"Communism" gameplay system literally doesnt work

[icedt729]

Except Capitalism (precisely Free Market Capitalism) in the US during this time period completely discounts the notion of intervention in the economy (from 1850s until 1910s) and leaves it to the society and intellectual class to bring about industrialisation and prosperity.

Hell, the whole reason why Robber Barons existed in the US for so long in the middle period of Vic3 (or lack thereof) is because, of a lack of intervention by the governement until after 1910

This perspective just comes from things like firm property rights, contract enforcement, intellectual property, and legal entities being taken for granted as things that just organically happened, and not as functions of the state.

Laissez-faire capitalism is predicated on the government doing little or nothing to actively manage the private enterprise-based market economy, but is still predicated on the state providing the legal, administrative, and judicial framework for that economy to exist and function.

 

[8ballsam]

Companies can have any practices they want on paper, but ultimately those practices are implemented by humans.

Some companies have realistic practices, others have fantasy ones.

pervasive corruption making defection a socially acceptable and low-risk activity,

U're just kicking the corruption can down the road

then company policies are a dead letter.

Crappy company policies would have crappy results I agree

Every actor in an economy, be they public or private, is ultimately made of humans, and thus affected by the culture those humans have. If that culture is highly corrupt,

I don't think it's possible for a culture to be corrupt.

since try as you might you can't get anything done as funds and resources go mysteriously missing and contracts are simply ignored with the courts simply not caring - heck, maybe the police will just plain extort - excuse me, make an offer you can't refuse least your company "evolves" - you. And the easiest way to model that in the current state of Victoria 3 is as a "tax" from building cashflow to employees to simulate everyone stealing what they can.

If the boss doesn't have the address of his employees family members and can't threaten to harm so as to incentivize their employees to not mess around, then sure "funds and resources can go missing". If a boss isn't willing to use threats of violence when it could be the most efficient economical decision then he is a less competent boss and will be "out-evolved".
Under this view indentured servitude isn't slavery (as slavery can have a moral association to it), it's "an efficient usage of available labor".

For amorality to be modeled in Vic3 my dumb idea is that laws and institutions are not necessarily applied even though the laws exist in the books. Instead the application of laws pass through a de facto check beforehand, which is based on the % of amorality. So for example colonization - lets say the existing law is Colonial Exploitation while half the clout supports Colonial Resettlement and the other half supports No Colonial Affairs. If your society is completely moral - the game functions as it does now. However if your society is completely amoral, then despite having Colonial Exploitation in law, since 50% of the clout supports Colonial Resettlement and the other No Colonial Affairs even though u have five levels in Colonial Exploitation in practice half of that bureaucracy goes to Colonial Resettlement and the other half goes to No Colonial Affairs (which in this case means it is wasted).
So a country that is on paper the idyllic paradise of the people could in practice be just as oppresive as former government types.

 

[Eddie121]

I think the core of the issue is that V3 doesn't currently model efficiency at all: every building with the same production methods, size and workforce uses the same amount of inputs, produces the same amount of outputs, and has 100% of its buy and sell orders reach the market with not a single pound going missing anywhere along the chain. Add the fact that the player is the only actual economic actor in any country, making all the decisions from what buildings to build and where to what production methods they use, and the game is really an idealized "spherical cow in a vacuum" command economy simulator - so of course the nominal economic model which best matches the game engine is going to end up being the de facto best.

A possible way to begin addressing this might be to implement efficiency and corruption. Efficiency would be a number from 1-100%, lowering the production speed and increasing raw material consumption as it decreased. Corruption, on the other hand, would directly "tax" building's cash flows and sending these "dividends" to the appropriate pops (who would then get radicalized if you tried to lower corruption).

Agree on this

These values could then be tied to the rest of the simulation by being temporary mitigatable by, in the case of dictatorial systems, purges and forced labour, giving the player some actual motivation to engage in tyranny.

Absolutely not. In fact the great purges of 1937-38 brought the Soviet economy to a sandstill. Worker discipline receded (more absences, less punctuality), waste and corruption piled up, and real GDP barely progressed until 1941. In short, it led to widespread economic and military ineptitude and almost cost the war.

Longer-term solutions might also be possible via reforms, but if repressive measures damaged the progress on those, and if communism had particularly high values of those to begin with, the player would have to run quite a balancing act to avoid the same vicious circle that crippled and ultimately killed the USSR. A socialist utopia would still be possible in theory, but the player would have to earn it.

This is getting hypothetical. I like the current implementation, where larger governemtn income also comes with larger losses.

 

[Eddie121]

Except Capitalism (precisely Free Market Capitalism) in the US during this time period completely discounts the notion of intervention in the economy (from 1850s until 1910s) and leaves it to the society and intellectual class to bring about industrialisation and prosperity.

