Egalitarian Win

What would you do if you were able to construct a nation's economy from the ground up? That question's answered in Victoria 3 Paradox Interactive's latest grand strategy game. There's much to do about this game, as online voices agree that communism is the way to go if you want to win.

_{source: YouTube}

The game invites players to build their own ideal society "in the tumult of the exciting and transformative 19th century." Starting in the year 1836 and running for 100 years, players are introduced to a simulated world, including all the nations' factions like the industrialists, the commoners, farmers, intelligentsia, churches and so on, and gives them the power to take total control of a country by letting them shape its politics and economy. The goal is to make the right decisions in order to become the most successful nation measured by several metrics like the size of the economy, people's willingness to immigrate there, population size and general well-being of its inhabitants. Watch the game-play trailer to get a good idea about how the game puts you in charge of a young society, and how the politics of your choice can cater to, or ignore, different factions.

There's been a lot of online noise about this game; besides the usual complaints that the game is full of bugs, there are some remarkable comments that we haven't seen before on a game of this sort. Players are complaining that communism is too overpowered, and that capitalist play-styles are too inefficient... Players that go for capitalism see that, just like in the real world, the bosses get high pay, and that workers get low wages.

But in a Victoria 3 communist economy, worker cooperatives ensure that all capitalist wealth is turned over to the workers. As a result, their high purchasing power allows them to spend more money in the economy, which increases economic demand. This leads to higher living standards, which attracts more immigration, another big boost.
_{source: Kotaku}

A Redditor who uploaded a post with the title "Current Communist meta is overpowered" concludes by saying "It's just so easy." Well, it is easy. A Victoria 3 game designer has called it the "Historical Materialism Simulator"; the way you choose to shape and organize the economy influences the conditions of the citizens participating in that economy, which in turn shapes political thought and makes it develop in certain directions. That's historical materialism in a nutshell, describing how the economic base and the cultural superstructure interact.

If you emphasize the profits of your capitalist class by importing cheap raw resources from foreign colonies, your private investments will be strong, letting you balloon your manufacturing industry. This also empowers the industrialists who want the country's laws configured in a liberal way to assure those profits and their position in society. But if you focus your economy around domestic manufacture and exports of staple consumer goods in highly productive, technologically advanced factories, your lower classes will thrive, become empowered, and assert their rights to democracy, living wages, and humanitarian policies.
_{source: PC Gamer}

That's economics 101. If workers have more disposable income, demand will rise, living conditions will rise, immigration will increase and so on. Wealth will be distributed more equally when industry and agriculture are organized as worker-coops, which means that democratic power is distributed more equally and freedom is distributed more equally, as opposed to landing all those benefits on the side of the capitalists who own the means of production under capitalism. To me it's no surprise that a lot of the biggest GDP numbers being posted by Victoria 3's end date of 1936 are using communism to do it. The game's designers say that they didn't plan for these effects to work out this way, but just implemented the mechanics as they understood them.

Unfortunately it's not that easy in real life; we can't structure our socioeconomic reality with a few clicks of the mouse. Also, the game designers admit that it's not a complete simulation, although an ambitious one, and that they didn't account for "corruption or cronyism, foreign economic influence beyond trade, or direct interference in another nation's politics, all of which could help make 19th century communism seem a bit less appealing than it does in the current meta." I for one am glad this game has caused so much discussion, as it has the potential to make people wonder about the viability of a more egalitarian socioeconomic structure in real life. Capitalism is failing, not only in real life, but in a digital simulation as well, so maybe it's time to consider alternatives that more closely resemble the democratic ideal of a truly equal distribution of power.

PS
Follow the link for the cover-image to watch a player create the U.S.S.R. in the game...

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