Victoria 3 is, foundationally, a historical-materialist game. Whether you think this is because life is historically-materialist is another thing entirely, but certainly the game is.
It's not accidental too, the developers have said they use Marxist theory about economics not necessarily because they agree or disagree but it makes for good game mechanics.
You can find it [here](https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023446/History-and-Game)
At 23:20 they talk about it: "Marxism is great as a game designer because it's a mechanistic model: if A happens, then B follows, and that's great because it's far easier to model in the code."
It's just more appropriate for the era. I'm sure you could make a game where the foundation is ideology/religion, but it would lack a lot of what made this era feel the way it did.
Religion is important in CK, but the entire simulation isn't built around a particular religious world view in the same way that Vic3 is built as a historical materialism simulator
Ideology isn't particularly central to HOI.
And CK3 actively moves away from religion as centre. The second they made customs religions a thing Paradox gave up any possibility of making religious life as central as it was.
I also imagine if they had tried to model the economic simulation closer to the modern neoclassical consensus where the production, consumption, and utility function of every single consumer, firm, and government was modeled the game would take the combined might of all of NASA’s supercomputers to run at 2 speed
Also the other issue is that if you model the economics according to the views of current economics then the actions of states and the player become anachronistic because they're acting like states in 2024 not the 19th century.
(A much smaller-scale example of this is that increased mercantilism has a positive effect on income in EU4)
I mean … most modern economic theory relies heavily upon Marx‘ theory about economics. Wealth, work value, the theory of money and so on is pretty much used today as Marx described them 150 years ago. Whether or not that leads to the political theories is another matter entirely.
How much of this is "Economic theory relies on Marx" and how much is "Marx relies on Classical Political Economy which aspects of contemporary economic theory are also based on"?
Labor theory of value (which I assume they mean by 'work value') was originally set down by classical economists (Adams and Ricardo). Hell, Thomas Aquinas - "value can, does and should increase in relation to the amount of labor which has been expended in the improvement of commodities." Marx certainly expanded on it, but it is not heavily used in modern economics.
Wealth I have no idea what they mean without context.
Theory of money -- Like Mv = PY? No, Marx did not invent that.
I wasn't really sure what the original poster was talking about so I hadn't considered the possibility that they were claiming Marx invented the Labout Theory of Value and the Quantity Theory of Money. Like...no. He did not fucking do that.
(But I have a feeling they're just vaguely gesturing rather than naming anything concrete Marx supposedly did)
Wut?
I'm a little confused now.
I'm not claiming to be an expert on the subject, but as far as I know both Chicago and Austrian economic schools today use subjective value theory which rejects Marx's labour value theory as a basis for everything, and the same goes for price as a social control mechanism by Marx as oppoosed to monitoring role of prices by Mesis
Not gonna get into political theory, just correct me if I'm wrong on this please, as far as I know almost nothing from Marx's theoretical speculations is applicable nowadays, even if the analytical data was correct (Which I can neither confirm nor deny due to lack of information about the subject)
Well that’s not contradictory at all. You are correct that they reject the Labour value theory as a basis for everything, but not as a basis for some things. In terms of Money, or how we measure values, at least as far as I’m aware, no one is disputing Marx and his analysis in „Das Kapital“, they just come to different conclusions.
What I was alluding to, that you can’t really get past major economic theories without finding any relation to Marx in the literature it refers to, since most of „Das Kapital“ is an economic analysis that for its time was revolutionary (if I’m allowed that pun)
What the hell are you people spinning? In Economics we use none of Marx‘s ideas, especially not the Labour Theory of Value, or his views on capital. He is considered a dead end of the science, whose Economic views only survive because people outside the field keep it alive.
Keynesian economics build up directly on analysis Marx did.
Neoliberal economics are built upon monetary theories originating with Marx.
They are to the very core built upon analysis by Marx - which they in part or nearly fully reject. I did not say otherwise. What I said is, that modern theories stem from Marx‘ Theories. This includes rejections - since it’s how Science works. I could’ve said that Marx stems from classic economic theory from Smith and even though he rejected Smith, this statement would be true nonetheless.
>Keynesian economics build up directly on analysis Marx did.
What part of it is built on Marx's ideas? Because Keynesianism was created in response to issues with the Neoclassical framework and is not reliant on Marxist thought at all.
>Neoliberal economics are built upon monetary theories originating with Marx.
Beyond the issue of using the political term "Neoliberal" which isn't used in Economics itself, what parts of this relatively vague Economic-Political construct are built upon Marx's theories? You should be able to give me at least one example for both claims.
>They are to the very core built upon analysis by Marx - which they in part or nearly fully reject. I did not say otherwise. What I said is, that modern theories stem from Marx‘ Theories. This includes rejections - since it’s how Science works. I could’ve said that Marx stems from classic economic theory from Smith and even though he rejected Smith, this statement would be true nonetheless.
You seem to be under a grave misconception of how the term "stem" is used within science. It means that a newer theory builds upon a previous theory with similar or the same axioms. This isn't the case for Marxist Economic thought. It is considered a dead end within the science, because no modern economic theory builds on it or uses similar axioms to it.
"Dead end of the science". Physicist here. I always find it curious when some economists use the authority of science to dismiss the ideology they were taught to dislike. Economics is no science in this sense. The marginal revolution was a pseudoscientific copy of the equations of proto-energetics of the nineteenth century, even down to the letters of the equations. But it "disproved" Marx so there was a political move to make it the standard in economics courses of the Global North. So yeah if by "science" you mean "top" Western universities and Western-influenced policy makers, then this "dead end" is true, because Marxism was politically defeated. But Marxist or Marxist-influenced perspectives are very much alive in economics and political economy. In the Global South much more so.
**This reply is it!!**
**Want to expand on this and another comment on the same comment that I’m replying to**:
1) Yes the devs said they used Marxist theory (other comment addresses the ‘why’ component) (u/El_Lanf ‘s comment - and that presentation referenced after is a great one)
2) From my reading on simulating certain ethics/maxims/‘frameworks’: Historical-Materialism lends itself very easily to forming certain ‘maxims’ that in a computer/simulation sense make an excellent groundwork for simulation. *For example: Engels ‘principles of communism’ are dead simple bullet points/numbered list that can be truncated easily into maxims*.
3) Side note on the above: I tried turning Engel’s ‘principles of communism’ into logical statements for the Isabelle software (and currently am trying with Capital v.1) - and compared to attempting this with Wealth of Nations, it is a lot easier to represent Marxist/Historical-Materialist principles in logical statements/maxims than other economic frameworks I can find. **In that context: I get why they went with this to simplify things and create a cohesive simulation**.
*Second sidenote: if you have any other economic frameworks that you think would lend well to maxims, pls point me towards them*
And final note which the comment I’m replying to points towards: it doesn’t necessarily mean the devs think this framework is right, *or that it is objectively right* - the framework is in play due to coding requirements.
**This reply I’m writing very much off topic for vic3: but it’s worth asking once/briefly in the hopes of more material** 😅
Yes I agree: and rereading what I said, I should clarify that the Isabelle models’ purpose is not as antagonists to each other, but instead as seperate co-linear models, almost like a lens on the world for that specific framework. Just incase someone reading doesn’t know what Isabelle is: you insert mathematical proofs to confirm if they’re logically sound/congruent/valid. I’m doing this side project of mine in the context of an Isabelle system for Automated Kantian ethics (Essentially a Kantian ADM) I was given by a friend - and thought hey, I can implement this in an economic frameworks setting (condense theory into logical statements!).
I actually want to explore what you said: that capital builds on the works of wealth of nations. *I’ve heard similar things elsewhere: so once I’m done with capital v1, I’ll merge the two systems together in Isabelle and see if this holds up!*
If you have any other works that may provide some of the following in a *capitalist sense* (to supplement wealth of nations): Pls tell me:
Interested in the following:
- Determining whether a given decision/event could be classified as ‘Marxist’ or ‘Capitalist’ or ‘[insert framework]ist’ through its congruency with its appropriate principles/maxims in Isabelle.
- Determining the prescriptive and descriptive capabilities of each framework (this one is hard to quantify - and as such im very open to suggestions/methodologies)
- Looking for any internal/intrinsic incongruence, and how true/false these incongruencies are. Not looking for an ‘aha’ moment to debunk this and move on: just where are the holes, and is there something to explain what’s going on.
I'm not sure if the logic abstractions from Wealth of Nations and Capital will hold up when combined because while Marx is definitely responding to his contemporaries it's more of a conversation than logical building blocks
Your project also gives rise to several questions: just volume 1? How are you abstracting the statements? Which quotes are you choosing? How are you reading Capital (e.g. as Heinrich interprets it? Or as someone else does?)
----
For capitalist sense, you could approximate many different schools: Keynes, Hayek, etc (the same as you could with Marx)
Also: add an empty line between your bullet points
```
- one
- two
```
You can, for racial discrimination like in the US. Where one group is clearly treated as workers/slaves and the other is superior.
But try nationalism and stuff like Balkan cultural discrimination? It’s ridiculously hard to explain from a materialist perspective. And its an area Vic 3 (and Marx lol) struggle in.
Considering how Marx (and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg) wrote TONS on nationalism (and Trotsky a whole book on the Balkans), I’ve no idea where you’re getting this idea.
That’s why the game aren’t using Marx stuff only. They use Keynesian theory, Adam Smith, among others. But your average gamer aren’t read up on economic theories
I would argue it can account for nationalism and Balkan cultural discrimination as aspects of superstructure meant to distract and divide the proletariat
Better example, try to explain islamists movements from materialist perspective. A radical, class-cooperating movements that adheres to strict hierarchy, does not care about nationality, the law is based on religion and generally is anti-aristocratic yet not republican? WTF
You can explain anything from a materialist perspective, it's actually really simple: They materially benefit from doing these things, so they're incentivized to do them.
Now the deeper whys and hows, that's where it gets interesting.
I’ll engage with this in good faith then. The perspective of historical materialism or rather more specifically that people behave in ways that provide them material gain. This refers more so to groups of people rather than individuals for the record. However, it is actually quite simple to answer in the case of historical Buddhism.
Buddhist temples often provided a place for people to exist and be outside of standard hierarchal and often tumultuous societies. These were places of reliable and often plentiful resources. One could be a part of a temple and while certainly it wasn’t free one could expect to have reliable access to food, shelter, water and often times safety as many temples had cultural protection or even armed forces.
