Well if we needed more incentive to being dovish in the future during confrontations we have it. The crisis not only caused an economy-hurting war scare but it cost us our MNKh minister. Defend what socialism has won so far, yes. But don't poke NATO in hopes of expanding it. Let them burn their own backyard and peoples to the ground while we build something worth remembering fondly.
This assume that the doves are not going to continously commit their previous errors or even being unconsciously embolded into increasing their scale.
Something that can manifest with Nato actually expanding in our friendly countries.
Edit: actually, the doves where already at that point in the past, so I think it is clear how long-term damaging they are.
Where does it say Balakirev is a rural? He's an oilman. That said I was thinking that finding a pro-rural agri person to be his successor in the nineties would suit the USSR well.
Where does it say Balakirev is a rural? He's an oilman. That said I was thinking that finding a pro-rural agri person to be his successor in the nineties would suit the USSR well.
As per his wikipedia page, he was born in the village of Tygda in the Amur region, which as Sandyman has detailed was (and remains) an extremely small rural town.
Well if we needed more incentive to being dovish in the future during confrontations we have it. The crisis not only caused an economy-hurting war scare but it cost us our MNKh minister. Defend what socialism has won so far, yes.
Personally I'm more inclined to push to make the next mnkh doves ministers fail starting from after the next one. (With dove I mean dove, not non hawk). It is a valid strategy for the QM.
It will probably be needed to avoid problems with our block when we won't oppose Nato.
Staff Notice: Please avoid insinuating that another user is a troll or acting in bad faith. There's no need for it, and it only serves to incense users in the thread needlessly.
Personally I'm more inclined to push to make the next mnkh doves ministers fail starting from after the next one. (With dove I mean dove, not non hawk)
Personally I'm more inclined to push to make the next mnkh doves ministers fail starting from after the next one. (With dove I mean dove, not non hawk)
It will probably be needed to avoid problems with our block when we won't oppose Nato.
My view of socialism/communism in terms of what is and isn't possible is mostly quibbles on the point of the withering away of state power in the creation of a socialist or non-capitalist economy rather than the possibility or impossibility of it as a form of organization. Communism as described by Marx likely isn't possible if only for the increasing sophistication needed for modern economics and the demands for organizational structures placed to keep even simple modern industries operational much less efficiently, but that does not mean that communism itself is impossible. A state organizational structure without markets and with a means of central allocation is possible to exist and likely far better than a comparative capitalist social structure, the question is how it can be reached with what is available. If what you have is the post-Stalin party structures left behind by the Soviet Union that built itself to function around Stalin and suddenly has to deal with its absence is, if anything one of the worst places for achieving communism. There is the common joke that the worst enemy of communism in the Soviet Union is the CPSU and that to a large extent applies.
I'm still catching up with the quest, but I saw this comment and felt like I needed to go full armchair leftist for a second.
First off, I think Blackstar has created an incredibly interesting quest here, with the kind of mechanical and historical granularity which I could only aspire to. It's definitely been a major inspiration on my own plan quests , Xenopoiesis and Class War Never changes. However, in spite of the clear understanding of real Soviet history evinced here, I think a deeper appreciation of socialist political economy could help to make it even better, especially considering the kind of macroeconomic challenges which I believe a developmental regime like the USSR is likely to face in the near future.
For starters, communism "as described by Marx" was never just the result of his idle, idealistic speculation, but exists as part a greater tradition of agitation by workers and intellectuals that goes back to the early modern era at least. This is to say nothing of the larger anthropological history of distribution according to need as an economic model, a model that is often referred to as 'primitive communism' or the 'gift economy', but which is probably too rich to be reduced to a single term. The question therefore isn't whether this model is viable in the abstract, but whether it is desirable given its potential limiting factors.
Speaking of which, I often see factors like 'complexity' brought up as the main obstacle to communist distribution, usually by free market advocates bringing up the calculation problem. (The latter is something I won't get into now, other than to say that the Marxist understanding of value makes economies a lot more calculable than marginalist theorists presume.) However, there is also a second line of objection on the basis of complexity, and this is the technocratic one. Basically, the incredibly complex nature of modern production makes any kind of democratic management impossible, hence why it needs to be centrally governed. Even if this isn't exactly what Blackstar was arguing here, it's a common enough argument that I'd still like to respond to it here.