Hell, the whole reason why Robber Barons existed in the US for so long in the middle period of Vic3 (or lack thereof) is because, of a lack of intervention by the governement until after 1910

This perspective just comes from things like firm property rights, contract enforcement, intellectual property, and legal entities being taken for granted as things that just organically happened, and not as functions of the state.

Laissez-faire capitalism is predicated on the government doing little or nothing to actively manage the private enterprise-based market economy, but is still predicated on the state providing the legal, administrative, and judicial framework for that economy to exist and function.

I don't know where you guys get this. There was a whole lot of government impetus in the capital accumulation process (beyond rule of law and a functional justice and property system) especially between 1783 and 1865.
The so-called American School of economics (in fact, Developmentalism) included state-led construction of the financial system and physical infrastructure (while giving ownership to well-connected shareholders), and strong protectionism.
After the colossal graft and consolidation of the ACW, the flywheel of American growth continued mostly on its own between 1866 and 1939. That's where you get the Gilded Age and Robber barons etc. but it's just one part of american history.

A few notes:

• Between 1891 and 1864, Congress and Treasury chartered no less than four National Banks, and most of the local banks were created under impetus from state governments.
• One of the first publicly funded infrastructure projects was the Erie canal. There was a frenzy of state-subsidizes railways.
• The intercontinental railway was almost 100% state-funded, by giving them free land to sell and massive subsidies.
• Until the income tax act of 1913, the lion's share of federal revenue (even during the ACW) came from tariffs. While they absolutely did result in some deadweight losses, they also depressed the labor share and enabled super-profits for selected business sectors, hence accelerating capital accumulation.

 

[DanielPrates]

Every now and then this thread is upped, and the title mostly says "communism literally doesnt work".... and I giggle like Ron Swanson.

 

[agonistes]

There's a UI bug - farmers and shopkeepers investing are displayed as capitalists. They don't invest very well, and investment only comes from *dividends*, so you don't get a ton of investment in a coop econ, but that is why it is telling you only capitalists are investing in buildings - it's actually farmers and shopkeepers.

As for the puppet thing, that is just straight-up a lacking feature. Annex them then release if you want to go that way.

Well, if a farmer is investing, the farmer is a capitalist.

 

[杜子垩]

I don't understand why comments are arguing about Communism. This problem is not really about Communism. It is about the game being lack of options to interfere other countries, which is very important for this age of imperialism. Communists, Capitalists, Monachists, Fascists, every Victorian regime was trying to interfere other countries.
The "change regime" play is actually disabled in the current version. And it didn't work well before. This is the true problem here.

 

[Goblin-Cookie]

The problem with this is that modern humans first appeared over 200,000 years ago, while agriculture only appeared some 10,000 years ago. That means that our ancestors spent around 95% of our history as hunter-gatherers. So we can not conclude that current primitives are "stuck", because 5% variance at the rate of progress is well within the realm of random chance.

It's also worth noting that for most of our history since the invention of agriculture life for most people was actually worse than before, and even now that isn't necessarily false. Let's not forget that a large factor driving American immigration was the possibility to get away from established societies and economic structures and live relatively free on your own. So the question isn't so much why some people remained at hunter-gatherer state, but what catastrophe forced our ancestors into the miserable existence of serfs.

Perhaps modern humans first appeared 200,000 years ago, or perhaps the whole concept of there being a defininate general date that modern humans appeared at all is merely a crutch to our uncomfortableness at the whole notion of humans evolving from basically apes. It is quite irrelevant however, because I wasn't talking simply about the biological evolution of humans but also about their cultural and scientific evolution as well. In order to concieve of agriculture, you have to develop the concept that plants grow from seeds through observation of the natural world. So we have to all these clever hunter-gatherers wandering about making basic observations about the natural world before the transition to agriculture can even been concieved and passing on those observations to others.

The reason why ordinary people were not better off because they invented agriculture is no mystery to me, it is because it wasn't invented by ordinary people to benefit ordinary people. It was invented by the rulers in order to make the lands that the rulers happened to control more productive and therefore to allow said rulers to become more powerful, since the more people the lands they rule over can support the more powerful they can become. The human race did not just develop a rudimentary understanding of biology before it adopted agriculture, it also developed some level of government heirarchy. That modern hunter-gatherers mostly lack a government heirachy is why they have remained what they are so long while others have developed further.

The biology provides the *how* but it is the government that provides the *why*. There is another issue here, not only does the government provide the reason for agriculture to be introduced, it is also basically impossible for people living without a government to introduce it. The reason for that is that property cannot exist in any meaningful sense without a government.

