Reality Rosa - A world where Communism works

Reality Rosa - A world where Communism works

"The greatest danger that I see in the present situation is that Germany may throw her lot in with the Bolsheviki..."

-Lloyd George, British Prime Minister, 1918

"The abolition of the rule of capital, the realization of a socialist social order — this, and nothing less, is the historical theme of the present revolution. It is a formidable undertaking, and one that will not be accomplished in the blink of an eye just by the issuing of a few decrees from above. Only through the conscious action of the working masses in city and country can it be brought to life, only through the people's highest intellectual maturity and inexhaustible idealism can it be brought safely through all storms and find its way to port."

-Rosa Luxemburg, 1918

Perhaps it was just a stroke of luck, a historical accident, that let Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and the rest of the Spartacist leadership elude the Freikorps assassins in 1919.

The effect of this accident, however, was to be seen four and a half years later, on October 15th, 1923, when after several false starts, the Luxemburgist KPD finally won a working class majority, seized power and held on for dear life. After the fire, blood and iron of the German Civil War, Luxemburg's party went about the work of socialist construction with genuine Teutonic thoroughness. As Vorsitzender of the Rat der Volkskommissare throughout the crucial early years of the German Federated Socialist Council Republic, Luxemburg's name ranks alongside Lenin and Trotsky as the foremost leaders of the socialist world revolution.

A Red Sun Rises

The victory of German Communism shook the capitalist world to its foundations. The first act of the Rätenrepublik government was to publicly annul the Versailles treaty, that "shameful contract of imperialist slavery". The second act was to nationalize all major banks and cartels under workers' management. Under the banner of the League of Nations, France and Britain tried feverishly to strangle the revolution, bankrolling every anticommunist force from the rightwing Social Democrats to the Nazis and hastily uniting them in the counter-revolutionary "Republican" Armies. It foundered on the rocks of their own workers' resistance. The British unions struck supplies bound for the German White Armies, as the CPGB tripled in size practically overnight. A botched uprising of the French Communists succeded in terminating Poincaré's intervention in the German Civil War, but ushered in the victorious Fascist coup of 1926. The sense that the end of the world - at any rate, the old world - was near, spread into the most conservative milieux of the wealthiest countries. All across the planet, people turned away from liberal democracy in increasing numbers: the poor, to communism; the rich, to fascism. The great world war of the classes appeared inevitable, and the defeat of the bourgeoisie more and more likely, as a mighty Socialist Soviet Federation arose from the ruins of capitalist Central and Eastern Europe.

The German October changed every factor in the socialist equation. The numerous, wealthy and literate German workers kept their appointed managers in line, and supplanted them to a large and increasing degree with proletarian self-rule. Cementing forever the Lenin-Trotsky line of international revolution, it consigned Stalin to the background, a self-described Trotskyist to his dying day. German industry absolved the Soviet Federation of having to bootstrap itself economically. Far from devolving into genocidal totalitarianism, under Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg the federation of workers' republics eased into an ever richer and freer socialist democracy. Never strangled by the dead hand of a privileged, despotic bureaucracy, but on the contrary invigorated and corrected at every step by proletarian freedom of speech, organization and criticism - that is, by soviet democracy - the socialist planned economy accumulated success after earth-shaking success.

The First Plan of 1925-29 centred around what was known then as Ostanhebung or Tyshkoshchina (after the German Volkskommissar of Planning, Lev "Tyshko" Jogiches) but is now usually referred to as esthiseyo. It involved the eastward transfer of four and a half million German workers and technicians, together with billions of marks' worth of goods and machinery, industrializing Russia at a pace that completely sidelined Stalin's effort on our timeline, which was, despite everything, one of that history's greatest economic successes. Agriculture was collectivized on a voluntary basis, backed by huge subsidies and grants from the now wealthy state. In accordance with the Marxist program, violence was avoided, and by the end of the decade, more than one third of Soviet farmers worked on the booming collective farms. The economy of Sowjet-Deutschland grew at an admittedly impressive rate of about 10%, but the former territories of Czarism experienced an astonishing average of 65% yearly growth. As Rosa Luxemburg put it in a 1925 speech to the Berlin workers: "We shall sow with knowledge, industry, and culture, those Russian steppes and those Ukrainian fields for which capitalism could find no seeds but bullets and corpses."

