Alternate Ideologies

[suul'ken]

When thinking about this fictional ideology, I was inspired by Prussian military culture and political history as well as the fascist belief of the supremacy of the state. Essentially what I came up with was a nation controlled entirely by its own military industrial complex.

De facto Henleins Terran Federation from Starship Troopers and Citizens Alliance from Rvbomally Space Cadet because it's based on them:

Culture Profile: The Citizens' Alliance by RvBOMally on DeviantArt

www.deviantart.com

 

[Reflection]

Equalist Imperialism

The idea that all members of an empire are equal citizens of said empire, so long as their loyalty is to the leading powers. The principal factor is to absorb and utilize different cultures and ideals to improve the nation's strength as they expand, and give more incentive to those who they "liberate" (conquer). As such, race or creed isn't the core factor here, but of loyalty and ideology.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Here's a little something based on my one-off treatment for a "more realistic" take on Richard Sobel's For Want of a Nail. The ideology in question is Sobel's, but I developed it more than he did in his book and gave it a much better name.

Social Capitalism

By all accounts we are living in the Age of Social Capitalism, but it is worth looking at how an ideology considered the impotent fringe for a century could suddenly come roaring back onto the world stage, and the best way to look on the works and opposing viewpoints of Bernard Kramer and Erich Neiderhoffer.

The former, of course, is infamous as the founder and first president of Kramer Associates, which went from a California mining and manufacturing trust to the most powerful corporation in the United States of Mexico in the space of five years. In order to better encyst itself within the Mexican state and to gain an edge against competitors President Kramer would institute policies focused on monitoring technological development from nations with greater freedom of inquiry, reasoning that being willing to adopt new techniques and devices before anyone else would give the mining and engineering giant the edge against more wary competitors. This early adopter attitude, coupled with hostile takeovers enabled by the government would be credited with allowing Kramer Associates to adapt and diversify far faster than would have been possible if the company had relied exclusively on the scientific work-product of the USM.

With this meteoric rise came the spread of the Kramer corporatist business model, where economic activity was concentrated into large firms that worked in tandem with the national government to guide policy. It would be the spread of this model, and the resulting worker misery, that would motivate Neiderhoffer to develop his economic theories in the mid-1870's. Under orthodox Social Capitalism, the best way forward for the struggling working class is to pool their resources, using their combined purchasing power to buy control of the companies they work for. Ideally they would be able to buy them outright and manage them collectively, but the brief French experiment with Neiderhofferist economics tried to expand worker access to stock in publicly traded companies.

Though this experiment would not survive the 1880s it would provoke something of a panic in the Kramer Associates board of directors, which began looking for ways to boost the loyalty of the workforce without giving them any real say in the company. As the company had diversified and spread internationally it had already taken steps to solidify its company identity by rotating middle and upper management between branches and paying its skilled workers enough to become consumers of the company's products, but the end of slavery in Mexico during the 1920s would force another change.

Although the company had realized the need to faze out the institution, and had in fact pushed for its abolition as an inefficient way to conduct business, there now came the issue of how to maintain control of the new mass of lower wage workers used to fill the bottom rungs of the company. The solution proposed by KA president Benedict would be relatively simple: the creation of a patchwork of "loyal unions" within all the Kramer shops with a so-called "advisory capacity". It allowed the great unwashed the illusion of workplace participation while preventing outside labor interests from worming their way into the Kramer workforce, while simultaneously preventing all the Kramer workers from coordinating with one another. And there the matter rested, at least until the Global War.

KA had long considered the Pacific its best opportunity for growth, ingratiating itself with Taiwan and the Philippines especially, with additional significant holdings in Japan and Australia. Naturally it saw Mexican belligerance in the Pacific as a threat to the company's interests, and the growing divide between the company and the state finally shattered, with Kramer Associates notifying Japan and Australia of Mexican war plans and transferring personnel and assets to Taiwan just ahead of USM plans to nationalize Kramer holdings in the country.

And here we come to the return of Social Capitalism: although the anti-Mexican pact had succeeded and Kramer had gotten sweetheart deals to rebuild Australia and Japan in the aftermath, the company was far more fragile than their entrenchment in the Pacific would suggest, given the complete severing of relations with Mexico that had benefitted and defined the company since its founding and the resultant drop in stock price given the new instability. It was in this weakened state that the various measures taken over the years to generate a spirit of corporate over national loyalty would backfire, with the disgruntled middle management class beginning to embrace Neiderhofferism as another tool of advancement and the frequent shuffling of personnel creating a vector for that tendency to spread throughout the company.

