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[falcc]

While laws and customs and property are getting worked out, I just want to throw in a suggestion for multiple possible systems of legal ownership. It makes sense that a race should potentially be communal, or communal within individual large entities, and similarly that some should be really reluctant to trade ever. Maybe not the existing races right now, but there could be some option in the raws for an economic emphasis.

Example: Elves in one world may value autonomy really strongly so they won't engage in trading, but offer something akin to tribute to other Elves when they have a surplus so their whole civilization is just existing on what it produces itself.

Or Goblins might be the exact opposite, with property being really contentious. So Goblins go out stealing from other people all the time, but if theft isn't frowned upon in the entity maybe the more cunning Goblins are eating out of other goblin's food stores, or warehouses in another goblin town kind of thing, and as long as they aren't caught in the act it's respected as their having earned that food.

Dwarves live kind of communal lives right now since the economy is out, but obviously still make exchanges with the mountainhomes. Autonomy you can kind of simulate if you live somewhere caravans will never be able to reach, but if you start to run out of food and you're some kind of frontier or religious settlement your homeland will never think "those Dwarves are doing something important, let's give them some free food when it gets hard" if they have a lot of extra production elsewhere. So you can't make the civilization value anything like that right now.

Sort of the logical extension is humans living in towns having to pay other humans for food even though they share an entity because of whatever. There ought to be different civilizations that have different values, guarantee food for their peasant class and all of the merchandise produced is just sold by the civilization instead of individuals and the numbers they get back in trade kind of get spread out evenly. Which is kind of how Dwarves basically live now without their being any kind of codified reason why these are distinct.

This would also let people play a race that is kind of opted out of the major economic overhauls, so when people love taverns and want to heavily tax hill Dwarves they can, but they could also make it so those people are considered to be guests of the civilization and so they owe them some amount of free rooms, or the hill Dwarves are thought of like family so they get free trade goods on occasion and the game reciprocates that when your main fortress runs low on stuff the hill Dwarves have.

[Reelya]

Communalism might be a better term/model so not to confuse with specific models derived from Marxism or Leninism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communalism

Adding something in the RAWs sounds good, but it would be much better if there was some dynamic element to it. In fact, dynamic ethics would be cool overall. If that was the case, then maybe each race could have a range or selection of allowable settings for each trait. Traits could alter in groups based on their situation, and this could be modeled in Legends as changes of leadership / government, along with what traits are the most viable given the size and situation of each community.

e.g. you could have a race which starts out with communal ownership (and decision making) in a small group, but that starts to break down as the group gets larger - leading to a personal possessions and taxation model. Different models would have "inertia" e.g. they wouldn't break down right away, but there would be a tipping point or random event that tips the model to a change of system (this could be for property rights but also government type).

With cultural "inertia", a colony spun off from a monetaristic / stratified and militaristic society would try and maintain these traits in the small colony, even though they're not the optimal system from a small group. Being too far from the optimal system for your size would eventually lead to a breakdown and sudden change of state for the group. For militarism, this could mean a breakdown of the organized professional army, leading to the rise of a citizen's militia structure (the change could be modelled as an uprising), and for monetary system this could mean the breakdown of private wealth in the hands of a few powerful dwarves - their individual holdings would be confiscated and either distributed out (leading to cycles of wealth accumulation and downfall) or collectivized, leading to more communual ownership. If things are commonly owned, but the population grows, this leads to too many disputes over who gets what. These disputes would be sorted out either by "going government" e.g. certain people oversee the wealth (state socialism), or dividing up the property (commercialism).

So there are really at least main parameters - economic: how much wealth is common vs private, political: who controls the community / common wealth, and militaristic: is there a central organized armed force, or do many dwarves serve in a militia? Allowing these to change would create a range of histories and colonies with various systems.

[Dirst]

There is plenty of precedent for colonies (who are quite aware that they are outposts, not new societies) to operate in a commonwealth mode not too different from a DF fort.  People own personal items, but all of the means of production and productive output are owned by the colony.  A military outpost maintains the commonwealth state indefinitely, whereas a settlement would be expected to transition into the parent civ's system over time.

Coming up with a model to handle that transition smoothly is, in a word, hard.  Individuals need to have wants and needs from the start and understand how to sate those needs.  Getting stuff from the commonwealth requires service while getting stuff from the market requires trade (usually money).

