Theory: Scientific socialism, how you understand the world and the process of revolution. Means of Production The fruits of capital. The foundations for progress. Cool for: Industrialization, practical economists, ruthless automatons. Means of production understands that communism is the economic conclusion to capitalism as much as its ideological foe, and that its goals are to understand and utilize the unprecedented productivity of the human race under capital, and to hopefully find a way to liberate the abundance from the exploitation. It is eminently fixated on counting beans, and as much as some communists might frown on such a thing, it can certainly help keep the Commune fed and the rifles loaded. It will enable you to keep the numbers up, even as the businesses are seized, and to always promote the growth of all the good, civilized things in life. At high levels, Means of Production will make you an economic powerhouse plotting a smooth transition to communism, but it might also make you a myopic econoclard who can't see that there's already more than enough to go around because you're too busy developing the productive forces. A low Means of Production will simply result in the socialism of poverty, sharing everything because there is not enough to make it worthwhile for anyone to accumulate more. It won't be capitalism, but it might make people want capitalism instead. Labour Power The source of all wealth. The share for those who create. Cool for: Unions, individual producers, languishing before the revolution is done. Labour power is the understanding that, under the capitalist mode of production, all extra value truly comes from the surplus, and thus exploited, labour hours of the working class, and that all revolutionary consciousness comes from recognizing this exploitation. Labour Power keeps you in touch with the concerns of the workers, lets you tune in on the reforms that would benefit them and ratchet down the persistent exploitation, reduce and fine-tune labour hours so that soon the working class will be free of both capital and itself. At high levels, Labour Power will let you make huge strides in building a popular communism, but sometimes the workers may ask for too much and create unforeseen consequences of development, like trapping you in some godforsaken halfway point in modes of production, like syndicalism. Low Labour Power, conversely, might make decisions at the workers' expense easier, but it will be hard to call your outcomes Communism anymore. Command Take over from the capitalists. End the anarchy of production. Cool for: Healthy organization, long-term survival, bureaucratic dictatorship. Command is the organization of the Revolution as one single front. From the party to the bureaucracy to the factories, this will let you put everything on a plan and every plan into motion. Command enables sweeping reforms, accurate reports, and a greater degree of self-awareness of everything in the Commune. High levels of command will solve many economic and bureaucratic problems, but people will be terrified at the paperwork involved in everything, and they'll be even more scared when the need for knowledge and control extends into their private lives. Low Command may afford people more freedom, but it will lead to ludicrous inefficiencies or, in the worst case, capitalism reasserting itself where you can't see. Infra-Materialism Try the impossible. Go beyond the Pale. Cool for: A higher purpose. The fate of Humanity. Pseudoscientific insanity. Infra-Materialism is the fringe but growing extreme edge of Mazovian socio-economic theory, the belief that dialectical materialism is not just a social science but a metaphysical one, channeling a great ideological plasm through the workers and the Commune and providing the solution to a world that is, slowly and inexorably, being consumed by the congealed, utterly hostile mass of history of memory in the form of the Pale. It is said that at the first level of development, properties of matter and life will be subtly influenced, at the second sufficiently revolutionary individuals will be able to affect the world with sheer thought, and at the third the laws of physics themselves will bend to complete the system of universal Communism. Even if you don't believe in the pseudoscientific psionic applications and so on, this is a powerful kind of belief. At high levels, Infra-Materialism will give people something to believe in fervently, a hope for a better, solved world, but they will start getting lost in outlandish, probably impossible projects. Low Infra-Materialism will keep things comparatively mundane, but people will have a harder time believing in Communism without an answer to the biggest questions. Natural Philosophy Link to the hard sciences. Understand the world we're changing. Cool for: Dizzying innovation, new tools in the productive process, dehumanizing scientism. Natural Philosophy encompasses all of the "hard" sciences that are much easier to falsify and break down than this socio-economics stuff. From chemistry to biology to engineering, Natural Philosophy is the grouping of all the Commune's base of knowledge and applications for the simple but important elements of understanding the world and knowing how to influence it. Natural philosophy will enable new wartime inventions, create more efficient economic methods that bring communism a little closer, and dispel ancient superstition. High Natural Philosophy makes the Commune's support for the sciences absolute, but it can also create a culture of not being able to see the forest for the trees: why ask a patient what their