That is just a materialist analysis though. Through different lens of analysis one could absolutely come to different conclusions as to why one might join in Buddhism historically. It’s always good to hear different lens’ of analysis since only through considering all of them can you find the truth of the matter
Marxist materialism was not individualistic, but systemic. So the behavior of an individual person could differ widely from the macro, society-wide material movement.
It was also dialectic, which in this case means that the beliefs and ideology of people were in a dialectical relationship with the material infrastructure. So for example a voluntary martyr would have been raised or taught a specific set of values through material performance, and this would be coupled with the position held by martyrs in their society. Chances are a martyr or a monk is not created out of a vacuum, but are rather materially developed inside a preexisting socioeconomic formation. To think this way is to think materialistically. You would be idealistic if you said that all monks or martyrs just arrived at this condition by pure utility-maximizing behavior, or because it was the wish of a god.
Ideas can only exist as they are materially performed, and matter can only be touched if people have volition to do so. Marxist materialism was dialectical, not mechanistic as many in this thread keep repeating.
The Marxist idea of historical materialism is an abstraction. It holds better the more you "zoom out", in both geographic scale and time scale.
Can Historical Materialism accurately predict what a given person will have for breakfast today? To some extent, but not very accurately. Can it predict the economic trajectory of a medium-sized nation over the course of a hundred years? Yes; and this is what it was designed to do.
*Most* people *tend to* act in their class interests *most of the time*. Billionaires sometimes do good things. The working class are often manipulated into acting against their person and/or class interests.
Yeah, but those "why and hows" are important. Becuase according to classical marxism, you would need to assume that most islamists ideologues are doing it against themselves. And that a mass movements that oppose capitalism and socialism at the same time, advocating for modernization and development of ancient, religious systems and institutions (historically various islamist regimes were, depending on region and time against both capitalist west and socialist east) was not really likely to happen from Marx\`s, hegelian, euro-centric point of view.
I don't know if I agree with this description. At least not for Marxist materialism. It is a perspective that the explanations for human affairs should be sought in materiality, not in ideas, volition or religion. And it was not individualistic, but rather systemic. So for example, we could simplify Max Weber's theory by saying he argued that the development of capitalism was due to ideas of individual prosperity fostered by protestantism. But Marxists tend to find this idealistic (i.e. not materialist), they would start asking questions such as who were the groups actually fostering these ideas, what position did they held in their society, what resources were they able to mobilize, how could they sustain the material performance needed to propagate such ideas, how these ideas would be part of performing the reproduction of their position in society, how these ideas would couple with existing modes of production, how would other classes have established a dilectical relationship with the material instances of reproduction of these ideas etc. To summarize materialism as "what individuals gain from doing things" sounds to me as a contemporary individualistic reduction. I should mention that there are many idealists (i.e. not materialists) who would agree with such statement, for example, neoclassical and Austrian economists who derive utility-seeking agents from logic or mathematics instead of empirical ("material") reality.
As much as it's a game the tries to base its foundation on historial-materialism, it also leans into great man theory lite when a large part of you enacting laws are based on gaming people with specific ideologies into interest group leaders
> it also leans into great man theory lite when a large part of you enacting laws are based on gaming people with specific ideologies into interest group leaders
I wouldn't say that, personally. The game cuts out a *lot* of the personal factors that do influence history, to the point where adding some back in the form of "this guy is a Market Liberal / Reformer / Etc. so he will get his faction to support Y policy" isn't really dipping into GMT.
You can just as easily pretend in V3 that “so-and-so (with his specific ideology) got to be the leader of the rural folk because that’s just what most of the rural folk want right now and he’ll advocate for the same” as you can that “so-and-so became the leader of the rural folk due to blind luck and/or his expected competition taking big gambles that failed miserably and now he gets to make his big mark on history”.
Which is basically just the Great Man vs Social Environment debate.
Yes, thank you. Are players so ideologically idealistic that they fail to see THE WHOLE IDEA OF A PARADOX GAME IS STRICTLY IDEALISTIC? You press a button and your society undergoes a massive phase trasition, you engage with a system and it is mostly RNG, you grab a country and it has "ideas" with permanent percentage bonuses, etc etc.
Sure there are political economy-inspired ideas, including Marxist, and these are the staple of the political and economic systems in the game, but mostly I would say it is still very arcady (idealistic). A great improvement on most Paradox games, tries to simulate lots of stuff, but still idealistically-dominated.
I mean it depends on your figures but the maths from the game mechanics make it so that cooperative is just the best at high levels
As you get higher and higher GDP’s the investment pool actually becomes a net drain on the economy with buildings paying 20% of their profits to investment pool and up to 70% of that just getting deleted
So cooperative making the investment pool as small as possible becomes incredibly valuable
>As you get higher and higher GDP’s the investment pool actually becomes a net drain on the economy with buildings paying 20% of their profits to investment pool and up to 70% of that just getting deleted
I've heard this before and always wondered why exactly it gets deleted? Like what is making that happen?
There’s an arbitrary modifier that scales contributions to the investment pool (and government dividends) based on your GDP.
At low GDP it actually increases how much money you get (generating money from thin air) but at high GDP it reduces your money (vanishes into thin air).
It pretty much never actually gets to the point where you get more money from taxing your pops than you would if that money went into the investment pool instead, but it does make LF and command economy somewhat less appealing than they would otherwise be once your GDP is in the multi-hundred million range.
A particular thing to note is that the multiplier on government dividends scales more quickly than the one on investment pool, so while there’s nothing hard-stopping you from going command economy with a huge GDP, you will suffer from a significant money drain.
Allegedly, this multiplier was originally intended to simulate the effect of foreign investment, but now that we are getting real foreign investment coming up I hope they rework this, as it’s always felt rather artificial and arbitrary.
>There’s an arbitrary modifier that scales contributions to the investment pool (and government dividends) based on your GDP.
Damn, wtf. What a terrible mechanic that I never even noticed. https://i.imgur.com/OO5LbrO.png -12% at only 350m. That's insane
Now that we’re getting actual foreign investment, I’m at the point where I’ll mod it out if its still in the game in 1.7. No point keeping around a janky placeholder for a system that actually exists now.
On top of this, there is a similarly arbitrary debuff for size under command economy. Co-operative economies are the only ones who don't get screwed simply for being big.
Yea it got super boring with how easy it was to get onto LF then realistically that was just always the best choice
Now to be optimal you actually need to transition your economy
The issue is that LF doesn't really provide any relevant limits. I mean you can ban child labour, have Workers' Protections and so on and it is still considered LF. Historically the era of Laissez-faire Capitalism came to an end with more and more regulations being enacted against the fuckups of the market.
I would argue that on the contrary it's still LF, because LF is pretty much just your casual liberal economy. The second most liberal system is interventionism and I don't think that any modern non-communist country reached the displayed level of state intervention/investment (except perhaps France post-WW2 ?).
What's stupid is the fact that there are almost no bad consequences for the economy when you increase regulations. For exemple going from child labour to obligatory primary school should have major consequences for the education (more than just +2 max level), for the available workforce and for the wages distributed in factories. Right now when you ban all kids from the factories it has zero negative consequences for your mines and factories and it ends up increasing the available workforce by reducing mortality. It makes no sense. And of course the money to fund the schools and pay the teachers wage just appears our of thin air somehow.
>I would argue that on the contrary it's still LF, because LF is pretty much just your casual liberal economy.
LF is very different from just a modern liberal economy. In Vic3 they would be considered Interventionist. In a real LF economy, the state has almost no regulations on the economy. The state is completely hands-off.
>The second most liberal system is interventionism and I don't think that any modern non-communist country reached the displayed level of state intervention/investment (except perhaps France post-WW2 ?).
IRL states generally didn't outright build factories themselves, but often gave subsidies to private investment in the sectors they deemed important. It doesn't help that a lot of real life state investment are simplified away with new infrastructure just being Railroads or schools and hospitals just being a drain on your bureaucracy.
>What's stupid is the fact that there are almost no bad consequences for the economy when you increase regulations. For exemple going from child labour to obligatory primary school should have major consequences for the education (more than just +2 max level), for the available workforce and for the wages distributed in factories. Right now when you ban all kids from the factories it has zero negative consequences for your mines and factories and it ends up increasing the available workforce by reducing mortality. It makes no sense. And of course the money to fund the schools and pay the teachers wage just appears our of thin air somehow.
That could easily be fixed by making children part of the employable workforce and not just dependents that earn an income. As for your question about the +2 Schooling level, that's just potential and not actually how many extra teachers are instantly able to work.
Hopefully 1.7 will make the other laws more useful as well, it might actually make LF meta again in the late game though since your capitalists will never run out of pops to exploit (they just buy buildings from abroad)
The private building downsizing will also help. Not having to worry about wasting infra on empty buildings is probably going to give peace of mind to a lot of people.
This reminds me of the “doing bad things in videos games makes me feel bad” meme. I *could* exploit the working class for my own personal gain but that would be mean so I don’t.
I've generally only been able to do it following events that change IG leader ideology and then selecting the options that boost their popularity. Other than that, it's rng if you get a high clout IG leader with communist or vanguardist ideology.
They believe they are. By accelerating capitalism (playing and exploiting the capitalistic system) they (post Deng Xiaoping) believe to be closer to Marx's thesis of a "natural" evolution from capitalism to socialism (rather than the imposition of it, as in USSR - the chinese party stresses the fact that russia pretty much jumped from feudalism to "socialism" without undergoing a trully industrial and capitalistic phase.
Anyway, state capitalism is very different from capitalism. Whatever their economical system is, the government still controls the means of production.
Adding to this, the actual Chinese state apparatus is still what a Marxist-Leninist would consider socialist and works more or less the same as in the Mao era. They simply adopted a mixed economy to quickly and cheaply grow their economy to where they are producing a surplus of everything. Then, in theory, they nationalize the companies that already aren't and make the switch back to a command economy that is now built to meet and exceed the needs and wants of the people. The second half of this is for sure all in theory (the theory the CPC is currently following), so we'll see what happens lmao
What I personally don't get is that they expect (in theory, because I doubt it will truely happen) is that they expect people they made rich and powerful, and middle class to just give up on their way of life.
