It's partly because the IWW really does not have a built out recruiting structure, and just imo is not set up to become a mass organization in its current form at all. Like the bump in membership it got has not really changed the horizons of its organizing imo.
Yeah it feels like it relies too heavily on the college crowd. IWW should be one of the first places you go when you're pissed at your boss at work for fucking you over by scheduling you to clopen 3 days a week and still keeping you at 30 hours and took off your pandemic hero pay. Too many IWW chapters don't seem to do much of anything.
Hey, the Cuban revolution only had like 12 guys on a rusty boat with some rifles. The IWW has hundreds of thousands of sympathizers. Especially because they provide free legal aid to workers.
yeah yeah popular opinion is kaiserreich bad and for chuds but consider that it served as my tipping point for full my radicalization from mild demsuccery to more revolutionary marxism.
imagine playing anywhere outside of the syndie nations, which all have based af writing and focus trees
lol yeah i dunno i'm a syndie stan i guess. i do think legit leftists are on the mod team do the writing for them. i want to believe they are doing it for a good cause
I am far too much of an annoying Marxist to dip my toes into worker run capitalism, but the flavour text is either by extremely well researched libs or some actual comrades are writing that shit. the things it talks about, and the prose of the more revolutionary focuses are :100-com:
you are reminding me next time i pick up HOI4 i need to finally try the two ML paths for the CSA. maybe well researched libs that did so much research they transformed into comrades over time (which sort of reflects in the syndie evolution from antagonists to protagonists over the years).
the totalist path for the US is very interesting. wish totalism was less of a 'le red fash' shitstain with Mussolini in Italy, who like I get was once a leftist, the Sorealians in France, and Mosley in Britain who was just an out and out fascist
I always saw "totalism" in game as applied Strasserism since it has the same sword and hammer symbol, and in the real world it at least pretended to be "socialist", bullshit though that was.
it is used for strasserist esque ideologies too, which is my problem, it is also used literally just for like.... actual Marxists. like straight up I was playing as Egypt the other day and although they can't go totalist without being puppeted, their totalist faction is called like the society of Egyptian Marxists. the Soviet and American totalists aren't strasserists either. it just comes of as asome real cringe horse shoe 'Stalin and Hitler actually had more in common than you think, ever wonder why it's called national SOCIALISM?'
i remember reading the devswanted to overhaul the ideologies because they were so constraining and vauge. personally i would liketo see totalism split into maybe a generic marxism or maybe marxism-browderism (?) (since -leninism is basically a dead ideology in kaiserreich) and a nationalist socialism. i could see them wanting to steer clear of too many references to WW2 stuff so maybe a different name like social-populism? or just totalism for the mosley strain. and split radical socialism up into a few strains for more clarity since they all sound like democratic socialism to the extremeeee! but are actually very different
I get the constrains of the system. they want to have 3-4 sub types for each of the over arching of like rad left, lib, and far right. the box is crowded as fuck as is, and you gotta cut corners and squish some folks into boxes to make things look neater. as much as politics is a special interest of mine and I want like 200 sub groupings of this and that, I know from a gameplay perspective it's just kind of stupid and implausible.
I appreciate that they really do take ww1 as a clear and cut point of divergence and follow that through. like Marxism Leninism failed, ofc people are going to turn to syndicalism as the premier form of leftism in the western world like it totally fits and all. and there very much were social populist far right with some left flavouring like the Sorelians, the original foundings of Italian fascism, and the Strasserists, it makes sense to sorta take that concept and run with it, and repurpose reactionaries in our like like Mosley and Mussolini into their syndicalist societies. I think they do a good job of it all, I just hate the implication that some of it brings about. like the Jacobins and Sorelians in France just straight up purge one another, they fucking hate eachother, they're obviously not treated as the same, and yet, it just looks like lib cringe
Lol if you were on the discord you'd recoil at how much they defend French Algeria
yeah, the HOI4 gameplay systems are just more streamlined is the thing
Kaiserreich is directly responsible for the resurgence of "syndicalism" as well as unironic Kaiser apologia. I think Hoi4's political system has made an entire generation of gamers dumber.
I blame it for giving :funny-clown-hammer: a meme ideology to brand himself in.
I think kaiser apologia already existed but it popularized it again.
Oh no the poor Kaiser, faced with the crippling punishment of being forced to live in a different mansion for the rest of his life, the world is so cruel 😭
I was interested in syndicalism when I first played the game. At the time I liked socialism but thought Stalin was evil, exploring an ideology similar to communism but without all the red scare baggage was helpful for me
same here. kaiserreich opened me to all the flavors of socialism beyond the "acceptable" demsuc variety. it catalyzed me to start exploring as well
In our last DSA bookclub one of the gamer's proposed a "Twitch collectively bargains" stream because you have to involve the workers and make them the front and center leaders. I think he stumbled on something genius
I think this has more to do with 2016 in general, tbh.
Personally, I shifted a bit more left after KR and TNO got me interested in actual socialist history (as opposed to SocDem), so I welcome this.
see the thing with HOI, and especially Kaiserreich, is that only diehard communists and literal fascists play the game. I would know, I've got 4k hours in the game
Vic 3 is going to come out soon, i am already brainstorming for Blanquist France and a version of the union that lost the civil war but supported the railroad strikes. Feel free to message me if you understand orthodox marxism or what would happen if the second internationale had a great power backer.