Funnily enough, my main objection to the centralist technocratic line derives from a field they often claim to pledge allegiance to: cybernetics. If you actually look into the work of someone like Stafford Beer (the British management scientist who played a key role in Cybersyn), it becomes evident that his life's work was a passionate crusade against those who would use an abstract appeal to 'the organization' or 'the computer' as a means of shutting down calls for democratic management. His main enemies were bureaucracy and technocracy, which is not what we've been taught to expect from advocates of economic planning.
Now, Beer's argument also weren't the result of idle speculation, but relied upon several basic organizational principles. One of them was Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, named for one of his cybernetic forebears. Basically, it holds that a regulator's Variety (the number of states an organization can be in) needs to be at least as numerous as that of the environment it is acting upon. In other words, every distinct Problem needs its own Solution. In practical terms, this compels an organization into several predictable maneuvers: restricting itself to a smaller domain of activity (compartmentalization, in other words), trying to expand its own regulatory capacity, or simplifying the environment it acts upon. The latter move is especially dangerous, since 'simplification' can be a violent process, and often doesn't produce a more sustainable operating environment (since you've thrown a bunch of different systems into discord).
Why am I bringing all this up? Well, because Ashby's Law suggests something counterintuitive about growing societal complexity: it compels a more varied and distributed mode of management. This is not what we tend to see in either state socialism or market capitalism, both of which have shown a tendency towards autocracy or monopolization. I'd argue that's because of their overreliance on the third option, simplifying the regulated environment. The alternative would be to divest themselves from certain responsibilities, or else allow more entities to be part of the decisionmaking. Either is a threat to the kind of class society which a state exists to maintain.
Long story short, cybernetic management is far from 'centralized' in a colloquial sense, since it implies that unilateral decisions are comparatively 'stupid'. Really though, the whole central-decentral dichotomy is politically unproductive, since decentralized authorities can make for petty fiefdoms, and centralized information pools can lead to a flourishing of democratic consciousness. What ultimately matters is whether those who are subject to a given decision (mediated by the level of abstraction at which these decisions are made) are able to make their approval/objection apparent and effective. And since decisions about all kinds of things are being made at all levels of society, something which is true of any society, the task of socialism is to undo the mechanisms of domination which operate at those various levels. That can mean shopfloor democracy or cybersyn in the economic domain, but it's also what leads communists to support the abolition of prison or patriarchy.
Anyway, it would be my suggestion that going forward, this quest forego a conception of communism as central state planning in favor of a more nuanced and diverse emphasis on the lives of ordinary people in this alternate USSR. From there, I think it will become a lot more obvious that what communists mean by communism is far more achievable than it might seem, even or especially in light of the insights of cybernetics. Really, the issue might be that capitalist economics insist on the existence of this thing called 'the economy', which really lumps together a whole host of social decisions about how to live and what to do as a society. Once those decisions actually become subject to the slightest bit of democratic organization (as we've seen in countless different ways throughout the history of worker self-organization), it quickly becomes obvious that these are many different questions, with different needs and different scales. Grand proposals about labor tokens or consumer councils exist alongside everyday practicalities like meeting schedules or communal dining halls. What makes socialism/communism/anarchism so tricky (and so interesting!) is that it has to answer all of these questions at once, while capitalism gets to bank on what already exists.
In the context of this quest, I don't expect the big-ticket items like democratic control over planning to be sorted out as easily as free housing and healthcare, since the latter also conforms with the Soviet's own tendency towards technocratic developmentalism. But both evince a communist ethos in their own way, and the people will fight for both if you let them. The results I leave up to the author's imagination, but I hope my present rant has provided some help in that regard.
Finally, a quick reminder that the crisis tendencies of capitalism have everything to do with the increasing ease of industrial commodity production, and that any economy based around firms competing for profit will suffer diminishing returns and chronic overcapacity as a result. The only solution to that is unfortunately political, demanding new measures and new management. As it is, even without the deficiences of OTL Soviet planning, the USSR is still not immune to secular stagnation of the neoliberal kind.
Not actively encouraging the military to kill Maoists = selling out allies, I see. It could be argued that it was worth it to consolidate our ties, and I would even agree, but simple recognition wasn't exactly a stab in the back.
Not actively encouraging the military to kill Maoists = selling out allies, I see. It could be argued that it was worth it to consolidate our ties, and I would even agree, but simple recognition wasn't exactly a stab in the back.
The conflict wasn't just us and the maoist.
The reason that conflict was there, the long term rebellion financed by Australia against a state that became communist completely on its own, was why we dispatched troups there.
The conflict wasn't just us and the maoist.