illness is, when they can be probed and prodded with special instruments, instead? Why care about human feelings, when biology can explain it just as well? Low Natural Philosophy, however, will lead to a luddite, primitivist streak in the Commune, an inability to understand the world and people that can only lead to lashing out or shutting in. Historical Dialectic Understand history as a process. Dispel idealism. Cool for: Acceptance of the past, prediction of the future, being baffled by the present. Historical Dialectic, simply put, lets you understand the past. It is far more than simply being able to recall all the intricate details of the past (although it will let you do that, since it is ultimately an extremely nerdy field), it is also a sense of understanding, and a grand narrative that not only justifies Communism but creates it. All of history as material thesis and antithesis, classes locked in a struggle that transforms and hones them in an upward and forward spiral, until, finally, voila, Communism. High Historical Dialectic makes this narrative central to everything, keeps the story straight, and will make sure you're informed on all the details, but it may clutter your awareness with unnecessary thoroughness and, of course, the fact and analysis fed through it might always have issues, coming from turn-of-the-century Revacholian scholarship. Low Historical Dialectic can save you from the background noise of knowing every detail, and the potentially embarrassing mistakes, but it will also leave you in the dark, practically. Culture: The arts, how the Commune speaks to the people. Post-Modernism Stare into the abyss. Find meaning in a meaningless world. Cool for: Societies that no longer need to suffer, transcendence of the human condition, decadent apathy. Post-Modernism is the cool kind of philosophy, the kind that smokes cigarettes in the university hall, says the class is pointless, and then asks you what you're going to do about it. Post-modernism will give you, the Commune, a streak of real awareness and lucidity, let you see beyond simple, useful narratives of history, and see the cold, hard truth of the absence of any real meaning or purpose. But it's not all bad, Post-Modernism also lets you handle that horrifying realization better, steel yourself, lets your people make their own meaning by helping each other. At high levels, you'll be a society full of decadent, depressive intellectuals who think about killing themselves a lot and are constantly speaking heresy against the Communist orthodoxy, but the ones who don't will have some very important things to say about the human condition and living content with the things we can't affect. At low levels, you'll be spared the distracting, depressing shit, but you won't have even a little moderating voice of anti-reason. Futurism Imagine a better world. Embrace change as a virtue. Cool for: Hyperstitional worldbuilding, acceleration, meltdown. Futurism is some good shit, how fast you're racing into the future and constantly tearing apart the old ways of things, it measures how much your social and cultural momentum is dedicated to disintegrating every old social tie or foundation, from race to gender to reality itself. Futurism enables grand plans about impossible architecture, a culture of rapidly changing fashions and expressions, and building really bitchin' fast cars. Futurism is the acid in acid communism, and yes, that does mean inventing acid first at the moment. High Futurism will have you doing your best to build impossible architecture and introduce wild new foods and practices to the people, constantly dancing on a knife's edge of identity redefined and identity lost, but it will also leave you something of a hyperactive wreck that will flit between ideas and programs faster than your conscious mind can keep up. Low Futurism keeps everything nice and conservative and normal, which is good for social cohesion but bad for changing a lot of the staid and tired social structures in Revachol. Shivers Raise the hairs on their necks. Broadcast to the people. Cool for: Loving cities, teachings in the streets, the genuinely supra-natural. Shivers is a strange one, your one genuinely supra-natural way to communicate with the people that make you up. As a semi-metaphorical expression of a city's ideological and historical features, you normally float above the masses who move about within you, but Shivers is the exception. The bite of cold that lets the bookkeeper see through windows to know what misery a mistake can cause in another neighborhood, the warm gust of wind that lets a drunk pub-crawler realize just how intricate their route is and how many people they will never see are watching, the tinge on the nerves that lets a depressed man know that something better is coming. Shivers is how you actually communicate to the people of Revachol, the invisible, incomprehensible signals in the temperature that make their hairs stand on end and the deepest parts of their soul take notice. High Shivers means the people of Revachol will genuinely love you, and know how special you are among cities and countries, although they might become utterly bizarre and strangely spiritual to the people of other nations. Low Shivers will make you silent, leaving the people alone to their thoughts and activities without knowing you are watching over them. Inter-Nationalism Unite all peoples. Find confidence in diversity. Cool for: World Revolution, secure but humble nations, cynical dealmaking. Inter-Nationalism is just how good Revachol is at interfacing with other nations, other cultures. The Commune must contend