With the growth of proletarian influence at the expense of Soviet bureaucratism, those Communists who supported workers' freedom and welfare gained the upper hand. The resumption of vigorous factionalism in the united CPSF led straight to a radical extension of proletarian democracy in the whole Federation. In 1926, the Soviet Government legalized all political parties that accepted state ownership of the means of production. Dzherzhinsky was not too happy with Lenin's conclusion, first demanded by Luxemburg, that the GPU/SPE should be "dismantled, oiled, cleaned and put securely under lock and key", but reconciled himself to this decision of the overwhelming Party majority that year. Partly voluntarily, but mostly kicking and screaming, the secret police was defanged by degrees, reestablishing freedom of organization and opinion. From 1932, with socialism securely in the saddle, all parties apart from White Guards and fascists were permitted to contest elections. Thanks to their farsighted and genuinely proletarian policies, the Communists still had decisive support among the workers and thus an absolute majority in the Congress of Soviets. The world was presented with the spectacle of Communists contesting and winning Soviet elections against those parties they had only yesterday terrorized and suppressed. On the whole, this softening of the proletarian dictatorship was referred to as the "Great Release".

The next big success internationally was the Chinese revolution of 1926. The insurgent Communist workers of Shanghai and Canton, backed by the Red Army and the rebellious peasantry, easily routed Chiang Kai-Shek and set about the task of integrating China into the SSF. The French, British and Japanese tried to intervene, but quickly pulled out for fear of provoking the Soviets as well as domestic revolt (Japanese troops came home from China, in one general's expression, "infected with the bacillus of revolution"). This was an event of world historic importance. A colossal nation of 450 million, treated by Western imperialism like dogs and slaves for centuries, finally shook off foreign rule, rose to its feet and dove headfirst into the modern age. China's greatest leader in this period was Communist founder Chen Du Xiu. China was so backward that it didn't even have a standardized language, let alone a tradition of liberal Enlightenment and democracy. Chen played the historical role not only of Lenin, but of Jefferson, Voltaire, and Chaucer besides. The last years of the First Five-Year Plan diverted significant resources to the preparation for China's anhebung, and the Second Plan was fully devoted to this enormous task. An endless stream of German, Russian and other barbarians, armed with the very latest in Western science and technique, assaulted the ancient walls of the "Middle Kingdom" intent on breaking down, not its dignity and independence, but its degrading Asiatic backwardness. Within a decade, simply because it had more people than the rest of the Federation put together, China assumed an economic, political and cultural leading role which it has kept ever since.

At this point, despite a number of temporary setbacks, the position of world Communism seemed unassailable. When Lenin finally bit the bullet in '28, the SSF, now headed by the troika of Trotsky, Chen and Luxemburg, was the world's second greatest power: a formidable bloc stretching from the Rhine to the South China Sea, barely hemmed in by increasingly shaky fascist France and Italy, an Imperial Japan staring collapse in the face and seething British India, with America watching in fearful resignation tempered by apocalyptic desperation. The Wall Street Crash of the same year signalled, even to conservative commentators, the final death agony of capitalism.

A planned, international community

The Bolshevik insurrection had counted on European revolution for its own survival. And indeed, internationalism was the basic principle of the Communist movement. The economic plan, which fused together the Central and East European and Asian economies (After the German October, Austria, Bulgaria and Romania fell, so to speak, automatically - Poland had to be "assisted" by the Combined Red Armies, a still controversial act) had its parallel in the intermingling and development of the Soviet cultures, and the union of the various Communist Parties with a minimum of conflict. National culture was not strangled in a bureaucratic vise but given full freedom to develop as well as encouragement to enrich and be enriched by the conglomerate of Soviet and world culture. The majority opinion, although far from unanimous, was that socialist culture had to be built not from scratch, from a "clean sheet", but on the basis of the massive cultural body developed under capitalism and previous class society, in the same way as socialist technique and thought generally. This was seen as the stepping stone to a peaceful, progressive federation of the world under a democratic planned economy.

