Assuming FTL travel but no FTL communication beyond sending a messenger ship...

Assuming FTL travel but no FTL communication beyond sending a messenger ship, and assuming getting from habited planet to planet takes a few days, how would space communists work? Would it be a viable method of government?

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Look to Traveller for how different forms of government work in a setting like that, it's literally just as you describe with no ftl coms and with huge messenger ships having data servers.

Regardless of goverment type, the question is if the ftl postal service can keep the nation together. Since that was a thing long before the invention of the telegraph I'd say yes, but expect a lot of corruption thanks to isolation to crop up regardless of locale governance method.

Would space feudalism work?

I don't see why not, but you couldn't really have a "greater vassal" thing in this scenario. They're all planetary/system dukes. Of course Bumfuck system will be poorer than most, but still.

It's viable on the system level.
You can get news from hab to hab pretty quickly in a solar system, but if you're looking to spread the revolution further, you're gonna need A. a nearby system that'll eat that shit up and B. people who you can trust to spread the message without setting themselves up as Glorious Leaders.

Essentially what you're looking at is the Russian Revolution in the core systems, but the Space!Provisional Siberian Government having clout in the outer systems

Define viable. Communism doesn't even "work" on Earth. That didn't stop the Soviet Union from trucking along for decades.

The question isn't about communications, its "Can the industrial capacity of the civilization overcome the gross inefficiencies produced by central planning?"

If it can, then long live the Revolution space-Comrade! If it can't? Expect to get 'liberated' really soon.

>Soviet Union
>communist

>the question isn't about communications
If we're talking about a revolution, then it's entirely about communications.

Industrial capacity-wise, it could do with a super-AI to plan the shit

Oddly enough, in this scenario, you probably don't really have that much of a cental planning. Just planetary planning and a interesting "uncommerce" thing between systems.

Maybe Space Moscow just say "alright, we need n millions of metric tons of food per year, Kolkoz-one. You're free to engage in business to boost your farming, of course".

Most governments that we have now existed pre-trains and telegraph in one form or another. And they worked under pretty similar constraints. You'd just have to have a more decentralized government.

I'd imagine that the larger the state, the less efficient Central Planning gets. A City-State might be able to make it work, but a vast nation the size of the USSR could not, and an interstellar state is going to fall apart even quicker.

Space Feudalism, on the other hand, would work. Even if communication was poor and some worlds were difficult to reach; as long as the taxes were collected and militaries could be levied, it'd work.

If the Empire could do this with communication taking months, then a planetary union could do it easily with communication taking a few days.

It still depends on the setting. How expensive is ftl travel compared to the average economic output of a planet?

It's not like actual people would be unable to be checked upon the KGB. I mean, the LOCAL KGB, but still, planet will have newspapers, telegraph, smarthpones, whatever.

AIs, user. Comrade Computer is your friend!

Communism is never a viable method of government.

Welcome to fucking traveller, this is the Third Imperium. Don't use psychic powers and we're good.

It'd be exactly like ancient feudalism, except bigger.

>Comrade Computer is your friend!
Damn right it is.

Computerisation done well can really help central planning, or anything really

>implying advanced AI able to calculate demand and supply constantly and infinite automation doesn't make space communism viable

(You)

Sick of these fascist HFY shitters, need some HFY that involves spreading the ''''''''''''''workers revolution'''''''''''''

In Star Traders, the setting works like this. FTL communication is banned for reasons that I will not get into here, so the various Faction Princes and wealthy individuals will pay Star Trader Captains to ferry important messages and secret cargo from system to system.

Britain had a few advantages that Communism lacks, chief of which was the fact that the people the British conquered tended to lack guns. Indeed, even spears would usually make the British think twice. No, the sort of people the British tended to prefer conquering were typically armed with viciously sharpened fruits.

Well if we're gonna base all of our estimations of Space Communism on the USSR, we'd have to assume a Space USA (i.e. a bigger, richer, more powerful nation constantly trying to topple the workers' state at every turn).

So I think the real question is: how strong is Space Capitalism in this example?

>communism
>working

Pick one.

Stronger than ever.

