Hearts of Iron 4 is a strategy game produced by Paradox where you can pick any existing nation in the late 1930s, and play as them in WWII. There are dozens of mods for the game, most exploring alternate timelines, but the most popular is Kaiserreich.

In Kaiserreich, the German Empire won WWI after France and Britain experience Syndicalist revolutions, replacing Marxist-Leninism as the world's dominant socialist ideology after the White Army wins the Russian Civil War.

I understand why leftists, in the materialist tradition of Karl Marx, are reluctant to get too attached to a work of fiction, but personally I love Kaiserreich's depiction of socialism. Each of the socialist countries are internally factionalized, with "Good Guys" and "Bad Guys" in each government. They go one step further by depicting the world order under the German Empire as explicitly capitalist, expressing Lenin's "Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism" assertion.

For those of you who don't know about this work of fiction, but want to partake in the conversation, here's a link to a lore video to get the full story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxM5FfdHVD8

A few days ago, I responded to a post of r/Socialism where someone asked if they should support Texas independence. I proclaimed that, as an anarchist, I believe that the best thing that could happen for (modern) geo-politics is if the United States, People's Republic of China, and Russian Federation broke apart at the same time. I mentioned the Deep South in my comment, and people took it to mean that I was some kind of Neo-Confederate who thought the world would be a better place if the Confederacy won the Am. Civil War, or returned in the place of the United States, completely missing the point. Two days later, I published an article citing my original comment, and explained in great detail why an independent Deep South in the modern day (in a hypothetical scenario where every region of the U.S. Russia and China is independent) does not necessarily equate return of the long dead Confederacy. I went on to argue that the CSA, politically, was absorbed back into the Federal Government, which continued their white-supremacist policies, and cited examples such as the Battle of Blair Mountain and the Civil Rights movement as examples of poor whites and blacks fighting for their rights against the existing capitalist and white-supremacists American Empire, and that it was the Federal Government that put these down.

I have not gone back to the original article I published to see how many up-votes or down-votes I got, but I still got some comments like "Do you think black would be better off under the Confederacy!" completely missing the point of my decentralist and non-utopian reasoning.

The full extent of my conviction would require an lengthy article on its own, but my reasoning for this is thus:

1. Smaller States equals weaker government.

2. American revolutionaries operating in these hypothetical countries would only need to contend with local reactionaries instead of the full might of the American Empire. (Citing Martin Luther King as an example of an effective socialist because he was a religious leader in his local community who was killed by the Federal Government.)

3. Reactionary political policies are contained on a regional basis, and are less likely to bleed out to the larger empire.

This hypothetical isn't meant to be an endgame of any kind, but a stepping stone towards further revolution.

Anyway, syndicalism is the socialist ideology I personally subscribe to, and decentralization is a core tenant of our beliefs. I'm thinking about publishing another essay on r/Socialism (possibly under my second account,) that articulates this theory of mine, but without mentioning the Deep South or the Confederacy and focusing more on how revolution would be easier in smaller countries. But I'm interested in what y'all think.

Would breaking the U.S.A. Russia, and China (and all their dependencies and allies) apart be a meaningful step towards socialist revolution? Should I continue this fight without mentioning the Slave-Owners Rebellion or take the L and avoid losing anymore karma? Am I on the right track with this (admittedly accelerationist) belief but forgetting some important details? I'm interested in what y'all think.

I know electoral politics is a simply a bourgeois performance of democracy to control the poor, and syndicalism as an ideology promotes direct action in the workplace, but wouldn’t make sense to form an actual Syndicalist Party that would (at least attempt to) represent labor interests in the halls of Power? One that could coordinate propaganda efforts, and work in conjunction with the unions?

https://asf-iwa.org.au/report-on-the-chinese-labour-movement/

Changes in workers action

We have recorded labor movements in different regions and industries through statistics of labor movement data over the past ten years. It presents a social, political and economic situation beyond the official narrative, and also foreshadows future changes in the labor movement.

First, China's economic composition and development model have undergone significant changes - from relying on low-cost export-oriented manufacturing for more than three decades to the rise of service industries such as online shopping and food delivery based on Internet platforms. As a result, more and more labor disputes have emerged in service industries ranging from health care and catering to banking and finance, as well as related transportation industries such as freight drivers.

On January 25, 2021, hundreds of nursing staff at Yan'an University Affiliated Hospital in Shaanxi Province launched a sit-in demonstration, demanding that the hospital increase wages and pay pension and medical insurance for employees. That month, couriers at Best Company in Hebei Province went on strike because their bosses had not paid wages, resulting in tens of thousands of undelivered packages piling up outside the warehouse without anyone delivering them.

It can be seen that while labor disputes in traditional manufacturing industries are still mired in quagmire, labor conflicts in emerging industries are also expanding in the form of new wine in an old bottle.

Second, since the 1990s, urbanization and economic development in China's inland areas such as Sichuan and Henan have accelerated, providing a large number of labor forces for the more developed coastal areas. As companies expand to inland areas, labor disputes in these areas also surge.

Once upon a time, Shenzhen was the epicenter of worker protests in China, but that has changed. In 2015, 75 manufacturing worker protests were recorded in Shenzhen, accounting for 75% of the total collective actions of workers in the city that year. But just two years later, in 2017, this number dropped to 22, accounting for half of the collective actions of workers in the city that year.

Finally, traditional social structures related to labor are eroded, and people are increasingly isolated and fragmented in society. Plus the first generation of migrant workers is gradually getting older, and the instability of labor is increasing day by day. Social welfare systems such as pensions are facing unprecedented challenges. Since 2000, factories have replaced the “kinship and regional connections” that workers once relied on, providing workers with a natural place for mutual solidarity and connection.

I have a question. Are council communism and trade/industrial unionism inherently opposed?