[Sergarr]

But the dwarfs are already communist!

The last time they tried capitalism, it backfired so hilariously that the dwarven economy entered the legend as the only major DF feature that was completely disabled because of it's brokeness.

[Sirbug]

Making dwarves officially communist would be a nice integration between lore and game mechanic. Let the elves and humans have their silly invisble limbs of the market. Dwarves have a goal in mind worth working for free and dying for.

[GavJ]

A bit confused. Communism as a government system -- that's exactly what dwarf fortress is already, almost textbook definition. Government owns all means of production, and doles out resources only as needed.

[Witty]

The only reason things are structured in such a fashion is because the fort economy was stripped out entirely. Once that returns in some form, private property, wages, guilds and all that will come right along with it. Frontierism would entail some sort of communal system, as Dirst mentioned. But it'd make more sense for this to pass into a mercantile/"capitalist" system as the fort becomes more entangled in the world affairs. But with the coming start scenarios, more options may become available.

Besides, dwarves can't be communist. They have a state.

[GavJ]

Besides, dwarves can't be communist. They have a state.

Wat? Communism pretty much NEEDS to have a state, or some central governance to control production.

[Reelya]

Frontierism would entail some sort of communal system

It normally doesn't in real life though, unless it's some religious sect creating a colony, and then the pastors/priests become the leaders. The other example of communalism is when the settlers of a location are all members of one extended family. In those cases, the partirach/matriarch/elders of the clan set the rules and things are commonly owned by the family. People who aren't related to the family but join the colony generally don't have the same property rights. So, religious orders and familial possessions are communal systems that are replicated in a new colony. In both cases these are just transplanted social relations that preexisted in the old society, and not some radical change to a communal system.

I don't think frontierism would automatically lead to a perfect communal system as we see in current DF. One example is the Greenland Viking settlement - they stuck with the cultural trappings of their homeland even though they were really counter-productive in that new environment. ended up dying out whilst Inuit on the island were flourishing at the same time.

The sagas mention Icelanders traveling to Greenland to trade. But the settlement chieftains and large farm owners controlled this trade. The chieftains would trade with the foreign ships and then disperse the goods by trading with the surrounding farmers.

Basically, it sounds like each farm was an economic entity, so there might have been communalism, but it was on the granularity of a family/clan.

[GavJ]

Dwarf fortress, unlike real life, though, makes it much less feasible I think for one or two dwarves to have self contained units. The game is really built toward division of labor something fierce. So unless you have a complex economic system, in a world like that, communal resources would just be the naturally obvious result. We all own the mason's shop, cause there's only ONE of them and we all use it, duh.

All the way up until property deeds and loans and fiat currency, etc., that seems like definitely how it would work. Which may not have been invented yet, or if it is, it wouldn't be nearly as well established as you're used to it in the modern day (or even the 1700s 1800s frontiers), and would seem more likely to be suspended for new colonies for quite some time until very well established.

...which is pretty much how the game works now, and how it worked even with the economy implemented before. So I'm still not entirely sure what the suggestion actually is.

[Reelya]

Besides, dwarves can't be communist. They have a state.

Wat? Communism pretty much NEEDS to have a state, or some central governance to control production.

That's leninist State Capitalism you're talking about. aka 20th century "communism" that is the complete opposite of Marx's ideas.

Marx's stages go:

1) Capitalism - as we know it.

2) Socialism - economic power held by worker's communes, some vestiges of the state remain. "communes" here basically means that all workplaces are owned/run by direct democratic decision by the workers in them. Hence, "the workers own the means of production". In Marxism, this means e.g. the workers in a shoe factory own the shoe factory and get a direct say in how it runs. The Soviets gave lip service to this concept, but in actuality workers did not have any of the autonomy Marx called for.

Communism - worker's communes become self-governing, the state dissolves.

Lenin introduced an "extra" stage after capitalism and before socialism, where the economy was run by large bureaucratic systems owned by the government. This was basically the capitalist system but with ownership shifted to the government. In Lenin's time they actually referred to this as "State Capitalism", not Communism, and it was promised to be a stop-gap measure before economic control was devolved to the communes. Not even Lenin had the balls to refer to the Soviet economic system as communism.