First, you must understand that there is no raw resource crash. The chief cost of something like iron or gold isn't in the mining, it's in the smelting. That is to say that while casual space travel might allow you to start mining the asteroid belt, where it is easier to acquire iron ore than in the Earth, the price of iron isn't actually going to be significantly affected, because the main cost of iron is found in removing the useless stuff like carbon or the like from the iron ore you have, and smelting it into a useful form. Ditto gold, silver, tungsten, and so on. Basically, the idea that going into space and mining the asteroid belt will somehow cause a post-scarcity environment or a resource boom is not true. There's already more iron in the Earth's crust than humanity could ever possibly use.

HOWEVER

What DOES get hit - and in a good way - is the exotic/luxury goods department. Assuming that other habitable worlds are "naturally" habitable and not terraformed, then this opens up a huge market for new goods. Don't you want to try a hunk of Centauran jackalope meat? Won't your girl love it if you home with a bouquet of Tau Cetan firetulips? And think about how much money is being made off of Phoenician dyes from Alpha Phoenicis!

People would get absurdly rich by staking claims to planets, or parts of planets, and gaining exclusive access to the goods there.

*Oh, by the way, Terran goods don't lose out on this front, either, because the folk in the colonies are going to want to have reminders of home, like Colombian coffee, cow meat, etc. So there's a fortune to be made in shipping of Terran goods to the colonies as well.

>Stronger than ever.

Well then Space Communism won't really exist, because Space Capitalism will "liberate" the shit out of any civilizations that try it.

Messenger drone relay. Or a messenger station relay. Both if you want redundancy.

is this bait?

>Image
Allende you crazy bastard

>space consumerism
Shit's expensive. There's some money to be made fleecing idiots who want to pretend space is a place humans are going though.

We don't need to go to other planets to amp consumers on buying the new line of smartphone. Just changing the shampoo bottle shape works fine. In the same way there's more iron here than we'll ever need, there's an infinite amount of marketing.

Claims on planets would be interesting. Depends on who's claiming jurisdiction. Nation states handing out corporate contracts seems plausible enough.

>how would space communists work? Would it be a viable method of government?
Yes, because communism can function as a local government the same way direct democracies do. The planets would be assigned production by the steering committee and that probably wouldn't change year-to-year.

Honestly it's probably one of the few other than anarcho-socialism or feudalism that would work in a no-FTL-comms situation.

English translation when

No.

The only reason feudalism worked was because the people were kept unarmed, powerless, and only marginally less afraid of their ruler than they were of being attacked by the ruler next door. They allowed themselves to be oppressed in exchange for protection.

That system only works if the people are hellishly poor and stupid. Swords and armor are expensive and need training. The moment someone can get a gun, they no longer need the protection of their feudal lord, and could just straight up end him if they wanted.

There's no way you could keep an entire planet enslaved to one dude against their will. You'll get a elective monarchy very quickly, or you get a ruler who is more or less a slave to his own military.

Could space communism work if the space Western Powers weren't constantly trying to fuck with it just because 'muh gomunism'?

I know that feel

>It's a totalitarian states are only bad because of those nasty mean liberal democracies episode

Unless the space-capitalism that these guys are all talking about turns into full-on wage slavery and memetic cyberpunk megacorporations. Reducing a massive amount of your populace into what is effectively indentured servitude is a fantastic way to simulate feudalism on the lower levels.

The only thing that would really change is who's up top. Instead of a king, you'd find things like a Corporate Court or maybe a figurehead-leader who's owned by the corporations in question.

There's more than one way to get a feudalism equivalent.

>Could space communism work if the space Western Powers weren't constantly trying to fuck with it just because 'muh gomunism'?

Who fuckin knows? Maybe? Probably?

We've never seen the system get a chance to run on its own. An isolated colony/planet/system settled by Space Communists would be a pretty great setup to explore how it panned out though.

LeGuin wrote a whole novel about it, in fact.

>all communism is totalitarian
>all communism is dominated by a state
>all communism opposes democracy

sure thing buddy

that chick is hot.

shes like a professional milf.
like, "Kids? Whose got time for kids? I'm a sexy space captain."

like i don't know, maybe a pilf? professional I'd like to fuck? Competence is so sexy. Let me be you bumbling ditzy house companion. You can rescue me space aliens when i get kidnapped.