Kramer Associates had long relied on a byzantine corporate structure to prevent its assets from being nationalized, and this opaque tangle of entities gave the newly politicized Kramer shop unions and middle management the opening they needed to discretely buy up falling Kramer stock through an equally opaque web of shell companies. And with that Kramer fell victim to its own game through the so-called Day-Trader Revolt, which would see the unions collaborating to use a series of short squeezes to increase their share of the company coupled with the threat of mass work stoppages to guarantee their new seat at the table.

Newly secure in their position, the workers would push to make the most of their new leverage. The melange of shop unions were consolidated into Social Capitalist political parties in the nations with the highest levels of KA influence, and the anti-Mexican alliance would be formalized into the Pacific Pact between Taiwan, Japan and Westralia (having seceded when Australia elected to remain in the Commonwealth), witth Kramer Associates retaining observer status and all three nations locked into favorable deals with the corporation and under the sway of SoCap parties. Although research among the great powers had been ongoing for a decade it would be the Pacific Pact that would successfully detonate an atomic bomb in 1962, claiming the device as a deterrent to potentially hostile action as the Kramer-backed Social Capitalists are growing in prominence around the world.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Have a flag for Social Capitalism!

View attachment 650545

The symbology of the Pact flag is relatively simple, with the lower half imported directly from the the original Gadsden flag used by Kramer Associates. Despite the flag's ties to the history of the USM it was considered an important symbol of defiance to foreign aggression. The upper half is the flag of Social Capitalism. With the failure of the French Revolution, the Leveller green of the English Civil War became the international color of socialism. The hammer and torch were selected by Neiderhoffer to represent worker cooperation between manual and administrative workers (the hammer and the torch, respectively). The white of the symbol was chosen to represent the peaceful path to worker empowerment offered by Social Capitalism.

 

[Ed of the Pueblos Libres]

Social Aristocracy.

The Social Aristocracy is a term of the thinkers of the Marxist left to a product of the late nineteenth century with the radicalization of politics in the United Kingdom towards the radical right.
A response to socialism, anarchism and separatist nationalism in various pairs of the Home Islands or other parts of the British Empire (Bengal in the British Raj, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, etc.), the elimination of many liberals and moderate conservatives, the assassination of the King Edward VII and the international relations of the moment.
This situation had left right-wing populists, radical right-wing conservatives, Anglo-British nationalists, and an aristocracy set on a survival instinct.

The Social Aristocracy has several elements at its base, imperialism, capitalism, nationalism and irredentism (Anglo-British), anti-leftism (anti-socialism, anti-anarchism) and restoration-authoritarianism (returning power to the aristocratic nobility or reducing democracy ).
Later it evolved in various sects or groups with particular characteristics, but that is another matter that we will explore later.

Some question how British democracy could degenerate into the Social Aristocracy, but there are various elements to take into account, such as the ownership of land in the United Kingdom (the nobility owned up to four-fifths of the land), with a nobility that It goes up to the 12th century onwards and it fervently opposed autonomy (Irish Home Rule), reforms and democratization (extending the right to vote to the working class).
A class that cared about its self-preservation and survival, only accepting consents when forced to do so.

The idea of the aristocracy-nobility is the preservation of a lineage, of a purity of blood and the superiority of a name-elite over the rest of the members of society (common people, the proletariat, etc.).
Just to give examples of this, in the 19th century (when the social aristocracy emerged), individuals adopted into aristocratic families in the UK were not eligible to inherit titles or property.

And the survival of the aristocracy was precisely in danger, international competition severely damaging the British Empire (the arms-naval race with Germany, the policy of containing Russia, colonial competition, etc.), the rise of capitalism created a bourgeois class that competed with the aristocracy for power.
In Europe there were already populist-conservative "revolutionary" movements that were popular enough to be appropriated by the British to function on a kind of English model (made by and for the UK).

Within the movement there are particularly important people, such as the Prince of Wales (and later King) Albert Victor, Louis Alexander Mountbatten (first Marquis of Milford Haven, rear admiral and later admiral, prime minister, etc.), Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Anglo-German thinker ), Harold Sidney Harmsworth, David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford.

These various individuals added different thoughts within the Social Aristocracy, Albert Victor and Louis Alexander Mountbatten were pan-Germanic, and Germanophile / Francophobic.
So was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, but he increased the popularity and influence of anti-Semitism and Aryanism (the idea of an Aryan race superior to the rest) within the circles of the Social Aristocracy, the elite of the nobility that dominated the United Kingdom in the late 19th century.

There were also more occult circles (knowledge and practices related to magic, alchemy, astrology and similar subjects), but they were never very popular.

