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Red Like Roses, Red Like Revolution

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Roaming_Guardian said:
Can I ask what the USAR did to not collapse economically when they adopted communism? Because every other communist country on record has rapidly descended into starvation, inflation, oppression, and assorted awful stuff. And if America is still a democracy, what happens when a pro-capitalist politician gets elected?
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As others have said you'd be better off reading Reds! itself. If I had to sum it up building a successful socialist state was considerably easier in a country that was already industrialized and boasted a democratic tradition not to mention the socialist movement within the pre-revolution United States already had built up worker militias and other community-based organizations that served as a nucleus of the state once revolution broke out compared to the more ad-hoc natures of the revolutions in Russia and China that quickly devolved into bureaucratic, totalitarian nightmares. And unfortunately, the USSR OTL was very good at making sure their satellite states and any movements they supported abroad followed this flawed model.
 
Roaming_Guardian said:
And on a less political note, is the southern border of the US now a mostly straight line leading straight onto the ocean? Is that one town separated by a lake and the Canadian border now an Island? When you say alaska is now connected to Washington, what does that mean? Is the long narrow strip of coastal areas an ithsmus? Or is the former Canadian border now the border with washington?
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As soon as I make the new Remnant map with the UASR, it'll make sense. But anyways, Alaska is moved closer to Washington State, and the UASR does have some Canadian Provinces(Northern and Western provinces didn't make it, it's still a complicated thing to work out.) But yeah, Southern Border is a straight line now.
 
RiverDelta said:
Well, the UASR is from another timeline where they explain your question very thoroughly. I'm not an expert, but there are many reasons why it went differently, and I'd suggest you read Reds to get a sense of it. To summarize very poorly, the US/UASR has strict democratic traditions, draws on De Leonist and Anarchist currents that would make it a lot more democratic and free, and has the massive industrial base to support a communist country.

@Aelita and @Mental Omega could probably explain it better, though.

As for your second question, the True Democrats (the capitalist, socially-conservative fringe vote) have been essentially marginalized due to massive changes in society and government action akin to what the real-life US did to the Communist Party USA.
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Sumeragi said:
Basically what happens when one is a developing nation.

UASR is founded upon a highly mature industrialized society that can already feed itself if the distribution problem is solved. The entire nation has to be a collective black hole of intelligence to fuck that up.
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Iscariotpaladin said:
As others have said you'd be better off reading Reds! itself. If I had to sum it up building a successful socialist state was considerably easier in a country that was already industrialized and boasted a democratic tradition not to mention the socialist movement within the pre-revolution United States already had built up worker militias and other community-based organizations that served as a nucleus of the state once revolution broke out compared to the more ad-hoc natures of the revolutions in Russia and China that quickly devolved into bureaucratic, totalitarian nightmares. And unfortunately, the USSR OTL was very good at making sure their satellite states and any movements they supported abroad followed this flawed model.
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Thank you for the responses. I am of the personal opinion that while communism sounds nice, but it cant function without a post scarcity society to back it up. All the same I'll go read Reds! And see if their explanations make sense.
 
Roaming_Guardian said:
Thank you for the responses. I am of the personal opinion that while communism sounds nice, but it cant function without a post scarcity society to back it up. All the same I'll go read Reds! And see if their explanations make sense.
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Ah, it seems like you've run into a bit of a mis-definition problem.

The point of Socialism and Communism actually is not 'free everything for everyone', though being able to do that would certainly be nice.

The point is actually one of equitable distribution of wealth. In any hierarchical economic system, the rich funnel an excessively disproportionate amount of wealth to themselves while contributing an extremely small amount of social effort on their own. This harms basically everyone by restricting resources away from the people responsible for making them, causing mass-scale misery while also retarding the growth of society. The point of leftist thought is therefore to design a system that can prevent the emergence of economic hierarchies, so that all classes get to fully enjoy the fruits of their own labor. Notably, by this definition, all Marxist-Leninist nations most emphatically fail at being Socialist, as they still have a privileged elite funneling resources to themselves. The fact that the elites in question were the government and Communist Party instead of businessmen means nothing.
 