The Chinese and Persian revolutions posed with renewed force the questions of an all-Soviet second language and a new, socialist system of timekeeping to replace the Christian and Islamic calendars. Fierce debate raged in the Communist International and in Soviet society at large. The two major linguistic contenders were Esperanto and Ido, the latter of which won out after Lenin's promotion of Ido as "Esperanto with the chinks ironed out". Taught to Soviet children from preschool on, this fully regular, streamlined, "Spanish-sounding" planned language rapidly became the world's most spoken. This was helped by its being an order of magnitude easier to pick up than, say, English. Today it is spoken by more than 96% of humanity, with 59% listing it as their 'second first language'. It is the language of the Plan, of the Infonet, of the Communist International, not to mention millions of original works of literature. It features next to the local national language on every roadsign and every restaurant menu in the world. There is a growing fear in certain quarters that the youth is actually losing its national heritage thanks to the immense preponderance of Ido - symptoms include the frequent erroneous transfer of Ido grammar and spontaneous direct translation of Ido idioms - but this is a hotly contested issue, being supported by many Communists and other progressive types.

The socialist calendar was introduced by referendum in 1933. It tried to kill two birds with one stone by abolishing Sunday and at the same time granting more days off - one in every six instead of every seven (there is presently heated debate about whether to extend the weekend from three to four days). It divides the year into twelve months, each with five weeks of six days. The months are childishly simple: Unmo, dumo, trimo, quarmo, kinmo, sesmo, sepmo, okmo, nonmo, dekmo, dekunmo and dekdumo. The days of the week descend into true banality: Undi, dudi, tridi, quardi, kindi and sesdi. The remaining five or six days constitute la semano komunia, Communion Week, a global year-end festival. Years were intially counted from the 1917 Russian Revolution (ero revolucia), but a later referendum changed it to 1968, the year of the World Communion's founding - ero komunia, Communion Era.

The German and Chinese revolutions, even moreso than the Russian, roused the hopes of the poor and oppressed of the world, thrown into war, starvation and poverty by aristocrats and capitalists. The international Five-Year Plan showed the superiority of socialism, as Trotsky put it, "not in the language of Capital, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity". But capitalism wasn't dead yet.

(To be continued...)
 

ninebucks

Banned
And I thought I was a Luxemburg optimist! :eek:

Seriously, this is going to get ripped to shreds.

China was so backward that it didn't even have a standardized language, let alone a tradition of liberal Enlightenment and democracy. Chen played the historical role not only of Lenin, but of Jefferson, Voltaire, and Chaucer besides.

This, for instance, is incredibly ignorant and racist.
 
Luxembourg wasn't even German- she wouldn't be able to lead a Communist Revolution. The only leaders to successful lead domestically supported Communist Revolution (Mao and Lenin) were able to marshal native nationalist sentiment in favor of their program- thats why Maoism and Leninism are so different from the original Marxist ideas they are evolved from.

If a German Communism is to not only survive, but thrive, it must be able to marshal military support from many of the returning troops, then defeat the Freikorps and the Social Democratic Government, hopefully provoke the Entente into some kind of intervention to justify the liquidation of the anti-Communist opposition. This government must then accept the Versailles Treaty, hopefully as some kind of general acceptance of the post-war order.

This German Communism will dominate Russian Communism in both intellectual capital and domestic industrial stregth. German, not Russian, Communism will be the global leader of the Communist International. With Germany having fallen to Communism, Austria may either become an Entente-supported "White" holdout, or a newly fallen conquest to the German "Reds" to be shortly followed by Hungary. Russia will have to bow down to Germany's superiority in industrial matters.

Italy's "Fascist" movement under Mussolini might be "Communist" in this ATL, joining with the new wave. Or, Mussolini might capitalize on anti-Communist fears to cement his own regime's control of government.

The UK is going to face a serious problem. I think that the IRA will court the German Communists as sponsors of their Revolution. That will certainly piss the UK off, and may well create the kind of class warfare that certain Republicans (de Valera among them) probably would want to continue the struggle. This IRA will force a continued war (which it will lose) and then start terrorist operations which will be supported by the (vast majority of the nationalist, and Catholic) population. This could claim lives of British politicans. Whose for some rather serious public assassianations of leading pro-Unionist politicans in the '20's?
 
I only read the first two paragraphs and skimmed a couple more, but this really is rather rosy. For instance, I don't think Britain would accept a Communist Germany; if the workers striked, they'd call out the police and auxiliaries to put them straight. At worst, it's civil war there as well, to say nothing of France, and Germany itself will be as devastated as Russia when their fighting is over. And you really underestimate the Bolshevik influence on the German revolutionaries; they'd guided and financed the movement since before Brest-Litovsk, they're not going to be marginalised anytime soon.
 
