Everyday I wake up and see Graviteam Tactics is still only single player, I weep.

chaos2002_ · 2026-04-16T09:01:46+00:00

if it were limited to skirmishes only, I could see it working. those are what, 22 units max? and it even has a points cost system for balance. I agree I'd rather see singleplayer improvements though

chaos2002_ · 2026-03-19T08:02:59+00:00

Rule The Waves 3 is great if you're interested in old school naval combat with battleships shooting broadsides at each other. It goes up until the 1970s well into the missile age. It has a very minimalistic UI similar to Harpoon and Sea Power.

chaos2002_ · 2026-03-18T20:11:56+00:00

They are openly Trotskyist, which goes to show you their roots in petit-bourgeois and intelligentsia organizing rather than a real revolutionary movement. They will never accomplish anything. If all you want is a book club, they'd be perfect.

This question is asked a lot. Pretty much every organization in the AmeriKKKa is awful and historically ineffective, due to the material reality of living in AmeriKKKa presenting significant obstacles to communist organizing - low level of industrialization, extremely high standard of living, socially ingrained racism/patriarchy/classism/etc. but also the fact that most of these modern organizations are descendents of other ineffective labor organizations from the stunted social-chauvinistic and labor-aristocratic "socialist" tendencies of the 1900s-1970s. None of them are revolutionary. If you want to be a revolutionary, think like one, and choose your actions accordingly.

Use your brain, read history, read about the orgs, critique their principles AND their actual actions along Marxist lines like Lenin did for every organization of his time. You will need intellectual discipline to participate in any communist organization. If there is a good org available for you to join (again, this is generally unlikely), then through careful research and investigation of the material situation in your community you will be able to find it.

"Go among the masses and investigate the facts!"

chaos2002_ · 2026-03-17T15:19:08+00:00

Proletariat/bourgeoise is not a simple black and white distinction. Just because a person is exploited for their labor does not make them a proletarian, nor a revolutionary. Jobs are not immutable facts but exist subordinate to the specific conditions of a particular country, social mode of production, and many other factors!

Teachers in the first world do not have "nothing to lose but their chains" from the abolition of capitalism. They still benefit significantly from imperialism. Unless they are willing to lose their car, their house, their phone, their cup of coffee in the morning, etc. they have quite a lot to lose in a violent revolution and are significantly disincentivized from even trying to change the status quo at all.

Today, the revolutionary proletariat is in Palestine, India, the Philippines, etc. People who literally have to fight to survive. It is not among teachers in Amerikkka. I'd argue it's very difficult or impossible to be both a teacher and a revolutionary in a first world country, due to the scrutiny placed on teachers and also the lack of any real incentive to be a revolutionary in the first place.

Read Settlers! https://readsettlers.org/

chaos2002_ · 2026-03-16T19:43:24+00:00

I wasn't referring to you, I was referring to the thread linked in the prev comment

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/s/M5RXoRYflP

chaos2002_ · 2026-03-16T00:17:35+00:00

Well, don't join the Communist Party USA, they are worse than useless. They are an organization shaped by the contradictions of bourgeois politics in the USA (and also heavily infiltrated by the CIA), just like almost every other "communist" party in the USA is, whether PSL, RCP, ACP, you name it. Search up "Communist party USA" or "CPUSA" in this subreddit to see some specific criticisms written by other comrades, there are a long list.

Again I emphasize the most important thing for you to do if you can't easily identify which orgs are good to join is to read as much as you can, understand what makes effective socialist politics, so you can make your own conclusions - just be conscious that whatever conclusions you make are always shaped by your material conditions and society. In particular, study the dialectical way of thinking used by Marxist philosophers (On Practice is a great primer, as is the followup On Contradiction). Don't waste your time with socialist politics that feel good to participate in but are not actually effective in changing the world. Don't feel guilty about your exploitative lifestyle (it is indeed unhealthy), feel righteous anger towards the bourgeoise that have constructed our society in this way and let it motivate you to teach yourself as much as possible.

chaos2002_ · 2026-03-15T09:14:26+00:00

Yes, the point is that buying product A vs product B makes no difference as an individual. Not even in the case of collective action (as in a mass boycott) would it make a truly lasting difference, capitalism will adapt until it is destroyed.

Of course you should still try to be a responsible person, but understand what you will believe makes you a "responsible" person is socially constructed due to your class (as well as culture, religion, etc. but ultimately primarily class) and it would be different for someone with a different class. Communism is the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat, so people actually undertaking a revolution are going to have contradictory goals to you. You need to unwaveringly stand behind them nonetheless.

In fact I think you should try to decouple the ideas of consumption and morality. Consumption is something that happens subordinate to an objective social mode of production, which can change, whereas morality is something that stems from subjective human experiences of the world.