The reason that conflict was there, the long term rebellion financed by Australia against a state that became communist completely on its own, was why we dispatched troups there.
No, the reason that conflict was there is that the military overthrew Sukarno because his governance caused a little bit of famine. KPI split over the issue with Maoists decrying the coup, we had a choice of whether we simply recognize the new government or actively support its purges. No one was against supporting Indonesia in Papua conflict, that happened and continues to happen under every GenSec.
No, the reason that conflict was there is that the military overthrew Sukarno because his governance caused a little bit of famine. KPI split over the issue with Maoists decrying the coup, we had a choice of whether we simply recognize the new government or actively support its purges. No one was against supporting Indonesia in Papua conflict, that happened and continues to happen under every GenSec.
If It was just that, the why we did not have a sino-soviet split?
Why the American action that took place ~some months after against the communists in the Middle East was actively compared with what we did in Indonesia, and also seen as a near specular move?
If It was just that, the why we die not have a sino-soviet split?
Why the American action that took place ~some months after against the communist in the Middle East was actively compared with what we did in Indonesia, and also seen as near a specular move?
We did have a bit of a split, but only a bit, because China still benefits more from trade relations and such with us rather than from a loud outcry over the dead. We got denounced and told we're taking a wrong course, though.
Because it followed the same rulebook of intelligence agencies funding and targeting death squads that go door to door and kill political activists. Turns out it's a method that can be used by anyone.
The doves were more successful at getting allied states than the hawks. The EAF, Indonesia, and indeed most of our African allies flipped with doves in power, because the doves aren't actually peaceniks, they just wanted to show actual discernment in who we send guns to.
Like argueably the only success the Hawks had was convincing Indonesia to purge the maoists, everything else was just building off Kosygins groundwork or incidental from factors the Hawks had nothing to do with
The EAF, Indonesia, and indeed most of our African allies flipped with doves in power, because the doves aren't actually peaceniks, they just wanted to show actual discernment in who we send guns to.
That is what we were doing, France got pissy, tried to blockade Libya, our navy tried to run the blockade and got a SOVIET VICTORY wiki box for our troubles and to avert a nuclear war we made an open promise to not send guns to Libya and a pinky promise to not send to to algeria through other means.
I'm still catching up with the quest, but I saw this comment and felt like I needed to go full armchair leftist for a second.
First off, I think Blackstar has created an incredibly interesting quest here, with the kind of mechanical and historical granularity which I could only aspire to. It's definitely been a major inspiration on my own plan quests , Xenopoiesis and Class War Never changes. However, in spite of the clear understanding of real Soviet history evinced here, I think a deeper appreciation of socialist political economy could help to make it even better, especially considering the kind of macroeconomic challenges which I believe a developmental regime like the USSR is likely to face in the near future.
For starters, communism "as described by Marx" was never just the result of his idle, idealistic speculation, but exists as part a greater tradition of agitation by workers and intellectuals that goes back to the early modern era at least. This is to say nothing of the larger anthropological history of distribution according to need as an economic model, a model that is often referred to as 'primitive communism' or the 'gift economy', but which is probably too rich to be reduced to a single term. The question therefore isn't whether this model is viable in the abstract, but whether it is desirable given its potential limiting factors.
Speaking of which, I often see factors like 'complexity' brought up as the main obstacle to communist distribution, usually by free market advocates bringing up the calculation problem. (The latter is something I won't get into now, other than to say that the Marxist understanding of value makes economies a lot more calculable than marginalist theorists presume.) However, there is also a second line of objection on the basis of complexity, and this is the technocratic one. Basically, the incredibly complex nature of modern production makes any kind of democratic management impossible, hence why it needs to be centrally governed. Even if this isn't exactly what Blackstar was arguing here, it's a common enough argument that I'd still like to respond to it here.
Funnily enough, my main objection to the centralist technocratic line derives from a field they often claim to pledge allegiance to: cybernetics. If you actually look into the work of someone like Stafford Beer (the British management scientist who played a key role in Cybersyn), it becomes evident that his life's work was a passionate crusade against those who would use an abstract appeal to 'the organization' or 'the computer' as a means of shutting down calls for democratic management. His main enemies were bureaucracy and technocracy, which is not what we've been taught to expect from advocates of economic planning.
