Quote:
Originally Posted by Ashtagon
Is Centrum communist (light)?
I've always thought that Centrum would agree with Karl Marx on his point that capitalism inevitably leads to boom-and-bust cycles and that these are a bad thing. I'm reasonably sure they would canonically reject communism as well as capitalism (both the 'failed' and 'successful' forms of communism), but I could never quite say why. Possible reasons include:
1) Most communist timelines tend to be Russia or China-dominated, leading to severe linguistic problems for Centrum.
2) Their command economies tend to have glaring inefficiencies compared to Centrum, which Centrum would reject.
3) Leading communist thinkers in history have tended to be outside of the Anglo-French philosophical sphere, leading to cultural rejection of the label, regardless of the possible similarities.
4) By the time Centrum became a thing, 'class warfare' on their timeline had largely become an outmoded concept, replaced by "societal survival". This line of thinking was reinforced again by the WMDs in their final war, which didn't even care about wealth or merit, let alone social class. Even if they came across a successful Anglo-French communist timeline, they'd reject it because the philosophical basis of that society is something that they simply consider outmoded.
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One big reason is because Marxism is theoretically oriented toward giving the workers an equal share in the bounty produced by the industrial revolution. Centrum would reject that out of hand. The lowest levels of workers in Centrum society deserve nothing except the minimum to keep them functionally productive. The Level 1s are kept in line by knowing that if they work hard enough they'll eventually make it to Level 2 and level 3. And an ideology that extols revolution is anathema to Centrum.