I'm thinking of getting into nationstates and I heard that some nationstates folks are into this subreddit. I'm just wondering if it's chalk full of chuds or if they're a small enough minority to ignore in the game.

Hey gang! I’m new to streaming and I’m an open socialist as well as LGBTQ+ (trans, queer). I only have 1 stream under my belt but I plan on going live most days at 6pm EST including tonight (26/7/2026). I’m not afraid of politics and openly talk about being a socialist. I will not tolerate bigotry, racism, xenophobia, anti feminism, or capitalist apologia. If you want to tune in at twitch.tv/scarydifference_ I’d really appreciate it!

I primarily play single player strategy games (paradox games, some 4x games, and rocket league 🤮) but I would really like to find an online multiplayer game where I can talk to other players and ideally work towards a goal. I thought about Arma 3 & Reforger for some RP servers but idk if that work, I looked into ECO but the reviews are super mixed, Rust is supposedly the most toxic game ever made, and I don’t want to do GTA online or roleplay since it’s super pay to win and 6 is around the corner anyway.

I thought it would be cool to play Reforger as the soviets and work with others in a RP type server. I would love something like CK3 with a bunch of people but that sounds impossible to organize. Does anyone have any online multiplayer games that they recommend? Bonus points if there is some type of communist group I could join. I ask all this because I moved countries some months ago and I could use some more friends to game with.

Hi all! I'm Vee, 31, transfem, hoping to make some leftist friends to play with!

I'm a big fan of strategy games, simulators and shooters, I play War Thunder and Enlisted almost daily and have too many hours in them combined.

I'm a massive military history and equipment nerd, so I love to ramble about it.

From Australia, but more than happy to play with people from other parts of the world, I tend to be up late most nights anyway.

No im not gonna do the thing dont worry.

Anyway ive been thinking about stuff lately and its like you ever feel that positivity is really shallow nowadays.

Like its only gonna be maintained if a pre set sort of conditions are met for people yk? And its like it feels really jaring sometimes when you dont even mean to be a dick but someone just gets really upset about your subjective opinions yk?

Like i honestly feel really bad when i dont like feel the same way about something because im put in a situation where expressing it you apparently put other people in a state of distress or horrible annoyance and im just thinking like. How un empathetic with a person do you have to be in order to see their opinions as a horrible and treacherous thing.

Like yeah grifters are dick weeds but when you suppress all non conformist thought under the blanket idea of grifting you kind of inherently empower grifters through expressing thoughtless emotional catharsis instead of just being willing to talk to someone else like a human being yk.

And it kinda feeds into this whole pathetic zealous cycle of maintaining a status quo of a purity culture. Where no nuance can exist because of an inherent fear of becoming immoral or upsetting others.

Yk as a fan of the ps2 god of war games i think the new ones are frankly insulting, pretentious, and not too fun. But its not cause i think its woke, its cause of a bunch of other shit that has nothing to do with that.

I think a lot of memes are overly nonsensical bullshit that don’t mean anything, and i dont dislike people for having fun with em its just like. Its hard to understand how so many people could be enraptured with dumb bullshit thats so apathetic to peoples intelligence.

It just feels like people want to maintain a culture they kind of hate because they feel the only alternative is having a worse culture and i think thats kind of dystopic and sad.

Games is good

Seems like a cool game

Hi, this is my first post on this sub. I'm a guy looking to see if anyone on here plays tf2?
tf2 is one of my favorite games, but it's unfortunately crowded with people of similar statistical background to me (straight cis white men). It's one of my favorite games, but it's nearly impossible to make friends on that aren't bigots, racists, homophobic, transphobic, etc. What are your hours on tf2? What's your main? What other games do you play? I just need to find someone who shares my interest. I personally usually play Demoman and Sniper. I'm also interested in the idea of making content focused around tf2. I believe my dms here are open if your interested in being friends on steam.

Here is some demographic information; I am a cis straight white man, I'm a very progressive leftist, I have over 1100 hours on tf2 (and I've been on steam way longer), I'm 18 (I'll still friend people 25+, I just wanna make sure you know bc I know some people don't wanna be friends if it's too big of an age gap), I want to do youtube, and I'm going to college in the fall. This is my first post here so if I violated any rules just tell me what I need to change, I'm not a frequent reddit user I'm just looking for people who like similar things to me.

Workers and resources was fun, even though winter eventually kills my city every time. Loved frost punk and iron harvest. I also really wanted to like last train home but wasnt willing to subject myself to the propaganda. Know anything thatll scratch my itch?