Now, Beer's argument also weren't the result of idle speculation, but relied upon several basic organizational principles. One of them was Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, named for one of his cybernetic forebears. Basically, it holds that a regulator's Variety (the number of states an organization can be in) needs to be at least as numerous as that of the environment it is acting upon. In other words, every distinct Problem needs its own Solution. In practical terms, this compels an organization into several predictable maneuvers: restricting itself to a smaller domain of activity (compartmentalization, in other words), trying to expand its own regulatory capacity, or simplifying the environment it acts upon. The latter move is especially dangerous, since 'simplification' can be a violent process, and often doesn't produce a more sustainable operating environment (since you've thrown a bunch of different systems into discord).
Why am I bringing all this up? Well, because Ashby's Law suggests something counterintuitive about growing societal complexity: it compels a more varied and distributed mode of management. This is not what we tend to see in either state socialism or market capitalism, both of which have shown a tendency towards autocracy or monopolization. I'd argue that's because of their overreliance on the third option, simplifying the regulated environment. The alternative would be to divest themselves from certain responsibilities, or else allow more entities to be part of the decisionmaking. Either is a threat to the kind of class society which a state exists to maintain.
Long story short, cybernetic management is far from 'centralized' in a colloquial sense, since it implies that unilateral decisions are comparatively 'stupid'. Really though, the whole central-decentral dichotomy is politically unproductive, since decentralized authorities can make for petty fiefdoms, and centralized information pools can lead to a flourishing of democratic consciousness. What ultimately matters is whether those who are subject to a given decision (mediated by the level of abstraction at which these decisions are made) are able to make their approval/objection apparent and effective. And since decisions about all kinds of things are being made at all levels of society, something which is true of any society, the task of socialism is to undo the mechanisms of domination which operate at those various levels. That can mean shopfloor democracy or cybersyn in the economic domain, but it's also what leads communists to support the abolition of prison or patriarchy.
Anyway, it would be my suggestion that going forward, this quest forego a conception of communism as central state planning in favor of a more nuanced and diverse emphasis on the lives of ordinary people in this alternate USSR. From there, I think it will become a lot more obvious that what communists mean by communism is far more achievable than it might seem, even or especially in light of the insights of cybernetics. Really, the issue might be that capitalist economics insist on the existence of this thing called 'the economy', which really lumps together a whole host of social decisions about how to live and what to do as a society. Once those decisions actually become subject to the slightest bit of democratic organization (as we've seen in countless different ways throughout the history of worker self-organization), it quickly becomes obvious that these are many different questions, with different needs and different scales. Grand proposals about labor tokens or consumer councils exist alongside everyday practicalities like meeting schedules or communal dining halls. What makes socialism/communism/anarchism so tricky (and so interesting!) is that it has to answer all of these questions at once, while capitalism gets to bank on what already exists.
In the context of this quest, I don't expect the big-ticket items like democratic control over planning to be sorted out as easily as free housing and healthcare, since the latter also conforms with the Soviet's own tendency towards technocratic developmentalism. But both evince a communist ethos in their own way, and the people will fight for both if you let them. The results I leave up to the author's imagination, but I hope my present rant has provided some help in that regard.
Finally, a quick reminder that the crisis tendencies of capitalism have everything to do with the increasing ease of industrial commodity production, and that any economy based around firms competing for profit will suffer diminishing returns and chronic overcapacity as a result. The only solution to that is unfortunately political, demanding new measures and new management. As it is, even without the deficiences of OTL Soviet planning, the USSR is still not immune to secular stagnation of the neoliberal kind.
Communism as described by Marx has the issue in that there is no prescribed path towards it and Marx himself maintains some of the issues of Ricadrian economics that he bridges from if talking conventional economics. The further problem is that the economy is inherently a politicized body that is directed towards some end by either market forces, state policy, or workers' initiative depending on the model of what model of social and economic organization is pursued. In this Marx's description of communism lacks bridging points toward the so to say end state where workers' power dominates institutions. The ten-point proposals are a path towards it, but they are not adequate as can be seen in a direct historical context.
Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society. -Engel's Principles of Communism 15 (Similar principles are said in Ch2 of Marx's Manifesto, I just prefer Engel's phrasing)
To start the process of approaching a communist scheme of economics several prior factors need to be established such as the goals of the economy one is building. How it relates to the rest of the world assuming the revolution has not been entirely globalized and how it is to manage the remaining global reaction to the revolution. To that end, any construction of communism must contend with the international response to the construction of communism and how it will be opposed as otherwise, the revolution will not exist for a prolonged period. This introduces a measure of judgment of policy directly in terms of how it contributes towards national defense and security as a main judging factor if that cannot be secured then the revolution would be stillborn before even the questions of how it can be achieved can be met.