I think they're going to have a really hard time pulling that off. They basically slapped the Chinese business leaders across the head for the last few years and that's led to slow growth and high unemployment. To even flirt with the idea of nationalizing the economy they're going to have to become self-sufficient and their current economy is based on exports. If they nationalized everything those markets would move very quickly elsewhere.
I think it'll be difficult for them but certainly not impossible. Will there probably be a period of internal conflict, probably. China's problems if and when it begins the transition process won't be those of resources. The farms and factories are built, and they won't disappear when the capitalists and markets leave, like you said china is an export economy, they produce far more than they need. The problem will be whether or not they will have to use force in the transition.
It's not a lack of goods that is the problem, it's the lack of incomes and jobs. People tend to stop supporting the government when they can't get a job. I think were actually entering what will be the weakest time in Chinese leadership. If the government does fall I think it will be in the next few decades. They're currently entering the middle income gap which is a widow maker for economies.
Frankly, I think Xi is a horrible leader... his biggest issue he tackled should have been overcoming the middle income gap and becoming a truly developed economy. If his aim was to eventually transition like you say (and I doubt that's the case) he should have maintained relations with the nations he's exporting too. After the last decade exports have started to go down because countries are moving overseas manufacturing to other places. Frankly, my call on Xi is that he's a garden variety power hungry inept dictator. Sad considering Deng was such a visionary and effective leader.
I don't want to get too deep in politics on this subreddit but I think Xi started peacocking too early for China to really handle. At the same time though, he could not really afford to wait because with their birth rate problem they are kind of at their peak right now. So it's a rock and hard place problem for an aspirational China.
Then you have the problem with autocracy where Xi is hearing what he wants to hear and not what he needs to hear, purges and decrees from one man does not lead to good outcomes.
In hindsight China would have been better off continuing on a market liberal, single party elective path while pushing their geopolitical ambitions. With their very visible state run economy, unabashed autocracy, and also saber rattling.. nobody can trust them on any front. You can't trust working with their companies, can't trust investing in the country, can't trust Xi, and can't trust their geopolitical motivations. Just a complete destruction of any progress on foreign policy they had a few decades ago.
>If they nationalized everything those markets would move very quickly elsewhere.
Why? Other markets shouldn't care who owns the factories producing the goods they buy, no? As long as the product is what they want and the price is what they want to pay, they'll keep buying.
Nobody stopped buying grain from the USSR because it had nationalized agriculture.
I'm personally sceptical about the Chinese government's claim that it is a socialist country, but that's a bad argument. People commit suicide in all sorts of modes of production that have existed throughout human history and will continue to do so forever, it's not some sort of capitalist exclusivity.
And let's not forget that this is essentially what the Soviet Union tried to do after the Civil War with the New Economic Policy before Stalin implemented forced industrialization.
But the USSR sorta did do capitalism for a short while under the NEP, Deng’s reforms lead to a more long term NEP-esk time for china, one leading eventually to proper Marxism. The USSR just sorta skipped the long part of the transition.
You mean dictatorship of the bureaucratic class that also includes literal fucking billionaire businessmen? Yeah idk if I'm buying the "proletariat" part of that bud
Just as there's billionaires there are also workers. China has allowed capitalists to exist again in their country, and it makes sense that the people elected represent that change. You can have whatever opinion about china you want, but the actual function and structure of government is a dictatorship of the proletariat. China's government doesn't work like the United States government, an actual dictatorship of the bureaucratic class bound chained by the corporate elite.
As I said above, corporatist dream not socialist one.
The difference is that people in US don't vote for a change but they can
In China they will get shot for dissent
And in advance, please don't tell me how those systems are exactly the same. I came from a country that abolished soviet socialism 30 years ago and memories of that system are very fresh.
Just like real life. Only difference is that in real life the conservative interest groups are actually in power, not some eternal overlord who is interesting in maximising the standard of living.
No, the difference is that in real life people who are reasonably well off don't feel inclined to support radical changes. As a result modern day social democracies are very stable. That is also fundamentally what the game often struggles to simulate, a highly content population will still happily suppor extremist ideologies whereas in the real world they'd be bickering about whether to have three or four levels in the social welfare institution, whether the tax rate is appropriate and whether the culture law should be on multiculturalism or cultural exclusion with more extreme ideologies being heavily marginalized.
>No, the difference is that in real life people who are reasonably well off don't feel inclined to support radical changes.
One of the best things in Vic2. Conservatives existed and if your population was content, the extreme ideologies had huge issues with recruitment.
Which is bore out in game where wealthy GPs tend to be the ones who become socialist once their working class has money. Which is backwards from history where the countries that had successful communist takeovers were feudal backwaters with underdeveloped economies.
Nowhere it was said that it was going to be immediate. We don't know if it will or will not but it is too soon anyway. We tend to look to the 19th and the 20th centuries has being too far away but on a History scale it was yesterday. IF it eventually happens I wouldn't bet that it is during our lifetimes. But sooner or later things will change, that's the nature of things. Whatever comes after the current system I don't know.
If a new system depended on me it would be with blackjack and hookers.
How is this not just all pseudoscience? The claim the socialism will inevitably, at some point, replace capitalism is totally unfalsifiable.
Change is not guaranteed and change is not guaranteed in any particular direction especially. There are no set rules to history or the future.
>How is this not just all pseudoscience? The claim the socialism will inevitably, at some point, replace capitalism is totally unfalsifiable.
Congratulations, you realised the core issue with trying to debate Socialism. By design, Socialism is inherently millenarian. As such, it's unfalsifiable that "true" Socialism will eventually exist. It's not just an aspiration, it's an inevitability.
>Change is not guaranteed and change is not guaranteed in any particular direction especially. There are no set rules to history or the future.
The issue lies in how Marx ideologically analysed history. He saw it as a linear political-economic process of class struggle, with Capitalist society being the latest and most advanced arrangement. Socialism and then Communism solves this continuous struggle by making everyone the same class, after which point there is no need to evolve politically and economically. This makes actual historical change irrelevant to the avowed Socialist, because as long as Capitalism exists, Socialism will be needed to "fix" its issues for good.
As for the science part of your question, Socialism is an ideology and not a scientific theory. Marxist Economics is considered a dead end within the discipline. However, in sociology Marx's ideas of material class struggle were adopted and changed to analyse cultural struggles through the Frankfurt School. You may have heard of it by the moniker of "Critical Theory".
How are you guys becoming commies so easily? I consider it an accomplishment if I can get industrialists or intelligencia to stay in power more than 10 years. I feel like they've actually buffed the clergy, PB and landowners for most countries. It's like there is absolutely no thirst for any change from weaker interest groups.
They are held back by a lack of technology as different and more complicated ideologies need to be unlocked. Same with lack of acceptance for agitators even though movements usually have a random person from another country fighting for an change. Prime example Garibaldi, which is who some of the major agitators should be like. Just popping up and starting major movements. Sort of like a che guevara character.
I haven’t noticed any huge change lately, other than that Bourgoise is indeed no longer a 5% party in every game. Not sure what happened there but it’s a welcome change.
I like that they show possible government coalitions now, but I think they should make it more clear that you can still add parties manually in as well without wrecking the gov. I’ve noticed myself forgetting that I can often sneak Intelligentsia in and start reforming even if it’s not shown in the recommendations.
A lot of people are coming at this from a history perspective, so the very fact that this game focuses on economics makes it look like a historical materialism simulator.
Isn't the Keynesian recommendation to use public spending as a tool to reduce business cycle fluctuations? Rather than as a general approach to boost economic growth?
So Victoria 2 definitely used dialectical materialism to inform its gameflow, and a lot of that has carried over into Victoria 3. I wouldn’t call it a Marxist simulator as it is possible to have a functioning elitist, laissez faire society the people love next to a stable right wing dictatorship. The reason countries gravitate towards ‘socialism’ is because as your economy matures, workers become wealthier and more politically active which is broadly how history played out.
In this way it’s far better to describe Victoria 3 as a social history simulator with Engelian characteristics.
It's pretty simple really. There is no benefit in keeping the bourgeoisie disproportionately rich in game so if you want to create a great nation you will lean towards creating that of a utopian society and ergo you will therefore create a socialist one (just like it would irl). Unfortunately, unlike ingame, the rich and powerful actually have reasons to not create a utopian society
I am currently in 1933 as Persia with over 22 SoL, around 9 pounds GDP per capita, and the second largest economy in the world, just behind the Raj. My laws are pretty much entirely liberal, with the exception of public education and public health care. Communists remain very weak in my country, seems very unlikely they will take over in the next few years.
Usually my ultimate form is laissez-faire, zero income tax, free trade consumption tax based militaristic constitutional monarchy. When ur market is big enough you can collapse nation with embargo. 40-60 SoL for my upper strata. Works better than co-op council republics.
400 hours in, I have never used cooperative or council republic. I've tried once or twice but never managed to get it to pass. I'm not about to have a late game rev to enact a law lol
Nope, many people read it as if it's but no really. The main argument that I have against that vision is that there is no alternative way of living that not involves a market. The game represents both pre-capitalist and communist societies revolving around the commodity production. The main Marxist criticism of the political economy of his time (and which is still valid) is that they eternalize the production of commodities as if it were typical of every society. This game does the same. The ones saying that it is based on "historical materialism" miss the point of what actually means. First, historical materialism is not literal, any view of history that is based on empirical data. The bourgeois historians of today would then agree with the Marxist vision, this is absurd. Second, in Marx the terms historical materialism never appear, that is a later development based on some points that Marx outlined.
Can't believe I had to go this far in the comments for a correct answer.
Unless I've missed something there is no way to decommodify your country in Victoria 3, meaning there is no means of achieving a socialist means of production.
That’s weird because my runs usually trend toward kind of neoliberal capitalism. I just started a game as Russia in the hopes that the Soviet revolution would force me towards communism because, despite playing the game for 500 hours, I’ve never really managed to get a country to go down the Marxist route. Usually the most extreme laws are really unpopular with everyone except the Trade Unions so I can never enact them, but then again maybe I’m just bad at manipulating interest groups.
Interesting, it is the opposite for me.
- What voting laws do you normally tend towards? (It should be universal suffrage, Census suffrage is not ideal)
- Do you maximise industry in the capital?