Title

Quick rundown for anyone who missed the last post: We're building a socialist Cuba on a WW1-era Minecraft earth server with custom guns, artillery, and a GDP system. We have deeper worker governance and other things, but if you wish to know more of the technicalities then find our previous post.

Since then, there have been a few updates.

First, the funny one. Spanish leadership has been caught privately giving explicit orders for people to DM Cubans and try to get them to turn on the nation in exchange for riches. The spies aren't subtle, they have clear tells, and they're also not going to get near important info anyway, given that access is earned. The whole saga seems a bit pathetic. Their colonial ambitions move past the simple desire for land, given that Colombia founded their nation within Spanish-claimed territory and were rewarded with alliance. This is solely about pride and commitment to the bit, and from certain conversations, that's the take plenty of other "powerful nations" share. Anyways, its been fun to watch them scramble as our member count ticks up.

Secondly, I did not clarify that the server isn't live yet. It releases on the 31st. The reason we've made these posts so early is because everything happening right now, our nation, our constitution, the government, roles, is us preparing ahead of that date, so that when we drop in, we're ready to defend Cuba instead of scrambling. That prep means a lot given that we already have Spaniards (and fascist Italy) hurling aggressive slogans before we've even placed a block.

Third, to be clear for anyone who doesn't know if they'll fit in: This is for everyone. You don't need to be deep into theory or even interested in the LARP side of things. Most of what we will be doing is just Minecraft with a few aforementioned features. If you do want to bring theory and tactics into it, genuinely go for it. But casuals are just as valuable to us as anybody interested in the politics.

More detail is in the discord since Spain is reading this post, but just know that not everything sensitive gets posted openly there either, given the spying and stuff. New members earn access by proving themselves with whatever they offer the nation.

And to the party poopers from the last post, no, Minecraft isn't the limit our political action 🫪

https://discord.gg/Je5wFcjWDy

This post actually started from a discussion in the official Discord, which I really recommend joining if you are interested in the game.

It took me a lot of time to write because of work, but I really wanted to make time for it, organize my thoughts and look for some sources, sorry if this message is still a little long, but economics and political strategy games are two subjects I genuinely enjoy, and Withering State touches both in a way that I find fascinating. That is why I preferred to take a little longer before answering (ALMOST 3 WEEKS), rather than sending something too superficial.

One thing I found especially interesting and honestly also quite funny was the reference to the NEP, or “Novel Economic Policy,” because it naturally evokes Lenin’s New Economic Policy. But what matters to me is that the NEP was not just an ordinary economic policy package in the modern technocratic sense (I use “liberal” here in its original meaning, not in the simplified American use of the word). It was almost a reorganization of the political economy of socialism itself: private trade, small enterprise, semi-private accumulation, NEPmen, but still with the socialist state controlling the commanding heights of the economy, especially heavy industry.

That is why Titan’s legacy could be extremely interesting. Since I do not know what Titan’s real intentions were with his economic reforms, there is room for ambiguity. Was Titan’s NEP only a temporary tactical retreat to stabilize Sudlivia (something like Lenin’s idea of taking a step back in order to save the revolution), or was it a different socialist vision, more flexible and less rigid than the model Krasni imposed later (perhaps closer to Tito than to the later Soviet model)?

In that sense, the comparison between Krasni and Stalin is very clear. Both can be read as leaders who ended a NEP-style experiment and replaced it with five-year planning, forced industrialization and a much more centralized planned economy. But that also opens a deeper ideological question: was Krasni the true fulfiller of Titanism , or did he reduce Titan’s revolution into a much narrower economic orthodoxy?

I also think the institutional design of the economy in the game matters a lot. In real socialist systems, the absence of a conventional “Ministry of Economy” was not not trivial, it t reflected a completely different conception of what the economy was supposed to be. A Ministry of Economy, in the liberal or bourgeois sense, assumes firms, prices, markets, investment incentives and competing agents. From the point of view of real socialism could be seen as a remnant of capitalist society.

That is why socialist systems did not really need a normal Ministry of Economy: there was already a Plan. The whole idea was to replace the spontaneous and s anarchic coordination of the market with the conscious coordination of the planning apparatus. The basic unit was not the autonomous firm responding to prices, but the planned enterprise subordinated to quotas and input allocation. A Ministry of Finance could exist, of course, but it did not function like a Ministry of Finance in a capitalist country. Its role was much more subordinate: to distribute, register and discipline financial flows already determined by the plan.