I just write said:
Ah, it seems like you've run into a bit of a mis-definition problem.

The point of Socialism and Communism actually is not 'free everything for everyone', though being able to do that would certainly be nice.

The point is actually one of equitable distribution of wealth. In any hierarchical economic system, the rich funnel an excessively disproportionate amount of wealth to themselves while contributing an extremely small amount of social effort on their own. This harms basically everyone by restricting resources away from the people responsible for making them, causing mass-scale misery while also retarding the growth of society. The point of leftist thought is therefore to design a system that can prevent the emergence of economic hierarchies, so that all classes get to fully enjoy the fruits of their own labor. Notably, by this definition, all Marxist-Leninist nations most emphatically fail at being Socialist, as they still have a privileged elite funneling resources to themselves. The fact that the elites in question were the government and Communist Party instead of businessmen means nothing.
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Well that's part of my argument, eventually whoever is in charge of running the new command economy will start funneling resources to themselves. People tend to be generally good, but eventually someone who only cares about themselves will end up in power and ruin it for everyone else, or someone doing the labor realizes they can get everything they need without putting in actual work and the system breaks down as that mindset spreads.

The primary failing of communism and socialism is that it always fails to account for people being assholes, or just incompetent.
 
Roaming_Guardian said:
Well that's part of my argument, eventually whoever is in charge of running the new command economy will start funneling resources to themselves. People tend to be generally good, but eventually someone who only cares about themselves will end up in power and ruin it for everyone else, or someone doing the labor realizes they can get everything they need without putting in actual work and the system breaks down as that mindset spreads.
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So what happens under any system without checks or balances.

The main issue you have is that you somehow assume that capitalism is not prone to that problem (it is, we just justify it as "they've earned it") or that the authoritarian vanguardist form of socialism that was dominant in our history was an inevitable path for any and all movements (even when that is specifically avoided in this case.
 
Roaming_Guardian said:
Well that's part of my argument, eventually whoever is in charge of running the new command economy will start funneling resources to themselves. People tend to be generally good, but eventually someone who only cares about themselves will end up in power and ruin it for everyone else, or someone doing the labor realizes they can get everything they need without putting in actual work and the system breaks down as that mindset spreads.

The primary failing of communism and socialism is that it always fails to account for people being assholes, or just incompetent.
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On top of what @Sumeragi said, I should note that free-market capitalism is also profoundly crap at asshole-handling. In fact, I would say it rewards cruelty in many cases, such as in corporate heads, where implementing, say, a policy of encouraging unpaid overtime provides more profit for the corporate heads without any compensation for those workers who are now expected to work for free. This is not a unique case of course, and various forms of worker-screwing are both popular and profitable.

Of course, this leaves the question of "if socialism is bad and capitalism is too, what's to do?" After all, both models seem to have extensive evidence of failure and tyranny, it seems like any compromise would just have the problems of both (thus seeming to also drop Social Democracy and the like) and any other option is more blatant (fascism, various types of monarchy). But the conclusion that socialism inevitably leads to tyranny of the managers and heads-of-state is just as flawed as many will find my above description of capitalism. One case I note that the US congress, the most legally powerful body in the United States (IMO, due to its sole ability to pass constitutional amendments) has yet to start demanding higher salaries and hoovering the economy, despite being totally able to do so under american law, by constitutional amendment if nothing else. They don't do this because as elected officials they remain beholden to the people who voted them into office (if somewhat inconsistently so, due in large part to the very low use of recall elections for federal politicians), and often hold strong enough opinions on subjects such as the power of government that they are willing to sacrifice self interest for it. Likewise, even assuming Perfectly Selfish Politicians, officials in a socialist country would also be unable to hoard money and power easily for the same reason - the people would either refuse to elect them next election, or a recall election would be held to prematurely oust them. The important part is the democracy, because as long as the people at the top are completely beholden to those at the bottom they are considerably less able to fuck them over, no matter the system.
 
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Interesting idea to put Panama between Anima and Sanus. It forces the UASR into an early confrontation with both the Grimm and the various governments of Remnant before they have any real time to prepare. I hope to see more.
 
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