If I try and plant the first crops without property rights, what will happen is that my neighbors will quickly figure out that I am planting edible seeds in the ground and they will simply dig them up to eat them themselves. Thus agriculture is impossible until people in the wider area already consider the seeds the first farmers are planting as *owned* and not freely available for gobbling.

I strenuously disagree with this sentiment (and it really does demonstrate that you "haven't cracked an anthropology book") for 3 main reasons-

First, as has been mentioned, "History" only covers recorded past, which right off the hop excludes 95% of the human beings who have ever lived. "Anthropology," in stark contrast to the implications of your post, studies human societies and cultures more broadly, both of the present and the past. As someone who has spent a lot of time interacting with professionals in both fields, Historians could stand to learn a lot from anthropologists, and anthropologists have started to basically believe they're better historians. If the humanities and non-econ social sciences weren't being horrifically underfunded it'd be a really interesting time in both fields to see how those conflicts synthesize. At the very least, it is not a "substitute" but it is an indispensable supplement.

Second, a reason it's an indispensable supplement is because there are still people running around in the year of 2023 CE using terms like "primitive" and "more or less progressed" without any hint of irony or introspection. Human societies have progressed in all kinds of ways in all kinds of different directions, the concept that every human who has ever existed did so identifiably at some point on a linear, sliding scale that goes from "caveman" to "me" is a laughable assumption that nobody but the most dedicated knuckle-dragger has taken seriously in the academy since the 1950s. When anthropologists interact with indigenous peoples today, they are well aware that they are not peering into the past or seeing ourselves in a "previous state," but, as you say, every single one of the people being studies has pretty much the same number of humans in their lineage as anybody else; and in 2023, it is nearly impossible to find someone who truly has not interacted in any meaningful way with the "modern world." Once again, literally nobody since the 1950s is out here going "now I will visit the xyz tribe and watch how our distant ancestors lived," anyone proposing a grant with that sentiment would be laughed out of any department in the world.

Finally, so yes, your keen insight that perhaps, "our" ancestors might have lived differently from modern "primitives," is not some kind of sick own of anthropology but taken as an article of faith by modern anthropologists. However, shockingly, modern anthropologists have looked into how our ancestors lived as well. Archeology, best friend of both anthropology and history, has really grown in the last 20 years, with more and more access to technological tools to target archeological digs and glean more information from the same. And relentlessly, that information has demonstrated that our own ancestors lived even less like us than we thought, with cities that lack a palace district (who ran the place..?) or evidence that people moved back and forth for generations between settled agriculture and hunting/gathering (I thought once you went sedentary you never went back..?). A lot of it is uncertain and unsettled, but early returns are not supporting your suppositions.

In conclusion, you should crack an anthropology book. Strongly recommend "The Dawn of Everything."

Well firstly I was mostly criticising those kind of ideas not advocating them.

My general point was that anthropology is useless to history, because you cannot study cultures in the present and learn anything about your own ancestors. That false assumption is however why we fund anthropology into basically doomed marginal cultures, because since they are 'primitives' we seek through through them to understand how our own 'primitive' ancestors lived. Without that supposition, there is no motive to care what those marginal cultures that soon won't even exist are like and thus no funding to study them. It doesn't matter if we now claim we don't believe in those ideas any more, we really do and they are the motive behind our studies.

Archeology by contrast is usually inconclusive when applied to eras beyond historical recrod and generally showspeople's lack of imagination regarding historical possibilities. Where does the formula Palaces = Government come from? A palace is something built by a government, the government does not *need* the palace in order to exist, even though the palace needs the government to exist. Nothing much can then be determined about the government of some long-forgotten city ruins based upon whether or not it has a palace complex.

A government can quite happily function with it's members gathering in a quite ordinary house or outside in a town square and there is also no particular reason why the members of the government personally have to have richer houses than everybody else; governing is inherantly just a job like any other. The interesting question here is why do we as society overvalue and mystify government to the point that we cannot imagine a government existing without huge gilded palaces.

 

[OllyOllyOxenFree]

I don't know where you guys get this. There was a whole lot of government impetus in the capital accumulation process (beyond rule of law and a functional justice and property system) especially between 1783 and 1865.
The so-called American School of economics (in fact, Developmentalism) included state-led construction of the financial system and physical infrastructure (while giving ownership to well-connected shareholders), and strong protectionism.
After the colossal graft and consolidation of the ACW, the flywheel of American growth continued mostly on its own between 1866 and 1939. That's where you get the Gilded Age and Robber barons etc. but it's just one part of american history.

