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It has to do with the fact that some of the historical communists like in Russia weren't really communist. They had elite rulers who lived much better off than the masses.
If you're looking for the Soviet Union kind of feel, you could try an authoritarian, materialist, militarist, police state, and a technocracy.
Otherwise if you're willing to have an actual communist society, Shared Burden and Beuracratic Beurocracy are excellent in combination for that structured equal society.
Well they asked.. you can claim to be anything.. it doesn't mean you actually are doing it.
The entire basis of the civic is shared wealth.
Would you say Russia's rulers had the same wealth as the commoners?
So in what shape are they actually following through with the civic?
In stellaris it kind of assumes that every empire has 'state owned businesses'.
I've done the thing you're looking for instead.
Oligarchy > Executive Comittee > Chairman (Executive Comittees - IspomComs - were the day-to-day functioning cores of the Workers' and Peasants' Councils - Soviets - after all)
Ethics: Authoritarian (to oscillate between Oligrachy and Dictatorship - late Soviet leaders were obsessed with avoiding a third Stalin), Materialist (for the secular totalitarian slant), Xenophile (for the internationalist slant)
Leads to Harmonious Collective AI.
Civics: Byzantine Bureaucracy, Cutthroat Politics
And yes, by default it's set to Stratified Economy. Have you ever heard of the Beryozka store chain?
P.S. For added bonus, the Democratic Crusader AI will readily play along!
Oh, the Bolsheviks were fairly Communist. They were, to be specific, Marxist-Leninist. Lenin slid in the concept of socialism as distinct from Communism - a totalitarian state set up in the wake of the revolution, and nominally democratic, that would eventually create conditions for Communism through rapid industrialization of agrarian Russia, and then self-dissolve. Instead, the Bolsheviks pretty quickly eliminated all but some of the closely-aligned SRs, while good old corruption set in and the vulnerabilities of “democratic centralism” resulted in a dictatorship.
I would hardly describe the Soviet Union as a technocracy. If anything, the scientific establishment would on several occasions end up repressed because science clashed with Communist dogma - take for example the assault on Darwinism for its reliance on competition between organisms, banned in favour of Lysenkoism and its embrace of natural cooperation and Lamarckian evolution.
Finally... was the Soviet Union militaristic? Probably not, despite the iconic soundbite - the military never held actual political power, like the Academy of Sciences and the actual government, it was deeply subordinate to the Communist party.
Nah, look at dennis.danilov's post. You're getting hung up on "communal" but Communal Parity does not nessicarily mean communist and communist doesn't nessicarily mean Communal Parity in Stellaris terms. I use it to represent mutualist societies.
There's no one set that represents "communism" because the details vary even between "communist" societies. Just like we have multiple forms of democracy in game.
The real problem here is that Stellaris is lumping economic status and individual freedoms both under Egalitarian. Just because you ruler is getting paid the same doesn't mean he doesn't wield political power. Maybe Shared Burdens is the wrong feel, there should be an Authoritarian compatiable Living Standard like Utopian Abudance that leaves political power still tiered by job and a few other tweaks.
Or a bussiness owned state if you're a Megacorp. That said it also seems to presume non-state owned bussiness also exist by default making most societies some kind of mixed economy. State of Lies mod looks to address this more specifically but I'm not sure how well it dovetails with other systems and mods.
Can there be economic freedom without political freedom? In pure theory yes, it’s how garden-variety authoritarian regimes operate, but once you have the power to meddle into people’s lives you tend to abuse that power to get rich, because why wouldn’t you.
Is the opposite possible; can there be no economic freedom (a strong case of state socialism) and yet political freedom? In pure theory, yes, but in practice there will be erosion of that freedom from both directions. Top-down, liberal democracies are mostly a product of the elites accepting they need a highly productive middle class - whereas, say, natural resource rentier economies tend to spawn authoritarian societies, because their elites can hire a handful of oil rig workers and keep machine-gunning the starving peasants. In a state socialist system, the state machine holds all the cards, so you can’t expect it to then play nove and afford you freedom when it already holds your lovelihood in its hands. What’s worse, owning nothing is likely to create bottom-up support for political unfreedom; if you’re accustomed to owning nothing, to the fruits of your labour not belonging to you, then you are more willing to shift the responsibility of all decision-making onto the state too, because you’re not accustomed to having agency when your life has been managed from above - freedom, indeed, becomes quite terrifying, and you end up in a permanently infantilize state.