What actually happened is that the communes were exterminated by Lenin and Stalin and the promised evolution though Marx's stages of socialism => communism never began.

The definition of a commune is basically a local council where everyone gets a say/vote, so "communism" in Marxism mean "rule by local councils". The local councils are the CENTRAL organizing bodies in Marxism. The Russians exterminated the communes, hence, they're not true communists.

Another way to interpret Marx's theories is about breaking down polarities. There is tension between the "owner" class and "employee" class. If the two classes are merged, then the conflict vanishes. This is the "socialism" phase - workers become owners of the enterprises they work in. Similar for Communism, there is a polarity between the political and economic spheres, with parallel systems. Marx believed political systems are built and maintained to keep the economically powerful in place. Hence Marx says to dissolve this polarity be eliminating the state apparatus and devolve the decision making rights to the economic units - which are what he called communes.

The Soviet system however doesn't achieve ANY of this breakdown of class issues. You still have workers and owners, but now the owners are politicians. You still have economic and political hierarchies as separate heirarchies (not combined as in Marx's ideas), and the political structures STILL exist to suppress the worker's class.

[GavJ]

in Marxism mean "rule by local councils"

i.e. a state...

Marx used "state" as a weird buzz word that even he didn't agree with his own definition of from moment to moment, making it almost entirely uselessly confusing.

Back on planet Earth, in normal parlance, a state is nothing more than simply a word for "a self governed region." Which would include rule by councils or pure democracy, or whatever else. A state is just the division of land and people that forms one voting body, etc. Which in modern day definitely needs to be larger than "local" in order to afford large projects like dams, oil refineries, water pipelines, etc. But in DF could definitely be local only.

edit: To be clear, we have a dwarven "royalty" but they don't actually do anything for you nor do they demand anything, so in actual practice, they aren't even really your same state at all as far as I'm concerned. Since they fit no criteria of one by anything except their delusion of claiming to have something to do with what happens in your fort.

[Reelya]

Communism needs ... central governance to control production.

Yeah, well I showed why Marxism doesn't need that. The local economic units are self-managing.

Plus, the communes self-rule. If you're not in a commune, you're not under their "authority", so the statement about a division of land etc doesn't really hold for what I described, and since membership in any commune is voluntary (you're not forced to work in a particular factory or farm etc), it fails the division of people argument.

When Marx talks about the state he was clearly talking about what was called the state at the time - established nation states along with all the institutions that go with them - authority, police, army, control through monetary system, debt, landlordism etc.

Just going "oh but Marx also recognized people have to sometimes work together to get things done, so he's a hypocrite!" isn't a great argument.

[Witty]

Frontierism would entail some sort of communal system

I don't think frontierism would automatically lead to a perfect communal system as we see in current DF.

Well, once things like crimes, potential revolts, thieves and all that stuff are added, it'll shake up the current system anyhow. I really doubt it's intended to be as peaceful as it is now.

To be clear, we have a dwarven "royalty" but they don't actually do anything for you nor do they demand anything, so in actual practice, they aren't even really your same state at all as far as I'm concerned. Since they fit no criteria of one by anything except their delusion of claiming to have something to do with what happens in your fort.

... That's because they're aren't even close to being done yet. Civilization leaders and their potential impact on the world is still an overall untapped/unfinished feature. Once Toady decides to give them more work, I'm sure they'll be far more active and influential.
 

[GavJ]

... That's because they're aren't even close to being done yet. Civilization leaders and their potential impact on the world is still an overall untapped/unfinished feature. Once Toady decides to give them more work, I'm sure they'll be far more active and influential.

So then this thread is a suggestion about how to fix some hypothetical problems that might or might not arise in the future??

If it's just a matter of "I want an option to not have to play with future royalty and feudalism arcs" then okay, I support that. Although I think that's already planned, since Toady has been supportive of different embark "scenarios" one of the most obvious of which would be outcasts from your civilization. I.e., classic dwarf fortress / royalty doesn't do anything. I.e. communism.

Yeah, well I showed why Marxism doesn't need that. The local economic units are self-managing.

This isn't the place to continue debating about Marxism for humans, I don't think. For applying to dwarven gameplay, I agree anyway that yes fortresses are totally are self-managing. Even in the most barren glacier, the caverns have all you need. So that model totally works in this game, regardless of real life. Not only does it work, but it's what we already have happening.