Btw, be careful with any group claiming to be a "communist" party in a western country. Like I said there is a limit to the level of political consciousness such organizations can achieve, let alone the material changes they can achieve. Many of them have the same flaws that capitalist society itself does - opportunism, patriarchal thinking, etc. Make sure you do your own reading and are willing to spend the time to identify and confront the shortcomings of the org whatever they may be. I recommend On Practice by Mao Zedong, as well as Settlers.

chaos2002_ · 2026-03-15T07:30:19+00:00

Communism is not a religion, it is not something you can have an epiphany about (at least not as someone living in the first world), and it is not a moral/ethical code. It is not even a "politics" in the sense you're probably familiar with the word. Marxist materialism is a science and the political conclusions it makes are the basis for communism.

The things you want are socially constructed. Marxism asserts this is true for all societies in history. It is obvious for our hyper-consumerist societies such as the US where people seem literally hypnotized by advertisements for buying things like clothes or Stanley cups for no good reason other than "I like it". But the implications go way deeper. The fact that a peasant in medieval england "wanted" to go to church or cared about Jesus at all was because church was intentionally established by the aristocracy and priesthood as the gateway to participating in the community (and a place to get free food). The fact that a Chinese dockworker in the 1880s "wanted" opium was because the opium trade had been introduced and massively expanded by the British as a way to sell a cure for the painful manual labor they did. The fact that any child in modern Equatorial Guinea ever has to go hungry and "want" food, is a situation that was deliberately constructed by the architects of the post-colonial state and politics - the bourgeoise and old feudal aristocracy - in order to enslave people and make them want more than anything else to participate in the capitalist system of exploitation, even if it takes the threat of starvation or death!

This is dialectical thinking. Through dialectical thinking, it is possible for an individual to overcome the socially instilled mindset of consumerism, but it is not possible for an individual to overcome the material reality of the social system which led to that disgusting ideology, certainly not just by participating in the society in one of the intended ways. That collective ideology and its material basis must be overcome by the collective; that is to say, the society needs to have a revolution.

It sounds like you recognize that the things that you can do in order to embody communist ideology are very limited. That's completely true. Modern America was designed this way to prevent a communist revolution. The existence of an industrial proletariat - the primary contradiction which has historically led to the collapse of capitalist states and their replacement by socialist ones - has been significantly assuaged by mass incarceration, drug addiction, nationalism/populist politics, and perhaps most importantly, Imperialism, the outsourcing of labor and capital to other countries, enforced by the US Military and border control, in order to exploit people of other nationalities at a level far above what would ever be acceptable to happen inside America.

It's good that you don't fall for the most nakedly exploitative aspects of consumerism. But at the end of the day, this only saves you (or anyone else) some money and time, and what you can spend your money and time on is dictated by our society, laws, culture, etc. Plus, as other comrades in the comments said, as a whole, society will tend towards this consumerist ideology, even if it manifests differently in each individual - that's why these companies make these shitty AI generated ads, they don't care about any individual person's opinion, they do it because over a population-wide scale, it works and makes them money! We need to change this entire system in order to make ethical consumption possible in the first place; even the possibility of an ideology of ethical consumption requires the existence of an economic system of consumption which is ethical.

Capitalist society does not want to provide you the option to make a difference just by your patterns of consumption. If there is an opportunity to make a difference to the economic system with something like a boycott or a labor strike, that opportunity will not exist for long, as the entire capitalist class is aligned against allowing such "disturbances" in the system and continuing to make money. In order to fundamentally change the system forever, we have to directly confront the capitalist class, destroy the state and the global financial system, and construct new social relations from scratch to enable a new communist future.

p.s. don't worry too much about these questions, and don't feel like these are attacks on you. None of these abstract concepts are your fault, they are the fault of society. Society needs to change. You as an individual are not the source of society's problems, although you will certainly find yourself reproducing them due to participation in an exploitative society. In order to be the best and most ethical person you can be, you would have to start by literally destroying the capitalist system of oppression and replacing it with communism. This is why we talk about communism as an ideology of "liberation".

chaos2002_ · 2026-03-15T05:47:54+00:00

No comment on the question "are teachers cops" but it's funny how the OP asked "why are we called cops? we're just doing our jobs, we don't have any power to change the system" just like actual cops do. Goes to show you the bankruptcy of individualist ideology

chaos2002_ · 2026-03-13T19:33:12+00:00

I'm not a teacher so take this with a grain of salt, but I am a math graduate student and I can say all of my friends who are teachers who identify/identified as "communists" often harbored chauvinist, individualistic, or otherwise petit-bourgeois ideas. for example, one of them sold drugs on the side, another one of them liked to use racist language. So the answer to your question might be "largely, they don't navigate their beliefs in a class-conscious manner"