 

[tus3]

Nations that have adopted this ideology usually have a tiered citizenship ladder, which determines the type of employment a citizen can have and in some rare cases even the amount of water allotted to the citizen's showers each month.

Why is water rationed? Are those countries in the middle of a dessert?

 

[traveller76]

Here's a little something based on my one-off treatment for a "more realistic" take on Richard Sobel's For Want of a Nail. The ideology in question is Sobel's, but I developed it more than he did in his book and gave it a much better name.

Social Capitalism

By all accounts we are living in the Age of Social Capitalism, but it is worth looking at how an ideology considered the impotent fringe for a century could suddenly come roaring back onto the world stage, and the best way to look on the works and opposing viewpoints of Bernard Kramer and Erich Neiderhoffer.

The former, of course, is infamous as the founder and first president of Kramer Associates, which went from a California mining and manufacturing trust to the most powerful corporation in the United States of Mexico in the space of five years. In order to better encyst itself within the Mexican state and to gain an edge against competitors President Kramer would institute policies focused on monitoring technological development from nations with greater freedom of inquiry, reasoning that being willing to adopt new techniques and devices before anyone else would give the mining and engineering giant the edge against more wary competitors. This early adopter attitude, coupled with hostile takeovers enabled by the government would be credited with allowing Kramer Associates to adapt and diversify far faster than would have been possible if the company had relied exclusively on the scientific work-product of the USM.

With this meteoric rise came the spread of the Kramer corporatist business model, where economic activity was concentrated into large firms that worked in tandem with the national government to guide policy. It would be the spread of this model, and the resulting worker misery, that would motivate Neiderhoffer to develop his economic theories in the mid-1870's. Under orthodox Social Capitalism, the best way forward for the struggling working class is to pool their resources, using their combined purchasing power to buy control of the companies they work for. Ideally they would be able to buy them outright and manage them collectively, but the brief French experiment with Neiderhofferist economics tried to expand worker access to stock in publicly traded companies.

Though this experiment would not survive the 1880s it would provoke something of a panic in the Kramer Associates board of directors, which began looking for ways to boost the loyalty of the workforce without giving them any real say in the company. As the company had diversified and spread internationally it had already taken steps to solidify its company identity by rotating middle and upper management between branches and paying its skilled workers enough to become consumers of the company's products, but the end of slavery in Mexico during the 1920s would force another change.

Although the company had realized the need to faze out the institution, and had in fact pushed for its abolition as an inefficient way to conduct business, there now came the issue of how to maintain control of the new mass of lower wage workers used to fill the bottom rungs of the company. The solution proposed by KA president Benedict would be relatively simple: the creation of a patchwork of "loyal unions" within all the Kramer shops with a so-called "advisory capacity". It allowed the great unwashed the illusion of workplace participation while preventing outside labor interests from worming their way into the Kramer workforce, while simultaneously preventing all the Kramer workers from coordinating with one another. And there the matter rested, at least until the Global War.

KA had long considered the Pacific its best opportunity for growth, ingratiating itself with Taiwan and the Philippines especially, with additional significant holdings in Japan and Australia. Naturally it saw Mexican belligerance in the Pacific as a threat to the company's interests, and the growing divide between the company and the state finally shattered, with Kramer Associates notifying Japan and Australia of Mexican war plans and transferring personnel and assets to Taiwan just ahead of USM plans to nationalize Kramer holdings in the country.

And here we come to the return of Social Capitalism: although the anti-Mexican pact had succeeded and Kramer had gotten sweetheart deals to rebuild Australia and Japan in the aftermath, the company was far more fragile than their entrenchment in the Pacific would suggest, given the complete severing of relations with Mexico that had benefitted and defined the company since its founding and the resultant drop in stock price given the new instability. It was in this weakened state that the various measures taken over the years to generate a spirit of corporate over national loyalty would backfire, with the disgruntled middle management class beginning to embrace Neiderhofferism as another tool of advancement and the frequent shuffling of personnel creating a vector for that tendency to spread throughout the company.

Kramer Associates had long relied on a byzantine corporate structure to prevent its assets from being nationalized, and this opaque tangle of entities gave the newly politicized Kramer shop unions and middle management the opening they needed to discretely buy up falling Kramer stock through an equally opaque web of shell companies. And with that Kramer fell victim to its own game through the so-called Day-Trader Revolt, which would see the unions collaborating to use a series of short squeezes to increase their share of the company coupled with the threat of mass work stoppages to guarantee their new seat at the table.

