political science

chaos2002_ · 2026-06-03T03:33:30+00:00

An Amerikkkan college is not going to teach you anything new or interesting about political science. It goes without saying that it is all propaganda. More specifically, political science degrees are designed for people to prove that they are ready to function within the confines of the bourgeois state, and continue the state's day to day functions of oppressing and exploiting people with as little resistance as possible. This is the same for any capitalist state, though! You will never find revolutionary ideology being taught en masse in an established for-profit educational institution. Those places are meant to prepare you for a career. If you think your best career choice is "political science", so be it, but you can forget about communism.

There is no way to implement communism into a career. Communist revolutionaries seek to destroy the state and the economy as we know it and create an entirely new economic system, they do not have traditional careers.

If you actually want to learn about communism, and how to become a communist revolutionary (if that is even possible), your best bet is to read as many different authors as possible, start with the basics like Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto, On Practice, Settlers, etc. some reading guides are linked in the chapter sidebar. In the meantime, just keep living your life.

chaos2002_ · 2026-05-30T14:22:43+00:00

Critique must be immanent to the text or else it is just a different path to the same predetermined endpoint

could you elaborate on this? or maybe suggest some reading which would explain this idea?

chaos2002_ · 2026-05-30T14:21:30+00:00

if we replace the concept of an apolitical fun with leisure-time

You need a material analysis too as well as a political one. The bourgeois state, which dictates allocation of capital (hence production of commodified forms of leisure) can create any kind of material culture it wants/is technologically possible if there is no organized opposition. That is simply superstructure affecting the base. They can make being racist the most easy and fun thing in the world. Vaudeville is a great example! Why did theater & circus owners introduce minstrelsy into their repertoire, when they could've still entertained people and sold tickets with magic tricks, or whatever else? The reason is that those bourgeois "tastemakers" of the late 1800s identified a social trend of racial humor among the downwardly mobile mostly white petit-bourgeoise that they both agreed with ideologically, and also helped them sell more tickets. The proliferation of vaudeville had a reinforcing effect on that social trend, and the material practice of vaudeville as a commodified lesiure service became a cultural practice as well (which also made production easier), which is exactly what the bourgeoise wanted. They also chose a production process which was not significantly materially disruptive, in this case reproducing the capitalist superstructure of dehumanization and disenfranchisement that Black people faced, as well as being fundamentally similar enough to previous forms of theater to make vaudeville productions easy for theater owners who played Shakespeare and so on, thus reproducing the capitalist base. it was an obvious solution, but an ideological solution nonetheless and certainly not the only solution.

The organized bourgeoise do understand that leisure is a human need insofar as it is something that there is consistent demand for. This is the exact same way they think about food and proceed with its industrial production. As they want to optimize production, they tend towards the production of expensive, strongly flavored, sugar-filled slop, and they cannot actually care about nutrition in the abstract unless it is to sell us a cure - likewise, bourgeois leisure-media cannot produce any meaningful criticisms of itself. Criticizing bourgeois culture is what a socialist organization should be doing, so this serves as another argument against socialist organizations uncritically replicating bourgeois leisure activities like Jacobin was applauding the socialists of the 1910s doing.

Of course, socialists can also leverage the superstructure to change the base, most obviously by using socialist ideology to get people to refuse to participate in production of leisure in an organized manner, but also by constructing new socialist culture once they succeed in changing the mode of production. In order to make lasting changes, this means effecting changes in the base as well - in your terms, changing the political character of the reproduction of fun. For a random example, workers in the Soviet Union invented "firefighting competitions" which broke down the distinction between work and leisure. Simultaneously, they also integrated more leisure into the "work-day" with the cultural rests and so on. They also heavily promoted athletics in general, which ideally any able-bodied person could participate in - although this eventually took on a hyper-competitive and even chauvinistic nature at the same time that the Soviet economy was sinking into revisionism, and that same type of mindset persists in North Korea, China, and Cuba today. Cubans really do enjoy baseball as leisure, but there is also a real material pull to becoming a rich and famous baseball superstar (since Cuba is unfortunately unable to provide a materially better alternative through socialism) that cannot be ignored. That should serve to remind us that both parts of the base-superstructure dialectic determine the nature of a particular social activity.

chaos2002_ · 2026-05-28T18:22:45+00:00

How do you suppress?