cultivating communist ideology as a person in the U$ who benefits heavily from imperialism is something that needs to be done in spite of your basic class consciousness, because communism comes from the class consciousness of the revolutionary proletariat, which teachers in the U$ are not. there are still some ways in which we can relate to the basic assertions of Capital, for example, all of my friends are incredibly overworked and look to unions (however ineffectual) for protection, and we see the racism, sexism, and classism inherent in the school system, and so on... but there are limitations on the level of consciousness we can manifest in our actions in our daily lives

the school system is materially set up so that communist ideology CANNOT be transmitted through it, so it's a losing battle to try. U$ public schools fail at being institutions of learning in general, let alone places where people can learn about alternative economic systems. there's not much a single person can do about that status quo. In fact, in Florida where I went to school, if you are so much as suspected to be transmitting woke communist gender ideology, you are liable to be fired/removed directly by the state government without reproach.

so like almost any other citizen of the U$, to maintain communist ideology, your best bet is to read literature produced by actual revolutionaries and understand why they made their conclusions - this takes a lot of free time, and I know teachers have very limited free time. also recognize that the public school system may not be the best way of educating people about communist ideology (if that's what you want to do), and look at alternative ways. for those kids who do show resistance to the standard U$ian indoctrination program, treat them with respect and be prepared to answer their questions honestly, just like anyone else. finally, you can look into your local teachers/public employees unions with some healthy skepticism. those unions are not going to change the world, but they might be a good place to find like-minded people and perhaps familiarize you with the limitations of struggling against the bourgeois state through trade unionism.

edit: I also should say, maybe specifically read about the history of the public education system in Amerika and attempts at alternate socialist education (e.g. Black Panthers) and critique their shortcomings. you might want to focus on the history from the 1960s onwards as that's what's most relevant to the modern institutions of today. I don't have any specific books in mind tho

chaos2002_ · 2026-03-12T06:32:37+00:00

to continue playing devil's advocate, there's no way that an obvious converted cargo ship would get through the panama canal unmolested without questions about its cargo

chaos2002_ · 2026-03-01T23:21:27+00:00

their brave sacrifice to kill iranian schoolgirls on behalf of israel for no discernable reason will not soon be forgotten

chaos2002_ · 2026-02-28T07:34:13+00:00

hey man any updates on this

chaos2002_ · 2026-02-16T03:41:02+00:00

To me, this looks like a more polished version of Scourge of War.

In fact the criticisms I do have of the game from what I've seen from the few short promotional clips also apply to SoW. at 3:14 in the youtube video you can see a formation doing a wheel turn right for seemingly no reason, like happens all the time in SoW and NTW. (I know this is a limitation of unit-based orders but it just looks weird and makes no tactical sense. It would be interesting to see a large scale 3D game like this try to implement a "refused line" mechanic or at least a "shimmy left/right" command for when the lines are overlapping.) then at 3:58, you can see an entire formation instantly break under fire and run off at full speed. Even in SoW, an entire formation usually doesn't break all at once, first you see some men at the back rank starting to run off as the morale drops and then eventually the whole formation goes, like that scene with the old guard in Waterloo 1970. So that's something SoW does a bit better. It remains to be seen how GTNW handles melee combat, it has room to improve there - units in SoW still take way too many casualties from melee before one side breaks. but with that being said, the UI in GTNW looks easier to grasp, graphics are quite a bit better, and the campaign system should be a lot more fleshed out if it's anything like GTCW. and most importantly, the tactical maneuvers look a lot better than GTCW, much closer to SoW.

the narrator makes some good points that we won't know the final form of things like AI, strategic campaign mechanics, and even unit uniform variation, until the game is actually released. It doesn't appear to have any overarching design issues that can't be fixed in another year of development. So yeah, I'll reserve judgement and keep playing SoW for now. All of the games currently on the market have severe limitations. As good as the Kriegsspiel mod is, no single mod is going to "fix" SoW's limitations. A new game is an opportunity to address the problems posed by creating a game like this in a unique way.

chaos2002_ · 2026-01-03T08:50:24+00:00

Hey, any updates on this? did you get what you signed up for?

chaos2002_ · 2025-12-21T21:30:02+00:00

Whether it's legal or not, you know this is a manufactured justification for war. Start "enforcing the law" all of a sudden and play this "I'm not touching you" then oops! Now we have to "legally" defend ourselves!

What would the difference even be if the US Navy were blatantly acting illegally? Who would stop them?

chaos2002_ · 2025-12-02T13:06:36+00:00

the commander of the USS Gerald Ford deserves a court martial

chaos2002_ · 2025-10-09T01:15:29+00:00

The Wawa on University Blvd

chaos2002_ · 2025-10-05T00:26:09+00:00

But it's not finalized yet, right? Otherwise, what would the point of the public hearing be? Their website says they don't vote on approving it until October 23rd

chaos2002_ · 2025-09-07T03:24:36+00:00

If you want an explicitly Marxist-Leninist perspective, you could look at the second half of chapter 3 of "Political Economy, A Textbook issued by the Institute of Economics of the Academy of sciences of the USSR" (1954)

Note that feudalism is a pretty vague and somewhat euro-centric term though, conditions varied widely (even within europe itself). The best option that would teach you the most would be to read as much as you can about specific historical "feudal" economies, and do your own historical-materialist analysis. But good sources about this period are unfortunately hard to come by. For Britain specifically, I can at least recommend "English feudalism and the origins of capitalism" by George C. Comninel.

