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If you're curious about how a syndicalist society might actually function, I'd recommend checking out 'The Dispossessed', by Ursula Le Guin. It's a sci-fi novel set on a world that had a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution 200 years previously, and goes into a lot of detail into the society that developed as a result. Le Guin is an anarcho-communist (a tendency very closely related to syndicalism, with a lot of overlap), so I was worried it would be a utopian political fanfiction about how awesome and perfect the glorious syndicalist society makes everything, but she's never been one to pull punches, even when it comes to positions she supports, so it's actually a very balanced view that goes into some of the problems such a society could end up having. It's an amazing novel, it really gets you thinking. It tries to ask what exactly makes a utopia a utopia, and what makes a dystopia a dystopia - for that matter, what makes a society 'authoritarian' or 'democratic'? Is the anarcho-syndicalist society more free than the capitalist one, because the syndicalists have no prisons or laws and everyone is free to do whatever work they please and live however and wherever they please while always being guaranteed housing and a minimum standard of living? Or is it less free than the capitalist one, because peer pressure, public shame, and collective passive-aggression result in a very rigid social order even though there isn't actually a central government around to enforce it? Does the social order still count as authoritarian if it's only there because the majority of the people want it to be, rather than because it's being forcibly imposed on them? Hell, what is a government? Does a federation of anarchist collectives count as a 'state' when it begins to develop a bureaucracy and a formalized system for the division of labor, even if it's all self-organized and leaderless? Is the anarchist society a paradise where people are free to live to their full potential, or a living hell where the institutions of syndicalist union democracy have led to a tyranny by majority that viciously attacks anyone who deviates too far from the norm? Or is it both? Neither? Anyway, it's a good book, and is one of the better fictional depictions of syndicalism/anarchism in action (I use the two terms interchangeably because there has always been a shitload of overlap between the two; anarcho-syndicalism is still by far the largest anarchist tendency and was historically the most influential).
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Feb 11, 2015 06:55
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Captain Bravo posted:Holy poo poo, I thought anarco-communism was a thing thought up by Ken McLeod for The Cassini Division. It's a real thing? Communism and anarchism were pretty hard to tell apart until the 1870s; you had some internal arguments, but the two ideological tendencies were part of the same movement, used the same flags, etc. The first major leftist split came in the wake of the failure of the Paris Commune in 1871 and was between the faction led by Marx (Marxists, obviously) and the faction led by Mikhail Bakunin (anarchists and mutualists); prior to that, 'anarchist' and 'communist' were used interchangeably by a lot of people. Even after that, the anarchist communism of people like Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, and the anarchist syndicalism of people like Rudolf Rocker and Emma Goldman, has been a pretty major force in the anarchist movement. The three times anarchists have actually attempted to seize and control territory on a large scale (the Ukrainian Free Territory, the Shinmin Autonomous Region, and the Spanish Revolution), it was mostly anarcho-syndicalists or anarcho-communists. You've got minor little fringe-of-a-fringe groups like the 'national anarchists' and 'anarcho-capitalists', but anarchism as a movement has historically always been firmly on the left end of the political spectrum. Hell, a bunch of the people killed by Stalin in his purges were anarchists who had fought in coalition with the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution; there had even been a couple of prominent Russian anarchist figures serving as generals in the Red Army. Anarchists were very enthusiastic about the October Revolution when it initially happened, and for the first few years of the revolution and the civil war the Russian anarchist movement pretty much universally fought alongside the Reds (although the Reds broke that alliance and wiped out most of the organized anarchist groups when they had become strong enough not to need them anymore). Even today, you see a lot of overlap between socialist groups and anarchist groups - they tend to hate each other these days, as Marxist-Leninists now have a long and proven history of betraying and murdering anarchists at the earliest available opportunity, but their politics are still similar enough on paper that you tend to get both groups coming to the same rallies and protests, agitating for the same causes, recruiting from the same social groups, etc. Sometimes you even get them in the same organization; the modern IWW is a weird mix of anarchists, syndicalists, left-communists, and Marxists (Marxists are, in my experience, the least numerous of the four groups, but they're definitely there). e: incidentally, that's why the  smiley has a red-and-black flag and a picture of Kropotkin on it.
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Feb 11, 2015 15:55
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TildeATH posted:You've got me beat. I thought it was just a Monty Python joke for the longest time. The main reason almost no one has heard of it today is that the main centers of the anarcho-syndicalist mass movement were in Spain, Italy, and Germany, and you may recall those as being places that fell to fascism in the early 20th century. A shitload of syndicalists died in the Holocaust, or in Franco's purges of Spain (at least 250,000 Spanish syndicalists and anarchists were killed after Franco took over). By the time the war was over, the heart of the syndicalist movement had been sent to the gas chambers, and it's hard to reassert influence when the majority of your former adherents are dead. The rise of the USSR and the defeat of Hitler also gave the Marxist-Leninists a huge propaganda advantage over any other leftist tendency, so they attracted far more new recruits than any other group, and most of the people who might have become syndicalists in the 1920s or 30s instead became Marxists in the 1940s and 50s. Don't get me wrong, syndicalists are still around (they're still a fairly potent force in the Spanish political scene, and are a constant, if minor, presence in much of Latin American politics), but they've never even come close to regaining the influence they used to have, and a good 90% of the world's population is probably totally unaware they even exist.