A few notes:

• Between 1891 and 1864, Congress and Treasury chartered no less than four National Banks, and most of the local banks were created under impetus from state governments.
• One of the first publicly funded infrastructure projects was the Erie canal. There was a frenzy of state-subsidizes railways.
• The intercontinental railway was almost 100% state-funded, by giving them free land to sell and massive subsidies.
• Until the income tax act of 1913, the lion's share of federal revenue (even during the ACW) came from tariffs. While they absolutely did result in some deadweight losses, they also depressed the labor share and enabled super-profits for selected business sectors, hence accelerating capital accumulation.

View attachment 968780

You do know what an oligarchy is right?

 

[AWittyName]

I don't understand why comments are arguing about Communism. This problem is not really about Communism. It is about the game being lack of options to interfere other countries, which is very important for this age of imperialism. Communists, Capitalists, Monachists, Fascists, every Victorian regime was trying to interfere other countries.
The "change regime" play is actually disabled in the current version. And it didn't work well before. This is the true problem here.

Absolutely this

 

[Minxfiver]

Communism is a revolutionary ideology, meaning it requires the removal of the current ruling class. It being established using democratic means is not possible, as that would require the ruling class to sit idly by as all their wealth and power is removed (as currently happens when you enact council republic) which is absurd. You can certainly reform to make the state more socialist, but going full commie using democratic means is innately unrealistic.

Half of the socialists of the 19th and early 20th century would disagree with you. The social democrats thought they would do exactly that. Communism is not a monolith of an ideology and the devs did a great job at modelling that it can be democratic or a dictatorship etc.

 

[DominusNovus]

Half of the socialists of the 19th and early 20th century would disagree with you. The social democrats thought they would do exactly that. Communism is not a monolith of an ideology and the devs did a great job at modelling that it can be democratic or a dictatorship etc.

If they did a great job, then it would almost inevitably decay into autocracy.

 

[grommile]

Where does the formula Palaces = Government come from?

Palaces are a vulgar display of power, and vulgar displays of power in general imply concentration of power.

As a general cognitive bias, A implying B is frequently taken to mean B implies A, and once you throw a belief in the basic truth of Acton's Law into the mix...

 

[Goblin-Cookie]

Half of the socialists of the 19th and early 20th century would disagree with you. The social democrats thought they would do exactly that. Communism is not a monolith of an ideology and the devs did a great job at modelling that it can be democratic or a dictatorship etc.

Problem is all that isn't an ideological difference between the Communists along the line you say. All Communists are ideologically in favour of Democracy, because it a Left-Wing, Egalitarian concept. Yet in practice all successful Communists create Dictatorships, but they still don't believe in it; they then often end up destroying Communism in the name of Democracy. Actually believing in Autocracy is a Right-Wing Idea.

Which is actually typical of Dictatorships in general. They seldom are supposed to be dictatorships but rather are intended to be some form of democratic republic but the leader has despite this and everybody's apparent beliefs become well a dictator.

To sum up; hypocrisy abounds. But do the hypocrites have a choice as to whether to betray their ideals, or is there some element of objective reality that compels them to that end but is absent from their belief system?

Palaces are a vulgar display of power, and vulgar displays of power in general imply concentration of power.

As a general cognitive bias, A implying B is frequently taken to mean B implies A, and once you throw a belief in the basic truth of Acton's Law into the mix...

Yes, it's a logical fallacy.

Palaces are evidence for the existence of Government but the absence of Palaces is *not* evidence for the abscence of Government.

They are more than merely a vulgar display of power however, that function is pretty much carried out alone by flags/banners/arms. They have another function, which is to mystify power by seperating it from the ordinary things of life, ordinary buildings, ordinary houses, ordinary people. There is a strong pseudo-religious element here, you are trying to insinuate political power is not something mundane by seperating it from the mundane things of life.

The reality is that power is incredibly mundane. What powerful people spend their time doing is going through the endless mundane trivialities of well practically everything they touch. We could actually conclude here that for some reason the powerful are ashamed of this fact, that power isn't easy, that it isn't effortless, that it involves hard work and that they built palaces to hide it all from everyone else.

 

[Jimboy93]

USSR was socialist. The notion that it wasn't is not seriously considered beyond socialist circles that consider the vast majority of socialisms that existed as not socialist, and that often do not consider the historical circumstances in which the USSR was born. In Vic3 terms it would be olligarchy and planned economy

This is a topic that can be argued about. In my opinion, the USSR was a fascist state that only used communism as a cover to fool people.

The methods used by Lenin and Stalin differed little from those of Hitler. Führerkult/Cult of personalty, propaganda, murder of people who had a different opinion or didn't want to work. concentration camps/gulags. A police that oppressed its own people etc.

None of this is said or advocated by Marx.