance most governments had to deal with, the tendency of the proles to revolt) with the productive power of state oriented socialist systems (because worker syndicates, uh, are made of workers?).

There was a legitimate critique that emerged though: the transitions of government style were much too easy to implement top down with a button click. That hit the nail on the head for why the simulation was going way off from reality. In reality, nobody at the top was giving up their power that way, and so movements towards these kinds of revolution were literally battled and crushed over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Arguably trying to build a communist or syndicalist nation should require the kind of battle for the revolution and risk of betraying the cause in the course of arming to defend it (or of being crushed by overwhelming force) that real revolutionaries went through.

In short, the police were invented to nerf syndicalism, and weren't represented in the simulation.


five
@five
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in reply to @Beancatte's post:

if a feasibly accurate capitalism simulation's developers don't build all the shitty sieve-like harnesses and restrictions and caveats that try to force capitalism into a semi-livable system with the same amount of complexity that we have built up irl, the simulation devolves into the same kind of hellscape pretty much immediately. the dikes always overflow eventually and if you aren't constantly building it up the forces of capitalism will wash away everything and return to its base state

you pass laws, they work around them. you plug the loopholes, they start laundering overseas. you start to go after that too but oops fuck the enforcement agency is getting defunded due to lobbying pressure. ah shit you are having trouble winning elections, they are funding their friendly opponents. shit damn your whole party leadership is doing it now. ok you finally scraped together a good case... damn they got the courts. well better make some concessions on upper bracket tax rates so that--fuck they convinced half the population you eat babies for breakfast anyway. ok well can we at least nvm there's a coup

Yeah the material for how the cycle between welfare state and neoliberal hell would go writes itself almost. Harder but also even more exciting is writing how the actual breaking down the system and making a better world could go. Just what assumption changes could lead to happy communes, or anarchist free associations, or worker and consumer councils, or whatever vision of fully automated luxury gay space communism one wished...

i'm not sure how it could be written in a way that isn't a bittersweet wish fulfillment fantasy or just depressingly too real. our society treats humans as fungible and blends and tears apart communities as small as 2 just on the basis of needing jobs, even when it isn't actively and explicitly sending cops to murder them

remaking any society that still inevitably consists of about 30% natural fascists, unmaking a society that won't go down without killing as many as possible and salting the earth, and to a society that keeps said fascists from gaining influence or acting their natural selves, is an unsolved problem in political science. i couldn't write it, i'd feel like i was being moony or trite.

That is definitely the imagination problem posed here. How to balance the real pain - which must be acknowledged to try to lead those who don't understand it to empathy - with the hope and possibility. I will continue to experiment with it.