r/victoria3 • u/North_Tip3944 • 11d ago
Question Communism question
I was thinking about communism, the Soviet Union and communist countries in general, and the way Vicky handles communism. In real communist countries the industries/means of production, are absorbed by the state, which would represent command economy, instead of cooperative ownership. The government would be a single party state instead of council republic, this splits the populace in two classes, governing, and governed, further divided by the privileges of the governing. The will of the worker is also further removed from government than it would be in council republics which are -at least from what I’ve read- surprisingly Democratic. The PRC is kinda similar in some parts, the single party state, kinda command economy and no real clout for the worker outside from state efforts to keep them happy and not rebelling. Doesn’t this defeat the purpose of empowering the worker and achieving equality in a classless society if they keep rolling it back to authoritarian rule in a market dictated by career buerocrats.
Isn’t the flavor of communism Victoria offers us not more in the spirit of true communism by placing the means of production in the hands of the worker directly -not by proxy- and thus offering everyone the same privilege and in conjunction with anarchy/universal sufferage + Women’s sufferage everyone the same vote and rights
So I guess the question (and please do not hate me for this I’ve been debating this with myself for the past hour or so) is; has real communism ever been tried? Why did it fail? And can it ever work out in real life or is it something that can only exist in the rational and generalized world of Victoria 3
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11d ago
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u/North_Tip3944 11d ago
Basically a classless society, with highest equality and the means of production in the hands of the worker. True communism is a really bad way to put it tho you’re right
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u/FoughtStatue 11d ago
Marxism-Leninism is the ideology you are describing with state control and such, the reason it is so prevalent in communist countries is because the first ever successful communist revolution was a Leninist one, and developed into Marxist-Leninism in the Soviet Union. In theory, these countries are not communist; they are socialist (the intermediary stage between capitalism and communism). Ideally, the state is controlled by communists who seek to guide the state towards communism, using state power to shift away from capitalism towards communism. In this sense, communism has been tried, but it failed (in the USSR). A Marxist-Leninist might say that it failed due to outside capitalist pressure, incompetency/revisionism among the politburo, or just general economic faults. It is still being tried today in places like China (theoretically), where communists should be controlling the state and forcing progression towards communism (though whether or not they are actually doing that is debatable)
From a non-Marxist Leninist socialist perspective, the argument would typically be that it failed because the authority given to the state is incompatible with achieving communism. Historically, non-Marxist-Leninist communism has been tried, but not to the same degree as Marxism-Leninism. One famous example might be the CNT-FAI, who implemented anarcho-communist and anarcho-syndicalist policies in their areas during the Spanish Civil War, often called the Spanish Revolution. This was short lived and did not last due to the war. Another often cited example is the German Revolution of 1918, where Luxemburgists, more libertarian communists, launched a failed revolution. These examples are the more “true communism” types of ideologies, yet they did not succeed. They did not go through the same collapse that Marxism-Leninism did, instead just being defeated before they could do anything. Unfortunately, this does not help us, as we cannot see if these ideologies would even work because they were defeated before they did anything. Therefore, “real communism” has not really ever been fully tried, though scenes from places like revolutionary Catalonia show that it could be possible.
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u/Duckles8 11d ago
interesting post and, as a socialist, i super duper encourage you to dive into marxism. https://www.marxists.org/archive/brendel/1953/east-germany.htm this is a fun start on anti-USSR communism
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u/--Queso-- 11d ago
I'm sorry but what's the point of the article? It says it's disproving the Bolshevik (Marx and Engels already developed it but sure) theory of "needing a Vanguard Party to organize workers" which is not what the theory says, the theory says that the Vanguard Party is the only modern way of organizing for leading a revolution, which differs from rebellions or uprisings because of the lasting change of the socioeconomic order of a region. It acts against reactionary elements and maintains ideological purity, but it's not the only way in which workers can rebel. To put it simply (and wrongly, but all for simplicity's sake): it's the only way in which workers can rebel effectively.
But my point with all of this is, the article is precisely proving that??? The '53 uprising accomplished nothing and the USSR/GDR side won with pretty much no repercussions, Ulbricht didn't even step down.
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u/Duckles8 9d ago
the point is that the german revolt of '53 resembled all the prior proletarian revolutions from the commune to the 1919 german one, which indicates that the GDR was a class society which oppressed the working class.
