Brain said:
As someone who has experienced communism directly and not just learned about it from other sources I find it quite ammusing when such arguments arise.
Kind of a pointless argument, no? It's called an
appeal to authority and is a logical fallacy. I know plenty of people who live in representative democracies but haven't the faintest idea of how they work. I don't doubt the fact that you have a better understanding of communism than your average joe, but the point that you lived under communism is irrelevant to the matter at hand.
The notion that political ideology can be isolated from economic ideology is ludicrous. Communism has evolved into stalinism precisely because it couldn't survive otherwise.
Au contraire. Suharto, Pinochet, and now China have all demonstrated how it is possible to have a totalitarian capitalist state. Communism evolved into stalinism as the result of numerous forces, most notably the lingering underground, mafia-like mentality formed from years of oppression, as well as an enormous bureaucracy.
It is impossible to have a "democratic communism" for the very simple reason that the state owns everything and exerts direct power over everyone simply by virtue of being their employer (there are other reasons as well, but let me keep this discussion in terms familiar to free-market societies).
True, under Stalinism the state owned everything, but Stalinism is in no way indicative of neither all the communist movements at the time nor the modern communist movement. When people speak of "democratic communism" they look less to the tyranny of Moscow or Beijing, and more to examples such as the Spain during the Spanish Civil War, Kerala in India and various worker-controlled towns and provinces in northern Argentina. In fact, one could easily argue that the USSR never came close to being communist, hence the name Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. True, democratic communism strives not for an overarching bureaucracy and instead aims to be a system of worker democracy.
Can you imagine running for office against your own boss? The fact is that there can be no political competition without economic competition. Again, this is very hard to explain to someone who hasn't really lived in communism.
Again, enter: worker democracy. True, there can be no political competition under
socialism. But democratic communism, on the other hand, is a different story.
Don't get me wrong. It is possible to create utopian "communist" societies and such societies really exist, but only on a very small scale (e.g. monasteries and secluded religious communities). As soon as your society gets to a size where not everyone can know everyone else directly then the ideal falls apart.
Kerala is a province in India of 33 million with a literacy rate of 100% that successfully implemented communism. True worker democracy CAN be implemented successfully, but has relentlessly been oppressed by the rest of the world. It is unreasonable to believe that a fledgling state can survive on its own, and with sanctions, sabotage and outright war surrounding them, the chance of success for any state that refuses to toe the official WTO line is next to nil.
I hope that the game will at least partly reflect this - e.g. you can choose a communist system but you can't have personal freedoms at the same time if your state exceeds a certain size. And I really hope that communism is not the super-efficient war machine that it was in C3C. Please! Communism is anything but efficient.
I simply hope that they make the civics system fun, balanced, and quasi-realistic - but in that order. Remember, it's just a game, and you can always mod it if you want.
s
. Most people have no clue how a communist state works in practice.