Sorry, but I don't think this TL is all that realistic. Everything seems to go right for German socialists to an implausible degree. In particular 1923 is way too early for the Germans to get away with abrogating Versailles, in the early 1920s the French were still messing around in the Rhineland and if the Treaty of Versailles were openly broken a French invasion is the probable result. A communist revolt in France in 1926 would be a dismal failure and would not stop France from intervening in Germany. A communist takeover of China in 1926 is also extremely implausible.
 

ninebucks

Banned
For instance, I don't think Britain would accept a Communist Germany...

Actually, that's one of the few things that seems passingly plausible. While the first five or six years post-revolution may be a bit rocky, eventually, the Western powers will have no choice but to peacefully coexist with a Communist Germany.
 
To be blunt, your PoD doesn't bring about your desired outcome. First of all, even with L&L, the KPD by 1923 would still have succumbed to the degeneration the entire CI had suffered by that time (this would have slowed, but it was in place by the third congress, and would still have proceeded relatively quickly). L&L would probably have moved into the KAPD at that point, and while any sort of Trot-Lux Fourth International would have been greatly strengthened by such a move, it would not lead to a successful revolution in Germany.

Then again, there's the Chinese revolution to consider. Historically, it was the influence of incompetent Comintern--mostly German--military advisors that doomed the hitherto successful campaigns of the Jianxi-based CPC, and such a problem would only have been exacerbated in a TL which gives the Germans more influence.

And of course there's Italy, Italy which had been through two years of militant workers' actions and then through a short period of fascist action and then takeover by the time of the KPD's ascendence. You still have an active Italian communist group at this point (in exile and in prison, but still active ;)), which would be effected by developments in Germany. I may have skipped over this, but to my knowlege the TL doesn't mention this at all.

A far better PoD, I think, would be a refusal of the Spartacists to join the USPD in April 1917, instead constituting the KPD with other left elements in June of that year. That gives them a far more decisive role in the original German Revolution, and could guarantee them the all-important loyalty of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, which they lost by collaborating with the Center--regrouped in the USPD--for as long as they did.
 
I believe Chiang Kai Shek was Soviet client in the beginning of 1926. For sure, he'll see light of the day and would very much prefer to unite himself with leftists (supported by iron steamroller of Germany-Russia) to gain control over China and not fight them.

However, I do share opinion of this timeline being ASB in whole.
 
Actually, that's one of the few things that seems passingly plausible. While the first five or six years post-revolution may be a bit rocky, eventually, the Western powers will have no choice but to peacefully coexist with a Communist Germany.

No, I meant initially, when the Glorious Revolution would still be under way and Britain's support for the counter-movements would matter the most. If they bothered to send troops to Russia, they'd sure freak out over a Communist government in Germany, it being such an important export market and "Bastion against Bolshevism". If and when the state is successfully established, then they'll eventually have to accept and recognise it, I agree.
 
Soviets in Action

So how does it work?

No Marxist ever suggested that society, the day or even the decade after the revolution, would be able to let every citizen contribute "according to ability", let alone receive "according to need". "Communism" in Lenin, AKA "the higher stage of communism" in Marx, refers to an economy of superabundance, that is, in practice, the end of economy. The logical result of technological advancement is a level of productivity that abolishes scarcity altogether, permitting each citizen to consume as they please with no need for labor compulsion of any kind. At this point money and the state will be unneccessary and therefore disappear. Communion R&D efforts are directed expressly in this direction, as we shall see later. But such a society can only appear after a prolonged period of economic development. That is the task of the socialist planned economy.