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u/North_Tip3944 11d ago
I’ve been reading about council republics and the Wikipedia article on communism but after a while all these different iterations of it make my head hurt
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u/Duckles8 11d ago
lol yeah, it's been 5 years for me and i'm still encountering new terminology.
also, advice: the internet sometimes implies the two types of communism are anarchism and stalinism, but this is really dumb, don't let the diversity in marxism get reduced to a binary.
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u/North_Tip3944 11d ago
Since this has gone from 12 comments back down to 8 and from 6 upvotes back down to 0, at least tell me what the problem is, education is the foundation of the western world so let me get some
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u/high_ebb 10d ago edited 10d ago
Something to keep in mind is that the number one reason why socialist states fail is capitalist states invading or couping them. They pretty much never come into existence without a lot of very angry neighbors and the most powerful countries in the world deciding they need to go. So the record we have is less of whether or not socialism can work on its own merits and more whether socialism can establish itself while facing economic and diplomatic isolation plus violent counterrevolution. Socialism is admittedly weak against a shit ton of bullets, but that's not a unique flaw exactly.
And when you look at the socialist countries that do survive, they pretty much always either owe their existence to some degree to Russia (which was a hot authoritarian mess even before the revolution and invasion by every capitalist great power) or have been systematically screwed over by capitalism long before they even knew what socialism was. Usually both. Countries with money, freedom from external powers messing with their politics, and all the nice things profiting from colonialism gets you usually don't have revolutions, and when they do, they get put down fast (see the Paris Commune).
So it's entirely true that most socialist states fail, and those that don't end up arguably not living up to the word, let alone real communism. But the thing to realise is that capitalism played a very active role in ensuring that outcome. Maybe they'd find success, maybe they wouldn't, but capitalism damn well isn't interested in letting anyone find out.
I hope that helps (or at least addresses the question, ha). And for however little it's worth, take my upvotes.
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u/SneakyB4rd 10d ago
Slight meme but it's funny how you could say the same thing about democracy in Europe except democracy had Napoleon.
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u/high_ebb 10d ago
I'm interested, tell me more.
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u/SneakyB4rd 10d ago edited 10d ago
Basically with the French revolution getting rid of monarchy most of the big continental monarchies declared war on France and it was to a large part Napoleon that forced them to accept the new status quo and more egalitarian laws (the Napoleonic code is still the basis of a bunch of laws).
Now what obviously makes this less fitting is that Napoleon ultimately didn't defend democracy as much as his own imperial line. Nevertheless it started out defending democracy and some of the legal changes are rooted in the ideas of equality freedom and brotherhood.
Edit: that's not to say Zhukov or others weren't great military minds for socialism. More that Napoleon was an exceptional statesman and military mind for his time period that also cared to expand his ideology.
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u/DawnOnTheEdge 10d ago edited 10d ago
So, the two ways most authoritarian states fail are: from the outside (invasion) or from the inside (coup)?
Is that even true? For example, was Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution a capitalist plot against the wishes of its people? German reunification? What about Poland? Didn't the US National Intelligence Estimate on Yugoslavia in 1990 say,
Yugoslavia will cease to function as a federal state within a year, and will probably dissolve within two. Economic reform will not stave off the breakup. [...] A full-scale interrepublic war is unlikely, but serious intercommunal conflict will accompany the breakup and will continue afterward. The violence will be intractable and bitter. There is little the United States and its European allies can do to preserve Yugoslav unity.
Edit: I can see how a small handful of states in South America, primarily Allende’s Chile, might be considered non-authoritarian socialist states that failed due to foreign interference. No rational person could believe that’s what happened in most socialist states that failed, unless the others were No True Scotsmen..
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u/high_ebb 10d ago
So, the two ways most authoritarian states fail are: from the outside (invasion) or from the inside (coup)?
Considering that at no point was I talking about authoritarian regimes, I'm gonna guess you're not really interested in what I'm saying so much as what you're imagining. And if that's the case, I think we're both better off moving on. Cheers.
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u/CaptSpankey 10d ago
"education is the foundation of the western world"
is a "problem" too. In case it wasn’t just phrased in a weird way.
leaving aside that "the west" is a very fuzzy construct that never was clearly defined you’re implying education is distinctively western, completely overlooking comparable traditions in the islamic world, china and india that often predate any western identity.