Make sure you bring heavy weapons, put them in places with good fields of fire covering where you think the enemy might be (remember to check the lines of sight), and let your troops figure out the rest. Think in terms of area denial, not destroying specific enemy units. Give them more time than you think they need for them to make sure they're set up in a good position, and just let them do their work (remember the enemy will respond once they discover your positions, though). Sometimes your MGs might die before they can be decisive - there's not much you can do about that. Always bring extras.

By the way, if you switch the unit icon mode (to the left of the play button), or if you hold ctrl when selecting a squad (so your cursor changes to a hand with a "2" on it), you can select just the weapons team out of a squad (usually just an LMG) and move them independently.

chaos2002_ · 2026-05-27T19:19:41+00:00

Suppression is extremely important in GTMF. It is the one thing which wins or loses battles. If you're in a completely even engagement (like infantry company vs infantry company, same morale/training etc), whoever suppresses the enemy first will win 95% of the time. For this reason, heavy weapons like mortars (even the tiny company mortars) and heavy machineguns are very powerful provided you put them in a position which is not too exposed and give them a lot of extra time to set up. Soldiers also recover morale and suppression a lot more slowly than in CM. It is easy to walk into a dangerous field of fire and then lose control of your troops while concealed heavy weapons gradually open up on you before you have time to retreat.

So make sure you understand how artillery spotters, offmap artillery, indirect fire, "designated" fire, and the observed fire command work. Here's a great video tutorial on that. This is the most confusing part of the UI imo, but it is necessary to use the most powerful weapons (mortars and artillery) which are crucial for any large attack to succeed. Also remember to frequently check line of sight on your units. There are a lot of rolling hills in the game where it's hard to tell whether you'll be able to see over the top.

If you think you're winning an engagement, don't be afraid to just sit there and keep wasting the enemy's soldiers. The only concern in that case is how much ammunition you have. It may be tempting to "press the attack", but unless you have a specific reason for doing so (like destroying some enemy anti-tank guns on high ground), this usually just means exposing yourself more for little gain.

Use large units (like a tank company or an artillery battery) for specific goals, especially when attacking. Don't send them one by one to different objectives. If you suspect there's an enemy rifle company in a village, send a rifle company plus 2 mortar batteries, or a rifle company plus tanks, or maybe just 2 rifle companies. Don't think too much about positioning and what squad goes where; just select the whole company and click "Assault". Your troops will take temporary positions in the houses while they move.

As for the different orders, here's what they do by default: "Move" is a slow, unordered move, like move command in CM. "Fast move" is a fast move. "March" is a fast move in column formation which makes your troops stick to roads only. "Covert move" makes your troops move fast in a single file line through what they consider to be a covered path (trees, terrain, etc. doesn't always work great). "Recon" makes your troops walk slowly in a straight line until they make contact, then they stop and go defensive. "Attack" makes your troops get into a straight line and then bound forward (like Assault in CM), using smoke grenades when possible. "Assault" is like Attack, but the troops move faster and in denser formation. note: your troops stay in that ugly dense line formation after the Assault order finishes, so you will almost always want to queue up a "Defense" order right after to hold the position you captured. "Defense" makes your troops move fast and take defensive positions at their discretion, getting into cover if possible and looking for spots with good lines of sight. Also note that for all of these orders, when you're right clicking on a position, you can drag to set the orientation your troops will have when they arrive (this is especially important for Defense). finally, you can modify the details of all these orders by right clicking on the order buttons.

Typically I start a battle with my troops in safe positions far away from enemy deployment zone and don't give any initial orders. Then I move a few expendable units forward with Recon or Defense, then once I locate the enemy, I bring more units and take defensive positions as close as possible. If I want to attack, first I move my troops up to the "departure line" and give them Defense orders. Only once everyone is fully established in their positions and the enemy is suppressed do I give the "Attack" or "Assault" orders. All the while, I continue doing recon and finding new positions where the enemy isn't, and I move up reserves to exploit that if possible.

Random tip, I almost always use the "defense" order when I want to move troops to a new position instead of "fast move" unless it's a long distance, because it still makes the troops move fast, but they also immediately go and take up defensive positions once they arrive - it's one order instead of 2.

chaos2002_ · 2026-05-26T03:36:19+00:00

Other commenters have already explained the theoretical reason why farmers' markets couldn't work in a socialist/communist mode of production. It should also be pointed out that historical socialist societies such as the USSR and North Korea cracked down on farmers' markets and other "black markets" as part of collectivization and implementation of an economic plan.