The main political purpose of socialism, or the "lower stage of communism", is increasing labor productivity to reach communism as quickly as possible. At this point there can be no question of equal reward for inequal labor, one of the most persistent myths about Marxism. Competition, or in Communistic, "emulation", is a vital productive force that must be harnessed to the full. "One man is superior to another physically or mentally," as Marx put it, "and so supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognises no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognises unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard." (Critique of the Gotha Programme)

However, the starting point of socialism must be an economy that is higher than the most developed capitalism. This is the reason why no Marxist ever suggested, before Stalin in Homeline's 1924, that socialism can be created in one country alone, let alone an underdeveloped agrarian country like Czarist Russia. For this reason the Bolshevik revolution, from the very beginning, had the perspective of German revolution or bust. This was because of purely material factors. On the basis of a backward economy it was impossible for the starving, illiterate and numerically weak proletariat to take the running of society into its own hands. The cruel struggle for so much as a loaf of bread, descending at times to cannibalism, meant that a privileged layer would have to rise above the working masses, with property interests of its own. "This development of the productive forces is an absolutely necessary practical premise [of communism], because without it want is generalised, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all the old crap must revive." (Marx, The German Ideology)

Thus, economic inequality had to make itself felt one way or another, and with it, political inequality and "all the old crap" of class society. The Leninists believed the prolonged isolation of the Russian Revolution would lead to capitalist restoration. As it turned out, it did, but only after decades of degeneration where the state bureaucracy carved out a privileged position for itself and fortified this position with a terrible totalitarian dictatorship, in the process stifling independent initiative and criticism. On Homeline, this "command economy" could and did produce astonishing results, although at a terrible human cost and only so long as it was a question of building giant factories and dams. As soon as it had to deal with a modern consumer economy with a million different commodities, this system of top-down bureaucratic command, this dictatorship of the secretariat, stagnated and finally fell. Stalinism thus depends on the contradiction between a planned economy and a low level of the means of production.

With the German Revolution, however, that contradiction was solved. Her massive, cultured proletariat, and her extreme industrial dynamism, previously bound hand and foot by the Versailles peace, permitted Germany to modernize Russia with a minimum of fuss. In the process, economic inequality was not increased but decreased. The Communists and state functionaries were strictly disallowed to earn more than a workers' wage, and they were held in check by working class public opinion. The proletarian dictatorship remained in the form of proletarian democracy. And this is vital to the functioning of a planned economy. It's impossible for a handful of bureaucrats in Moscow to plan in detail the workings of a whole country, even if their names were Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. A Five-Year Plan is not an infallible revelation, but only a rough working hypothesis. It must be continuously adjusted from below. This requires the fullest freedom of opinion and criticism, as well as workers' control over the managers and the government. In Trotsky's words, known to every middle schooler, "a planned economy needs democracy as the human body needs oxygen". The basic political unit of this democracy is the soviet.

Arbeiterräten, conseils d'ouvriers, labor councils, shoras or cordones - such mass organizations have spontaneously appeared wherever the modern working class has been forced onto the road of revolution. The Ido term still pays homage to the soviet's country of origin. Every workplace has its soviet, where managers are elected by compulsory voting of the whole workforce. This soviet also sends delegates to the city or regional soviet, which in turn sends delegates to the national soviet, and so on all the way up to the 1101-strong World Congress of Soviets, which elects the sovieto popolkomisara, Sovpokom, the Council of People's Commissars. The current Chairman of Sovpokom (as of 2008 AD/40 EK) is the Indian Communist Rajan Bhandoo, who has governed the world for the past 14 years. State administrative functions are performed by the entire population round-robin, like jury duty. This so-called admindevo is inefficient, but considered necessary to prevent a permanent bureaucracy from developing. Soviet representatives are elected every 4 years, but they are also recallable at any time by the electorate. In other words, changes in public opinion make themselves felt instantly. This was the case, for instance, when Ekoplan was implemented in the 1970s. The Communist vote dropped by more than 10% in the week after the Ecologist overturn, giving way mainly to Proletarism (which places workers' immediate welfare before such 'starry-eyed schemes'), and only picked itself up slowly in the following months. The Communists remained in a majority, however, as always.

With 120 million active members and more than four billion registered voters, the Communist International is the largest political party on any known timeline. In China and the ex-colonial nations, where the Comintern essentially built the labor movement from scratch, it regularly polls upward of 80%. In Europe and America they are happy to get more than 60%, having to compete with everyone from Christian socialists to anarchists to proletarists. Only a handful of national republics don't traditionally grant an absolute majority to Communism. These include Persia, Poland and other countries where the revolution wasn't quite as popular as elsewhere. The Comintern itself is as far from a uniform monolith as you can imagine. Ever since (and ever before) the 1921-24 ban on Party factions, the Communists have been scrupulous about Party democracy, believing it the only way to maintain and train an educated leadership. While all members have to carry out majority decisions, these decisions are only arrived at by the most furious and uncompromising factional debates. Indeed it is a point of honor for every Communist to state his frank opinion in Party discussions. There are literally dozens of Communist factions, based on every divisive issue from the rate of space colonization (Mondists and Cosmists) to the rate and social intrusiveness of technological change (Homists and Progressivists). The factions have their own daily papers, congresses and in many cases TV stations. This acute responsiveness to events and public opinion, combined with its sensitive network of Party comrades in practically every workplace, is the main reason why Communism has retained working class support and avoided any serious splits. Another factor is the abject weakness of the opposition.

