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Before I begin: A small (tl;dr) more practical version of this text will be written and published for the eCzech Republic today as well. This is a very long and boring text based on plain economics. It has no funny pictures of hammers, sickles or stars. If you are already bored after hearing that I suggest you go watch some pictures of cute puppies and kittens.

tl;dr: http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/what-is-to-be-done-in-the-eczech-republic--1529330/1/20

Hello comrades,

Today I'm going to write an article on a subject I've been working on and thinking about for a while, but have never really made an article about. I call it: eSocialist Game Mechanism. It could be seen as the economical/game mechanist side of eCommunism. It is eCommunism without the propaganda, the symbolism and the real life side involved. It is the economic policies that should be/are pursued by eCommunists.

Now, eCommunist parties all over the world have utilized communes. Communes have a very simple set up. All workers earn minimum wage, but on top of that get all the goods they need donated from the commune, the commune’s surplus is sold on the market. This typically starts out with a grain and food commune in small parties and then typically extends towards weapons and moving tickets if a militia is formed. It is my simple evaluation that houses are not necessary anymore now you can eat up to 300 health worth of food every day. A commune food company run well can provide more than enough food for all the commune workers to cover their daily work + training health and happiness costs.

Off course the communes are fun and all, but they do not fundamentally change the relations of production in your country, it does not establish eSocialism. Especially two clickers will not be easily convinced to go into the commune, because all they see is the low wage you are paying them compared to what the capitalists are paying. They do not know that they will in fact also get food, weapons, moving tickets, etc. That means in short that there is no way you can completely eliminate capitalist production relations by simply running large communes and trying to out compete them.

An example of this failure was GOSPLAN, a project in Russia, the eCommunists there tried to out compete the capitalists on the Q1 food market. This attempt was severely disrupted because the admins implemented the new hospital rule thus causing the demand for Q1 food to drop dramatically. They then shifted their focus to multiple markets, but still they could not destroy capitalism, the capitalists simply lowered wages so they could lower prices and compete with the commune again. It’s a battle that cannot be won and does not destroy capitalism. There is just no way that you can set up a large enough commune system to bankrupt the capitalists on all markets. This is because of two reasons, the first one I stated earlier: you will not get enough workers because they see the higher wages the capitalists pay and the second one is that setting up such a large commune system requires an insane amount of gold, which is hard to acquire. Unless… you completely control the state.

This brings me to my own “recipe for revolution”: Creating an eSocialist state and a state planned economy with control of the in-game congress. Control over the country presidency is useful, but not essential since all the important laws are proposed and voted on by the congress. When controlling the state you get several new weapons against the capitalists. These weapons are enough to completely destroy them when used properly. The first one and the most important one is taxes.
There are three types of taxes:

Income taxes - The taxes on the money that a manager collects from a company’s account and the wages an employee receives. In an eSocialist state these should always be set on 99%. Not only does it mean that most of the wages an employee receives flow right back into the state coffers. It also means that capitalists cannot take the money out of their companies unless they feel like donating 99% of it to the state. A few unsuspecting capitalists will do this and it gives a nice bonus to the state coffers. A downside of this is that extracting money made on foreign markets from the companies will result in large amounts of foreign currency ending up in the state coffers. This is however not that large of a problem. It just requires moving them routinely from the state coffers to an organization to get them converted to gold and buy raws in other countries.

Import tax - The added tax on foreign products sold on the local market. In a lot of capitalist countries this is already set to 99% for all manufactured goods and 0% for all raws. In an eSocialist state this should be set like this if it is not already set like this. In the event that the state creates its own raw companies overseas the import taxes should be set to 99% and the raws “sold” for 0.001 of the local currency so there are no taxes on it.

V.A.T. - The tax added on all purchases of manufactured goods. In an eSocialist state this should be set to 99% for all manufactured goods, so nobody can buy them from their market with saved up money without paying giant amounts of it to the state. It deals a very direct and strong blow to the capitalists.

Your second tool is the minimum wage. Setting this to as low as it goes is best in the eSocialist state. Together with the 99% income tax it means that the workers get very very little money into their pockets. At the time of writing I’m not sure what the current lowest minimum wage is. It might be 0.1 of the local currency right now. That would be ideal because it would most likely mean that 99% of that 0.1 (so, 0.099) would go the state and only 0.001 goes to the worker. Since the game only saves two digits it would mean that the worker gets 0. If the lowest minimum wage is 1 it would result in the worker getting 0.01 of the local currency per day. Which is not a disaster, but not ideal either. Because it still requires pumping small amounts of currency to all the communes. While in the first case it would result in not having to EVER transfer any currency to the companies.

Your third tool is the funds the eSocialist state has. You can use the funds you get from the taxes to expand your state planned economy. The state can also create money of the local currency for 0.013 gold per unit of the local currency. In the unlikely event that your currency is worth more than 0.013 gold per unit on the monetary market you can increase your gold supply with this by buying gold with the local currency. This however, only works once because it will cause inflation of the currency that makes it worth less than 0.013 gold per unit.

Even with all these tools there is one factor that is a little harder to obtain and that is proper leadership. To run a state planned economy you need quite a lot of people to manage the communes on a daily basis and a lot of active congressman to make sure all proposals pass. This is not always easy to accomplish, but it is useful to know that your enemies face exactly the same problem. On top of this there need to be enough jobs for all the workers who leave the capitalist companies who can no longer pay them. This requires good coordination and planning.

There is also off course the question of what to do with the companies the capitalists have. The capitalists should be offered a small buy off sum that is large enough to be accepted, but small enough to be cheaper (combined with renaming them to the state planned economy naming convention) than buying a new company plus any upgrade costs. Until the capitalists have left the country or sold off all their companies there will be resistance. This resistance has to be crushed in any way possible.

As a last note, I would like to ask all the people responding to this article to respond to the economic strategy expressed in it and not simply post a “Hurr durr communists are evil mass-murders” type of comment. It is lame and not funny.

- Derkk
Former Party President of the Communist Party of the eNetherlands (3 terms)
Former minister of economy and State Companies of the eNetherlands (1 term)
Manager of the Communist Party of the eNetherlands Commune (+- 6 months)
Congressman of the eNetherlands (WP/CPNL 3 terms)
Congressman of the eCzech Republic (Svoboda, 1 term, brutally cut short by the fascist Vit Ruzicka)
Eternal eCommunist and Socialist Game Mechanist

There are probably a few more functions that I have done in the past, but I can’t be arsed to add them and this article is long enough yet.