Let me guess, you’re a fan of the tri-axis model from Nation-States. I guess it’s just too bad most of it is populated by rare or fictitious forms of government.
WHERES MY PROPERTY ?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/06/NationStates_Political_Map.jpg
This? Nah, but I've always found it needlessly complex and full of arbitrary distinctions rather than fictitious. I actually think Stellaris' method of picking a government from Civics and Ethics does a better job of detailed analysis and for simple I'd go with standard "political compass" axes. I just don't think Sterllaris is perfect in this regard.
While the tendecies you list exist, there are numerous tendecies that can de-stabilize any system. Pick a state in existence today and I can make a compelling argument why it *should* not function; in practice other factors allow systems to function despite their flaws. What systems are common or rare has as much to do with outside factors as it does intrinsic tendencies.
There's ample cases of authoritarian regimes offering prosperity and chains in history. So I think a Living Standard to handle it would make sense for a large number of cases. As Shared Burdens also affects political weights, it makes sense that it specifically requires Egalitarian.
I'm not sure whether Egalitarian being what it is is really a problem, more that it leads to a problem with a hole in the variety of Living Standards currently. If it's a problem I'd say it's less of one than the Spriitualist Ethic, or rather the very specific values its Factions hold.
Well to be totally fair, if Paradox were going to do Communism properly, they'd have to send someone to your house to shoot you in the back of the head, take over your game and immediately switch your empire to authoritarian. I mean that's how marxist ideologies always function. It starts off with idealistic leaders who want to share the wealth and live in a socialist paradise. They then rapidly find out their idealism and happy thoughts won't protect them from a knife in the back from those who want power and a bigger share of the pie and it rapidly decends into authoritarianism from there. Not allowing players to choose an authoritrian communist empire, is ridiculous when all communist empires sooner or later devolve into authoritarianism.
It starts with coffee-shop intellectuals. That’s a legitimate description of Marx and Engels.
Then someone with a more practical mind comes along, and starts grounding the ideology. That would be Lenin, who based his work on a lengthy tradition of the Russian far-left terrorist underground that had bagged at list one regicide, and was planning to attempt Communism in a country where peasants were already organized into Communes, complete with forceful redistribution of land of successful farmers every few years.
This guy then manages to seize upon a moment when someone else breaks the system, and wins by playing dirty. The Communists were barely a blip when Socialist-Revolutionaries and Constitutional Democrats seized power in early 1917.
He then proceeds to build up an initial generation of ideological ass-kissers, and among them, an even greater Machiavellian emerges by gaming the system (Stalin).
Now that’s a bit more accurate.
What’s more, it’s universal. Say, Hitler emerged in the wake of numerous Communist uprisings in Germany, which mean Commie-bashing was in demand and he answered that demand by dragging the National-Socialist party further right than, say, his bud Leo Strasser would have liked.
Whoops, broke Godwin’s law...
Anyway, Strasserism sort of lives on in National-Bolshevism, which would have been peak edgelord were it not for the anarcho-fascist movement.
Look, there's no denying that Stellaris is by far a generalizing game, and does not depict what it's like to run an empire of any sort, in a good way. You want that, go for Vicky, heck, even the "abstract" EU-IV that tries to define each aspect of the game into some points here and some entities there, does a little bit of a better job.
Nevertheless, this is a problem with perception on your end. Would shared burdens be suitable for a communist state? Yep. Was that a spirit of the USSR? Hardly. You gotta remember that technically USSR was supposed to be a "for the people, by the people" state, but it in no way was such a thing.
What I'm saying is if you want to role-play a failed communist state, just grab a mix of auth/materialist/xenophobe/phile/militarist depending on what you prefer with a Dictatorial government, and something along the lines of Byz Bureaucracy (USSR is more defined by that perk than by Shared Burdens tbh, you had to apply for everything, listing all potential and possible reasons and whatnot).
It's the same misconception as people thinking that Fanatic Spiritualist is "dumb" and Fanatic Materialist is "smart". In essence, any /fanatic/ inclination is delusional, and Materialist merely defines the approach, the overall mindset, the common idea that's accepted as true. Spiritualists aren't worse off in technology, they just believe in the opposite groundwork (in Stellaris terms).
The Spiritualists are right, and the Materialists are wrong in their key assumption. Neither deny scientific rationalism.
Funnier still, psionics research had fairly reliable funding in the Soviet Union.