A capitalist is just a monarchist who doesn't have the guts to choose a king.

A Democracy is socialist by nature, just because we call ourselves a capitalist society doesn't make it true.

Centralized production is actually terrible for a communist state. It takes the power out of the hands of the people and places in the planners appointed by the state.

I mean, the classical definition of communism just doesn't really hold up. It doesn't really matter who controls manufacturing and distribution, whether its the government or a handful of private wealthy industrialists, the point is, so long as no one else has access, a small minority controls how goods are manufactured and process with no input from the populace.

I mean, you don't get to decide what scale to up our potato chip production to, whether shelves should be lined with nothing but potato chips or they might have one pack in a dingy basement.

Society has some say in what happens as consumers, but they really don't have any say in macro-scale projects or things that take a great deal of resources.

I don't get to decide if lockheed decides to light a trillion dollars on fire on their latest boondoggle any more than russians get to pick what their leaders spend their money on.

We don't elect industrialists and economic planners, we elect politicians.

I guess what I'm saying is that macro economics is a closed process. Most people don't have any say in what happens, and we just trust these engineers and buerocrats and whatnot to be infallible and not make any mistakes.

Which means they are not allowed to take any chances. If they make one big mistake, they get fired. So their only vested interest is not to get fired by keeping everything the way it is.

People might want more of things we are not producing, but because investment is a closed process practiced by only a handful of individuals, all of like mind and similiar thought processes, the chances of them producing it are slim to none.

Likewise, there may be plenty of things being shoved down our throat that we don't want, things being produced at a massive scale so that the cost of production drops to nearly zero, who are so economically conservative that they don't realize that they would actually make more money by scaling back production.

That was actually one of surprising things about (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn) - it had a top-down centralising element, and emergency control, but it was designed to make individual factories and their workers have more of a say

nice wiki link.

shit sounds cash. I looked up Bayesian filters and it actually had a working example of its implementation that made sense.

How does a robot know where it is? How do we know how much of a thing is needed and why?

Of course, in the modern sense, it is not so much what is needed as it is what we want. The goal is generally to apply socialism to our needs and capitalism to our wants. Or is it the other way around?

most everybody needs a house and a certain amount of personal space in order to be happy. But has anyone ever sat down and though about how much?

Has anyone ever thought, well, if I can put 70% of people in mansions and 30% of people in shacks, is that better than 90 percent of people in tiny apartments 10% in mansions?

What if I could put EVERYBODY in a mansion? Or at the very least, at least 3 bedrooms per person per house?

Why is this not possible? Is it a resource constraint? A labor constraint?

I detect a faggot with no historical knowledge!
You're wrong, idiot. Feudalism emerged because of a legitimate need for protection, and historically has only been moved when it veers into highly oppressive serfdom (Russian Empire) or the Nobility get stupid (France). Otherwise, it has literally no downside.

>highly opressive serfdom
>feudalism
>2 different things

Human nature. That's what makes communism fall apart: it fails to take into account basic human nature. That is to say, if everyone had a 3-bedroom house, a significant portion of the population - I daresay the majority, in fact - would want 4-bedroom houses so that they could lord this fact over the people still stuck with 3-bedroom houses. They would be willing to do extra work of some variety in order to acquire those 4-bedroom houses, of course, but that very drive to do more work would naturally cause them to classify themselves as "better" than the people who don't (or can't) work for bigger houses. Such people are lazy, after all.

Basically, if you establish a "baseline", people are going to want to fundamentally live over that baseline. We are an acquisitive, avaricious species by nature. We don't want to live in "balance" or be "equal", we want to be superior and to have things. We like things. Things are nice. And it's not nice when other people have the same things, or better things, since that means that we're not better than other people.

>and historically has only been moved when it veers into highly oppressive serfdom (Russian Empire) or the Nobility get stupid (France)

I feel that isn't correct, given that feudalism ended in more places than just Russia and France.

Feudalism ended in Europe because military power shifted from armies consisting of and maintained by the nobles to professional, standing forces under the authority of national rulers. Feudalism was de facto gone from most of Europe (excluding Russia) by the 1500s, even if some archaic laws or traditions of it de jure remained until the 1700s.