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Feb 11, 2015 18:19
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What about Emma Goldman? I know Alexander Berkman is mentioned as dying, but his partner Emma was, if anything, an even more influential anarchist figure than he was, and I don't recall seeing her anywhere. In real life she was an ambassador for CNT-FAI during the Spanish Revolution.
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Feb 20, 2015 05:57
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poo poo, is there any way I can contribute to this mod? It sounds like it needs an American touch, and I'm an anarcho-syndicalist, a labor historian, and an actual honest-to-God officer in the IWW, so I may be able to help out a little, help the American events make a bit more sense. The fact that there's no Emma Goldman in this mod is genuinely loving hilarious, she's one of the most influential anarchist figures of the 20th century. It would be almost like having a Russian Civil War game that doesn't mention Lenin anywhere. Big Bill Haywood doesn't appear to be in the game either, despite being a major figure in the American radical labor movement until he was arrested, sent to prison, escaped, and fled to Russia to fight for the Bolsheviks. In real life he was an economic advisor in the early days of the USSR, and one of the founders of an 'Autonomous Industrial Colony', an experiment in syndicalist workplace democracy that was supposed to serve as a model for the rest of the Union and ended up being forcibly shut down by Stalin in 1926. He turned to alcoholism after the Colony was purged and had drank himself to death by 1928, and was buried in the Kremlin as a hero of the revolution. In KR-world, he just...doesn't exist, despite being one of the more important labor figures of the early 20th century in the US and an outspoken syndicalist (and also an acquaintance of Jack Reed). e: There's a Haywood in the mod, but it's Harry Haywood, no relation (although he was a legit badass in his own right). Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Feb 20, 2015 |
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Feb 20, 2015 09:20
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GSD posted:Charle Chaplain is mentioned as making some pro-Combined Syndicates movie, released shortly before elections. It gets censored. Chaplin doesn't get mentioned after that because he's a possible government minister for the Combined Syndicates.
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Feb 21, 2015 05:35
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James Garfield posted:I'm playing CSA and France declined the Alsace-Lorraine or war event It'll start eventually regardless. While I like the randomness and replay value added by having multiple different ways for the Second Weltkrieg to start, it almost always seems to start way too early for it to be much of a thing. It kicked off in 1937 in my last Combined Syndicates game, when I was still locked in a life-or-death struggle with the AUS, and the war was already over with the complete annihilation of the Internationale by Mitteleuropa by the time I won, so it was just like...gently caress, where do I go from here? Also, Fortress Britain sure does seem to get invaded easily, I don't know who said the AI is terrible at amphibious landings but the German AI has been more than capable of conquering the UoB the last three or four games I've run.
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Feb 21, 2015 16:04
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So I guess it's not so much that the AI is good at amphibious invasion and more that the AI is bad at defending the British Isles.
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Feb 22, 2015 17:19
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Holy poo poo, capitalism is imploding in this timeline and we're not even having to do anything. Also, that 'we changed our minds!' decision is hilarious.
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Feb 27, 2015 16:54
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xthnru posted:I am finally caught up on this thread ,and I can only give you heaps of praise for your narrative style, and the way you reflect the era in your writing. Excellent work. Heyo, fellow worker! 
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Mar 12, 2015 05:54
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Yeah, but I seem to recall there was an unsuccessful syndicalist uprising in China in the 1920s in the KR backstory, so presumably a lot of them still got killed around the same time, it was just under slightly different circumstances.
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Mar 12, 2015 21:17
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paragon1 posted:If they're following a syndicalist model, shouldn't the judges be selected by and from among the unions of the people who practice law? Selections would probably still have to be confirmed by another branch of government. A lot of them would probably be abolished, or at least they were the last time this was actually tried in real life, but it's worth noting that this pissed off some of the professional class enough to make them support the fascists. The CSA seems to be taking a more moderate approach, so they'd probably instead be gradually phased out or reorganized into planning/administrative/logistics syndicates and shifted into new lines of work which still make use of their training, like dispute mediation (for lawyers and the like) or economic planning and data collection/interpretation (accountants and other white-collar moving-money-around jobs).
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Mar 13, 2015 01:52
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Raskolnikov38 posted:The Catholic League vs. the Arab bloc. Or a team up to crush Protestant Germany. An invasion of the Ottoman Empire to recapture Constantinople for Christendom.