Generally speaking, capitalism holds the same position as black slavery does on Homeline. It's a monstrously inefficient, cruel, immoral and long obsolete system that only a lunatic could seriously advocate. The expropriation and repression of the "bourgeoisie and their hangers-on", now generations past, is no more controversial than Homeline Lincoln's treatment of the Dixie plantationists. Historians may debate this or that measure of the founding comrades, but hardly anybody doubts the essential rightness of their cause. Public opinion regards restorationists as, at best, ludicrous Don Quixotes; at worst, dangerous fringe elements. Liberal democracy is regarded either as the midwife of fascism or a special kind of fascism. Although the latter is inaccurate from a Marxist point of view, the Comintern makes little effort to enlighten the masses on this point. The Liberal Democratic Party, which despite the name is a broad alliance uniting almost every anti-socialist under the sun from rightwing ex-Social Democrats to moderate ex-fascists, consistently fails to poll more than one percent of the global vote. Its "strongholds" apart from the United States and Britain include Poland, Persia and Georgia, in all of which they've gotten as much as 3% on occasion. The LDP holds a single deputy in the Congress of Soviets, the octogenarian Margaret Thatcher, and their constituency is similarly geriatric.

In addition to 'bourgeois' rights like freedom of speech and assembly, the Constitution of 1968 guarantees cost-free healthcare and education, as well as the right to work, to every citizen, that is, legally speaking, every human being. Of course, you can't just walk in anywhere you please and demand a job like you would demand a sack of flour, but the employment bureau is obliged to offer you some kind of employment, be it only trash picking. New social provisions, like free broadband, are amended into the constitution every few years. Basically, Reality Rosa has the welfare state to (literally) end all welfare states. The exception, of course, is prolonged, unforced unemployment, the subsidy of which is a feature of capitalism, not socialism. It used to be a felony, but with the second Great Relaxation in the first decade EK and the associated slashing of bureaucracy, was left to the discretion of impersonal economic forces. After all, there's no structural unemployment here, and morality suggests that whoever will not work, shall not eat.

Intellectual innovation is handled in an interesting way. An inventor can patent and thus own his idea. But since the means of production are publicly owned, he can't actually do much with the idea except sell it to the government, which immediately makes it public domain. Socialism eschews royalties in favor of single payments, for fear of creating privileged lifestyles. Thus, a groundbreaking innovation is rewarded by a couple million somi (somo = socialista mono, literally 'socialist money'), like a hefty bonus or winning the lottery, without the inventor ever having to prowl the corporate jungle or tangle with the tigers of finance. Wage differentials are a source of contention. The current max is 1:1.32, down from previous years, and some Communists want to abolish income differences immediately while the majority considers them a necessary spur to productivity which cannot possibly disappear until communism. The trick is to balance the creative force of egoism with the ethical demands of socialist equality. Of course, none of this applies to Communists, who by the revised Law of the Party Maximum (abolished by Stalin in Homeline's 1932) have to donate to the Party any personal earnings above minimum wage.

The shortening of the working day, not to mention the liberation of the Third World from the need to herd goats, has led to an immense flowering of culture. The kultdomo (culture house) is a feature of the smallest little town, providing citizens with free access to instrument practice, high-quality recording studios, writing courses, theatre groups and so on. Fatly subsidized from the public chest and subject to neither government nor market censorship, the arts present a picture less like Stalinist Russia and more like Belle Epoque France, or Classical Athens, only two or three orders of magnitude more extensive. It seems like almost every week some new school emerges and fights like a tiger for its right to existence, and its self-evident superiority to all previous schools. From the most individual like literature, to the most collective like film and the still adolescent interactive arts, Communion production displays amazing levels of creativity, daring and innovation. Not just in special venues but in the soviets, the press, the infonet, even on street corners, furious debates rage over the matist-novist manifesto of the followers of Zhang Beihong, or Izmailov's latest experimental synthetist installation. The place of advertising in public spaces is filled largely by art and science. A city bus might be an Impressionist gallery on wheels, or might be dedicated to explaining Einsteinian relativity. Streets, blocks and entire cities are often festively decorated by the local population. In Rosa, people take art seriously.