Read books of Ivan Efremov. He had some nice space communism books. Frankly characters sometimes feel a little alien.

Communism doesn't work on earth, I don't think space fixes that issue.

This is why to achieve communism, you need to change human nature. We have bound rivers to perform work for us with dams and waterwheels, we have bound wild beasts to breed in captivity and provide meat and milk, who says we can't bind human "nature"?

Le it's never been tried, goy

>Assuming FTL travel but no FTL communication beyond sending a messenger ship
I find many Sci-fi writers just a narrow minded sometimes.

If we have FTL anything, we have FTL communication. Something as simply as sending a tube fired at light speed to the local communication hub of that system.
Can be automated, no people needed, only time delay would be when "Firing" said tube into lightspeed.

And starfighters only drop out of hyperspace, when the space freight stops crossing the divide.

>space without entrepreneurs

Aside from the fact that it sounds monstrous?

Bullshit. The various kingdoms of India were well into the gunpowder age by the time the EIC began playing them off each other, and the west coast of africa had a long history of trading for guns in exchange for slaves.

Is that from somewhere? Sounds like something out of Blackadder.

> Assuming FTL travel but no FTL communication beyond sending a messenger ship, and assuming getting from habited planet to planet takes a few days,
> Would it be a viable method of government?
Yes. Provided you have technology to have population work ~10 hours a week and ~10 hours to engage in politics (rest is education/culture).

Communications doesn't matter that much: it took days - if not weeks - to get information across USSR in 30s, but it was capable of significant centralization even without high-capacity data storages.

> how would space communists work?
Some sort of Federation, I'd guess.

Or is this a question about Galactic Revolution? Because if this is something along the lines "you need to conquer every planet for Communism to happen" - that's absolutely retarded vulgarization.


> I'd imagine that the larger the state, the less efficient Central Planning gets.
No. It's the opposite - economies of scale. That's why Cuba almost went under at the same time as Soviets collapsed - it had no political problems, but there wasn't anybody to trade with.

You are also assuming that Planning requires absolute Planning, but IRL nobody ever does that. Plans are for general coordination of production and direction of resources.


FFS, Soviet Union was Socialist, not Communist. It's right there in the name: Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics.

you sound like every bad scifi antagonist ever.

It is from Blackadder, specifically Blackadder Goes Fourth (the WWI season).

>Baldrick: "How did the war start, anyway, sir?"
>George: "Well, Baldrick! It's because of Kaiser Jerry, isn't it, and his conquering ways!"
>Blackadder: "George, the British Empire currently encompasses a fifth of the planet, while the German Empire consists of a single sausage factory in Munich. I *think* we may have had something to do with it."

Blackadder is such a great series.

And then there's THIS asshole, who's never seen it.

Human norms and beliefs changed greatly over the existence of meaningful human civilization (so the past 8000-10000 years as far as actual cities and agriculture are concerned).

Do you assume mid 20th centuries beliefs and norms are the true height of humanity?

> Would space feudalism work?
No. Feudalism is based on land being scarce - people have to work for landowner to get a living.

However, you need industrial economy for space travel. And once you have it, land is no longer the precious thing it was. The real power now lies within the distribution of industrial goods: i.e. within money that became the ultimate exchange tool.

That's why there is no industrial Feudalism - either aristocracy becomes Capitalist or it is replaced by Capitalists (or both).


> Has anyone ever thought, well, if I can put 70% of people in mansions and 30% of people in shacks, is that better than 90 percent of people in tiny apartments 10% in mansions?
That's not how it works.

It is perfectly acceptable to have market for consumer goods that you don't have an abundance of.

I assume that the fundamental nature of humanity has never changed, even if the pomp and circumstance surrounding it has.

"I want more" isn't just a basis of humanity, in fact, it's a basis of life itself. No animal species attempts to exist in balance with nature, they all try to dominate it, and are kept in check only by competition with other animal species. We can see what happens when that competition is removed with, for example, the rabbits in Australia, where in less than a hundred years their population jumped from an initial start of 24 rabbits in 1859 to over 600 million by 1950. Just ten years after their introduction to Australia, you could kill or trap two million rabbits per year without having any notable effect on the population.