Newly secure in their position, the workers would push to make the most of their new leverage. The melange of shop unions were consolidated into Social Capitalist political parties in the nations with the highest levels of KA influence, and the anti-Mexican alliance would be formalized into the Pacific Pact between Taiwan, Japan and Westralia (having seceded when Australia elected to remain in the Commonwealth), witth Kramer Associates retaining observer status and all three nations locked into favorable deals with the corporation and under the sway of SoCap parties. Although research among the great powers had been ongoing for a decade it would be the Pacific Pact that would successfully detonate an atomic bomb in 1962, claiming the device as a deterrent to potentially hostile action as the Kramer-backed Social Capitalists are growing in prominence around the world.

This was quite well done.

 

[GameBawesome]

This is from another thread I did.

American Loyalism "American Red Coats"

After the American Independence, many Loyalists fled in exodus to British Canada. However, many families stayed in the Colonies, moving to more isolated communities around the Thirteen Colonies, majority in New England. These Loyalists and their descendants would form fraternity clubs, which would form the American Loyalist Society. These Loyalist followed a ideology called "American Loyalism", that had Pro-monarchist, Pro-British, Anti-American, and Anti-Democratic beliefs. Around the 1820s, the Society would evolve into the paramilitary society, called the American Redcoats, which wishes to separate from the USA, and rejoin the British Empire, through violence revolution. The American Redcoats would gain it's name from the fact they wore outdate British Uniforms, including Tricornes. At first, they've kept their allegiance private and secret, not to earn the ire of the USA. Even though they've mostly of descendants of British Loyalists, they've recruited locals, who were disillusion with the USA, and made propaganda, praising the British Empire. But around the 1850s, as political tensions between the North and South build up due to the subject of Slavery, the American Redcoats made their move. This culminated in the 1861, Uprising of New England, in which hundreds, if not thousands, of American Redcoats took over parts of New England, taking advantage of the Civil War. After forming a the Provisional Government of the Commonwealth of New England, the American Redcoats sent a letter, requesting to rejoin the British Empire. The British sent no response to them, but some British officers in Canada considered it. However, after the Americans finished their Civil War, the turned their full-attention to the Redcoats, and would crush the uprising in 1869. The majority of the Redcoats would be exiled to Canada, where the Society would continue to function, until it's membership died out, and the Society collapsed in 1880, ending the ideology of American Loyalism as a force, although would survive in small groups/

 

[Born in the USSA]

This was quite well done.

Thanks! Given the focus in the book on a massive wildly successful megacorp and the Marx analogue's development of an ideology based on stock ownership it struck me as odd that Sobel never crossed those threads.

 

[suul'ken]

Can we use ideologies from our Future/Planned projects?

 

[Born in the USSA]

Can we use ideologies from our Future/Planned projects?

Sure, that's what I did. Heck one of my posts is nothing but links to ideologies from people's projects on this site

 

[Paradoxer]

Sounds like Sinicization.

I thought same but More Confucius philosophy like you see in China

 

[Paradoxer]

Anarcho-liberalism (Vicky II shout out), based on the political philosophy of Jakob Mauvillon, Herbert Spencer, Auberon Herbert, etc. Essentially, a 19th century antecedent to anarcho-capitalism before it was a thing. In order to become a legitimate ideology, I reckon some point of divergence where a more radical candidate took control of the British Liberal Party over say, Gladstone.

A more radical classical liberals or American republic could do just that. Outside of infrastructure, military, and basic networking the government is very decentralized and let capitalist/bourgeoisie along with majority of masses to handle their own personal affairs. The prevention of monopolies and oligarchs being only time government steps in because it destroys free trade and competition. Same goes for blatant price control or monopolization of certain economic centers. Also no stuff like patents, welfare, or social safety nets.

Think Wild West or “frontier justice” on laws. It still can be very democratic society but the laws are minimal. You could do heroin or coke as long as you don’t drive or put anyone at risk. Basically, most simple and common sense laws like don’t kill, steal, rape, property damage, arson, or causing others trouble. If you do they hang you or send you to chain gang labor prisons especially if you can’t pay off fines for damaging someone or their stuff. Courts main job to settle disputes between citizens who often have right to self defense and guns so at times a thief or assaulted or trespasser on private property will be shot.

Tax wise it is flat rate adjusted to inflation or deflation. Also money backed by physical materials or goods are more likely even if not solely a gold standard anymore as economics advance. Taxes are kept rather straight forward and simple.

The government money goes to infrastructure, military, law enforcement, and courts(bureaucratic system along with tax and revenue management). Private armies and state militias are also much more common.

