A Deviation From the Norm

Day 5,013, 20:08 • Published in USA USA • by Pfenix Quinn
A Deviation From the Norm

No: 52 Day: 5014 or so


Get this. Classes of players have a point of view that reflects their class. Not in a vulgar, robotic, deterministic way. Noobs and weaker, non-paying players may take on the perspective of a tank or a VISAboi. Flip it around too. Those in a more priveleged strata, if they grind their minds, can develop consciousness and take actions reflecting the interests of the working and bored majority of players.






We know a few things from studying the Ancient and Venerable-like PQ Thought...





"To be concerned only about cooperation with in-game bourgeois forces and to forget about the workers, the soldiers and the progressive middle strata of the e-World. This is Right Opportunism.


"Objectively speaking, the e-bourgeois class can only be parasites who live off of the labor of the e-majority. In order to protect their role, they're driven to try to hegemonize the cultural sphere as well, which means squeezing all the fun out of the game for everybody except themselves.


"The virtual-economic character of the imperialist class and their closest lackeys leads them to engage in intense competition amongst themselves, which in turn plays out in never-ending attempts to attack and destroy each others' regions and nations, often pushing beyond the limits of sportsmanlike conduct to achieve these ends.


"This is not, at its root, due to a choice on their part. Rather, it's a key element of the game's intended design as a capitalist business model. Contradictory as it may seem to revolutionaries who can and do genuinely enjoy playing the game, the fact is that the game owners are the real "masterminds" of the e-bourgeois class. This class is the most likely to spend real cash on the game. So the game owners obviously have a vested interest in promoting bourgeois, especially imperialist, behavior within the game."



BUT ALSO.


"Revolutionary workers realize, sooner or later, that a truly new and better e-World is possible. They seek ways to transform it in the interest of the broad e-masses and, ultimately, to benefit the oppressed people of the real world too, at least in the cultural sphere. They variously describe themselves as socialists, anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, left-wing democrats or left-wing social-democrats, internationalists of various types, communists, absurdists, dadaists, situationists, artists, intellectuals and anti-imperialist guerillas."

-- Phoenix Quinn, ca. Day 600





The goals of the Socialist Freedom Party Animals and the Global Anarcho-Sydicalist Movement of which the Party is the dynamic turbo-charger are:

1 - To abolish all class distinctions between players.

2 - To abolish all economic relations upon which those class distinctions rest.

3 - To abolish all social relations that correspond to those economic relations.

4 - To revolutionize all ideas that go along with those antiquated social relations.




To argue that the goal of the SFP is simply to punch Nazis in the nose and to drive disgusting racist groypers out of eRepublik is a gross mis-characterization. That's how certain comedian-intellectuals of the cocktail-imbibing e-jet set like to misrepresent the Revolution. You know, like: "Oh, those crazy SFPers, they want to bump off all the non-proletarians. Then magically everybody will turn into ideal anarcho-communist-proletarian saint-like players. Stupid mongrels. They so dumb. Nyuk-yuk-yuk."


That is not an original critique. It's simply the plot of every really bad Hollywood screenplay about the Cold War. The evil Soviet secret agent declares, all mad-eyed and shit: "Bwa-ha-ha!!!! We'll be One Mind! One World! Everybody Equal!" And our local chad-karen brigades, full of certainty, bad beer, and flavorless cheese, solemnly shake their heads in agreement with the neo-nasties, muttering, "And that's communism!"

LOL.




NOW. To be clear.

Bopping Nazis on the nose is good.




Seeking to make eRep an uncomfortable place for racists and similar scumbags -- BAM!, shit yeah -- likewise good. Yes, that's a fine thing indeed, boss.

Ridiculous distortions of the revolution's goals and absurd simplifications of what it will take to achieve them? Mmmmm... -- not so hot.




Wut? So tell me what it is then.



OK.



It's...

* Transforming the underlying conditions that give rise to stupid ideas...
* Transforming the settings that engender social relations which reinforce gross economic inequalities...
* Transforming the virtual ground beneath our virtual feet -- the virtual economic ground that leads players to believe that an unfair system which celebrates boredom and perpetuates nationalist hatreds is somehow in their interest...
* Transforming all the conditions that give rise to class distinctions...


Yeah.

OK.
It's a lot.








It can seem like history is some fixed thing. That what is, is. That what is, has to be. That those changes which are possible are only those which have been done. That only incremental change is possible.



That's a simplistic reading of things. Reality and e-reality are considerably more complex.






A famous example...

After the end of the US Civil War and the abolition of slavery, after the evil-racist-idiot branch of US politicians at the time aborted Reconstruction (a program similar to what later became known as de-Nazification), then every type of legal restriction was created in the former slave states to limit and contain the freedoms of Black people in the South. Vagrancy laws. Voting laws. You-cant-walk-on-the-sidewalk laws. And much more.

Beneath that, what? The reason for these types of social enclosures?

It was the extension of sharecropper system, for poor Blacks and poor Whites alike. Sure. Now you could have your few little acres and a mule. Not entirely unlike the industrial system of company towns in mining districts in Appalachia, Michigan and elsewhere, the sharecropping system for harvesting cotton was constructed such that you'd still have to turn over a large share of the crop to the big landowner who'd loaned money to buy tools and crap.



The traditions, customs, laws were designed by and for the large landowners and enforced by KKK terror. Sharecroppers lived and worked in a box. It was a trap, difficult to get out of. By the time you'd try to sell what little crop you had left, you'd end up being in debt to the landowners. When you tried to escape, then the system -- meaning the cops and the Klan -- would come after you. Much like the slave-catchers of the previous era.

That went on until after WW2.





Us cynical post-modern sophisticates like to make jokes about how tractor technology was celebrated in Soviet Russia during the Stalin era as a godsend from backbreaking labor. You know. Those "boy loves tractor" posters, right?

They were also popular in Maoist China about 10 years later, where the visual theme shifted a bit to "check out those cool, happy tractor girls".

We forget to joke about how it was so in the USA too. But without the over-the-top Disneyesque enthusiasm for socialism. In the USA, the introduction of tractors to the cotton-growing South meant that Black folks got thrown off their land. En masse. Once tractors were introduced, a massive migration swept hundreds of thousands of Black folks from the South to the North.





The forces of production, the new machinery, fundamentally changed social conditions -- especially the relations of production -- in 1950s USA too, even without a socialist revolution.

Purely technological advances in the cotton industry were everywhere. Growing methods, picking and substrate automation, irrigation, and so on, including the use of tractors. Those things were pretty well advanced by then in quite a few places, including Soviet Russia and soon afterwards in Peoples China. They were happening in other parts of the USA too: Arizona, for example. And in other parts of the world, like Pakistan, too.


There weren't such massive social migrations in those other places (well, maybe in China, but that's a different story) because the relations of production weren't disrupted to such a large degree at the same time that the new technology was introduced.



What was at the heart of the changes that rolled out of Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama like a mighty river? The huge shift in the relations of production in the post-War South was the fulcrum. That's what triggered, more broadly, the enormous changes in ideas and in social relations which ensued. Changes that roil through RL politics of the USA to this day.




And, imho, that's the type of earth-shaking change still needed in eRepublik.



So. You know what to do.



Right-o!


Join the SFP Co-op!
Transform the e-World through mutual aid!




Oh. Hey. And why not vote me for SFP PP?
Or not. I hear What A Guy is p cool too.




The SFP is your friend. The SFP has always been your friend.