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Mar 13, 2015 18:49
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TildeATH posted:Somebody needs to start pumping out Alt-Hist Syndie movie posters. Death Race 2000 now seems like a "What if the capitalists hadn't been overthrown" serious alt-histoy premise now. Maybe in this reality David Carradine can finally get the success he deserved. A cheesy jingoistic propaganda flick in the 50s called 'I Married A Capitalist!' Instead of a biopic called 'Patton' about a reckless eccentric general, you've got one called 'Hemingway' (or 'Rose', if you want to stick with a tank commander; what has Rose been doing so far, anyway?). Features a scene in which someone says the sentence 'Hemingway, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!' Charlie Chaplin doesn't go into exile (like he did in OTL after his last American movie was blacklisted for being Communist propaganda) and keeps making movies in the US well into the 1950s. Instead of a thousand Lost-Cause-Of-The-South movies, you get a thousand movies about the radical abolitionist movement and a bunch of Southerners complaining about Hollywood's biased portrayal of John Brown or Nat Turner. Star Trek is the same show, but is widely perceived as having a conservative political message rather than a progressive one. Matewan is the same movie. Shitloads of subversive Westerns which feature traditional Western plots shot from the perspective of the Native Americans. John Wayne becomes famous as one of the best villain actors in the industry. Ed Wood is still endearingly bad.
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Mar 16, 2015 20:35
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paragon1 posted:The Marvel and DC comics are surprisingly unchanged, with the millionaire playboy types being union leaders instead of CEOs. Oh my god, Batman as a radical trade union leader whose parents were killed by Pinkertons and now moonlights as an anarcho-syndicalist vigilante. Red Son is the canon Superman and there's an alternate-universe special where he's a capitalist. Chief Savage Man posted:Rose is in Winnipeg with six divisions, nowhere near a tank. Aww.  He was one hell of a tank commander in OTL and would probably be pretty famous for it if he hadn't gotten killed.
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Mar 16, 2015 20:56
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the JJ posted:I love how America has this 'gubmint bad' right wing when it's, as our syndy brethren show us, really a pretty lefty position. Saying 'no gently caress you, I the laborer* get to use this, not you fascist pigs, I shall use this for the good of humanity in a way that transcends national borders' is pretty left. Anarchism was originally a radical left-wing ideology (even today, numerically speaking, communist anarchism is a much larger ideological tendency than anarcho-capitalism, which admittedly isn't saying much) and the first person to call himself a 'libertarian' was a communist, so if anything the left has a better historical claim to the 'gubmint bad' rhetoric than the right does.
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Mar 19, 2015 03:05
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This comic scene still appears exactly as depicted, only Anti-Flag is the hero and Captain AUS is the villain:
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Mar 19, 2015 04:44
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I had one game where Russia joined the Entente, the Internationale declared war on Mitteleuropa, and the Entente, when given the option to declare war on the Internationale...decided to declare war on Mitteleuropa instead, so you had WW2 playing out almost exactly the same way it did in OTL, just with the politics switched up a bit.
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Mar 19, 2015 16:12
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David Corbett posted:Why are the Maritimes included in Québec? I mean I get that New Brunswick is officially bilingual, and that there are certainly Acadian communities remaining in Nova Scotia, but the area is mostly anglophone and in any case definitely not Québécois. Pretty borders.
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Mar 26, 2015 20:25
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The Canadians get a 'True Americans Division' of exiles if the CSA wins the Civil War, maybe MacArthur ended up commanding it (and then got rolled a second time).
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Mar 27, 2015 00:52
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Redczar posted:You should be able to reform Byzantium in Kaiserreich because it was the best, most influential and long lasting culture ever, surpassing any other empire you could possibly name, and the spirit of it was surely still fresh in the mind of greeks in 1940 I think it's technically possible for you to reintroduce the Megali Idea and reestablish the Byzantine Empire as Greece, but it's not something that will ever actually happen unless a player is specifically angling for it and is probably in there mostly as a joke decision. You can do the same thing in vanilla Victoria II, as well.
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Apr 1, 2015 08:16
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A White Guy posted:I just realized that the CSA flag is the International Workers of the World flag. I really should've drawn the connection, considering how much time I've spent studying them It's kind of impressive that you've spent so much time studying us and still got our name wrong (it's Industrial, not International). Sorry, I've seen that mistake so many times and it grinds my gears a little more every time, especially when it's newspapers reporting on our organizing campaigns and attributing them to a union that doesn't actually exist.
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Apr 2, 2015 08:10
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Planned Economy is basically the absolute worst policy decision you can possibly take in every Paradox game that has it as an option, to the point that I'm starting to wonder if it's some kind of deliberate political statement on the part of the developers.
Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 07:38
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I met the real life CNT-FAI's communication/PR director in person last year, she's hilarious. She's also an American by birth, although she's a naturalized Spanish citizen now. Pretty sure there are a bunch of modern-day CNT people who would get a kick out of what they can pull off in Kaiserreich. They've only got about 15,000 members now and aren't even the largest anarchist labor union in Spain anymore, so the idea of the CNT-FAI leading the country in an uprising is beyond silly these days, but a lot of them get nostalgic for the old days when they had two million members and were launching mass insurrections against the government every few years.
Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Apr 9, 2015 |
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Apr 9, 2015 04:21
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Kavak posted:I imagine your fellow Wobblies would feel the same way about the Combined Syndicates. Oh yeah, Kaiserreich is basically politics porn, there are a lot of Wobs who play and love it. We were never anywhere near as large as the CNT in real life, though - the IWW peaked at about 40,000 members total in the US (probably a little over 100,000 worldwide), while the CNT had some locals with more than 40,000 members at the height of their power. IRL, we couldn't have pulled off a revolution in the US by ourselves even at our peak (although we sure as poo poo wanted to), while the Spanish anarchists came pretty drat close to actually managing it more than once in the 20s and 30s. For us, syndicalist KR-America is outlandish fantasy wish fulfillment; for the CNT, syndie KR-Spain is more 'oh yeah, we almost had that.'
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Apr 9, 2015 07:30
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Kavak posted:The Combined Syndicates is what would've happened if the One Big Union actually came to be- what would the numbers have been if you had every single unionized American worker under a single banner at that time? In that alternate scenario, ~2.5 million in 1924, over 3 million in 1936. Take that, CNT!
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Apr 9, 2015 10:16
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lenoon posted:I know this is from a bit back but I'm not half as familiar with American labour history as I am with British and that number seems .... Very very small. I can't give you te figures for British trade union membership off the top of my head but I know their ww1 history very well - 3.5 million votes against conscription in 1915. That's the combined vote of the TUC and Triple Alliance, the other unions also held huge referendums on the subject (with some overlap in membership). I'd have to check inthe office but I think 1913-14 union membership clocked in to the 7-8million mark. Surprised that the combined union members in the US were comparatively much smaller! The number was probably higher in reality, but bear in mind that a lot of unions in the US at the time were considered subversive organizations and were thus illegal, so they weren't exactly reporting accurate numbers to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This was also a period of heavy suppression of labor organization, so even the legal unions tended to primarily attract the very radical or the very desperate. Here in Oklahoma, there are editorials from major papers during that time period in which they openly call for all trade unionists to be shot and hung from telephone poles, and there's a Mexican restaurant where the Tulsa IWW hall used to be because the police burned the hall to the ground in the early 20s. The military dropped bombs and lethal poison gas on striking miners as late as 1921. Union membership was so comparatively low because, in much of the country, you were literally risking your life if you signed up for a union card.
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Apr 16, 2015 20:00
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Ahahaha, the Second Weltkrieg ends because of a diplomatic technicality and everyone's kind of just like 'well, I guess we'll go home now'. It's amazing. Even so, that's really something that should be fixed. Is there some sort of event flag that can be un-flagged if Portugal goes syndicalist?
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Apr 19, 2015 05:54
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Erwin the German posted:Saw this happen in an AAR, actually - I think the PSA gets the chance to re-declare the United States. Not sure what other options there may be. 'The US is dead, hail Greater Pacifica!'
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Apr 24, 2015 18:22
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David Corbett posted:Yeah. The two of them cooperating to knock out Germany makes a lot more sense to me, because they both have something to gain. The Internationale takes out its strongest foe, recovers Alsace-Lorraine (and maybe Romandy and the Rhineland), and is able to use its power as a European hegemon to flip Northern Italy, Belgium and maybe the western Balkans. Russia recovers what it lost at Brest-Litovsk, avenges the humiliations of the last decades, and prepares to play the long game against the Internationale - just from a position of strength, with much of its population, industry and resources recovered. This is also known as 'more or less exactly the same situation we had in real life, just with the ideologies flipped.'