The basic economic unit of the Socialist World Communion is the public entraprezo (enterprise), which is Communistic for 'company'. The largest entraprezi are the few dozen that constitute the "commanding heights" of the economy, each overseeing assets of trillions of somi and employing tens of millions of workers. Beneath these megenti (mega entraprezi, 'great enterprises') stand millions of small and medium-sized firms. The public sector is, in fact, not wholly dominant. Private employment of labor is illegal, but independent non-profit enterprises, one-person companies and workers' cooperatives based on market principles, do exist. These elements are mainly, however, a source of nourishment for the public sector, like the public sector under capitalism is a crutch and fleshpot for the private sector. Public restaurants on every street corner provide cheap, tasty and healthy services. Apart from steadily supplanting the nuclear family, these communal behemoths are steadily outcompeting less resourceful bars and restaurants, which has provoked a measure of protest.

(Next: Reaction raises its head/the World Revolutionary War/Science and Technology)
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
The problem with German communist revolutions after WW1 is that the Commies had no real armed forces to defend themselves versus the remnants of the German army and the Freikorps. You need some kind of POD that gives the German revolutionaries a strong armed wing for this to succeed.
 
The problem with German communist revolutions after WW1 is that the Commies had no real armed forces to defend themselves versus the remnants of the German army and the Freikorps. You need some kind of POD that gives the German revolutionaries a strong armed wing for this to succeed.
That's why any PoD will have to give the German commies a way to propagandize in the army on a large scale in a time when they'll be listened to, in addition to allowing them sufficient time to develop their own paramilitary organization. That's why I place the PoD for my "commies win the German Revolution" timeline in 1917; this gives the commies of Bremen and Munich (historically the most well-organized and militant outside of Berlin; Levine and Gorter were rather better at revolution than L&L) more time to train their Red Guards, and a central organization unencumbered by Centrist illusions allows for propaganda of more scope and clarity in the Army.
 
No, it only exists on my hard drive, since it's still incomplete (I haven't got past 1919 even in the best drafts). I'll throw together an introductory post if you like.
 
I think the phrase is "Why isn't this in the ASB section?"

The German hard-left had quite a brutal streak of its own, and would only win the civil war by using it to the full. I fail to see why their economic plans would be anything short of disastrous, Germany was already far too monopolistic with protected and backward agriculture. These problems will be accentuated and Germany will lose its chances of economic leadership.

Brutality is of course also integral to communism, as it provides for no other way to make people stay at their jobs.

This would be a fairly naff, moderately unpleasant country within a decade.
 
I'm more than a little sceptical about your vision of successful communism, but I must admit it is well written. Bravo.
I have a question. What about religion? What does it look like in your Red World? What do the Christians think about abolishing Sundays and Jews about abolishing Shabbats? Do they have days off during their holidays?
 
I would suggest simply concentrating on the timeline following from successful German Revolution, which while unlikely, is definitely not ASB. Even having that revolution spreading throughout the world, avoiding Communism's need to compete with more efficient systems is possible. However, the rosy vision of global communism that actually works, as in provides goods and services to the average person more effectively than capitalism without post scarcity productive capability is impossible.

Wage differentials are a source of contention. The current max is 1:1.32

Just as the simplest example, would you want to invest 10 years of difficult training with endless stress as a brain surgeon in order to earn 32% more than the milkman? What if I, being smarter, stronger, and more energetic, have twice the productivity of the average worker? If I can only earn 32% more than the lowest paid person, I'm going to do all my work in as little time as possible, then spend the rest of my time sitting around. Just like every other vision of communism, this is asking for a change in human nature, which requires either massive gene engineering or ASBs.
 

Sachyriel

Banned
In Europe and America they are happy to get more than 60%, having to compete with everyone from Christian socialists to anarchists to proletarists.

Anarchists don't run for public office that often. We'd be called independents.
 
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