Further, while some of this might be to my more ML background and more general priors, the improvement of material conditions needs to be an instrumental sphere of any practice of communism as otherwise capitalist competition even in its externally exploitative forms will act as a consistent and active measure of suppression. The class consciousness of the workers is well and good, but people cannot thrive on class consciousness alone, leaving the essential factor of having to compete with whatever element of the capitalist world is still functioning even during the theoretical construction of communism. Ideological commitments cannot overcome this gulf in material conditions and that principle limit effectivly forces the rapid development of productive forces as an inherent factor if the revolution is not to be destroyed in its proverbial childhood.
What the two prior assumptions mean for any system of economic organization from more market to communistic ones is that they need to deliver practical increases in the end production of both military and social goods. Without the production of the former increasing to match that of external capitalist threats the revolution cannot be made to last, without the production of the latter, the revolution will be overtaken and propagandized away from even the best-intended revolutionaries with the workers preferring comfort over the liberation of the working class. With both of these as a metric for the judgment of transitional systems as long as a global revolution has not been achieved, any method of organization must be judged by productive outcomes as outside a global revolution if it cannot overtake the capitalist world any revolution, no matter how well-intentioned or "utopian" will be destroyed.
This all puts a massive load on any new socialist or communist economy which is arguably the best argument against attempting a "primitive" communist system or lower orders of organization. If as per the above, a key instrumental factor on which a revolution succeeds or fails is the increase in core production along with improvements in the development of domestic material conditions then any economic scheme of organization must serve towards that end. If the assumption that a world revolution cannot be carried out in short order stands true those are the only conditions on which a transitory economic model towards communism can be judged, as the revolution must be able to endure assault from the rest of the world to bring about the liberation of the working class. This leads to the argument against communitarian methods of organization as, while not bad in terms of post-global revolution/communism, are not effective for the essential transitory stage of the struggle.
Modern industrial organization requires the coordination of an untold quantity of resources that cannot be managed by a community organization on any significant scale as the limits of human social relations institute a cap of around 150 closely known associates and further, the availability of expertise in industrial economics is limited. This could be done through a market system as the marginal value in a system provides an effective series of control signals in the cybernetic sense, allowing a system with a limited degree of local controls and information to function without forming lower-level decision paralysis. The market mechanism is a distribution shorthand that allows for a lack of control and information access on the local level to be compensated for through the use of collective pricing schemes. In a nonmarket decentralized economic paradigm, the problem of information is solvable but it is an inherent problem and requires the localization of total production controls on the decision loop level rather than on the external control level if decentralizing the economic system of the organization. For simple input production, this can work but at the point that hundreds of diverse inputs need to be tracked the model breaks down or requires absolute vertical integration that introduces its vulnerabilities.
Cybernetics in economics and broader control theory approaches towards economic problems are less an instance of central control being necessarily required, just of it as the easiest solution. Oskar Lange in Introduction to Economic Cybernetics broadly compares both capitalistic and Marxist systems of organization as a series of controls and influences, forming a basis for the Marxian understanding of cybernetics in economics. This is also upheld through several engineering control theory papers of which am going to crib heavily off of The Economy as a Distributed, Learning Control System by Francis Heylighen. In his view, any economic model is governed as a complex intersection of control loops with the influence of actors on these loops forming the principal means of economic organization. Heylighen is far more market-based than Lange, but he still offers a comprehensive view into economic cybernetics under the guise of a mixed system that would, while containing different "control signals" still be similar in a worker-operated or state-operated model of economics.
A market scheme for cars with a reduced complexity:
In the scheme of a market economic system, the influences on your economic loop are driven by the demand as seen in the change of marginal pricing as the largest factor and its contrast with the marginal cost of inputs across a single loop. These seperate out micro-level economic activity into a system of discrete controlled decision loops allowing for a direct look at them without an overwhelming data set. In a traditional market mechanism, the loop governing production is dependent and guided by external information sources through marginal pricing systems, allowing a form of independent feedback for the production of goods. Depending on these market influences, the enterprise will have an imperfect perception of them that will then follow with action to either raise, change, lower, or modify production in the attempt to optimize the loop for profit or in a non-profit system maximum retention for workers.
