Communism (& Socialism) in RPGs

Kwalish Kid

Explorer
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!"

Now, I can think of somewhat communist cultures in the Star*Drive setting for Alternity. I can also think of some of the more socialist aspects of the Star Trek setting. Some of the Russian and southeast Asia settings for Robotech might include this, too. However, that's about as far as I can think.

Can anyone else think of the communism, socialism, Bolshevism, totalitarian socialism, anti-consumerist anarcho-syndicalism in RPGs?
 

log in or register to remove this ad

Kwalish Kid said:
Can anyone else think of the communism, socialism, Bolshevism, totalitarian socialism, anti-consumerist anarcho-syndicalism in RPGs?

Isn't there a Red Star RPG based on the graphic novels? That will have an example of a totalitarian pseudo-socialist (more Stalinist, I'd suppose) state.
 


In Vampire: The Requiem, some of the Carthians can be die-hard communists wanting to apply the precepts of Bolshevism to the society of the Damned. The Carthians form the most recent Covenant among Vampires. It is merely a few hundred years old. What differenciates the Carthian movement from other Covenants is its stance on Kindred politics inspired by the idea of human democracy. Any type of idealist can be part of the Carthian movement, from the moderates to the die-hard extremists of all kind. Given that communism certainly has been justifying its existence in numerous occasions by a deep belief in the concept of "power to the proletariat", some communists can certainly fit within the movement and form communist factions, even a sort of Internationale, within it.
 
Last edited:


I think there were some Red Chinese planets in Traveller 2300 but I can't remember if that's a fact or not.

Communists are of course the arch enemy in Paranoia.

In Underground, Quebec separatists formed a Communist state.

Communist is an alignment in Illuminati

Marvel SUperHeroes of course had numerous Communist superheroes and villains; the Proletariat, Red Ghost and his Super Apes, Black Widow, Radioative Man, etc.
 

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.
 
Last edited:

Marxism in RPGs

While it's true that communism is typically found in modern and sci-fi settings, there is some historical precedent. Small, isolated groups that didn't need to worry about famine or overly aggressive neighbors, say, on tropical islands, could afford to share what wealth they had, sometimes coexisting with tribalism.

So, too, could small communities that were defended by or hidden within more warlike neighbors, from early Christians hiding in Roman catacombs to some of the idealistic communes in the U.S. of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In a fantasy setting, there would be little to stop Elves, who appear to worry little about mundane matters such as food and are capable of decentralized defense, from sharing their resources equally. Or, perhaps the Dwarves or Gnomes could parley their industrial production and affinity for guilds into labor unions. Note that the works of fiction and early role-playing games will reflect their authors' views and the eras in which they were written. While Star Trek: the Next Generation didn't use money, the all-consuming collective of the Borg certainly reflected late Cold War anxiety.

The implementation of Marxism as Stalinism, Maoism, and other flavors, marked by the suppression of dissent, central economic control, and a desire to export "the revolution," is a sad hallmark of the real 20th century. Even Nazism had a socialist component, and most of these regimes collapsed after a few generations of authoritarian rule. On the other hand, the ideals of fair treatment of all workers regardless of gender, ethnicity, or religion; an equitable distribution of wealth; and the evolution of societies still has its appeal.
 

Kwalish Kid said:
Can anyone else think of the communism, socialism, Bolshevism, totalitarian socialism, anti-consumerist anarcho-syndicalism in RPGs?
There's not a lot of democracies or republics either. Most are monarchies.

IIRC, anarcho-syndicalists were alive and well in guild-led mercantile countries though. Could be sorta like Greyhawk City & Waterdeep.
 

KK,

One thing you may want to consider is instead of looking for overt Marxism/socialism in game settings, you may want to use Marxist criticism as a lens to look at the games/structures themselves. For example, how are labor and its fruits distributed at the game table? What about the dichotomy in authority between the DM and players? How do experience point systems demonstrate an epistemology that might privelege capitalist values?

Does this help?
 

Remove ads

Top