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Apr 24, 2015 22:35
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Affi posted:Boy. The american civil war is hard. A lot of it is ultimately going to come down to luck - how many foreign volunteers you get can really mean the difference between victory and defeat early on. You can get something like four or five extra divisions right off the bat, most of them modern infantry divisions instead of militia, along with a few wings of fighters and tactical bombers. All of that makes a huge difference, and the less of it you get, the harder the war will be. If you end up with very few foreign volunteers, or no foreign volunteers, it might honestly be better to just reload and savescum a bit until you get a more favorable outcome on those events. You can also get additional militia volunteers by pushing for St. Louis, Buffalo, and a province in Minnesota (e: whoops), although I can't recall which province right now - and, although it's a little bit macabre, you can also gain two additional divisions by intentionally losing a large amount of core territory, triggering an emergency conscription of old men and children that will give you a bit more militia to work with. If you hold out long enough for the next Internationale conference, there's another wave of events which can give you even more divisions of foreign volunteers, as well as even more aircraft and an injection of Supplies, which can again make a massive difference, and is again worth savescumming for if you're in a desperate situation. It helps to be really aggressive in the early war while the enemy is still forming up, and work on pushing out to stable defensive lines that you can hold. Try to situate most of your defenses outside of your core territory, because it means you can safely fall back if needed without losing very much. Be willing to trade space for time as long as you protect your core territories. While on the subject of your cores, don't be afraid to abandon the Upper Peninsula until you have more forces - it's difficult to defend and very susceptible to getting cut off, and one thing you absolutely cannot afford to do is outright lose even one division. Make heavy use of air support, particularly tactical bombers - if enemy units attack you, pound 'em; if you're attacking enemy units, pound 'em; if you think the enemy is gearing up for an attack, pound 'em. You can seriously blunt an otherwise unbeatable enemy offensive with judicious use of air power. Also, don't build infantry in the early war - build militia exclusively, either with no attached brigades or with only artillery (arty doesn't increase the build time, and is the only brigade that doesn't as far as I know). You can upgrade any militia division to any other division type later, so you won't be stuck with them forever; right now, you just need to get rifles on the front line. Let women serve in the army as soon as you can, because the increased manpower growth rate combined with your already-higher base manpower will pretty much guarantee you an eventual victory even if you spend the entire war fighting defensively - the other factions will bleed themselves dry dashing themselves against the Combined Syndicates' endless wall of humanity. I've seriously won the ACW before by just securing and fortifying the Northeastern US, waiting for the USA and the AUS to get down to zero manpower (leaving them unable to reinforce any of their divisions), and then kind of just effortlessly walking over them. Also, I'm not sure if it's still there, but I seem to recall that in earlier versions there's an event that will delete all your Militia divisions once you're the only remaining American faction, so don't wipe out New England and the PSA until you've upgraded them all to something else, unless you want to rebuild your military from scratch. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 18:34 on May 1, 2015 |
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May 1, 2015 17:35
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RZApublican posted:Given the number of free divisions and militia you get as the CSA, are there any similar amount of forces for the American Union State? I know each side gets foreign intervention but it would be cool if they also got free units for taking certain provinces. I think they get a couple foreign volunteer units but nowhere near as many as the CSA. They start the war with a larger military than the CSA, though. From what I've seen, the CSA is where most of the variability in the war comes. Their chances are influenced a lot by decisions completely out of their hands, and if they get lucky with the AI event choices, they can steamroll everyone else pretty easily, but if they don't, they'll collapse pretty quickly. The AUS generally has the same starting situation every time you run the war without as much variation, and it's pretty lovely. The PSA can influence the war a lot too - it's possible for them to secede, raise a military, and then immediately vote to ally with or outright rejoin the United States, effectively doubling the size of MacArthur's army and making it much more difficult to win as either rebel faction; they can also independently declare war on the USA and turn the Civil War into a four-way.
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May 1, 2015 19:47
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The only time I've seen a tank division show up in the ACW (that I didn't build myself) was in my last game when MacArthur apparently decided to pour most of his IC into building one. I didn't have any idea it was there until I went to attack what I thought was a small, poorly-defended salient and suddenly there's armor smashing effortlessly through my militia hordes.
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May 2, 2015 05:57
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Gamerofthegame posted:Supply originates from your capital, fullstop. If there is a land route to the province from your capital that you or an ally control (I don't think neutrals allow passage) then the province is in supply. If there isn't a land route, then you have to supply the province with a convoy from the sea or it simply isn't in supply. Units not in supply don't regenerate their "health" (as fast) and resource-using units like not-infantry start to blow chunks. It doesn't do too much, but it does hurt. Not having sufficient supplies also confers a pretty significant combat penalty even to non-resource-using units. Note that you can also use Transport Planes to supply cut-off provinces from the air, although supporting a force of any significant size this way requires massive numbers of aircraft and you'll have to pull off some real Berlin Airlift style poo poo.