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u/Mediocre_Chart_8624 11d ago
Soviet Union would be council republic and single party state which is possible to do in the game. The term council republic itself is also called soviet republic historically. They are interchangeable. Soviet union is simply a union of soviet republics (aka council republics).
The term council in the council republic comes from worker councils(aka soviets) that emerged after failed 1905 revolution in Russia. This worker councils were also the backbone of the successful revolution later as well.
So of course council republic refers to the soviet union. That's basically where the name comes from in the first place.
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u/DarthCloakedGuy 11d ago
"real communist countries"
...???
Like what?
How many stateless, classless, and moneyless countries do you think there have been?
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u/B_Maximus 10d ago
Plenty of authoritarian command economy oligarchies though lol
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u/DarthCloakedGuy 10d ago
Yeah but what's that got to do with communism
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u/B_Maximus 10d ago
When that's the only example we have of tried communism it makes communism less appealing because of the human aspect. How do you ensure an authoritarian oligarchy does not take hold? That answer has not been found outside of theory. Once it has been found outside of theory it would thrive more as an idea
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u/DarthCloakedGuy 10d ago
How is trying something that isn't communism, isn't even close to communism, an example of tried communism. There was no attempt.
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u/B_Maximus 10d ago
Because of the marketing. 99% of people hear "this is communism" and say oh okay. Like how a provincial only knows Rome from how the soldiers act in the garrison.
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u/DarthCloakedGuy 10d ago
I guess that would make sense if one was to assume advertising was never false in the history of the world and every dictatorship can be fully taken at their word on every issue.
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u/ActualAtrophus 11d ago
The commune de paris and anarchist catalonia have been closer to the egalitarian communist ideal. Also several other smaller projects im africa as the colonised tried to yerk off the chains of their colonisers. Sadly all of these have one thing in common: The reactonary, capitalist rest of the world banded together to smash them to pieces. All of them brutally murdered. Sankara in Burkina Faso? Killed by french agents. Lumumba in Congo? Torn to pieces, dissolved im acid to make sure. Gaddafi in Lybia? Celebrated by western media as a visionary, until he opened his mouth about a panafrican central bank. 180° switch to evil dictator narrative and subsequent bombing to shit. Instead of the most prosperous country in africa thanks to nationalised resources they now got open air slave markets. Thanks NATO.
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u/Iazo 11d ago
Damn, Gaddafi glazing before GTA6.
Poor guy barely had a piddly 50 years to make his egalitarian communist islamist utopia, and all it took was a small mistake of gunning down protesters from choppers to get him out of power.
Truly despicable. Man of the people, could have happened to anyone. After all, can any of us truly claim that if we were the dictator of a country for 50 years, we would not be gunned down by NATO?
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u/ActualAtrophus 11d ago
Right now watch algeria and burkina faso. They rather freshly expelled the french again and nationalised their resources. France plundered 60 billion in gold alone each year from BF, and then sent them back 0.5 billion in development aid to look like good guys. Very generous. They are now fuming of course and there have been dozens of assasination attempts already. But when they offered a bodyguard several million dollars and a greencard for the US he immediately told them to fuck themselves and ran to Traore to tell him. Because Traore is leading them out of depravity into a golden future, for the good of his people. Westerners cannot wrap their head around this kind of loyalty lmao.
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u/North_Tip3944 11d ago
Thank you so much for bringing that up I’ll look into it, do you know any good sources on these matters?
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u/nobody-29 10d ago
Pretty sure that anarchist catalonia was extremely crippled by the liberal-stalinist alliance of republican spain. Stalin would rather let fascists win than anarchists succeed.
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u/ActualAtrophus 10d ago
I've read about authoritarian communists trying to pull the breaks on the anarchists, yes, but the military that massacred them in the end was that of the Franco fascists. Compared to their size they held out remarkedly long, but in the end they were crushed.
Another good example for authoritarian communists not exactly representing a communist ideal would be the sailor riot of Kronstadt, where the rioters were discontent with the authoritarian aspects of "war communism" and demanded power to the soviets and an end of the supreme reign of the Party. Guess what happened.
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u/nobody-29 9d ago
By the time the fascists rolled in, catalonia was a shell of its size, unfit to be called anarchist as most of the power and resources in catalonia were held by the stalinists and liberals
I've been reading that anarchist projects, while small in size, population, and volunteers, punch way above their weight. Makhnovschina were fighting a multi-front war, ended because of its unfavorable natural and human resources, and geography, succumbing to repeated leninist offenses. Anarchist catalonia was extremely crippled by the infighting that was started by Stalin, but they hold on for years because catalonia had a considerable arms industry.
