Kwalish Kid said:
As part of developing academic work on RPGs, I'm looking at a number of ways of analysing RPGs. One form of analysis is Marxist analysis. In the middle of some preliminary work on the subject, I was struck with a thought, "There's not a lot of communism in RPGs!"
Come see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! We are being repressed.
I'm going to try my best to keep this politically neutral.
There isn't alot of socialism in antiquity as you'd understand it. There was typically not enough surplus production in society to support the decentralization of wealth, much less fund a bureaucracy to do it. They had a hard enough time collecting taxes and funding the bureaucracy to do that (corruption was generally rampant). Generally everyone everywhere was ruled by some sort of warrior elite caste, and the only transferance of wealth was the accumulation of what was necessary to support that caste. Societies that didn't do this, generally found that they were unable to protect themselves from the typically highly agressive neighboring warrior elite.
The nations that at least in part escaped that trap (for a while at least), you might have heard of - places like Israel, Greece, Rome, and England.
But in general, no one was able to fund socialism because no one had a productive enough society to support more than an aristocratic 'leisure' class. For example, as recorded in the Book of Acts, the early Christian church ran one of the first true communist societies for a few years, before abandoning it as untenable as the church increased in size with the famous proclamation, "Let those that do not work, not eat."
Welfare of various forms was practiced from time to time but generally from an authoritarian stance. If the aristocratic class ran a surplus, they might return a benefice to the lower class in order smooth class conflicts over. However, for the aristocratic class to run a suplus implied that it was a good year. When help was most needed, that is when the crop failed, it probably wasn't going to be available.
Socialism as you know is IMO a consequence of widespread mechanization. Before mechanization, wealth is almost identical to food because crop yields are so low that almost everyone is a subsistance farmer.
The first Marxist analysis (his own) was a study of the wages of craftsman beginning in the middle ages through his own 19th century. The medieval guild system has a very prominent role in shaping Marx's early thinking. Marx concluded that the real wage of craftsman had been trending downward since the high middle ages. Pushing this trend line out to the late 19th century, he discovered that if the trend continued there would come a point where the wage of a craftsman - carpenter, mason, brick layer, glassblower, whatever - would fall below his living wage. From this he concluded that he was witnessing an inevitable collapse of capitalism, and thus the theory of communism was born.
I won't critique the math of that except to note that in the High Middle ages, masons, carpenters, glassblowers and the like represented within that society highly educated, highly trained, rare professional people, and that in the 19th century they represented ordinary working laborers. I'd also note that a craft monopoly is probably not the anti-capitalist system that Marx took it for.
If you want to do Marxist analysis on RPGs, you probably aren't going to be able to do it by looking at the simulated cultures of the RPGs themselves. Fantasy RPGs dominate the market, and I can't think of alot of Sci-fi RPG settings where Marxism is used as anything but window dressing. You are going to have to define castes within the social community of RPGs (DMs and Players), and some way that these castes are in inherent conflict over scarse resouces.
Either that are you are going to have to examine the fact that regardless of setting, characters in RPGs tend to belong to that warrior elite rather than the peasant class.
Are we oppressing anybody? Orcs maybe? It's worth noting if your a Marxist that the term 'villain' derives from the word for peasant.