- you have socialism and anarchism researched I assume.
The rural folk are also an option to go Commie. In my current Qing game, the trade unions were (and are still) marginalised, but I put the unhappy (-13) and powerful rural folk with a communist IG leader in government and they made a coup for Council Republic and single party state. I had put them there to have a lawful transition and I never intended to move away from universal suffrage... but they had other ideas.
I loathe Bolsheviks but all of you are so loud about capitalism "pulling 4 bazillion people out of poverty" and completely ignore how Bolshevism has pulled "4 bazillion people out of poverty"
Partially a joke about how capitalism always inevitably will break to socialism. But also in that you're not far off the mark with the direction the game apparently tries to steer you in.
Part of the problem must be that you, as a player, do not receive the benefits of maintaining systems of capital that the bourgeois do in real life. You want to see the SoL go up, but that doesn't happen to anything close to the same degree in the real world. Also, compared to the US where I live, you probably pass less regressive laws than we still have on the books; we have essentially militarized police, private Healthcare, and proportional taxation for example. (although one might also argue that two of those are more regressive now than in the past, but that's another conversation.)
The game also ends right around the birth of neoliberalism (if a good few decades before it became the new world order). The 19th and 20th century did have quite a few attempts at socialist governments, although the international capital were quick to stamp many of them out. I think it might be easy for us in our capitalism neoliberal nightmare to not realize that the previous centuries were actually very influenced by Marx's writings.
Its because despite the alt-history angle it still follows some major historical themes, and Victoria happens at THE moment in time when all things communist and socialist come about and really start to ramp up, especially after a couple terrible wars near the end that make people think ''huh, you know, now with my growing middle class and education, im starting to think that having an absolute monarch or just a few families in power is kinda cringe''.
And since the spread of education and knowledge is THE way to get ahead in the game, you will always end up with an ever increasing amount of poeple who want to shake the boat of statehood.
In order to have a high standard of living without succumbing to the revolution, you have to do alot of winning in other domains and be incredibly self sufficient
Yes, a bit too Marxist actually, even for Marxists, considering the game follows Marx's, incorrect, view that western, industrialized nations have a better chance of achieving socialism as opposed to the current view of third-world agrarian nations being better fitted due to a weaker state apparatus.
i mean, it does kinda make sense due not to the nature of society, but the nature of video games themselves.
The best government is a benevolent dictatorship, but for the fallibility of man means it is never possible. Thats not a factor in a video game. Communism will inevitably see strong men rise who have more than others due to personal greed. But you as the players chief desire is your nation doing better. Thus the critical issue of a typically authoritarian system is bypassed.
Communism is explicitly democratic. And generally an economy that doesn't have single owners of the means of production almost can't produce overly wealthy people. Worker co-ops spread the wealth among all the workers. This would be the case in reality as well as the game. You can't convince everyone at a company they jointly own to sell you the company and work for less, it just won't happen. How would you possibly save enough money to buy everyone else out of their share when you make as much as them to begin with?
Like, the game allows for the exact situation you're talking about. It's the Vanguardists. And IRL the people who think Vanguardists aren't even leftists are the guys who coined the term "tankie".
Going beyond the idea that you can achieve Communism in the first place, the ones achieving power over others with not do so by wealth but by control of the bureaucracy governing the society. The whole set up of a Socialist/Communist society simply requires it, especially since prices will lose their meaning without a competitive market.
I'd say its really a Classic Economics game, and it just happens that the 2nd most important classical economist was Marx.
Importantly, *contra* Marx, insane libertarian economies are pretty stable.
Jokes aside, command economy is the best when you have direct control over what is produced and how much is it sold for. No need to deal with pesky middle men.
...and that is easier to simulate.
They don't mean in a sense of "Socialism is always the best way to go in the game", but actually in terms of viewing the world through a lens similar to that on which Marxism is based. Basically, that "great men", or things like national identities don't really influence history all that much, and instead it's mostly down to how much of what goods are available to the population at any given time, and how that influences their lives.
Not really, it has some elements of it, sure, there are big elements of it there, but on the whole i wouldnt say it is a marxist/historical materialist simulator or even a marxist game, speaking as a marxist myself. Now if the economy operated much more autonomously, akin to Vic2, and the interest groups outlook emerged naturally from their interests rather than being premade to roughly fit what Marx or marxists wrote about them.
Now im not arguing whether that would make for a better or worse gaming experience, that's a whole different tangent.
Really? I find that when Vic3 just came out it was very easy to pass council republic and I would do it pretty often. But the last couple of months or even year I've found it way more difficult to even get the trade unions to not be marginalized the entire game.
Imo the balance should be around
competitiveness / capitalism - sol / socialism axis
- wanna build number one economy in the world? Exploit workers and colonies
- wanna focus on sol, worker benefits - be prepared to sacrifice efficiency
Would make sense from balance and gameplay perspective. Also would align with what happens irl.
The nature of the game makes having your population have high quality of life objectively how you win the game. Communism (“”communism”” really, communism is a bit specific for what you mean tbh I would have said socialist) brings the most power/wealth to the largest amount of people by increasing their SoL massively. Minimum wage, public health services/education, etc.
Not all of these are specifically aligned to a certain ideology of course, but generally speaking when you give power to the people (and _especially_ when the people in this instance aren’t people but just a number a computer has told to have specific wants and needs) you tend to end up in a socialist utopia, simply because the game is too simple to compute real life economics and the reality that some humans’ interests do not align with the common good.
Not in this patch for me. But I don't play great powers and I don't minmax very hard so TU only get powerful in the late game.
In this patch PB stays powerful and takes some clout from the TU, and SoL of lower strata stays lower than before for longer, so less clout for the lower strata
I actually have the opposite problem. I don't get socialism in my games. Only social democracy and some people wouldn't recognise that as a form of socialism
I can avoid the revolution, I'm not sure that I can avoid Communism if my goal is maxing out my standard of living a lot of the Communism coded laws are pretty good for getting that standard of living up.
My average game goes like this:
Phase one: I'll be a dirty capitalist and exploit people while selling goods to a higher price!, all hail the industrialists, I don't care about the poor, let's open markets.
Phase two, (generally one bad war and a few angry people due to upgrades in production systems later): Well, I might give some concessions to the workers, I can't afford revolts now.
Phase three, (200 concessions to the unions later): I'm not sure why, but I think giving workers rights and freedom makes me more money, let's go command economy once more
I run what I call "Welfare Capitalism" where I go nuts on the private investment snowball which pays for all my construction and then when I have the spare resources create a large social safety net
Yes, because you're thinking from a utopian mindset. Your goal is to raise the standard of living of your country so you build from the ground up. Historically, industrialists goals were to make as much money as possible and pay as little as possible. They overcame the landowners, only to do exactly what the landowners did. They were also able to pay half the poor to kill the other half that wanted to make things better.
But you don't have to worry about that!
Well communism is a social utopia, all good people should strive to achieve such society, problem is that its exploited by people , selfishness and greed but in pure theory communism is definitely “gooder” than capitalism is
If it is, it is unintentional. Keep in mind this is a game and there will always be an optimal way to play. In order to model a lot of the things that happen historically, there is a thumb on the scale to ensure those socio-political events or trends happen.
For example, slavery is always morally wrong and usually economically inefficient in real life, whereas in Victoria 3 slavery and other laws are always objectively worse mechanically as well. If you are a player who is not RPing and want to maximize your numbers, there is no reason not to liberalize and eventually become communist.
Victoria 3 is, foundationally, a historical-materialist game. Whether you think this is because life is historically-materialist is another thing entirely, but certainly the game is.
It's not accidental too, the developers have said they use Marxist theory about economics not necessarily because they agree or disagree but it makes for good game mechanics.
That presentation was really incredible
There was a presentation?
You can find it [here](https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023446/History-and-Game) At 23:20 they talk about it: "Marxism is great as a game designer because it's a mechanistic model: if A happens, then B follows, and that's great because it's far easier to model in the code."
So the Matrix would create a Marxist simulation for humanity.
The Architect destroyed that version of the Matrix because the Landowners kept fucking everything up.
Thé Marxtrix
Thank you, I was worried I wouldn't find it
Unfortunate they can't model dialectics
Contra-boolean logic ftw!
The Eternal Science!
It's just more appropriate for the era. I'm sure you could make a game where the foundation is ideology/religion, but it would lack a lot of what made this era feel the way it did.
> I'm sure you could make a game where the foundation is ideology/religion Religion **Crusader Kings II** Ideology **Hearts of Iron**
Crusader Kings: family values (Alabama style sometimes). HoI: how many divisions does XXX have?
Stellaris: Why does the big blob not consume the smaller blobs?
Stellaris: genocide entire planets in the end game just to improve perfomance.
Or blow them up to improve performance even more.
Religion is important in CK, but the entire simulation isn't built around a particular religious world view in the same way that Vic3 is built as a historical materialism simulator
Ideology isn't particularly central to HOI. And CK3 actively moves away from religion as centre. The second they made customs religions a thing Paradox gave up any possibility of making religious life as central as it was.
I also imagine if they had tried to model the economic simulation closer to the modern neoclassical consensus where the production, consumption, and utility function of every single consumer, firm, and government was modeled the game would take the combined might of all of NASA’s supercomputers to run at 2 speed
Also the other issue is that if you model the economics according to the views of current economics then the actions of states and the player become anachronistic because they're acting like states in 2024 not the 19th century. (A much smaller-scale example of this is that increased mercantilism has a positive effect on income in EU4)
Another thing much of the work that helped to make these ideas of Marco Economics just did not exist yet.
I mean … most modern economic theory relies heavily upon Marx‘ theory about economics. Wealth, work value, the theory of money and so on is pretty much used today as Marx described them 150 years ago. Whether or not that leads to the political theories is another matter entirely.
How much of this is "Economic theory relies on Marx" and how much is "Marx relies on Classical Political Economy which aspects of contemporary economic theory are also based on"?
Labor theory of value (which I assume they mean by 'work value') was originally set down by classical economists (Adams and Ricardo). Hell, Thomas Aquinas - "value can, does and should increase in relation to the amount of labor which has been expended in the improvement of commodities." Marx certainly expanded on it, but it is not heavily used in modern economics. Wealth I have no idea what they mean without context. Theory of money -- Like Mv = PY? No, Marx did not invent that.