to be only one part of a true Communist World Republic, after all, and that means dealing with the rest of the world on equal terms. Inter-Nationalism is the celebration of diversity and worldwide revolutionary unity without abandoning what makes us distinct, it is the partnership of nations rather than the liberal dissolution and absorption of nations, and enables you to butter up and deal with these other countries so much more effectively. High Inter-Nationalism will make you a master negotiator and a keystone of nations uniting against capitalism, but it will also make you a bit of a cynical busybody who will do anything, even sacrifice important principles, to impress others. Low Inter-Nationalism makes you a pariah state, an awkward asshole who says insensitive things when meeting new countries and can't help reminding them of... someone else. Mass Media Give the masses what they want. Entertain and educate. Cool for: Enjoyable lives, cultural exports, societies of spectacle. With Mass Media, the people can be given one unified flow of information and entertainment, a perfect convergence of technology and organization to let culture spread further and be more perfectly preserved than ever before. Mass Media encompasses the ability to use film, radio, print, and potentially in the far future television to project cultural products everywhere. Mass Media unites the people, gives them something to laugh or cry at together, and keeps the collective unconscious relatively stable. It enables culture and ideas to remain remarkably stable across great distances and numbers of people, which is both of immense propaganda value and just plain good for more and more complex cultural expressions to the widest audience possible. A high Mass Media skill will let you play up the emotions and thoughts of the people like nothing else, a single unified culture, but at the cost of crushing localism, tradition, and a great deal of free thought with the blunt methods involved in such technology. A low Mass Media leaves more room for localism, but it will essentially cause the culture to fracture apart slowly but surely. Solidarity Feel wounds together. Share victories together. Cool for: Close-knit communities, support in the dark times, contagious despair. Solidarity is a kind of social empathy, the measure of people being able to understand and care for the pains of others. It is a foundational element of the Commune, the spark that turns the average citizen into a revolutionary when they can no longer bear the sight of their neighbors starving, dying of the plague, or forced out into the cold. Solidarity enables the Commune to hold together from terrible blows to morale, from failure. Solidarity keeps the fire burning for the cause, even after a whole torrent of water has fallen on it. For you, it will represent the will to keep going and the cause itself. High Solidarity will leave you hardened and able to take many miserable, humiliating blows, but it will also leave you a bit of a depressive, crying wreck at how much more there is to fight for, always. Low solidarity will leave you fragile and the people disloyal at best, and at worst the entire Commune will feel built on sand. Militancy: Your defense, how hard you can fight the reactionaries. Organizing Let the working class come into its own. Seize what is ours. Cool for: Labour organization, strikes against the capitalists, strikes against the Commune. Organizing is the militant organization of labour groups in Revachol, and their combination into one united front to battle the capitalists to the bitter end. Organizing enables fomenting strikes in areas you don't control, and special voluntary hyper-production in areas you do control. However, it is a wild, militant force that does not exactly obey central planning, and there is always the risk that certain labour organizations might carry their own agendas that are less high-minded than absolute Communism. High Organizing will have the entire working class up in your support, but it will fill you with lots of little subsidiary organizations all with their own extreme agendas. Low Organizing, meanwhile, will leave organized labour quite passive, and limit both their usefulness and unruliness. Armament Churn out the materiel to fight. Turn a Commune into a fortress. Cool for: Victory in the long war, safety in the short war, doom in the endless war. Armament is the raw materiel used in any war effort, the share of economic production that goes into producing the guns and bullets needed for the defense of the Commune and the forward march of the World Revolution. Armament enables a well-oiled war machine with all the heavy artillery, tanks, lorries, aerostatics, and yes, humble riflemen needed for any kind of modern conflict Be careful, however, as efforts with Armament have a tendency to balloon into their own ridiculous, overwrought affairs that can actually waste resources reasonably needed elsewhere. A high Armament will let you have a modern fighting force with the newest tools, but it will make you keyed up to waste more and more resources on expanding and upgrading everything, and it will make you aggressive and eager to get into more and harder fights. A low Armament, meanwhile, will leave your forces nothing more than a rabble with rifles and their fanaticism. Mobilization Turn the people into an army. Give everyone a part to play. Cool for: Expanding operations, more thorough revolutions, hopeless mobs. Mobilization needs more troops in the trenches. It needs a lot more troops in the trenches. Mobilization is the measure of how much of the Commune's population