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May 22, 2015 01:38
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The professionalization-versus-democratization debate was a huge issue in CNT-FAI in real life during the uprisings, and one that was never satisfactorily settled. I've read the transcripts of arguments in the syndicate meetings, things got heated (I'm not sure what it is about Spanish anarchists specifically, but even to this day their meetings are the angriest and most hostile of any syndicalist or anarchist group I've ever dealt with; if they deem something worth talking about at all, at least one person will find cause to scream obscenities about it). The CNT itself was a trade union, of course, but given that it developed out of illegal anarchist organizing under a repressive military dictatorship, it had a very strong and very aggressive militant streak to it, to the point that the union effectively merged with the anarchist terrorist group FAI (they've always technically been separate organizations, but even today their relationship is so close that it's sometimes difficult to tell where CNT ends and FAI begins). The union ended up developing two parallel organizing models - the syndicalist unions themselves, and then the militant wing. Prior to the revolution, their militant wing was organized into local 'Defense Committees', roughly equivalent in size, structure, and function to the 'Active Service Unit' organizing model the PIRA later adopted during the Irish Troubles. Each Defense Committee was a small, largely-independent clandestine cell with a small geographical area of responsibility. They had clearly defined roles and functions, official plans of action, a set of rules and guidelines, but no official chain of command. When the Revolution broke out, the Defense Committees formed the core elements of what became the anarchist militias - each Committee coordinated anarchist and trade-unionist volunteers in its area of responsibility, armed and supplied them as best they could, and formed the framework for a rudimentary chain of command; these sections then linked up into larger, more coordinated groups, and then these groups formed up into the militia columns that ended up being the core of anarchist military strength. It's really quite fascinating to study, because while there were plans of action in place, there was no formalized chain of command or military structure in place, and the organization of the anarchist military happened largely organically during the first few days of the war. It worked pretty well during that initial period of confusion, and if anything actually worked better than a formal structure would have - the anarchist militias were so decentralized and flexible that they were able to react to situations much more quickly than the fascist forces could, and were extremely unpredictable opponents. Once the initial battles ended and the long war set in, though, things started to get a bit more complicated. For one thing, the urban guerrillas that were so effective in the first days of confused street fighting proved...significantly less effective at conventional warfare; though they enjoyed a few months of great success in Aragon and nearly captured Zaragoza, they ended up getting bogged down as their supply chain stretched to its breaking point and the informal, ad hoc command chain struggled to coordinate any kind of large-scale campaign. You would have militia columns just vote to launch an attack on what they thought was a juicy target, without coordinating it with any other elements of the force at all and sometimes without even bothering to tell anyone, then charge on in without any thought for the larger strategy. This resulted in a bunch of separate occasions where the anarchists would successfully defeat a fascist force, capture a town or key strategic point, celebrate their 'liberation' of the site, and then just loving turn around and go back to their trenches, whereupon the fascists would come right back and occupy it again. It also resulted in several major defeats which could have been victories if the militia had bothered to coordinate with their support elements (the anarchists actually had access to some decently effective air support, as anarchist sympathizers had heavily infiltrated the Air Force before the war, and there were also two or three anarchist artillery batteries and a scattering of armored vehicles, but little of it was used effectively at the strategic level). You had some elements of the anarchist movement, mostly centered around veteran frontline fighters like Durruti and Garcia Oliver, who wanted to establish a formalized and standardized military for the anarchist workers' movement and build effective centralized coordinating bodies for it, while you had others who saw this as the creeping influence of statism and authoritarianism, and accused Durruti of wanting to establish an 'anarchist dictatorship'. All of this was also happening in the context of another parallel debate, between factions of the anarchist movement who wanted to ally with the Republic against the fascists and then try to launch a revolution against the Republic after winning the war ('Treintistas'), and factions who wanted to use the confusion of the fascist uprising to seize power from the Republican government immediately, abolish the Republic, and fight fascism on their own terms while also building the revolutionary society at the same time ('Faistas'). They were trying to develop a system that would allow them to effectively fight and win a war, run the economy of a wartime nation (having collectivized almost all economic activity in the areas they controlled), and keep the whole thing fed, powered, and supplied - while also promoting their revolutionary philosophy, building a new society, and trying to do it all without compromising any of their democratic ideals or their commitment to decentralization and non-heirarchical organization. No one's quite sure whose proposed strategy would have worked better, it's all hypotheticals at this point, but the debates definitely had a major effect on the evolution of the anarchist movement, and it's interesting to imagine how they would have worked out in a universe where the anarchos actually won. Syndicalism and anarchism caught one big 24-carat run of bad luck in OTL; they were actually pretty competitive with Marxists for the hearts and minds of the left before World War 2, and were pretty serious political contenders all the way up to the late 1930s. Spain, and then WW2, completely loving gutted syndicalism as a movement - and, since most anarchists at the time were syndicalists, this also meant anarchism got gutted. Syndicalism had been particularly strong in Germany and France, which means a shitload of them died in concentration camps; that said, those two were at best second to Spain, where the CNT alone had over two million members at its height and wasn't even the only major syndicalist org in the country. The Civil War, and the Franco dictatorship's subsequent genocide, ripped the heart out of Spanish syndicalism; at least 500,000 syndicalists were killed in the Francoist purges, and that's not counting the ones killed during the war itself, or the hundreds more killed in counter-insurgency operations in the following decades. By '45, with the USSR flush with victory in WW2 and Marxism-Leninism ascendant, syndicalism was reduced to a fringe movement and has never come close to recovering to its previous strength. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Jul 30, 2015 |
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Jul 29, 2015 06:29
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The latest Kaiserreich completely overhauls the United States and the American Civil War and it's kind of nostalgic to reread through this and remember the old clunky-rear end mess (as compared to the new clunky-rear end mess). In the new one the CSA actually can't join the Internationale without cheating, there's a restriction preventing the country from joining factions and declaring war on the Entente yourself requires at absolute minimum a year and a half of focuses (and if you take the fastest possible path you'll still be dealing with some absolutely crippling post-civil-war maluses). Unless you're willing to do some console-command finagling and a bit of tag-switching, the post-ACW is going to be a pretty boring game. The Civil War itself is a hell of a lot better, though - every faction spawns a big bunch of militia divisions, and the arriving-foreign-support events mostly give you piles of manpower and equipment instead of just outright spawning free additional divisions. You have to make sure to aggressively build extra divisions, though, because every single one of the event-spawned militia units disappears at the end of the war, potentially leaving you with practically no army. There are now many more ways for the Civil War to happen, multiple ways to avoid it entirely, and a greater variety of paths for every US faction to take. There's a lot more flavor events and decisions for everyone, and most of the generals and political leaders are now people who were actually, A, alive, and B, relevant, although the ideologies are mixed up as always (Elizabeth Gurley-Flynn, who was persona non grata in the IWW by 1936 in real life and had become a dedicated Marxist-Leninist by 1940, leads the syndicalist faction, for example). The focus tree is fucknormous, which is not a good thing (it takes about ten years to do the whole CSA focus tree, with like two years of that dedicated entirely to the constitutional convention), but it does allow you a ton of variety in how you shape the country. The country changes name and flag no matter which branch you go down, though, and the new flag options are awful, although it's relatively easy to go in the files and change back to the original one. It's loaded with bugs and design oversights and shot through with typos and missing localization, and the whole thing suffers from stuff overload, where the devs seem to think that you improve things by just jamming more stuff into them (there's a bunch of national focuses on the CSA focus tree which were originally one focus but have now been split into 2-4, like 'allow women to serve in the army' and 'allow women to serve in the air force' are two separate focuses now for some goddamn reason, despite only having 3-4 leader traits to choose from there's literal dozens of redundant political leaders that mostly do the same thing, and there's multiple redundant weapon manufacturer options that all do the literal exact same thing.). Despite that, it's still weirdly compelling, you just have to do a bit of cheating (cheat yourself through some of the national-focus bloat, cheat yourself into the Internationale, maybe cheat yourself through some of the utterly crippling post-Civil-War debuffs which could see you requiring 150% of your civilian factories for consumer goods). I expect America to go through at least one more thorough overhaul before it's 'done' (this is actually the second one it's had so far), but it's already barely recognizable compared to this. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Nov 5, 2018 |
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Nov 5, 2018 22:07
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I made it to 1944, did the entire focus tree, and conquered all of North America without ever getting that as an option, it might have just been a bug. I eventually just cheated my way in. Hilariously the war ended up working out basically the same way it went in OTL, with Germany and their Italian allies conquering most of Europe and then fighting a two-front war between a faction centered around the United States and a faction centered around Russia. Russia went syndicalist, conquered most of its neighbors and installed syndicalist governments in them, and then formed its own faction instead of joining the Internationale, so Mitteleuropa and the Entente (which ended up merging) were sandwiched between two rival syndicalist power blocs. I mass naval-invaded northern France in summer 1944, the Germans suffered complete manpower collapse (for the hell of it I tagged over to them and they had literally zero men left, despite being on Scrape The Barrel conscription policy), and 1945 ended up being a race to see which side could capture Berlin first. There's technically a bunch of minor powers left here and there which I might mop up, but the war is basically over (Japan, despite being capitalist, joined the Russian alliance along with their Chinese puppets, and Mittelafrika collapsed entirely on its own). It was hilariously bloody, especially compared to earlier versions of the mod (Germany lost something like 18 million troops over the course of the war, nearly 1/3 of the real-life population at the time) and the AI deployed nukes prodigiously (the Germans dropped at least three and the Syndicalists responded with two of their own). I got a lot of use out of Airborne during the ACW, there's rarely any depth to the lines so you can sometimes occupy several critical victory locations at once. I caused New England to capitulate in four days by dropping four divisions of paratroopers, one in each of four key cities. The Socialist Republic of Italy capitulated in 1940 and somehow had 3-5 surrounded divisions deep in the Alps that held on for the entirety of the war until my troops relieved them in early 1945, I have no idea how they managed that. Also, Hawaii joined the German alliance, which I'd never seen happen before (they then pumped all their factories into fighter production and sent thousands of pilots to die over the English Channel)