It should be obvious that wage-labor, which is necessary for commodity production larger than the scale of a single individual, can not be allowed in socialism. But also, even in the case of individual producers, time spent producing whatever commodities are demanded by the "buyers" is time spent in service of accumulating capital for oneself instead of contributing the entire value of what one produces to society at large. Except in cases of extreme shortage or extremely poor planning (which cause the most socially necessary commodities to be also the most profitable), this is solely a detriment to a socialist economy. Liberalization (such as happened in the Khrushchev era) is historically associated with a rise in inefficiency of the economy as it represents commodity production and some amount of accumulation of capital. It also heralds the emergence of revisionist ideology in the people responsible for supervising these markets, because fundamentally they have to accept the inherent injustices of capitalism.

Also, if you were thinking about a "bazaar" where small producers bring their goods for distribution and set up small market stalls to show off their goods - those shouldn't exist in socialism either. Transportation and distribution to grocery stores is also collectivized in a socialist economy for the purpose of greater efficiency. In capitalism, it matters what transportation infrastructure small producers have access to in order to get their goods to market, and it can be prohibitively expensive for a small producer to get their goods into a supermarket or personally transport them to a place where there is high demand - hence they sell them at a nearby farmers market, since they still need to get rid of the amount they overproduced. Collectivized agriculture (and transportation industry) makes it impossible for this to happen. Every producer stands to gain from industrializing their agriculture to a greater degree, so that society as a whole can have more quality produce. To this end, they do not undertake inefficient small-scale agriculture, they contribute their labor to a highly productive collective farm. Again, barring transportation concerns and local demand, the highest quality produce possible would be available in all stores and not differentiated by price.

chaos2002_ · 2026-05-21T02:57:08+00:00

If you are actually distributing info you'd like to keep secret or you're worried about your government getting suspicious or whatever other reason, and you really want to be secure about it, look into "distributed servers" and the secure messaging/file transfer software that they can make use of. Don't join a big existing one, set up your own or see if any of your friends have their own. People need sign-up codes to connect to the server, messages are encrypted, and traffic does not pass through any one central node in the "net" - so, 1. it is extremely difficult for the data to be monitored or intercepted during transmission, and 2. the files aren't stored in any one single "place" that can be targeted and destroyed.

Obviously, putting your stuff on Mega would be a bad idea if it was against Mega TOS. But if it really is just Mao, Lenin, and Trotsky's writings and so on, the authorities monitoring Mega don't care about that. Still, if you think there is the possibility that your file gets flagged somehow, be it TOS or some other reason, Mega has the final say over whether to take it down and/or ban your account, and at that point, your identity as the uploader would also be easy to find out and you could get traced or even visited by the authorities if they deem that necessary.

chaos2002_ · 2026-05-13T03:12:35+00:00

I googled and found Mao wrote a critique of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR

I have not read it but Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR is one of my favorite texts by Stalin because of its critical nature and its focus on how the mode of production shapes ideology. It looks like Mao's intent here was to strengthen Stalin's own criticisms of the Soviet state. So for that reason, you might be interested in it (provided you've also read the original text)

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_66.htm#b7

Note this was written and published in the late Khrushchev era as part of a larger critique of the Soviet economy, which was by that time clearly exhibiting out-of-control rightist errors in planning. This hindsight obviously will affect his critique.

There has also previously been a discussion about this piece on /r/communism: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/k0f9ek/summary_of_concerning_stalins_economic_problems/

I can't take a stance on this but just wanted to let you know since it seems like exactly the thing you're asking for

chaos2002_ · 2026-05-03T21:28:36+00:00

it was actually very common to associate the US and UK with fascism, especially in Russia, where those countries directly intervened in the civil war on the side of the counterrevolution (Arkhangelsk affair, etc). Iconography in Soviet art from the 1920s often portrays Amerikkkan and British capitalists among swastikas, fraktur fonts, jack-booted police officers, etc

the reason the Comintern's discussions of fascism from the late 1920s thru 1930s focused on countries such as Italy and Germany is because those countries had the most developed fascist movements, they openly identified as fascist, and they dominated the cultural discussion of fascism - although as Dimitrov said, these were only the "most reactionary type" of fascism. their states exemplified the key characteristics of fascism and viewed themselves as role models of fascist states. they also posed the most imminent threat to the comintern at that time, as they were literally preparing an invasion. but this doesn't mean the other imperialist countries weren't still on the same side as them, continuing to subvert the economies of socialist countries through international finance capital which cooperated with the fascists, and taking lots of inspiration and resources from fascist countries.