is ready and able to take up arms for you. Whether out of fanaticism, desperation, or simple duty to others, they will come marching to your call and do whatever needs doing in the name of the Revolution. Mobilization enables bigger military operations, obviously, but also more internal security, a wider net cast to catch the bourgeoisie, and the manpower for state-directed projects to get done no matter what. High Mobilization will put a massive amount of your population at arms, which is both excellent for fighting to the last breath and terrible for making those breaths count, with all the difficulty in coherently directing such a mob. A low Mobilization, however, leaves your forces starving for hands to hold the guns. Strategy Plan your attacks. Apply strength with precision. Cool for: Perfectly timed and positioned strikes, military skill, smoky rooms of generals and politicians. Strategy is how smart you fight with the resources you have, an amalgam of many abstract statistics from the density of NCOs in units to the amount of prep-work done by the commanders. Strategy lets you take a small number of men and materiel and overcome the odds, maximum effect for minimum loss. However, Strategy requires intelligence, in all senses of the word, and as you grow this stat you also grow parallel intelligences within the Revolution, shadowy interests with their own goals and assets that are almost truly independent of you in an abstract way. High Strategy can deliver miracles on the battlefield, but it will also subject your people to conspiracy and collusion by those who claim to know best. Low Strategy keeps things simple and in the open, but you'll be unable to avoid some truly stupid military plans. Élan Aggression in all things. Push the Revolution at every opportunity. Cool for: Thorough social change, annihilation of enemies, states of paranoia. Élan is the spirit of aggression, of the attack carried home and the charge continued until your legs give out beneath you. Élan is certain that the Revolution is never truly over, that the battle has never been completely won, and that there is still an eternal fight to keep on thrashing through with maximal aggression and panache. Élan enables, in practical warfare, the most fanatical and constant attacks and charges with all the troops' hearts, and in more abstract terms it will help keep spirits high and keep the people at home ready to root out and destroy reaction at every chance. High Élan makes you a pure war machine of the Revolution, pursuing the enemy to their homes and trenches and dragging them out by the hair, but the attendant terror will be violent, terrifying, and sometimes unnecessary. Low Élan, however, will leave you adrift and unmotivated, and leave you weak to counterattacks and fifth columns. Propaganda Spread the news of the revolution. Help others understand. Cool for: Confident populations, defections to the Revolution, cults of personality. Propaganda is how hard you can push the Commune and its ideals to the people, it is the talent for finding the right combination of truth and deception to keep people's belief and hope high, at all costs. Propaganda is not strictly speaking lying--after all, it is just as much the work of properly getting your successes out to the public as it is hiding your failures--but there is of course something a bit dirty and disconcerting about relying on it. Also, a strong propaganda machine leaves you open to very strong organizations and individuals overemphasizing themselves, and taking on an outmoded, obsessive part in the Revolution. A High Propaganda keeps the people true believers and honest fighters, but be careful of the big parades with portraits and statues. A low Propaganda, however, is the worst of all worlds, in that the people will be angry and easily manipulated by other people's propaganda. Justice: Restoration, how you set the world right. Restoration Resolve conflicts for good. Make all parties happy. Cool for: Revolutionary courts, conflict resolution without violence, inability to take a side. Restoration is justice in a purer form, the idea of responses to crime and conflict without punitive measures but instead a fair exchange to set things as right as possible. Restoration enables the Commune to have an effective legal system that processes all these claims while executing the Revolution at all levels, from creating new laws legitimizing the seizure of economic power by the workers to making it so petty theft is met by giving the perpetrator the means to live without stealing anymore. High Restoration gives you a steady head for these things, always keeping in mind who the real victims and villains are and carrying out this justice so that the world gets better, fairer, and more honest bit by bit. The downside of course is that all this talk gets you caught up in a lot of technicalities and debates, and when you're sympathetic to everyone you start not wanting to really take a side on anything. Low Restoration can save you from this interminable fence-sitting, but will also leave you with crude, angry methods of dealing with conflicts and crimes. Order Keep the streets clean. Enforce decisions without resistance. Cool for: Respectful consensus, service to citizens, police states. Order keeps things quiet. While most of the Revolution is all energy and the people excited for a new world, Order is the stick in the mud with the practical concern for making sure people can live their everyday lives and that everything goes smoothly. Order lets you keep the workers' neighborhoods quiet and safe, make the council meetings respectful of