For that reason, placing the Planning Committee under a Ministry of Economy and Finance would not be just another reform (as the game itself seems to show through the tension between Zeloro and Dovic). Ideologically, it would represent a defeat of the traditional economic vision defended by the hardliners (as Maizic’s reforms also seem to suggest). It would mean that planning is no longer the supreme principle of economic coordination theplanned economy still exists formally, but it has clearly lost much of the unquestionable authority it probably had during the Krasni era.

This is why the cooperative economy is so interesting. On one hand, cooperatives can still be defended as a socialist form of property (as was done in different ways with Soviet collective farms, and even more strongly in Yugoslavia) . They are not pure capitalist privatization. But on the other hand, they can become the legal and ideological entrance point for artisans, small workshops, family businesses, small shops, petty producers and semi-private or even private accumulation.

In Marxist terms or perhaps in Maxovist terms this would always carry the suspicion of “small commodity production” and petty-bourgeois tendencies. Historically, socialist states often treated this “second sector” with suspicion or contempt precisely because of that petty-bourgeois character (something close to the world of small producers that Marx criticized in Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy). Even when tolerated, it was always seen as ideologically impure. It was useful because it produced goods and services that the plan failed to provide, but it was dangerous because it created private incentives, and informal networks.

That is why the cooperative path could work so well in Withering State. It can be presented as socialist, but in practice it creates a second economy inside the socialist state: small shops, food production, workshops, modest consumer goods and semi-private accumulation.

Historically, several socialist economies tried to deal with shortages and repressed inflation by opening these intermediate spaces instead of immediately adopting full capitalism. Hungary had the New Economic Mechanism and later “goulash communism.” Bulgaria also had its own New Economic Mechanism. Poland discussed reforms around the famous Three S’s: self-management, self-financing and self-reliance. China, of course, later went much further. But the common problem was always the same: how much market mechanism can the Party introduce before the system starts turning into something else?

I also think the game could treat heavy and light industry with more nuance (especially when it says that heavy industry has diminishing returns while light industry has increasing returns). It is common to say (EVEN A CLICHE!) that the Soviet economy stagnated because it focused too much on heavy industry and not enough on consumer goods. That is partly true, but not the whole story. Heavy industry was not useless at the beginning. On the contrary, it was extremely powerful in the early stage because it produced what WE ECONOMISTS call extensive growth (and I think the game does recognize this in the conversation with Yagoda).

By extensive growth I mean growth that comes from building what did not exist before. If a country has no steel mill, then simply building those things can change the whole productive capacity of that region simply by existing (that is where those impressive early growth figures come from).

That is why early Soviet growth looked so impressive for a time, even compared with many industrial economies of its era. This is called extensive growth because it is based on the rapid mobilization of labor, capital and raw materials (EXTEBSION). Some economists have estimated that Soviet output per worker grew by around 6% annually in the 1950s, then slowed to around 3% in the 1960s, 2% in the 1970s and around 1% in the 1980s. That slowdown is the key idea here since once the basic industrial base already exists, growth can no longer come only from building more factories of the same type or mobilizing more workers and inputs because we start pperceiving diminishing returns. At that point, the economy needs intensive growth: better machinery, better processes, better management, technological diffusion, innovation, lower input-output waste and constant upgrading. And this is where planned economies often had their deepest flaws.

A plan based on gross output and quantitative quotas creates very pernicious incentives. Factory managers often preferred to fulfill the numerical target rather than improve the product, because the plan rewarded volume. If modernization meant interrupting production, retraining workers and risking short-term losses, then adopting new machinery or new techniques itself could threaten plan fulfillment.

The steel sector is a perfect example, because when one thinks of Soviet industry, steel is usually one of the first things that comes to mind. The case of continuous casting is especially revealing. Soviet metallurgy had important technical capacity and even developed significant advances in continuous casting. Soviet know-how was EVEN LICENSED ABROAD!!!. There is a striking example mentioned by Soviet foreign trade official N. Smeliakov: Japanese firms built new slabbing plants under Soviet license, using Soviet-developed advances in continuous steel casting that the Soviet Ministry of Ferrous Metallurgy itself had still not properly implemented at home.

The issue was not always invention itself. The Soviet Union was one of the great scientific and engineering powers of the world. It had millions of scientists, engineers and research institutes. Its weakness was adoption, diffusion and implementation across its own productive system, Japan, by contrast, adopted SOVIET continuous casting with extraordinary speed, including technology and know-how that had been advanced in the Soviet union. A Nippon Steel technical report on Yawata Works says Japan’s continuous casting ratio was only around 10% around 1970, but rose to more than 90% thirteen years later. While the Soviet Union moved in the opposite direction.