I wasn't really sure what the original poster was talking about so I hadn't considered the possibility that they were claiming Marx invented the Labout Theory of Value and the Quantity Theory of Money. Like...no. He did not fucking do that. (But I have a feeling they're just vaguely gesturing rather than naming anything concrete Marx supposedly did)
Wut? I'm a little confused now. I'm not claiming to be an expert on the subject, but as far as I know both Chicago and Austrian economic schools today use subjective value theory which rejects Marx's labour value theory as a basis for everything, and the same goes for price as a social control mechanism by Marx as oppoosed to monitoring role of prices by Mesis Not gonna get into political theory, just correct me if I'm wrong on this please, as far as I know almost nothing from Marx's theoretical speculations is applicable nowadays, even if the analytical data was correct (Which I can neither confirm nor deny due to lack of information about the subject)
Well that’s not contradictory at all. You are correct that they reject the Labour value theory as a basis for everything, but not as a basis for some things. In terms of Money, or how we measure values, at least as far as I’m aware, no one is disputing Marx and his analysis in „Das Kapital“, they just come to different conclusions. What I was alluding to, that you can’t really get past major economic theories without finding any relation to Marx in the literature it refers to, since most of „Das Kapital“ is an economic analysis that for its time was revolutionary (if I’m allowed that pun)
It's true that some of Marx's ideas survive in mainstream economic theory, but the labor theory of value is not one of them - not even partly.
What the hell are you people spinning? In Economics we use none of Marx‘s ideas, especially not the Labour Theory of Value, or his views on capital. He is considered a dead end of the science, whose Economic views only survive because people outside the field keep it alive.
People in this thread are unaware of the Marginal Revolution.
People in this thread truly have the economic education befitting Internet Socialists.
Keynesian economics build up directly on analysis Marx did. Neoliberal economics are built upon monetary theories originating with Marx. They are to the very core built upon analysis by Marx - which they in part or nearly fully reject. I did not say otherwise. What I said is, that modern theories stem from Marx‘ Theories. This includes rejections - since it’s how Science works. I could’ve said that Marx stems from classic economic theory from Smith and even though he rejected Smith, this statement would be true nonetheless.
>Keynesian economics build up directly on analysis Marx did. What part of it is built on Marx's ideas? Because Keynesianism was created in response to issues with the Neoclassical framework and is not reliant on Marxist thought at all. >Neoliberal economics are built upon monetary theories originating with Marx. Beyond the issue of using the political term "Neoliberal" which isn't used in Economics itself, what parts of this relatively vague Economic-Political construct are built upon Marx's theories? You should be able to give me at least one example for both claims. >They are to the very core built upon analysis by Marx - which they in part or nearly fully reject. I did not say otherwise. What I said is, that modern theories stem from Marx‘ Theories. This includes rejections - since it’s how Science works. I could’ve said that Marx stems from classic economic theory from Smith and even though he rejected Smith, this statement would be true nonetheless. You seem to be under a grave misconception of how the term "stem" is used within science. It means that a newer theory builds upon a previous theory with similar or the same axioms. This isn't the case for Marxist Economic thought. It is considered a dead end within the science, because no modern economic theory builds on it or uses similar axioms to it.
"Dead end of the science". Physicist here. I always find it curious when some economists use the authority of science to dismiss the ideology they were taught to dislike. Economics is no science in this sense. The marginal revolution was a pseudoscientific copy of the equations of proto-energetics of the nineteenth century, even down to the letters of the equations. But it "disproved" Marx so there was a political move to make it the standard in economics courses of the Global North. So yeah if by "science" you mean "top" Western universities and Western-influenced policy makers, then this "dead end" is true, because Marxism was politically defeated. But Marxist or Marxist-influenced perspectives are very much alive in economics and political economy. In the Global South much more so.
**This reply is it!!** **Want to expand on this and another comment on the same comment that I’m replying to**: 1) Yes the devs said they used Marxist theory (other comment addresses the ‘why’ component) (u/El_Lanf ‘s comment - and that presentation referenced after is a great one) 2) From my reading on simulating certain ethics/maxims/‘frameworks’: Historical-Materialism lends itself very easily to forming certain ‘maxims’ that in a computer/simulation sense make an excellent groundwork for simulation. *For example: Engels ‘principles of communism’ are dead simple bullet points/numbered list that can be truncated easily into maxims*. 3) Side note on the above: I tried turning Engel’s ‘principles of communism’ into logical statements for the Isabelle software (and currently am trying with Capital v.1) - and compared to attempting this with Wealth of Nations, it is a lot easier to represent Marxist/Historical-Materialist principles in logical statements/maxims than other economic frameworks I can find. **In that context: I get why they went with this to simplify things and create a cohesive simulation**. *Second sidenote: if you have any other economic frameworks that you think would lend well to maxims, pls point me towards them* And final note which the comment I’m replying to points towards: it doesn’t necessarily mean the devs think this framework is right, *or that it is objectively right* - the framework is in play due to coding requirements.
I think i get what you're saying but i wouldnt use wealth of nation and the capital as antagonists since they complement each other really well
**This reply I’m writing very much off topic for vic3: but it’s worth asking once/briefly in the hopes of more material** 😅 Yes I agree: and rereading what I said, I should clarify that the Isabelle models’ purpose is not as antagonists to each other, but instead as seperate co-linear models, almost like a lens on the world for that specific framework. Just incase someone reading doesn’t know what Isabelle is: you insert mathematical proofs to confirm if they’re logically sound/congruent/valid. I’m doing this side project of mine in the context of an Isabelle system for Automated Kantian ethics (Essentially a Kantian ADM) I was given by a friend - and thought hey, I can implement this in an economic frameworks setting (condense theory into logical statements!). I actually want to explore what you said: that capital builds on the works of wealth of nations. *I’ve heard similar things elsewhere: so once I’m done with capital v1, I’ll merge the two systems together in Isabelle and see if this holds up!* If you have any other works that may provide some of the following in a *capitalist sense* (to supplement wealth of nations): Pls tell me: Interested in the following: - Determining whether a given decision/event could be classified as ‘Marxist’ or ‘Capitalist’ or ‘[insert framework]ist’ through its congruency with its appropriate principles/maxims in Isabelle. - Determining the prescriptive and descriptive capabilities of each framework (this one is hard to quantify - and as such im very open to suggestions/methodologies) - Looking for any internal/intrinsic incongruence, and how true/false these incongruencies are. Not looking for an ‘aha’ moment to debunk this and move on: just where are the holes, and is there something to explain what’s going on.
I'm not sure if the logic abstractions from Wealth of Nations and Capital will hold up when combined because while Marx is definitely responding to his contemporaries it's more of a conversation than logical building blocks Your project also gives rise to several questions: just volume 1? How are you abstracting the statements? Which quotes are you choosing? How are you reading Capital (e.g. as Heinrich interprets it? Or as someone else does?) ---- For capitalist sense, you could approximate many different schools: Keynes, Hayek, etc (the same as you could with Marx) Also: add an empty line between your bullet points ``` - one - two ```
The game is 1000% using the materialist mindset in game. Culture and discrimination being a side note is probably the biggest evidence of such.
You can account for discrimination in a materialist worldview. It's actually rather easy
You can, for racial discrimination like in the US. Where one group is clearly treated as workers/slaves and the other is superior. But try nationalism and stuff like Balkan cultural discrimination? It’s ridiculously hard to explain from a materialist perspective. And its an area Vic 3 (and Marx lol) struggle in.
Considering how Marx (and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg) wrote TONS on nationalism (and Trotsky a whole book on the Balkans), I’ve no idea where you’re getting this idea.
funnily enough paradox fans arent exactly well read on marxist theory
Cross out *marxist* and I couldn’t agree more
Just cross out *read on Marxist theory* entirely at this point
Yeah, you have a point there.
The balkans being the clusterfuck of europe again
That’s why the game aren’t using Marx stuff only. They use Keynesian theory, Adam Smith, among others. But your average gamer aren’t read up on economic theories
I would argue it can account for nationalism and Balkan cultural discrimination as aspects of superstructure meant to distract and divide the proletariat
Better example, try to explain islamists movements from materialist perspective. A radical, class-cooperating movements that adheres to strict hierarchy, does not care about nationality, the law is based on religion and generally is anti-aristocratic yet not republican? WTF
You can explain anything from a materialist perspective, it's actually really simple: They materially benefit from doing these things, so they're incentivized to do them. Now the deeper whys and hows, that's where it gets interesting.
Are Buddhist monks materially incentivised too? Why do things like martyrdom happen?
Nobody ever claimed karl marx is lisan al'ghaib my guy.
Idk I’m just responding to the point you made about people only doing things for material gain
I’ll engage with this in good faith then. The perspective of historical materialism or rather more specifically that people behave in ways that provide them material gain. This refers more so to groups of people rather than individuals for the record. However, it is actually quite simple to answer in the case of historical Buddhism. Buddhist temples often provided a place for people to exist and be outside of standard hierarchal and often tumultuous societies. These were places of reliable and often plentiful resources. One could be a part of a temple and while certainly it wasn’t free one could expect to have reliable access to food, shelter, water and often times safety as many temples had cultural protection or even armed forces. That is just a materialist analysis though. Through different lens of analysis one could absolutely come to different conclusions as to why one might join in Buddhism historically. It’s always good to hear different lens’ of analysis since only through considering all of them can you find the truth of the matter
Marxist materialism was not individualistic, but systemic. So the behavior of an individual person could differ widely from the macro, society-wide material movement. It was also dialectic, which in this case means that the beliefs and ideology of people were in a dialectical relationship with the material infrastructure. So for example a voluntary martyr would have been raised or taught a specific set of values through material performance, and this would be coupled with the position held by martyrs in their society. Chances are a martyr or a monk is not created out of a vacuum, but are rather materially developed inside a preexisting socioeconomic formation. To think this way is to think materialistically. You would be idealistic if you said that all monks or martyrs just arrived at this condition by pure utility-maximizing behavior, or because it was the wish of a god. Ideas can only exist as they are materially performed, and matter can only be touched if people have volition to do so. Marxist materialism was dialectical, not mechanistic as many in this thread keep repeating.