In US this could also tie to expansionism and pan Americanism in opposition to often imperialist mercantile European(ancien regimes) empire regimes in Western Hemisphere

 

[Bassoe]

Has anyone done any of Ivan Yefremov's ideas yet?

• Inferno, the Nature and Nature's way of death and suffering at the basis of life and development (evolution etc.). Main measure of societal infernality is how much efforts are the individuals forced to spend "for nothing", without contributing to their well-being. The main achievement of Humanity in the novel is that it overcame the Inferno through arduous journey finally achieving "free and rational life for everyone".
• Ahriman's arrow, the apparent selection and forces in the infernal societies directed against their best and brightest and most good-willing.
• Communist moneyless Earth society, self-organizing through interactions of free highly morally developed responsible individuals, with collective child-rearing, direct planet-wide voting and discussions on every issue, and High Councils coordinating people's efforts each in its area of expertise.
• Protective societal systems, targeted at preventing the lowly infernal parts of human psyche to resurface and break the finely tuned societal order of Communist Earth (e.g. counteracting aggressive tendencies in advance, that would otherwise necessitate counter-force in self-defense, if allowed to develop into actions).
• The Great Ring of Civilizations communicating with each other by sending radio signals through space each to its closest neighbor, enduring the delays as determined by the laws of physics, exchanging ideas and information about each other's culture, history and values. The sending of the signal is described as taking an enormous amount of energy, on planetary scale, in order to reach even the closest neighboring civilization in the Ring.
• The cardinal law of the Great Ring whereas any interference in a state's internal affairs is forbidden unless that civilization is impeding free access to the full, unaltered, non-filtered and non-distorted information for all and any of its subjects – in which case such a state is said to have no right to exist and the interference by the Great Ring is demanded to free its people and ensure their Right to Know and Right to Think:
  

  "Not one state has such a right [to deny access to information], not one planet! The sacred duty of each of us is to contravene such an unprecedented oppression. Who dares block the way of a sentient reasoning being towards knowledge? ... When in the Great Ring a state is discovered that blocks the way to knowledge for its people, such a state is dismantled. This is the only case that gives the right to interfere in the affairs of another planet. ... the prohibition to learn about arts, sciences, life on other planets, is unacceptable."

 

[Falecius]

Apocrytocracy: The belief that no matter what form of government exists as "window dressing", that all matters of real import are in fact determined by a small and secretive coterie of long-serving civil service professionals and high-ranking military personnel, along with a select few individuals from the "private sector" with expertise, intelligence and/or insight, whose ranks seldom change no matter what the latest election results are - and that all in all, it's probably a good thing

But this is... How countries are actually run...

 

[GeographyDude]

But this is... How countries are actually run...

I’d say it’s a mix.

In many actual nations, the long-lasting senior civil employees have maybe (?) 40% of effective power, and in areas in which elected leaders generally do not focus on.

That is, the civil servants are junior partners of a sort.

 

[Aghasverov]

Equalist Imperialism

The idea that all members of an empire are equal citizens of said empire, so long as their loyalty is to the leading powers. The principal factor is to absorb and utilize different cultures and ideals to improve the nation's strength as they expand, and give more incentive to those who they "liberate" (conquer). As such, race or creed isn't the core factor here, but of loyalty and ideology.

"We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us."

 

[TwiliAlchemist]

Painean Liberalism - A classically liberal ideology based on the writings of Thomas Paine. It calls for a free market, the establishment and maintaining old age pensions, a Citizen's Dividend, State financed public education, and an end to Slavery. It finds its supporters through freedmen and some of the growing American Middle Class. Painean Liberalism finds a party in the Liberty Party, which grows first into a local political party in the Northern United States and then a national party.

 

[Bassoe]

'People's Neoconservatism'

My deliberate misinterpretation of Anne Amnesia's Unnecessariat. Trying to patch over the flaws of modern status quo ideology by attempting to link the well-being of the plebeians to that of the ruling classes, ensuring said plebeians have a stake in the system's continuation and as such, are motivated to be loyal to it. Instead of not invading middle eastern countries for oil outright, make shares in the stock of the oil and military equipment companies benefiting from said invasions a signing bonus for plebeians enlisting in the military fighting said invasions, tariffs on international trade with sweatshop labor, to pay for a BGI for the locals left unemployed by race-to-the-bottom competition, etc. Instead of fixing a broken system, make sure everyone personally benefits from the broken status quo and as such isn't motivated to change it.

 

[suul'ken]

Instead of fixing a broken system, make sure everyone personally benefits from the broken status quo and as such isn't motivated to change it.

I fear that insted of fixing anything this is the most likely solution we can hope for problems - In ANY country!