Communism
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"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
Communism is the socioeconomic philosophy that promotes a classless living where every individual works for the betterment of the whole (the "Greater Good", so to speak) and means of production are made the property of the collective rather than any single person. There were various systems and methods based around the idea of common property ownership to various degrees employed throughout history, but proper communism starts with Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher/political thinker who observed the effects of the Industrial Revolution. The cliff notes version is that while the mechanization of production that was happening was a good thing as it generated a lot of wealth, it was grossly unfair that said wealth only benefited a few business owners while most people lived in Victorian poverty and he viewed society as being on a very clear cut path of social evolution with clearly defined phases and stages based around competition between various socio-economic classes.
According to Marx, capitalist society would get more and more divided between a very small number of ultra rich property owners and an increasingly poor lower class, then there would be a violent revolution in which the owners would be overthrown and replaced by a new socialist government where everything was owned by the state for the benefit of all. Then the state would dissolve and you would get a classless stateless communist society in which everyone worked for the common good somehow. Even though that last part is pretty far fetched, it had its appeal to a 19th century worker who works a fourteen hour shift in a dark textile factory (along with his wife and six of their eight kids) for just enough money for an dirty apartment smaller than the average modern living room in a crime ridden slum, enough coal and second hand clothes to avoid freezing to death, and enough bland food to avoid starving to death, at least until the power loom takes off his hand and he gets fired and thrown onto the street while his employer is sipping brandy and eating caviar in a 40 room neoclassical mansion with a dozen servants. As such it gained its following. The most influential communist nation in the modern world is China, who rose to the role after the fall of the USSR (By ironically, dissolving abandoning hard line Marxism in favor of it's own brand of capitalism).
In modern global society, it is normally considered impractical and too Utopian to function. This is because the governments who practice it apply communism to the people they govern while keeping themselves at the top of the ladder. Many believe that it cannot exist without great faults and descent into paranoid totalitarianism and thus many people who choose to support it are seen as hypocrisy-prone worthless idealists primarily in western nations. As always, human faults prove to be the Achille's heel to another idea....back to the drawing board!
One of the main reasons communism is that society did not develop on the lines that Marx thought it would. Industrial era poverty was rather horrible, but Marx was not the only person to see this and so various other people (some, if not all of them agreeing with Marx to degree or another) for various reasons did things to make less horrible by reforming what existed, rather than ripping everything down and building it back from scratch. They introduced labor laws, safety standards and collective bargaining for improved wages, benefits, and working conditions. A few industrialists found out that if they payed better wages they could get the best workers who worked better and would buy the products made in the factories where they worked. This gained steam by the late 19th and 20th century and reduced the revolutionary fervor among the various communists and socialist groups. Typically communists took over not in Industrial countries, but in backwards countries with minimal industrialization which were already caught up in considerable social upheaval (Tsarist Russia, post-WWII china and so forth). Once the commies got into power in said area, they pushed their industrial efforts forwards. The fact that the revolutions which put communists into power also put in place hard handed dictators who quashed anything that they thought might look like dissent also did not help matter.
As to the economies, everything was centralized and put under a single economic plan for expansion. This could work at getting shit done expanding infrastructure and manufacturing (the AK-47 and the T-54/55 would not have become the world's most widely produced assault rifle and tank respectively if they could not), though it could often end up failing miserably as it did in the Great Leap Forward. But even when it did work it generally did so inefficiently with mixed up priorities. You end up with situations were you have shops which have Ice Cream that no one can afford and not enough bread to go around and spending huge amounts of effort to increase the annual output of sheet steel and do little to actually turn that steel into things that people can use. And heaven forbid that you allow one of your citizens become some CAPITALIST and buy that surplus steel and hire people to make it into forks to make up for the fact that the five year plan did not produce them in sufficient quantities, that way inevitably leads to slavery don'tcha know! This is before all the rampant corruption, giving much of the Nation's actual industrial output to the military and setting very high quotas for production which must be filled OR ELSE.
It is a sacred law of /tg/ alternate history homebrew settings that there must be at least one communist faction and it must control at least 50% of the world's total landmass.
This article has been marked as containing treasonous capitalist road sentiments. Please report to your local commissariat for re-education through labor.
Communism has also provided us with the Russian army, which is awesome.