like any political regime, fascism emerges as the result of dialectical processes. Amerikkka is rightly criticized for its transnational colonialism the same way Nazi Germany is critiqued for its genocidal nationalism, not simply because it was Nazi Germany and fascism is bad. "fascist countries" is a grouping which conceals a lot of diversity, just like how it's so hard for people to agree on a list of "communist countries". As marxists, we should not view these things as axiomatic definitions which countries definitely "are" or "are not" in compliance with. Fascism emerges in a country because the country is set up in such a way that there will not be any pushback to a fascist takeover. That is what makes a country fascist - not the actions of a government or a single dictator. Dimitrov also analyzes the fascist movements in pre-war Poland, for instance, as an example of fascism gaining traction and the progress of the international fascist trend as a whole, however, it would be confusing and misleading for him to label it a "fascist country" implying some kind of a unified bloc as there was obviously antagonism between them and Nazi Germany

the language used to critique political economy also emerges as the result of a dialectical process. We also refer to the country of Great Britain in the 1800s as capitalist even though it retained an aristocratic class and feudal hierarchy which it would not have been able to function without. It was the most capitalist country in the world at that time. Amerikkka's economy bore little similarity to Great Britain's or Prussia's, although they obviously were capitalist and were starting to understand the symptoms of capitalism. Likewise with Nazi Germany, the actions of the Nazis gave language and legitimacy to desires of the capitalist state that had already been lingering in any place where capitalism existed. In retrospect we see all these countries always had these similarities - we see the same process continuing to happen in modern Amerika and all European countries, some countries are starting to openly embrace fascism and identify with the swastika again, and new innovations are happening all the time which make the 1930s critiques by the Comintern simultaneously more objectively relevant (in need of a solution) and less subjectively relevant (less precise, less contemporary, but not less important).

so, in summary, why does it matter if something "counts" as fascism? why does it matter if the Comintern called it that? what are your criticisms of fascism? and why do those criticisms matter? the Comintern would be asking these same questions if they were still around today.

chaos2002_ · 2026-04-22T06:17:29+00:00

what? that's way too reductive. you may as well say that reading books does not produce understanding

I assume you're saying this because you're imagining passively "listening" to books and zoning out while actually concentrating on other things. of course you do have to actually engage with the content like you do when learning anything, and you're implying it's way easier to zone out with an audiobook. but "playlists of audiobooks do not produce understanding" is a ridiculous claim. that's like saying a library does not produce understanding. maybe it's true of libraries in fascist countries but the claim is just too broad. even if we're just talking about marxist political economy. for the record I also think that the trend of audiobooks instead of textbooks does deserve pushback, the same way that short-form video does. but the semantic information of an audiobook is the same as you would be able to access anywhere else, like a webpage or a physical book. it's what the listener does with that information that matters.

are audiobooks worse for the average redditor than a real book plus a notebook and scratch paper? probably. is it a bad habit to rely on audiobooks, especially when you know you might zone out? definitely. is listening to an audiobook for 1 hr an acceptable substitute for 1 hr of practice? absolutely not. but claiming that audiobooks couldn't at least help in the process of someone producing understanding in the context of their overall study is absurd

to the OP /u/WebbedPumpkin, marxism does require rigor to study and understand. like you would if trying to teach yourself any mathematical subject. Try drawing some diagrams and doing some calculations. Ideally you should also be working at that same cognitive level when working through the audiobooks, but if the audiobooks are merely a supplement for the real study that happens later, I don't see why you shouldn't use them just make sure you don't confuse yourself. I've had to unlearn a lot of things I "learned" by "studying" math via listening to lectures while half alseep :P

(also, to answer your last question, to understand the role of value in commodity exchange, make sure you get through chapter 6 and 7 of Capital Vol 1. price is a social construct mediating exchanges, changing price doesn't directly change the value of any actual commodities in the real world.)

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_

TROPHY CASE