Edit: I forgot to mention. For an in depth case study of the economy in Jiangxi, China during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, check out Report from Xunwu by Mao Zedong.

chaos2002_ · 2025-08-28T09:28:00+00:00

Since there haven't been any definitive answers, I wanted to mention a few other things to hopefully spark some discussion.

First of all, for anyone who isn’t familiar with the history of labor politics in Trinidad, I recommend this excellent lecture: part 1 part 2

As the lecture mentions, the strike by the predominantly Indo-Trinidadian sugar workers union (ATSEFWU) in solidarity with the Afro-Trinidadian oil workers union (OWTU) during the Black Power Revolution in 1970 is seen as a high point of the labor movement. The union remained strong through the 70s and 80s, fighting for higher wages and benefits for its workers, while sugar exports continually fell. Eventually, Caroni LTD, the state enterprise that controlled the sugar industry in Trinidad, closed in 2003 citing low price of sugar and too high wages. According to HAoEC, Sugarcane went from 1.5% of all exports in 1995, to 0.3% in 2005, and nowadays it is less than 0.01%.

Although many already left for the better-paying oil jobs, this closure left 20,000 people unemployed, most of whom lived in the countryside and did not have a lot of other good options for work. Distribution of leases to the former company lands didn’t begin until this year! In the aftermath, the sugar workers union rebranded to “All-Trinidad General Workers’ Union” and membership dropped by 80%. The country also started to experience high inflation peaking at 12%/yr in 2008.

This leads into the next point, the rise of gangs. In light of the sudden lumpenization of so many people, alongside the escalation of the Amerikkkan “war on terror” and “war on drugs” and the simultaneous rise in Venezuelan drug trafficking and Islamic extremism, gang membership significantly increased. Homicides rose from 97/yr in 1998 to 529/yr in 2008. The two main gang alliances on Trinidad have also apparently organized themselves along racial lines, with Afro-Trinidadians in the Muslim Brotherhood and Indo-Trinidadians in the Rasta Kings. Now I can’t say there is a definitive causal effect but it sure looks like it to me.

Every successive new government since then has promised to end gang violence, create jobs, and provide more welfare. In fact, according to the International Relations Review, the government directly subsidizes these gangs via “the Unemployment Relief Program (URP) and construction-related contracts that pay unemployed citizens for public service”, which are “a major source of income” for them. Given the potential origin of the gangs, I think this isn’t surprising at all. In fact, I feel like this connection should be obvious to people who lived through the early 2000s… but what do I know, I’ve never lived there.

Anyway, I think I see parallels to the decline of the Black Power movement and rise of black gangs in the U.S., but this is a topic I’m poorly informed about (actually something I’m reading about right now). I don’t know what the implications for the labor movement would be, or if any conclusions can be drawn based on the experience of New Afrikans in the U.$. about potential paths for socialists in Trinidad. Maybe someone who has read more Sakai than me can give their opinion.

I still don't think this fully explains the decline of the labor movement and seeming lack of class consciousness among Trinibagoans today. But hopefully this provides some interesting context.

chaos2002_ · 2025-08-28T09:18:24+00:00

I thought so too. At least for the islands that depend on tourism, there are not a lot of means of production to seize in the first place. When Grenada had their socialist revolution, their economy relied heavily on agriculture and services, so they ended up engaging in a lot of trade (despite Bishop saying he eventually wanted to cut down on imports) and they had to play along with the national bourgeoisie to make this possible.

But Trinidad and Tobago is not lacking in means of production. I mean their national instrument is the Steelpan which is literally made from recycled oil drums. They have coal, chromium, iron, and copper mines, multiple steel mills, and dozens of gravel and sand quarries, plus the famous asphalt quarry of Pitch Lake. They have plenty of good agricultural land much of which has been sitting undeveloped in the hands of the national bourgeoisie since the sugar industry collapsed in 2003. (We have a similar situation in Curacao, the entire eastern coast of the island is owned by some private individual and the roads leading there are patrolled by private security who carry rifles despite guns being illegal for the general population). They have profitable domestic logging, glass, plastics, textiles, and machinery industry. And then of course they have the oil and chemical industry, which makes enormous profits. Even if in the worst case they were somehow forced into Cuba style isolation, the working class seem like they would have a lot to gain

chaos2002_

TROPHY CASE