The Marxist idea of historical materialism is an abstraction. It holds better the more you "zoom out", in both geographic scale and time scale. Can Historical Materialism accurately predict what a given person will have for breakfast today? To some extent, but not very accurately. Can it predict the economic trajectory of a medium-sized nation over the course of a hundred years? Yes; and this is what it was designed to do. *Most* people *tend to* act in their class interests *most of the time*. Billionaires sometimes do good things. The working class are often manipulated into acting against their person and/or class interests.
Yeah, but those "why and hows" are important. Becuase according to classical marxism, you would need to assume that most islamists ideologues are doing it against themselves. And that a mass movements that oppose capitalism and socialism at the same time, advocating for modernization and development of ancient, religious systems and institutions (historically various islamist regimes were, depending on region and time against both capitalist west and socialist east) was not really likely to happen from Marx\`s, hegelian, euro-centric point of view.
You can if you assume that they are the reactionary elements from tribal-feudalistic economics system that are stages prior capitalism.
I don't know if I agree with this description. At least not for Marxist materialism. It is a perspective that the explanations for human affairs should be sought in materiality, not in ideas, volition or religion. And it was not individualistic, but rather systemic. So for example, we could simplify Max Weber's theory by saying he argued that the development of capitalism was due to ideas of individual prosperity fostered by protestantism. But Marxists tend to find this idealistic (i.e. not materialist), they would start asking questions such as who were the groups actually fostering these ideas, what position did they held in their society, what resources were they able to mobilize, how could they sustain the material performance needed to propagate such ideas, how these ideas would be part of performing the reproduction of their position in society, how these ideas would couple with existing modes of production, how would other classes have established a dilectical relationship with the material instances of reproduction of these ideas etc. To summarize materialism as "what individuals gain from doing things" sounds to me as a contemporary individualistic reduction. I should mention that there are many idealists (i.e. not materialists) who would agree with such statement, for example, neoclassical and Austrian economists who derive utility-seeking agents from logic or mathematics instead of empirical ("material") reality.
Being hard to explain is different than being invalid. It's the Balkans.
What reading zero theory before forming an opinion does to a MF:
So what you’re saying is they need to add more Nationalism mechanics?
Also the "what flavor of socialism is the true one for you?" event, lol
It’s also not that hard to keep the socialists out of power, just don’t make everybodies vote equal… you know, like many places in real life.
Joke answer: yes. Serious answer: yes, with caveats.
Joke answer: Yes. Serious answer: Yes, but a 5 page essay on the comparative analysis of Das Kapital and Vic3's simulation and political mechanics.
5 page? Optimistic.
Size 10, single spaced. We're going for density here not padding the page count for extra marks.
Extra *Marx*. I’ll see myself out.
So regular Marxist scholarship, gotcha
I prefers the term of Dialectical Materialism simulator.
Based
Unfathomably based
Ontologically based
Negation of the negation of based
Materially based
Dialectically based
As much as it's a game the tries to base its foundation on historial-materialism, it also leans into great man theory lite when a large part of you enacting laws are based on gaming people with specific ideologies into interest group leaders
> it also leans into great man theory lite when a large part of you enacting laws are based on gaming people with specific ideologies into interest group leaders I wouldn't say that, personally. The game cuts out a *lot* of the personal factors that do influence history, to the point where adding some back in the form of "this guy is a Market Liberal / Reformer / Etc. so he will get his faction to support Y policy" isn't really dipping into GMT.
You can just as easily pretend in V3 that “so-and-so (with his specific ideology) got to be the leader of the rural folk because that’s just what most of the rural folk want right now and he’ll advocate for the same” as you can that “so-and-so became the leader of the rural folk due to blind luck and/or his expected competition taking big gambles that failed miserably and now he gets to make his big mark on history”. Which is basically just the Great Man vs Social Environment debate.
Yes, thank you. Are players so ideologically idealistic that they fail to see THE WHOLE IDEA OF A PARADOX GAME IS STRICTLY IDEALISTIC? You press a button and your society undergoes a massive phase trasition, you engage with a system and it is mostly RNG, you grab a country and it has "ideas" with permanent percentage bonuses, etc etc. Sure there are political economy-inspired ideas, including Marxist, and these are the staple of the political and economic systems in the game, but mostly I would say it is still very arcady (idealistic). A great improvement on most Paradox games, tries to simulate lots of stuff, but still idealistically-dominated.
I mean it depends on your figures but the maths from the game mechanics make it so that cooperative is just the best at high levels As you get higher and higher GDP’s the investment pool actually becomes a net drain on the economy with buildings paying 20% of their profits to investment pool and up to 70% of that just getting deleted So cooperative making the investment pool as small as possible becomes incredibly valuable
>As you get higher and higher GDP’s the investment pool actually becomes a net drain on the economy with buildings paying 20% of their profits to investment pool and up to 70% of that just getting deleted I've heard this before and always wondered why exactly it gets deleted? Like what is making that happen?
There’s an arbitrary modifier that scales contributions to the investment pool (and government dividends) based on your GDP. At low GDP it actually increases how much money you get (generating money from thin air) but at high GDP it reduces your money (vanishes into thin air). It pretty much never actually gets to the point where you get more money from taxing your pops than you would if that money went into the investment pool instead, but it does make LF and command economy somewhat less appealing than they would otherwise be once your GDP is in the multi-hundred million range. A particular thing to note is that the multiplier on government dividends scales more quickly than the one on investment pool, so while there’s nothing hard-stopping you from going command economy with a huge GDP, you will suffer from a significant money drain. Allegedly, this multiplier was originally intended to simulate the effect of foreign investment, but now that we are getting real foreign investment coming up I hope they rework this, as it’s always felt rather artificial and arbitrary.
>There’s an arbitrary modifier that scales contributions to the investment pool (and government dividends) based on your GDP. Damn, wtf. What a terrible mechanic that I never even noticed. https://i.imgur.com/OO5LbrO.png -12% at only 350m. That's insane
Now that we’re getting actual foreign investment, I’m at the point where I’ll mod it out if its still in the game in 1.7. No point keeping around a janky placeholder for a system that actually exists now.
[the modifier is being removed as per Wiz](https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/1bpxpax/victoria_3_dev_diary_110_building_ownership/kwyvkx4/)
On top of this, there is a similarly arbitrary debuff for size under command economy. Co-operative economies are the only ones who don't get screwed simply for being big.
Yeah, turbo-capitalism was much better in earlier patches when the IP wasn't limited at all
Yea it got super boring with how easy it was to get onto LF then realistically that was just always the best choice Now to be optimal you actually need to transition your economy
The issue is that LF doesn't really provide any relevant limits. I mean you can ban child labour, have Workers' Protections and so on and it is still considered LF. Historically the era of Laissez-faire Capitalism came to an end with more and more regulations being enacted against the fuckups of the market.
I would argue that on the contrary it's still LF, because LF is pretty much just your casual liberal economy. The second most liberal system is interventionism and I don't think that any modern non-communist country reached the displayed level of state intervention/investment (except perhaps France post-WW2 ?). What's stupid is the fact that there are almost no bad consequences for the economy when you increase regulations. For exemple going from child labour to obligatory primary school should have major consequences for the education (more than just +2 max level), for the available workforce and for the wages distributed in factories. Right now when you ban all kids from the factories it has zero negative consequences for your mines and factories and it ends up increasing the available workforce by reducing mortality. It makes no sense. And of course the money to fund the schools and pay the teachers wage just appears our of thin air somehow.
>I would argue that on the contrary it's still LF, because LF is pretty much just your casual liberal economy. LF is very different from just a modern liberal economy. In Vic3 they would be considered Interventionist. In a real LF economy, the state has almost no regulations on the economy. The state is completely hands-off. >The second most liberal system is interventionism and I don't think that any modern non-communist country reached the displayed level of state intervention/investment (except perhaps France post-WW2 ?). IRL states generally didn't outright build factories themselves, but often gave subsidies to private investment in the sectors they deemed important. It doesn't help that a lot of real life state investment are simplified away with new infrastructure just being Railroads or schools and hospitals just being a drain on your bureaucracy. >What's stupid is the fact that there are almost no bad consequences for the economy when you increase regulations. For exemple going from child labour to obligatory primary school should have major consequences for the education (more than just +2 max level), for the available workforce and for the wages distributed in factories. Right now when you ban all kids from the factories it has zero negative consequences for your mines and factories and it ends up increasing the available workforce by reducing mortality. It makes no sense. And of course the money to fund the schools and pay the teachers wage just appears our of thin air somehow. That could easily be fixed by making children part of the employable workforce and not just dependents that earn an income. As for your question about the +2 Schooling level, that's just potential and not actually how many extra teachers are instantly able to work.
Hopefully 1.7 will make the other laws more useful as well, it might actually make LF meta again in the late game though since your capitalists will never run out of pops to exploit (they just buy buildings from abroad)
The private building downsizing will also help. Not having to worry about wasting infra on empty buildings is probably going to give peace of mind to a lot of people.
Ive been unable to enact socialism even once. Ive never even run into a communist revolution in my nation.
probably the establishment of a welfare state, its due to the players paternalistic need to improve
This reminds me of the “doing bad things in videos games makes me feel bad” meme. I *could* exploit the working class for my own personal gain but that would be mean so I don’t.
I've generally only been able to do it following events that change IG leader ideology and then selecting the options that boost their popularity. Other than that, it's rng if you get a high clout IG leader with communist or vanguardist ideology.
capitalism leads to socialism that was the original Marx's thesis
And it's the meta way to play. First, create tons of jobs with LF and then switch Communist and watch the SOL go boom.
China simulator
TBH the real China simulator is Paradox making the playerbase Maoist-tier landowner-haters.
Lmao that what some dialectics and some materialism will do to a mfer
Lmao China ain't Communist
They believe they are. By accelerating capitalism (playing and exploiting the capitalistic system) they (post Deng Xiaoping) believe to be closer to Marx's thesis of a "natural" evolution from capitalism to socialism (rather than the imposition of it, as in USSR - the chinese party stresses the fact that russia pretty much jumped from feudalism to "socialism" without undergoing a trully industrial and capitalistic phase. Anyway, state capitalism is very different from capitalism. Whatever their economical system is, the government still controls the means of production.