procedure and opinions, and make sure people know that Communist government is good government. Sure, it may seem harsh to put the eyes of Revolutionary Law on simple graffito artists or unruly people, but they are disrupting the Workers' State. High Order keeps everything to the plan and to schedule, and prevents many unwelcome public disruptions, at the cost of possibly making people feel like they are constantly being watched and corralled into obedient quietude. A low Order can unleash some more positive spontaneity, but nobody likes being punched out by drunks on the street or having things wrecked weekly by a new revolutionary demonstration. Decolonization Set everyone free. Right your past wrongs. Cool for: Destruction of racism at the root, foundations in the oppressed, paralyzing white guilt. Decolonization is all about reckoning with the dark past of Revachol, with the horrible things that were done by this country and its people before the Revolution. From the original occupation of the island and the brutal exploitation of Semenine and Iilmaran laborers to build Revachol from nothing, to the colonial empire that made Revachol Suzerain of the world, there is a dark, dark history here that needs to be dealt with, probably by some means of development or reparations and actively seeking to center the former colonies' concerns. Of course, the people of Revachol, of whom a significant majority are "white" by some definition, are a bit distant from some of the more high-minded discussions on this topic. Decolonization will let you do great things for the people who were harmed by Revachol before, but white working-class Revacholieres might find it insulting to be treated as if they're imperialist lackeys in the middle of a Communist revolution, and even minorities and ex-colonized populations can find a lot of the rhetoric on this topic condescending at best. High Decolonization will set you on a good path repairing the damage, but be careful of all the advice flowing in from students who might be over-eager or depressive about these things. Low Decolonization will leave you an insensitive, boorish mess who has a hard time convincing people you've really changed. Feminism Understand gender. Hold up half the sky. Cool for: Recognition for invisible labour, freedom for all expressions, falling into essentialism. Feminism is the personal stuff, the stuff about tearing down the wretched patriarchal structures that undergird all of preexisting class society and freeing sex and gender from the crushing weight of history and oppression. Feminism lets you navigate the thorny issues of women in Revachol and start making positive progress, from letting women make decisions about their reproduction and working lives to involving feminine perspectives at all levels of the Commune's decision-making. Feminism also, by proximity as a skill, also encompasses a wide range of movements for sexual and general gender liberation, but this can often be a mixed bag to deal with. High Feminism will let you hear the concerns of all these groups and act on them, but it will also introduce the nagging concerns of certain groups who have very specific, prescribed definitions of man and woman, and that man and woman alone are the categories to liberated and dealt with. Low Feminism will save you from the headache of navigating that particular struggle at the moment, but it will be leaving the needs of at least half the world deemphasized. Peace Take action without arms. Build a world without war. Cool for: The prevention of death and suffering, principled resistance, easy marks for imperialism. Peace works to resolve violence all over the world without the need to fight, a very useful talent for a Commune to have when the eyes of the world are on it and eager to pounce. Peace is not just a skill of negotiation and compromise, but also resolution, since there are a lot of international conflicts in which you can deploy some influence and resolve things your way. This negotiating tack, of course, involves reigning the violent revolution stuff in a bit, and lowering your defenses to earn trust might just be taken by unscrupulous capitalists as a chance to stab you in the heart. High Peace will make you the upstanding Communist in the international community, but that also means you will be surrounded by bourgeois monsters who don't care how upstanding you are in their desire to kill you. Low Peace will make you an internationally reviled warmonger whose "Revolutionary campaigns" make the headlines as simple expansionism, but it is more honest to what's going on. Agency Let people control their own lives. Build a revolution of choice. Cool for: Withered away states, people knowing what to do on their own, endless meetings and debates. Agency is the measure of how active the average working citizen is in carrying out the Revolution themselves, the amount of leeway given to the freedom of the individual from bourgeois notions of law and class society. Agency is fixated on direct democracy and creating a society that can no longer be called a state, an organization of producers that does not need force or coercion to achieve the benefit of society. Agency lets you leave things to the working class, and for them to make it work, day by day. High Agency makes you an anarchist paradise with a multitude of different organizing expressions between communities, but negotiating the differences to something that can serve the high Revolutionary purpose will be, simply put, Hell. With a low Agency, you'll seem like a despotic centralized state to many, but there will be certainly fewer distractions.