I'm generally quite pleased with kaiserreich, albeit totalism as a phenomenon always seemed super weird to me.
The Leninist/Stalinist style of governance OTL was in many ways an unusual freak of history that radically differed from pretty much any desired or orthodox view of what a socialist system should be. My favourite example of this is of course Karl Kautsky, a man so representative of the standard views for radical socialism that he was nicknamed "the pope of Marxism" and he actively condemned it every chance he got even to the point of calling it a slave state.
Leninism and it's variants was very much the product of radicalism in a very under industrialised, autocratic and in many ways still feudal society.
So when it essentially reappears in the other syndicalist nations, it's kinda weird. Starting in Britain under Mosley is super weird, Britain being super proud of its democratic traditions and in many ways more democratic than otl (democracy being used on literally every sector of society) a beauracracy which is still largely intact due to the calmer nature of their revolution, already being highly industrialised (hence radical measuresn to industrialise quickly are not needed), with numerous trade partners unlike the USSR...
Finally fundamentally the fact that these nations are willing to call themselves specifically syndicalist suggests that decentralised rule was very desirable amongst the general populace and the revolutionary intelligentsia, unlike the minority Bolsheviks who unusually for the time campaigned otherwise.
And yet despite this, virtually every time I played or have seen an AAR, pretty much the whole of the synditern becomes totalist. What should in the kaiserreich universe be so weird as to largely be ignored (the closest otl equivelant I can think of is the ideology of technocracy inc, or if randians existed in the interwar period) somehow becomes the norm. This is even stranger when movements such as Sorelianism exists atl (being different to its otl form) that provides a PERFECT authoritarian path for the syndicalist nations if that is what people wanted.
The Leninist/Stalinist style of governance OTL was in many ways an unusual freak of history that radically differed from pretty much any desired or orthodox view of what a socialist system should be. My favourite example of this is of course Karl Kautsky, a man so representative of the standard views for radical socialism that he was nicknamed "the pope of Marxism" and he actively condemned it every chance he got even to the point of calling it a slave state.
Leninism and it's variants was very much the product of radicalism in a very under industrialised, autocratic and in many ways still feudal society.
So when it essentially reappears in the other syndicalist nations, it's kinda weird. Starting in Britain under Mosley is super weird, Britain being super proud of its democratic traditions and in many ways more democratic than otl (democracy being used on literally every sector of society) a beauracracy which is still largely intact due to the calmer nature of their revolution, already being highly industrialised (hence radical measuresn to industrialise quickly are not needed), with numerous trade partners unlike the USSR...
Finally fundamentally the fact that these nations are willing to call themselves specifically syndicalist suggests that decentralised rule was very desirable amongst the general populace and the revolutionary intelligentsia, unlike the minority Bolsheviks who unusually for the time campaigned otherwise.
And yet despite this, virtually every time I played or have seen an AAR, pretty much the whole of the synditern becomes totalist. What should in the kaiserreich universe be so weird as to largely be ignored (the closest otl equivelant I can think of is the ideology of technocracy inc, or if randians existed in the interwar period) somehow becomes the norm. This is even stranger when movements such as Sorelianism exists atl (being different to its otl form) that provides a PERFECT authoritarian path for the syndicalist nations if that is what people wanted.