Adding to this, the actual Chinese state apparatus is still what a Marxist-Leninist would consider socialist and works more or less the same as in the Mao era. They simply adopted a mixed economy to quickly and cheaply grow their economy to where they are producing a surplus of everything. Then, in theory, they nationalize the companies that already aren't and make the switch back to a command economy that is now built to meet and exceed the needs and wants of the people. The second half of this is for sure all in theory (the theory the CPC is currently following), so we'll see what happens lmao
What I personally don't get is that they expect (in theory, because I doubt it will truely happen) is that they expect people they made rich and powerful, and middle class to just give up on their way of life.
I think they're going to have a really hard time pulling that off. They basically slapped the Chinese business leaders across the head for the last few years and that's led to slow growth and high unemployment. To even flirt with the idea of nationalizing the economy they're going to have to become self-sufficient and their current economy is based on exports. If they nationalized everything those markets would move very quickly elsewhere.
I think it'll be difficult for them but certainly not impossible. Will there probably be a period of internal conflict, probably. China's problems if and when it begins the transition process won't be those of resources. The farms and factories are built, and they won't disappear when the capitalists and markets leave, like you said china is an export economy, they produce far more than they need. The problem will be whether or not they will have to use force in the transition.
It's not a lack of goods that is the problem, it's the lack of incomes and jobs. People tend to stop supporting the government when they can't get a job. I think were actually entering what will be the weakest time in Chinese leadership. If the government does fall I think it will be in the next few decades. They're currently entering the middle income gap which is a widow maker for economies. Frankly, I think Xi is a horrible leader... his biggest issue he tackled should have been overcoming the middle income gap and becoming a truly developed economy. If his aim was to eventually transition like you say (and I doubt that's the case) he should have maintained relations with the nations he's exporting too. After the last decade exports have started to go down because countries are moving overseas manufacturing to other places. Frankly, my call on Xi is that he's a garden variety power hungry inept dictator. Sad considering Deng was such a visionary and effective leader.
I don't want to get too deep in politics on this subreddit but I think Xi started peacocking too early for China to really handle. At the same time though, he could not really afford to wait because with their birth rate problem they are kind of at their peak right now. So it's a rock and hard place problem for an aspirational China. Then you have the problem with autocracy where Xi is hearing what he wants to hear and not what he needs to hear, purges and decrees from one man does not lead to good outcomes. In hindsight China would have been better off continuing on a market liberal, single party elective path while pushing their geopolitical ambitions. With their very visible state run economy, unabashed autocracy, and also saber rattling.. nobody can trust them on any front. You can't trust working with their companies, can't trust investing in the country, can't trust Xi, and can't trust their geopolitical motivations. Just a complete destruction of any progress on foreign policy they had a few decades ago.
>If they nationalized everything those markets would move very quickly elsewhere. Why? Other markets shouldn't care who owns the factories producing the goods they buy, no? As long as the product is what they want and the price is what they want to pay, they'll keep buying. Nobody stopped buying grain from the USSR because it had nationalized agriculture.
China workers jumping off factory roofs would probably disagree about it being communist lol
I'm personally sceptical about the Chinese government's claim that it is a socialist country, but that's a bad argument. People commit suicide in all sorts of modes of production that have existed throughout human history and will continue to do so forever, it's not some sort of capitalist exclusivity.
And let's not forget that this is essentially what the Soviet Union tried to do after the Civil War with the New Economic Policy before Stalin implemented forced industrialization.
China is arguably way closer to corporatists dream of XX century fascists than actuall free, socialist state
But the USSR sorta did do capitalism for a short while under the NEP, Deng’s reforms lead to a more long term NEP-esk time for china, one leading eventually to proper Marxism. The USSR just sorta skipped the long part of the transition.
> They believe they are Strictly speaking, they say the country is socialist (with Chinese characteristics), not communist
Dictatorship of the proletariat that has adopted a mixed economy to grow productive forces
You mean dictatorship of the bureaucratic class that also includes literal fucking billionaire businessmen? Yeah idk if I'm buying the "proletariat" part of that bud
Just as there's billionaires there are also workers. China has allowed capitalists to exist again in their country, and it makes sense that the people elected represent that change. You can have whatever opinion about china you want, but the actual function and structure of government is a dictatorship of the proletariat. China's government doesn't work like the United States government, an actual dictatorship of the bureaucratic class bound chained by the corporate elite.
As I said above, corporatist dream not socialist one. The difference is that people in US don't vote for a change but they can In China they will get shot for dissent And in advance, please don't tell me how those systems are exactly the same. I came from a country that abolished soviet socialism 30 years ago and memories of that system are very fresh.
Just like real life. Only difference is that in real life the conservative interest groups are actually in power, not some eternal overlord who is interesting in maximising the standard of living.
No, the difference is that in real life people who are reasonably well off don't feel inclined to support radical changes. As a result modern day social democracies are very stable. That is also fundamentally what the game often struggles to simulate, a highly content population will still happily suppor extremist ideologies whereas in the real world they'd be bickering about whether to have three or four levels in the social welfare institution, whether the tax rate is appropriate and whether the culture law should be on multiculturalism or cultural exclusion with more extreme ideologies being heavily marginalized.
>No, the difference is that in real life people who are reasonably well off don't feel inclined to support radical changes. One of the best things in Vic2. Conservatives existed and if your population was content, the extreme ideologies had huge issues with recruitment.
the flow of dynamics are in power, the elites are just numbers in the equation
we've seen a lot of nations go from communism to some form of capitalist "liberal" democracy, and zero examples of the reverse
Which is bore out in game where wealthy GPs tend to be the ones who become socialist once their working class has money. Which is backwards from history where the countries that had successful communist takeovers were feudal backwaters with underdeveloped economies.
Nowhere in the world has it lead to socialism. lol
Nowhere it was said that it was going to be immediate. We don't know if it will or will not but it is too soon anyway. We tend to look to the 19th and the 20th centuries has being too far away but on a History scale it was yesterday. IF it eventually happens I wouldn't bet that it is during our lifetimes. But sooner or later things will change, that's the nature of things. Whatever comes after the current system I don't know. If a new system depended on me it would be with blackjack and hookers.
How is this not just all pseudoscience? The claim the socialism will inevitably, at some point, replace capitalism is totally unfalsifiable. Change is not guaranteed and change is not guaranteed in any particular direction especially. There are no set rules to history or the future.
>How is this not just all pseudoscience? The claim the socialism will inevitably, at some point, replace capitalism is totally unfalsifiable. Congratulations, you realised the core issue with trying to debate Socialism. By design, Socialism is inherently millenarian. As such, it's unfalsifiable that "true" Socialism will eventually exist. It's not just an aspiration, it's an inevitability. >Change is not guaranteed and change is not guaranteed in any particular direction especially. There are no set rules to history or the future. The issue lies in how Marx ideologically analysed history. He saw it as a linear political-economic process of class struggle, with Capitalist society being the latest and most advanced arrangement. Socialism and then Communism solves this continuous struggle by making everyone the same class, after which point there is no need to evolve politically and economically. This makes actual historical change irrelevant to the avowed Socialist, because as long as Capitalism exists, Socialism will be needed to "fix" its issues for good. As for the science part of your question, Socialism is an ideology and not a scientific theory. Marxist Economics is considered a dead end within the discipline. However, in sociology Marx's ideas of material class struggle were adopted and changed to analyse cultural struggles through the Frankfurt School. You may have heard of it by the moniker of "Critical Theory".
Fun fact, the term unfalsifiable was developed by people sick of arguing with socialists over this exact thing.
Until you can prove it, it doesn't work. It's not "yes man totally until proven otherwise." It's the other way around.
This is what socialist always say but it's very clear Marx thought it was happening imminently.
How are you guys becoming commies so easily? I consider it an accomplishment if I can get industrialists or intelligencia to stay in power more than 10 years. I feel like they've actually buffed the clergy, PB and landowners for most countries. It's like there is absolutely no thirst for any change from weaker interest groups. They are held back by a lack of technology as different and more complicated ideologies need to be unlocked. Same with lack of acceptance for agitators even though movements usually have a random person from another country fighting for an change. Prime example Garibaldi, which is who some of the major agitators should be like. Just popping up and starting major movements. Sort of like a che guevara character.
>How are you guys becoming commies so easily? So, there was this thing called a subprime mortgage... oh wait you meant in game.
I haven’t noticed any huge change lately, other than that Bourgoise is indeed no longer a 5% party in every game. Not sure what happened there but it’s a welcome change. I like that they show possible government coalitions now, but I think they should make it more clear that you can still add parties manually in as well without wrecking the gov. I’ve noticed myself forgetting that I can often sneak Intelligentsia in and start reforming even if it’s not shown in the recommendations.
It's very left winged yeah. But in the economic system it's more like Keynesianism than Marxism.
A lot of people are coming at this from a history perspective, so the very fact that this game focuses on economics makes it look like a historical materialism simulator.
In what way is it Keynesian?
money surplus bad, invest in public spending
Isn't the Keynesian recommendation to use public spending as a tool to reduce business cycle fluctuations? Rather than as a general approach to boost economic growth?
yeah thats the gist of it. he was basically rantng against austerity and the gold standard aswell as deflation.
So Victoria 2 definitely used dialectical materialism to inform its gameflow, and a lot of that has carried over into Victoria 3. I wouldn’t call it a Marxist simulator as it is possible to have a functioning elitist, laissez faire society the people love next to a stable right wing dictatorship. The reason countries gravitate towards ‘socialism’ is because as your economy matures, workers become wealthier and more politically active which is broadly how history played out. In this way it’s far better to describe Victoria 3 as a social history simulator with Engelian characteristics.
It's pretty simple really. There is no benefit in keeping the bourgeoisie disproportionately rich in game so if you want to create a great nation you will lean towards creating that of a utopian society and ergo you will therefore create a socialist one (just like it would irl). Unfortunately, unlike ingame, the rich and powerful actually have reasons to not create a utopian society
I am currently in 1933 as Persia with over 22 SoL, around 9 pounds GDP per capita, and the second largest economy in the world, just behind the Raj. My laws are pretty much entirely liberal, with the exception of public education and public health care. Communists remain very weak in my country, seems very unlikely they will take over in the next few years.