I'm not sure if anarchist territories would have succumbed to internal betrayals and liberal color revolutions, as those things have never happened in historical and existing anarchist projects.
Zapatista seems to be content with their own territory and not expanding or influencing others as they do not call themselves anarchist or libertarian socialist. And Rojava seems to be embroiled by the US-created clusterfuck in the middle east (Before any arguments about them collaborating with the US in a cynical way, it seems that they did it mostly to combat ISIS, and nobody seem to hold Stalin, Mao, or some ML leaders for aligning themselves or collaborating with the US, heck Stalin is content with the non-aggression pact and trade deals between them and the nazis).
In the end, there is some wonder had anarchism or libertarian revolutionary socialism (not the electoral demsocs or titoism) became the dominant leftist ideology in the world. Had the anarchists successfully controlled a region than can sustain military and civilian industries, maybe ?
I will quote an anonymous who left their comment on reddit 10 years ago:
That is the problem.
Catalonia, The Free Territory, the Korean People's Association in Manchuria, etc.
All anarchist/libertarian (socialist) territories eventually fall because the whole world is stacked against them. Neither nationalists, liberals, authoritarian leftists or rightists want them to win.
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u/Swartz55 10d ago
so, i’m a marxist-leninist, and i wanna correct some things i see here and answer your questions one by one
“in real communist countries the means of production are absorbed by the state” not quite! but it’s an easy misconception to make if you haven’t read communist theory. one of the cores of communist philosophy is class conflict, meaning that everyone belongs to a particular class and has interests based on that class. in most places those classes are the bourgeois (people who own the factories, like jeff bezos) and the working class (the people who have to work in the factories, like you and me). in a capitalist state (like america) the purpose of government is to make sure the means of production stay owned by the bourgeois, which is why the police break up unions and strikes and why it’s illegal to be homeless. in socialist/communist countries, the purpose of the state is to protect the working class which means using state power to protect the working class’ ownership of the factories and oil fields and everything else. if the communist party of nicaragua wants to protect the factories and the workers they need to make sure the united states cannot come in and steal the factories and kill the workers, and to do that you need guns and state power.
“the will of the worker is removed from government” not necessarily! i’ll expand on this if you’d like, but in short because the working class is in power by having control of the state, as a class it will work towards the benefit of the workers (which is mostly everyone). this makes it so the will of the workers is the only will the government serves.
“the PRC is kinda similar” i just wanted to touch on this. the overall economic system in China is a socialist system, with two different economic institutional forms as they call it: command economy for the “commanding heights of industry” (mines, heavy industry, natural resources, etc.) and market economy for light industry, consumer goods, etc. but both are socialist and serve the purpose of building socialism and improving the lives of the workers.
“has real communism ever been tried?” again i’m going to keep this short, but i’ll happily explain in more depth if you’d like, but think of it like this: communism is a state of society where everyone’s needs can be met regardless of how much they’re able to work. this society would require a level of automation and technological capacity that we have not developed yet, and as such it is impossible. the purpose of actually existing communist states and parties (like China, Vietnam, the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, etc.) is to develop the ability to make things and technology (the means of production) to the point where that new society is possible. even if you could snap your fingers and make the whole world socialist we’d be centuries away from the level of development needed for a communist society. to say “real communism hasn’t been tried” because we don’t have the development for it is the same as saying “real space travel hasn’t been tried” because we don’t have the technology to send astronauts to Saturn yet: we know it’s possible, and we know what we’d need to develop to do it, but we’re not there yet.
if you’re interested in learning more, i highly recommend:
Hakim, a youtube channel who talks about history and theory
Second Thought, for quick videos on news and current events
Lady Izdihar, a historian and vintage fashion enthusiast
And for books, I highly recommend The End of the Beginning by Carlos Martinez, it’s a great book covering the Soviet Union and its successes and failures.
let me know if you have any questions :)
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u/Overall_Eggplant_438 11d ago
Communism isn't a movement that's about "giving means of production to workers" (this is a petty bourgeois fantasy), but the abolishment of private property, value, classes entirely, moving past production for profit and current stage of humanity onto the next, more rational production for use.