In the case of market socialism, this concept morphs towards one of the individualizations of cybernetic command loops, with workers the ones responsible for making the observation and decision on an enterprise/loop level in a system. This changes the nature of the internal loop but does not fundamentally change the external influences of the cybernetic control system or the proverbial control inputs. The enterprise still seeks to optimize its turnover in an economic paradigm for growth even if that growth is directed by the workers and provided to the workers to ensure that the surplus value of their labor is retained. From there, decisions to modernize are conducted by the workers, as a further factor of internal decision loops but this applies for either form of market system no matter if it is worker or more conventionally operated.
Where this is interesting and when discussing non-market systems the controls of the proverbial control system are altered and shifted towards other means depending on the scheme of social and economic organization that is pursued. This comes as a change of control system inputs rather than internal system decisions with the separation of the two allowing for a more detailed look toward the finer aspects of an economic model. If so, in the traditional central control aspect of a cybernetic model the demand pressure is determined through a central processor or a series of processors that would then signal to industries how many of x items need to be produced along with subsequent cascading effects of that production. This in a "centralized" model would involve the effective consolidation of organs that would determine the demand pressure and the conditions of supply for the internal decision loop that would then carry out the objectives of the plan. This model is to a large extent agnostic to internal organizational structures as they would be in charge of interpreting the signals rather than generating them.
My fundamental dividing line between a centralized and decentralized system is less a single regional office vs an office in Moscow but more about what control signals are sent externally and how they act on the internal decision loop. In theory, it is possible to have an economy that is entirely contained within a single-division loop as all factors are contained as one point of analysis but that reduces external control signals to nothing. While pretty from an economic perspective, this would only lead to the same crisis of overproduction or underproduction that has been posed as a problem in capitalist economics, as there would be few signals and explicitly no connection between society and economy. By introducing those controls the debate becomes one of how influential should they be outside the economic unit and how rigidly should they impact its performance. If the control itself is the worker's demands, it becomes a question of communication and information. How do you predict the demands of the workers six months in advance, how do you adjust production in response to failures of prediction, and how do you prevent the measure from succumbing to forgery and excess influence?
Decentralization of an economic model in the sense of cybernetics is to reduce the influence of price or command factors on the internal cybernetic loop, reducing its controls in favor of internal valuations. These can still be viable and even predictive but this places a far greater emphasis on the role of local decision-making as the primary means of directing economic growth leading to a lack of responsiveness to other aims. Further, the distribution of information systems and internalization of control inputs would serve to degrade the strength of control over individual enterprises which will reduce supply chain integration and the strength of the military industry along with its ability to deliver production much less complex goods. Cross-industry experts are rare and hard to train especially due to the rapid progress of technology and the limitations of human lifespans and requiring them at the lowest level is not possible in an economic paradigm derived from the current one, causing any state attempting the transition to decentralized control loops to be placed under immense pressure especially in the critical point of the transition even if politics are perfectly aligned.
Blackstar's destress mechanism is to write detailed essays in a debate on the relationship between Marxist ideals, modern economies, and the potential of cybernetic economics.
Anyway, it would be my suggestion that going forward, this quest forego a conception of communism as central state planning in favor of a more nuanced and diverse emphasis on the lives of ordinary people in this alternate USSR. From there, I think it will become a lot more obvious that what communists mean by communism is far more achievable than it might seem, even or especially in light of the insights of cybernetics.
While I think there is a lot of lively discussion to be had (the QM likes elaborating on theory as you can see), and those discussions can enrich the reader base of the quest and bring insights on Marxian theory, at the end of the day this is kind of "central planning: the quest", and generally, the internal politics of the USSR are played straight with a great focus in keeping true on how its political players acted and justified themselves. Perhaps a radical reorientation of the economy and politics on the confines of the quest is possible, but it requires the kind of seismic shifts on the system (that very much works to perpetuate itself, both on the part of the CPSU which as the bureaucratic and political class generally fight to maintain their status, or us the MNKh who do so as well) that are either external (an apocalyptic oil crisis well into our period of peak oil) or generally us failing to do our jobs as economic planner (which would probably lead to a lot of a salt) dealing a critical blow to the institution of the MNKh, reverberating through society.
At the end of the day this is very much a historical quest, and while that has its upsides, certainly Soviet politics, society and economics were really interesting and present a number of what ifs, it limits us in certain ways that something like Fantasy Planquest (which is quite good, I think you might like the changes it had, and the QM herself participates in it iirc) doesn't. I hope this answer doesn't disappoint you too much, but well, its difficult seeing something like it happening tbh.
Well back to economic stuff the only other thing know about us and Eastern block trade is that a few nations in it were more than happy to sell guns to the American gun market Wonder if it's even more here.
en.wikipedia.org