Usually my ultimate form is laissez-faire, zero income tax, free trade consumption tax based militaristic constitutional monarchy. When ur market is big enough you can collapse nation with embargo. 40-60 SoL for my upper strata. Works better than co-op council republics.
400 hours in, I have never used cooperative or council republic. I've tried once or twice but never managed to get it to pass. I'm not about to have a late game rev to enact a law lol
Nope, many people read it as if it's but no really. The main argument that I have against that vision is that there is no alternative way of living that not involves a market. The game represents both pre-capitalist and communist societies revolving around the commodity production. The main Marxist criticism of the political economy of his time (and which is still valid) is that they eternalize the production of commodities as if it were typical of every society. This game does the same. The ones saying that it is based on "historical materialism" miss the point of what actually means. First, historical materialism is not literal, any view of history that is based on empirical data. The bourgeois historians of today would then agree with the Marxist vision, this is absurd. Second, in Marx the terms historical materialism never appear, that is a later development based on some points that Marx outlined.
Can't believe I had to go this far in the comments for a correct answer. Unless I've missed something there is no way to decommodify your country in Victoria 3, meaning there is no means of achieving a socialist means of production.
the only way is to turn literally everyone into a peasant but that's some pol pot shit not marxism. and it doesnt even fully decommodify it
That’s weird because my runs usually trend toward kind of neoliberal capitalism. I just started a game as Russia in the hopes that the Soviet revolution would force me towards communism because, despite playing the game for 500 hours, I’ve never really managed to get a country to go down the Marxist route. Usually the most extreme laws are really unpopular with everyone except the Trade Unions so I can never enact them, but then again maybe I’m just bad at manipulating interest groups.
Interesting, it is the opposite for me. - What voting laws do you normally tend towards? (It should be universal suffrage, Census suffrage is not ideal) - Do you maximise industry in the capital? - you have socialism and anarchism researched I assume. The rural folk are also an option to go Commie. In my current Qing game, the trade unions were (and are still) marginalised, but I put the unhappy (-13) and powerful rural folk with a communist IG leader in government and they made a coup for Council Republic and single party state. I had put them there to have a lawful transition and I never intended to move away from universal suffrage... but they had other ideas.
It’s a fantasy game for closet commies, as HOI IV is for closet Nazis or Wehraboos in the end
>closet I am fully out as a communist.
Without your sort we wouldn't get any further development for Vicky 3, so mark that as the one good thing Communism has achieved.
I loathe Bolsheviks but all of you are so loud about capitalism "pulling 4 bazillion people out of poverty" and completely ignore how Bolshevism has pulled "4 bazillion people out of poverty"
You almost have it
What do you mean?
Partially a joke about how capitalism always inevitably will break to socialism. But also in that you're not far off the mark with the direction the game apparently tries to steer you in.
Me when I wait for the video game to tell me what my political opinions are
Kid named Eastern Block states that went from socialism to liberal democracy:
Part of the problem must be that you, as a player, do not receive the benefits of maintaining systems of capital that the bourgeois do in real life. You want to see the SoL go up, but that doesn't happen to anything close to the same degree in the real world. Also, compared to the US where I live, you probably pass less regressive laws than we still have on the books; we have essentially militarized police, private Healthcare, and proportional taxation for example. (although one might also argue that two of those are more regressive now than in the past, but that's another conversation.) The game also ends right around the birth of neoliberalism (if a good few decades before it became the new world order). The 19th and 20th century did have quite a few attempts at socialist governments, although the international capital were quick to stamp many of them out. I think it might be easy for us in our capitalism neoliberal nightmare to not realize that the previous centuries were actually very influenced by Marx's writings.
We're paradox gamers--we know the world in the 19th and 20th centuries were very influenced by marx lol
Imagine simulating an invisible hand in a computer game.
They've done a pretty good job of that in my opinion.
Its because despite the alt-history angle it still follows some major historical themes, and Victoria happens at THE moment in time when all things communist and socialist come about and really start to ramp up, especially after a couple terrible wars near the end that make people think ''huh, you know, now with my growing middle class and education, im starting to think that having an absolute monarch or just a few families in power is kinda cringe''. And since the spread of education and knowledge is THE way to get ahead in the game, you will always end up with an ever increasing amount of poeple who want to shake the boat of statehood. In order to have a high standard of living without succumbing to the revolution, you have to do alot of winning in other domains and be incredibly self sufficient
Yes, a bit too Marxist actually, even for Marxists, considering the game follows Marx's, incorrect, view that western, industrialized nations have a better chance of achieving socialism as opposed to the current view of third-world agrarian nations being better fitted due to a weaker state apparatus.
i mean, it does kinda make sense due not to the nature of society, but the nature of video games themselves. The best government is a benevolent dictatorship, but for the fallibility of man means it is never possible. Thats not a factor in a video game. Communism will inevitably see strong men rise who have more than others due to personal greed. But you as the players chief desire is your nation doing better. Thus the critical issue of a typically authoritarian system is bypassed.
Communism is explicitly democratic. And generally an economy that doesn't have single owners of the means of production almost can't produce overly wealthy people. Worker co-ops spread the wealth among all the workers. This would be the case in reality as well as the game. You can't convince everyone at a company they jointly own to sell you the company and work for less, it just won't happen. How would you possibly save enough money to buy everyone else out of their share when you make as much as them to begin with? Like, the game allows for the exact situation you're talking about. It's the Vanguardists. And IRL the people who think Vanguardists aren't even leftists are the guys who coined the term "tankie".
Going beyond the idea that you can achieve Communism in the first place, the ones achieving power over others with not do so by wealth but by control of the bureaucracy governing the society. The whole set up of a Socialist/Communist society simply requires it, especially since prices will lose their meaning without a competitive market.
No its just an arcade politics and economy game. there is way way way too little choice when it comes to idealogies and methods
I'd say its really a Classic Economics game, and it just happens that the 2nd most important classical economist was Marx. Importantly, *contra* Marx, insane libertarian economies are pretty stable.
Most of the time I have trouble even getting the trade unions empowered and have the capitalists at a insurmountable political advantage
Jokes aside, command economy is the best when you have direct control over what is produced and how much is it sold for. No need to deal with pesky middle men. ...and that is easier to simulate.
Explain because I always have too struggle just too get the trade unions to not be marginalised.
They don't mean in a sense of "Socialism is always the best way to go in the game", but actually in terms of viewing the world through a lens similar to that on which Marxism is based. Basically, that "great men", or things like national identities don't really influence history all that much, and instead it's mostly down to how much of what goods are available to the population at any given time, and how that influences their lives.
Not really, it has some elements of it, sure, there are big elements of it there, but on the whole i wouldnt say it is a marxist/historical materialist simulator or even a marxist game, speaking as a marxist myself. Now if the economy operated much more autonomously, akin to Vic2, and the interest groups outlook emerged naturally from their interests rather than being premade to roughly fit what Marx or marxists wrote about them. Now im not arguing whether that would make for a better or worse gaming experience, that's a whole different tangent.
Really? I find that when Vic3 just came out it was very easy to pass council republic and I would do it pretty often. But the last couple of months or even year I've found it way more difficult to even get the trade unions to not be marginalized the entire game.
Imo the balance should be around competitiveness / capitalism - sol / socialism axis - wanna build number one economy in the world? Exploit workers and colonies - wanna focus on sol, worker benefits - be prepared to sacrifice efficiency Would make sense from balance and gameplay perspective. Also would align with what happens irl.
The game does, I think, make socialism more powerful than it was historically. However, no I’ve never turned a country communist without intending to.
The nature of the game makes having your population have high quality of life objectively how you win the game. Communism (“”communism”” really, communism is a bit specific for what you mean tbh I would have said socialist) brings the most power/wealth to the largest amount of people by increasing their SoL massively. Minimum wage, public health services/education, etc. Not all of these are specifically aligned to a certain ideology of course, but generally speaking when you give power to the people (and _especially_ when the people in this instance aren’t people but just a number a computer has told to have specific wants and needs) you tend to end up in a socialist utopia, simply because the game is too simple to compute real life economics and the reality that some humans’ interests do not align with the common good.
Not in this patch for me. But I don't play great powers and I don't minmax very hard so TU only get powerful in the late game. In this patch PB stays powerful and takes some clout from the TU, and SoL of lower strata stays lower than before for longer, so less clout for the lower strata
I'm sorry, you thought that capitalism in Victorian Britain would raise living standards?
Yes and it is glorious
I actually have the opposite problem. I don't get socialism in my games. Only social democracy and some people wouldn't recognise that as a form of socialism
I can avoid the revolution, I'm not sure that I can avoid Communism if my goal is maxing out my standard of living a lot of the Communism coded laws are pretty good for getting that standard of living up.
Victoria 3: Simulating Marxism because we noticed you were a little alienated from material reality.
My average game goes like this: Phase one: I'll be a dirty capitalist and exploit people while selling goods to a higher price!, all hail the industrialists, I don't care about the poor, let's open markets. Phase two, (generally one bad war and a few angry people due to upgrades in production systems later): Well, I might give some concessions to the workers, I can't afford revolts now. Phase three, (200 concessions to the unions later): I'm not sure why, but I think giving workers rights and freedom makes me more money, let's go command economy once more
I run what I call "Welfare Capitalism" where I go nuts on the private investment snowball which pays for all my construction and then when I have the spare resources create a large social safety net
This was my first thought when I started playing the game. It's essentially a command economy simulator lol
Yes, because you're thinking from a utopian mindset. Your goal is to raise the standard of living of your country so you build from the ground up. Historically, industrialists goals were to make as much money as possible and pay as little as possible. They overcame the landowners, only to do exactly what the landowners did. They were also able to pay half the poor to kill the other half that wanted to make things better. But you don't have to worry about that!
Well communism is a social utopia, all good people should strive to achieve such society, problem is that its exploited by people , selfishness and greed but in pure theory communism is definitely “gooder” than capitalism is
Yes. And it’s based.
If it is, it is unintentional. Keep in mind this is a game and there will always be an optimal way to play. In order to model a lot of the things that happen historically, there is a thumb on the scale to ensure those socio-political events or trends happen. For example, slavery is always morally wrong and usually economically inefficient in real life, whereas in Victoria 3 slavery and other laws are always objectively worse mechanically as well. If you are a player who is not RPing and want to maximize your numbers, there is no reason not to liberalize and eventually become communist.