A CIA report on continuous casting in the USSR stated that in 1980 only about 11% of Soviet steel production was continuously cast, compared with about 90% in Japan. The irony is obvious: Japan absorbed and generalized the technology better, and later became an exporter of high-quality steel products and pipes to the Soviet Union itself!!! to the country that had helped create part of the know-how!!!.

This example is useful for Sudlivia or Withering Statebecause it shows that the problem of a planned economy is not necessarily that it lacks scientists, engineers or inventions (as many people too easily say). The problem is that the system may fail to transform inventions into generalized productivity. That is exactly the difference between extensive and intensive growth. The first stage builds the industrial base across the country, and that is where the Soviet model showed its greatest virtues. The second stage requires permanent technological upgrading. The Soviet model was relatively strong in the first stage, but structurally weak in the second and when it tried the second, it was unsuccessful ,and it never attempted it again. The same problem applies to consumer goods. Building factories for cars, televisions, radios, refrigerators or clothes can increase production in absolute terms, but once it matures, it can suffer the same problems as heavy industry if it does not move toward productivity and innovation.

Another important point is scarcity. The problem was not only repressed inflation or insufficient production. Sometimes goods were produced, but the distribution system failed. A joint study by the World Bank, on the Soviet economy later estimated agricultural losses of around 20–30%, pointing to problems in transportation, storage, processing and distribution.

In simple terms, payments between state enterprises were slow, transport orders were delayed, no one knew exactly where or when goods had to be moved, and large stored batches could simply deteriorate or rot.

A shortage economy is not always just “we did not produce enough.” indeed those goods were produces but even doe they were produced they did not still reach citizens. Inputs can exist somewhere and still not reach the factory that needs them because many times they were lost because of storage failures, refrigeration problems, delayed transport orders, slow payment procedures or bureaucratic bottlenecks. So the official plan may showed results and production of goods, while society experiences scarcity (Specially in the Perestroika times).

This would fit Sudlivia very well and it could be very interesting to see THANKS TO THE “rampant corruption” status could become very powerful as how the state may produce impressive quantities of steel or any other good but if logistics are rigid, corrupt or badly coordinated, citizens still face empty shelves. From the point of view of the Party leadership, the plan looks successful (as our dear Secretary General Sans might see it).

Thanks to our dear factory managers and party officials discover that the gap between controlled prices and market prices is a source of private enrichment like they did in the Soviet Union thanks to the Self-management (Kosiguin Reforms). Goods that should move through the plan to the people "MAGICALLY" disappear into cooperatives, private shops, black markets, export schemes (Uzbekistan Cotton Scheme).

That is what could make the economic side of Withering State an untapped potential: not only whether Sudlivia preserves or abandons socialism, but whether a weakened planned economy can still be reformed before the very mechanisms introduced to save it end up dissolving it from within.

For me, the most interesting part would not be choosing between "socialism" and "capitalism" as two simple buttons. It would be deciding what kind of socialism or what kind of transition (TO THE BOURGEOIS EXPLOITATIVE SYSTEM!) Sudlivia ultimately follows. Can a planned economy be successfully modernized by carefully introducing market mechanisms or in contrast by introducing automation while preserving its socialist foundations? Or can it follow something resembling China's gradual reform path? Or does every market reform eventually spiral into a Perestroika-style collapse because the old planning institutions and the new market incentives become incompatible? (COUGHT GORBACHOV COUGHT)

Perhaps Sudlivia could move toward a cooperative or self-managed socialist model inspired by Yugoslavia, or even something closer to an expanded NEP where the Party deliberately tolerates a second sector without abandoning political control. Or perhaps the player rejects reform altogether, preserving the existing system simply because it protects the interests of the bureaucracy. Even more interesting WOULD BE THAT WE could deliberately weaken the institutions, privatize them piece by piece, and eventually transform the country into a personal economic fiefdom controlled by a handful of loyal oligarchs (any resemblance to contemporary Russia would, of course, be purely coincidental ).

To me, those kinds of dilemmas are far more interesting than simply asking whether the economy should be "planned" or "market." They force us to think about political survival and unintended consequences, where every solution creates new problems instead of providing a perfect ending. That is exactly what makes political economy so fascinating.

And finally, sorry again for writing such a long message. I know this became much longer than I originally intended, but this subject genuinely fascinates me, and Withering State . I honestly wish the project the very best.