Changing such a fundamental, biological imperative is impossible...and, again, monstrous to even attempt.

>sexy
Are we looking at the same picture? Brick head, freakish spinal curve, collapsed ribcage, no abdominal cavity and enormous thighs? Clearly this is some sort of horrific Rob-Liefeldian mutant?

An unfounded assumption is just that.

Just about every religion and philosophy on the planet generally went against the "I want more".

Biological competition is absolutely irrelevant, for humans are not rabbits. If all there was to life was competition, would people ever be compassionate? Would there be a fight against slavery, centuries ago? Would there be a fight for equal rights for all humans? What people want is to be secure and safe. Keeping up with the joneses approach to competition is a recent invention and it doesn't define humanity.

>Just about every religion and philosophy on the planet generally went against the "I want more".

Yes, just about every single one does. And yet look at what we ultimately are and always have been: a consumer society, where we always try and one-up each other. Look at where the Dalai Lama would be living if he could actually go to Tibet. Look at the incalculable wealth of the Papacy.

What does that tell you?

>If all there was to life was competition, would people ever be compassionate?

Note how I called it "a" basis for life itself, not "the". There are other features, it's not the end-all-be-all. But attempting to remove such a fundamental biological fact is literally insane.

I guess we can't all follow Ayn Rand and be a godless capitalist who would sell his own mother for a profit. Some things have to be taken up on faith, like belief in humanity and hope for a better future.

> "I want more" isn't just a basis of humanity,
There is no such basis. There is only "I don't have enough".

If you get 200 hamburgers to eat per day, will you strive to get 2,000? No, you can barely eat 20 per day anyway.
If you have 200 rooms to live in, will you strive to get 2,000? No, you can barely keep 20 of those in order.

You are under delusion that "I want more" is universal is only because our current society is based on artificial poverty on all levels. Even rich are desperately poor: they can't afford security.


Moreover, the whole argument about "human nature" is flawed: it in no way precludes Socialist revolutions, since poor people also "want more", and just like rich they don't really care about law. Especially, when getting more by working is a non-option, when only rich get richer. And this is not a exception (which happen occasionally when somebody is threatening with revolution), but a rule. Austria, for example: since 1998 productivity is 20% higher, but wages are 18% lower.

> No animal species attempts to exist in balance with nature, they all try to dominate it, and are kept in check only by competition with other animal species.
How many animals are keeping humans in check? We are pretty much past this stage. And attempts to to keep ourselves "in check" by competing the old way would mean nuclear war and possible extinction.

Do we really have to rely on nuclear war for our civilization to function? I think not.

...

I think he means the viciously sharpened fruits, which sounds like youtube.com/watch?v=U90dnUbZMmM

I think that people only think Space Feudalism works because 40k, and I don't think that's a fair example.

>How many animals are keeping humans in check?
We are starting to be constrained by resources and logistics. It's possible to beat this problems though. For now.

But overall people really need something new to get them really going. War or space doesn't matter that much. Though space would be preferable.

It gets in the way of things that are associated with modernization in countries like England.

I should actually at least explain something - it's hard to have large-scale industry, and a feudalistic economy is invariably tied to agriculture. Russia only slowly grew out of the feudal system towards a more modern one not just because of reforms, but because their raw resources were highly prized by other European countries - and even then, they weren't producing much of their own.

>how would space communists work?
Kill billions of people and then declare that it wasn't real communism.

>and a feudalistic economy is invariably tied to agriculture
What stops the Lord's property being a factory instead of a load of fields?

Genuinely curious, is it the fact that it's much easier for a bunch of tenant farmers to support themselves off the farms, meaning minimal upkeep is needed from the lord?
They can just take their tax and leave everything else alone unless shit's going down?

I...honestly don't know. Even in England, the nobility's power mainly came from the land and agriculture, and as that started becoming less profitable it was more that they were losing their titles than building factories.

It could be simple tradition or what's expected of a noble, it could be economic factors (building a factory out in the country, far away from the city, means you have to ship in raw materials and ship out what you make), it could be that they just couldn't compete with the non-nobles...

...