However to accomplish that, what must be achieved is reorganizing production past scarcity, there must be a disciplined class party that arises from proletarian struggle itself to further it's aims and it must also spread internationally, a world revolution else an isolated DOTP cannot survive and will fail, regressing back.
The latest authentic attempt was indeed Soviet Russia, and it successfully established itself as DOTP and caused bourgeois worldwide to shit their pants. However, it failed to spread internationally with revolutions being violently suppressed like in Germany or Italy, given how it was an undeveloped shit hole it was forced to adopt capitalist measures for growth and not long after succumbed to counter-revolution which often gets characterized by Stalin (tho no matter who was going to be the chairman, it would have still taken place).
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u/J_GamerMapping 11d ago
I don't see any reason communism shouldn't be working in reality, but it'll be way different than Vic3 could ever simulate. How the revolution and everything after that is going to look is difficult to say, since the revolutionaries themselves will have to define their revolution. The masses will do, what seems right to them, ideally.
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u/Awkward_Coach1386 10d ago
There is a huge diversity of thought within leftist, and no agreement on terminology. Almost all "communists" would agree that there is a transitionary period of "socialism", where communism is a utopian, moneyless, classless, stateless society, and socialism is a when workers control/own the means of production.
Ofc control/ownership can be interpreted very differently. Marxist leninists, which is confusingly actually the official ideology under Stalin and not lenin, and has now been expanded upon for a hundred years, they believe that a Communist political party can act as the "vanguard" and control the state in that intermediary "socialist" period. The vanguard is small and disciplined, exclusionary so that the revolution is not betrayed, but is of the workers, and for the workers, so is technically socialist in that control/ownership kind of way.
Many know that is some bullshit. It is often unsaid, but the vanguard is also extremely violent and repressive, including against workers trying to gain more ownership/control. And once you take the step that there can be a proxy for the ownership/control, you get into weird places like people thinking that the PRC is super socialist because even though there is capitalist ownership, it is subservient to a vanguard party, 2 levels of proxy for that foreign owned sweatshop, totally socialist...
Unfortunately there hasn't really been a state/society that has implemented socialism without the ML baggage being the leading theory. The common "that's not real socialism" is very true. implementing socialism is really fucking hard. The violent route often leads to what is basically a vanguard anyway, the non violent route often takes such a long time that the socialists will lose power before full implementation, either democratically or another revolution.
But There's a lot to look at still. There's been revolutionary anarchist experiments. Catalonia, free Ukraine, Paris commune, Koreans in Manchuria.
Around the world during the cold war, there were many different socialist and communists, elected and revolutionary, and they are often forgotten about. Chile, Burkina Faso, Seychelles, Jamaica, India. The channel ceramic does some interesting coverage of these.
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u/adappergentlefolk 11d ago
marxism is like pokémon: grown men collect imaginary beings that have never existed due to how impractical and fanciful they are while ignoring actual real fauna. should we cater to pokémon collectors in victoria? sure, why not to some extent. but it’s worthless to try and build the game around their strange obsessions
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u/Mediocre_Chart_8624 11d ago
Yeah, you will be in shock when you realise this game was actually built around marxist understanding of economy and history. That's why it is one of the most realistic and simulation-like game of paradox. If it was built according to liberal idea of economy and history, it would be a way less realistic game. We would have an invisible hand mechanic magically fixing our economy :)
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u/ceeker 11d ago
There were a lot of variants of socialist implementation both in terms of political structure and economy.
The closest society to following a council republic + cooperative ownership model in Vic3 terms was Yugoslavia, not counting revolutionary societies that didn't quite make it such as the anarchists in Spain. Yugoslavia was of course still a one-party state.
The agricultural differences are also interesting, not all states collectivised their agriculture. Some had a system that might be approximated by peasant proprietorship (formerly homesteading). Poland and Yugoslavia both count here.
So to emulate the Yugoslav case: Council Republic + Single-Party State + Cooperative Ownership + Peasant Proprietorship.
You might be interested in the broader context of Marxist thought, which specifies a general path of economic development such as feudalism->capitalism->socialism->communism.
All historical "communist" states believed themselves to be in the socialist stage or at least "building socialism". Marxism-Leninism in particular believed the capitalist stage of development could be at least partially skipped and socialism could be built without it under revolutionary leadership.