Communism
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"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
Communism is the socioeconomic philosophy that promotes a classless living where every individual works for the betterment of the whole (the "Greater Good", so to speak) and means of production are made the property of the collective rather than any single person. There were various systems and methods based around the idea of common property ownership to various degrees employed throughout history, but proper communism starts with Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher/political thinker who observed the effects of the Industrial Revolution. The cliff notes version is that while the mechanization of production that was happening was a good thing as it generated a lot of wealth, it was grossly unfair that said wealth only benefited a few business owners while most people lived in Victorian poverty and he viewed society as being on a very clear cut path of social evolution with clearly defined phases and stages based around competition between various socioeconomic classes.
According to Marx, capitalist society would get more and more divided between a very small number of ultra rich property owners and an increasingly poor lower class, then there would be a violent revolution in which the owners would be overthrown and replaced by a new socialist government where everything was owned by the state for the benefit of all. Then the state would dissolve and you would get a classless stateless communist society in which everyone worked for the common good somehow. Even though that last part is pretty far fetched, it had its appeal to a 19th century worker who works a fourteen hour shift in a dark textile factory (along with his wife and six of their eight kids) for just enough money for an dirty apartment smaller than the average modern living room in a crime ridden slum, enough coal and second hand clothes to avoid freezing to death, and enough bland food to avoid starving to death, at least until the power loom takes off his hand and he gets fired and thrown onto the street while his employer is sipping brandy and eating caviar in a 40 room neoclassical mansion with a dozen servants. As such it gained its following. The most influential communist nation in the modern world is China, who rose to the role after the fall of the USSR (Ironically, by abandoning hard line Marxism in favor of it's own brand of capitalism).
In modern global society, it is normally considered impractical and too Utopian (read: naive) to function. Most modern economists agree that some form of market economy is better than one which is completely state planned models used by communist states for reasons listed below. Many believe that it cannot exist without great faults and descent into paranoid totalitarianism. Thus, many people who choose to support it are seen as hypocrisy-prone worthless idealists primarily in Western nations. As always, human faults prove to be the Achilles' heel to another idea....back to the drawing board!
One of the main reasons communism doesn't work (though it may be said we haven't seen a "proper" communist state form, i.e. from a revolution in a post-industrial nation) is that society did not develop on the lines that Marx thought it would. Industrial era poverty was rather horrible, but Marx was not the only person to see this and so various other people (some, if not all of them agreeing with Marx to some degree or another) for various reasons did things to make life less horrible by reforming what existed, rather than ripping everything down and building it back from scratch. They introduced labor laws, safety standards and collective bargaining for improved wages, benefits, and working conditions. A few industrialists found out that if they payed better wages they could get the best workers who worked better, would buy the products made in the factories where they worked and would develop a brand loyalty. This gained steam by the late 19th and 20th century and reduced the revolutionary fervor among the various communists and socialist groups. Typically, communists took over not in Industrial countries, but in backwards countries with minimal industrialization (if any) which were already caught up in considerable social upheaval (Tsarist Russia, post-WWII China and so forth). Once the commies got into power in said area, they pushed their industrial efforts forwards. The fact that the revolutions which put communists into power also put in place hard handed dictators who quashed anything that they thought might look like dissent also did not help matters.
As to the economies, everything was centralized and put under a single economic plan for expansion. This could work at getting shit done expanding infrastructure and manufacturing (the AK-47 and the T-54/55 would not have become the world's most widely produced assault rifle and tank respectively if they could not), though it could also end up failing miserably as it did in the Great Leap Forward which only produced pig iron, dead sparrows and famine. But even when it did work it generally did so inefficiently and with mixed up priorities. You end up with situations were you have shops which have ice cream that no one can afford, coupled with not enough bread to go around. Or spending huge amounts of effort to increase the annual output of sheet steel and do little to actually turn that steel into usable goods. And heaven forbid that you allow one of your citizens become some CAPITALIST and buy that surplus steel and hire people to make it into forks to make up for the fact that the five year plan did not produce them in sufficient quantities, that way inevitably leads to slavery don'tcha know! This is before all the rampant corruption, giving much of the Nation's actual industrial output to the military and setting very high quotas for production which must be filled OR ELSE leading to people cooking the books to say that they produced a million drillbits instead of the 200,000 actually produced which screws up future development projects.
In general there are three ways communism is used in fiction and board games:
- 1 FILTHY GODLESS COMMIE-NAZIS: Dangerous, faceless enemies, ripped straight from the wettest dreams of Cold War-era America. These communists are the enemy, a vast, brutal, godless horde determined to take over the world that our heroes must resist. This attitude is occasionally played for comedy, as in Paranoia where Friend Computer's glitched-out personality has made it a paranoid wreck obsessed with a largely-imaginary adversary.
- 2 Champions of the Proletariat: The other side of the coin to what is listed above. These are either rebels against corrupt corporate overlords or a body of workers and soldiers fighting against fascist invaders, most people who complain about GeeDubs think they are being this. Occasionally show up in Medieval settings as anachronistic peasant revolts or other politically-radical types out to pull down the social parts of Medieval stasis.
- 3 GLORIOUS COMMUNISTS: Somewhere between the other two and generally played for laughs. Communist regimes are oppressive, but also able to do great thing through sheer force of Industrial Might, soviet Super-Science, Stalinist Architecture and Will-Of-The-People and can be heroic just as easily as villainous. See Red Alert-II and III, and to a lesser extent a few parts of the Imperium of Man.
Communism has also provided us with the Russian army, which is awesome. It is a sacred law of /tg/ alternate history homebrew settings that there must be at least one communist faction and it must control at least 50% of the world's total landmass. Even Khador draws on the imagery of the Soviet armed forces, despite being more analogous to Tsarist/Imperialist Russia politically.
Like all radical ideologies, communists are all over the Sixth World, mostly among the poor and disenfranchised who can't help looking up at the big fancy megacorp enclaves and wondering how that makes any kind of just sense. The Berlin Flux State was probably the biggest and most successful anarcho-communist enclave in-setting for a while, before it became such an embarrassment to the megacorps insisting they're the only game in town that many of them (including the one run by the great dragon Lofwyr) had it dismantled somewhere around second or third edition.
People like to call the Tau communist. There's some truth to that, given they're a highly-collective society that generally values group achievement over personal accomplishment, but they're also a largely class-stratified society, with only the assurance that their leaders are theoretically cooperating for the Greater Good to keep them from being out-and-out feudalists with castes. Then again, that isn't too different from what many commie states became.
Star Trek is complicated. On the one hand, the Federation are essentially commies, but their advanced technology has created a post-scarcity economy so they can get away with it. Conversely, their chief rivals, the Klingons and the Romulans, are transparent parallel versions of the USSR and Maoist China seen through the pre-detente eyes of an American lounge lizard. Similar post-scarcity communists are common in Eclipse Phase, though with a much stronger anarchist bent. They are largely and uncomplicatedly perfect due to the game designers' raging stiffy for that kind of thing.
Any WWII or quasi-WWII game worth its salt will have a communist faction, including the classic Axis & Allies and the modern wargame Flames of War. Additionally, many classic board games have attempted to tap into the forty-five year struggle for dominance between Amurica and the communists. The most famous and best is probably Twilight Struggle. TSR also released an RPG set during the Cold War called Top Secret, though, like most non-D&D TSR products, no one under thirty-five has ever heard of it.
This article has been marked as containing treasonous capitalist road sentiments. Please report to your local commissariat for re-education through labor.