Feudalism is linked heavily with the fact that serfs were a relatively scarce resource, so you want them to STAY in your village/castle/whatever (not necessarily by almost-slavery, but very possibly). This also meant that the feudal lord was by necessity a war lord, of course.

Industrial revolution, on the other hand, was started by something of a suplus of proles AND the fact that machines were too costly for farmer/workers (up to 1700s it wasn't really the case).There were more than enough people in the cities to work these machines, which meant (as it happened) that while Dickens was right and probably people in London's slums WERE living worse that serfs in Russia or even China at the time, owners didn't need slaves. There always was someone more than enough desperate to work in your place, if you want to be a little melodramatic.And besides, there was no other real alternative. In a sense, industrialization and the subsequent trade unions were the realization that the market NEEDED some checks and balances. But I digress.

Now, it's scifi, you can play with these as much as you like. I mean, check Herbet and his "planetary capitalists", it's not really that new. But regarding IRL history, the other user is correct

Besides, while land-owners aren't anything new, feudalesim meant some measure of self-sustenance of the feud part (never total, but still). I'm not sure how you could play that angle with an hypotetical feudal-but-hittech future: feuds would be pretty large even for a simpler, 1800s tech level, if they were to be self-sufficient. Just think about coal, metals and all that shit. It's not a matter of having 20 different kind of fields.
On the level of nation-states, probably, so...

I imagine space colonialism will go much like regular colonialism: subject to rule of your mother country until you're independent enough to tell them to fuck off and enough military power to not be worth the trouble of keeping around.

>Industrial revolution, on the other hand, was started by something of a suplus of proles AND the fact that machines were too costly for farmer/workers (up to 1700s it wasn't really the case).There were more than enough people in the cities to work these machines
You've got that a bit the wrong way around user, people moved to cities because that's where the work was - weaving used to be a cottage industry, but there was a fantastic confluence of inventions and situations that made the industrial revolution happen, and quite a few were inter-dependant.

Leonid Kantorovich had actual solutions for central planning that were based on proper, computer calculated optimal resources allocation. He got Nobel prize for his research.
Now, at that time they didn't have neither computing power nor political will, but I see nothing stopping your fully automated luxury gay space communism to actually be centrally planned with Kantorovich being regarded as the hero who started it all.
Especially that when you get off this planet you probably will have more resources you could ever dream of, mined on asteroids, and little to no need for human work, because almost everything will be automated. There's very little planning you need to do at that point.

>Personal weapons and starship weapons become so advanced that precise operation of them requires enough training to warrant a whole class of people dedicated to defense
>The relative isolation from terrestrial law and the dangers on new colonies allow this new nobility to assume positions of authority
>The difficulty of leaving the colony makes for de facto serfdom
>Recognizing the genetic dangers in small populations, colonies are able to work out a deal to arrange marriages between individuals by means of messages exchanged over trade ship caravans
>The drive to make a colony self sustaining as transport ships arrive less and less often and populations grow a bit, makes land again one of the most important commodities
>The crude AI colonies made, hampered by hard limits on CPU size and the dangers of solar storms without magnetic fields often malfunction, becoming one of the many threats inherent to colony life which nobles must protect the people against ultimately leading to their replacement with regular workers in most places, with efforts at mass automation failing as a result
>Populations are kept low by a drop in fertility rates and are maintained carefully
>Nobles adopt various codes limiting bloodshed when they or nations fight: instead taking captives for ransom becomes common
They'd inevitably call it something else but it'd be feudalism. Honestly could be pretty comfy or pretty horrible as with most systems. Bonus points for new kinds of superstition.

>Nazis existing more than once in history
>That "no u" instead of actually going for one of the actual ridiculous flaws of their system
Pathetic, unless
>Nazis secretly have built bases in Antarctica or the moon or something and they keep collapsing and starting over
In which case it's pretty funny.

It also had "soviet" in its name, when soviets were disbanded by Stalin when he took power.
It was nothing more than a state capitalist dictatorship by then.

Leninism and its offshoots, the primary form of communism the world's seen, are totalitarian, dominated by a state, and anti-democratic. There've been very few examples of other communist systems. The only example that I can think of from the top of my head, Spain, got destroyed by fascists, not mean ol' liberal democracies.