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Nov 5, 2018 23:01
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the best/worst part is that there was already a vanilla way of doing it that worked just fine - hell, anarcho-syndicalism is actually present as an ideology in vanilla HOI4's game files. countries which can become anarcho-communist in vanilla HOI4 include Belgium, Iran, and...uh...Cambodia under Pol Pot  The way it works in vanilla HOI4 is that there are the 4 ideologies and then each one has 3-5 sub-ideologies beneath them. They don't really directly effect the gameplay at all, but the thing is, the Kaiserreich ideologies don't either, so the ideology system could easily be pared down without sacrificing any gameplay Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 00:27
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It's 1947 and still going, I decided to play it out to the end and see what happened. There's four power blocs left. There's a greater Austro-Hungarian Empire in central and Southern Europe which white peaced out of the Weltkrieg when Germany started to collapse and is now just sitting there, neutral to everyone, with its armies and industry at full strength. There's the Eurasian Alliance, an alliance of syndicalist and radical socialist nations led by Soviet Russia, which includes Poland, eastern Germany, the entire Middle East, Turkey (except for Cyprus, where the Ottoman government is ruling from exile), Egypt, and Sudan, as well as the decidedly non-syndicalist Japan and China. There's the Third Internationale, another alliance of syndicalist and radical socialist nations, this one led by the Union of Britain (the Commune of France was conquered and occupied by Germany for four years) which includes western Germany, Belgium, France, northern Italy (southern Italy is in Austro-Hungary's sphere), all of the northern half of Africa west of Egypt, the CSA, Australia, India, Burma, and Canada. Finally, there's the Entente, which by November 1947 is Greece, Portugal, Norway, the West Indies Federation, and New Zealand, with the British royalist court ruling from exile in New Zealand. It's been one hell of a ride getting there, and I'm preparing a joint aerial/naval landing in Portugal to finally knock them out of the war (CNT-FAI won in Spain but they've remained steadfastly neutral ever since). They're the last major country left in the Entente and the technical leader of the alliance, so that should at last knock the Entente out permanently. France is as we speak doing a national focus which gives them a wargoal to spread the revolution to Austria, so it looks like Europe won't be at peace for long. I have no idea what's going to happen when the only two alliance blocs left in the world are both syndies (from a gameplay perspective probably nothing, but I mean, like, story-wise), particularly given that both blocs now include capitalist countries (the Internationale has a few of the independent African states that broke away when Mittelafrika collapsed, not all of which are syndicalist). South America is hell, everything from Mexico to Argentina is National Populists, with the sole exception of Yucatan, an independent social-democratic republic which has won three wars against Mexico thanks to an impenetrable line of land forts. The core units of my army have been fighting more or less continuously for ten years and they've all got Field Hospitals to reduce experience loss (and limit the manpower drain from a decade of warfare); my Marines and Airborne in particular are hardened as gently caress, and all of my generals are gods on the battlefield. The Marines have by this point executed major amphibious landings at Miami, Nova Scotia, Normandy, Sardinia, and North Africa, and the paratroopers have dropped into Boston, Providence, Buffalo, Ottawa, Normandy, the Po River valley, Corsica, and Tunis. I have literal dozens of fighter and bomber aces. I have carriers with nearly a hundred ship kill credits to their name. Although I have still yet to develop nukes, the British have, and have so far used them eight times, making a total of 12 nukes dropped in this timeline (the Germans used four on the advancing Russian hordes as a desperation move during their collapse). I'm also on Service By Requirement at this point and am still starting to run low on troops, even after converting most of my infantry to Mechanized, and even with field hospitals everywhere. America has been bled white for the revolution to the tune of 'There's a Better World A-Comin'. So has everyone else, for that matter - Germany lost almost a third of its population, Russian losses exceeded their real life WW2 losses, France lost nearly a million men before their defeat and then spent four years under German occupation. A couple oddities include that Hawaii managed a separate peace and is now independent and neutral with everyone. It's the last surviving non-syndicalist American Civil War faction. Vietnam and the CNT are both syndicalist and both neutral. The Phillipines is a liberal democracy in the Russian syndicalist bloc. The Kingdom of Spain, which lost the civil war almost a decade ago now, still controls the almost-completely-uninhabited southern half of Morocco, with its capitol being a 1-victory-point hamlet in the middle of a trackless desert (northern Morocco is independent) and its military consisting of a single division. They are at peace with and neutral to everyone, including the CNT. Also, by the end of the war, Germany had pumped out literal thousands of Rocket Interceptors and they were the main body of the German air force; they also seem to have lend-leased them to the Entente, because I'm still running into German rocket planes in the skies over Portugal. e: loving lol the Brits just nuked Lisbon e2: and Oslo Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 03:12
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