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#1501
June 26th, 2012, 09:30 PM
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#1502
June 27th, 2012, 02:13 AM
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#1503
June 27th, 2012, 06:15 PM
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#1504
June 27th, 2012, 08:58 PM
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So Kaiser Wilhelm gets tried as a war criminal? That's going to be interesting, in the Chinese sense...are Hindenberg and Ludendorff going to be tried as well?
Bruce
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#1505
June 27th, 2012, 09:16 PM
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#1506
June 27th, 2012, 09:31 PM
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#1507
June 28th, 2012, 01:13 AM
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Hey guys, I think we need to talk again about the comic book Golden Age in this universe, more because... well, I think many character will work differently.
For one, would some even appear? I don't see the Joker appearing, or it being nearly as likely, for one.
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#1508
June 28th, 2012, 04:56 AM
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What's Rosa Luxemburg's status in the revision? Is she still going to survive and come to the USAR or is the Spartacist Revolt going to go largely as OTL?
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#1509
June 28th, 2012, 06:07 AM
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Editing rast's A Shift In Priorities. Redubbed Quote:
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#1510
June 28th, 2012, 07:27 AM
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What I have said above is purely my own opinion. If you know anything I have said to be incorrect please tell me, I love to learn. 
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#1511
June 28th, 2012, 08:24 AM
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The Joker could still work. He's a psychopath for hire, and the only reason why he works for anyone is because it gives him the resources to play. The Penguin could be an American expatriate capitalist with a serious grudge, personally involving himself with financing and leading counterrevolution in America. Superman will stay closer to his original roots, as a crusader for social justice as well as the moral paragon demigod that he evolved into. Unlike OTL, he'll end up being a lot more subversive, and won't really represent The Man quite like he does now. His people will have been an ancient communist people who fell into decadence, and failed to save their own planet, minus one child sent to Earth (plus the inevitable other Kryptonians that will pop up later :P). He'll land on a collective farm in Kansas, and his portrayal will be heavily influenced by the concept of the New Soviet Man Wonder Woman's backstory will probably be Atlantean in origin. When the great ancient Atlanteans were destroyed for rivaling the powers of the gods, a small group of immortals remained as a secret society, guiding the lesser peoples from the shadows for thousands of years, before deciding with the rise of Fascism to intervene directly. Beyond that, I don't know enough about many of the Golden Age superheroes to know how they'd be different or whether they'd occur at all. Obviously, some that became mainstays may not, and some that died may become popular, and there might be entirely different ideas that only vaguely resemble OTL heros. One of the key things to remember is that there probably won't be an amalgamation into two shared universes. That was something that was a dynamic of capitalism. Either the genre will coalesce and they'll say "Hey, you know what'd be cool? If we made like one big playground and put all our characters in it", and then elect a governing editorial body to set the ground rules, or there will be a fractured multiverse of different superheroes. Next, you have to remember that comics won't devolve into a superheros only medium. Superheros will just be a popular genre in a diverse medium. Quote:
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#1512
July 2nd, 2012, 12:33 AM
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Part 1 of ???
Nineteen Thirty-Eight By the late 1930s, the economic mode of the UASR had reached a metastable dynamic equilibrium. The earlier shifts, false-starts, failed-projects more or less dwindled, and a definable pattern emerged to the national economy based around a set of workable practices. In many ways, the emerging order was a retreat from the highest hopes of the Revolution. Some had to be abandoned out of simple necessity, as the technology and the level of productive forces did not permit a total annulment of market economic relationships. Others came as a result of the growing power of the coordinator class within the nation’s political, economic and cultural centers. And still others came about due to the logic of the party-state. In this period, and indeed all succeeding periods, it must be understood that in the UASR, economics is politics to a far greater extent than in advanced capitalist state. Further, in the 1930s, the trend of politics was for power to flow towards national levels and political centralism. This is became the source of the American proverb “All politics is national.” The post-revolutionary situation assured it, as did the tremendous influence held by the Workers’ Communist Party and the national trade union leadership. Thus, in 1938’s tumultuous elections of deputies to the All-Union Convocation of Soviets, and the Convocation’s own election of deputies to the Central Executive Council, the key issue of debate wasn’t the personality of any candidate; it was each party’s economic platform. Whoever controlled the executive would have a defining factor in the form that the Second Five Year Plan would take. It is hard to underestimate the influence the Five Year Plans had on the form that the national economy took. The First Five Year Plan had defined the nation’s domestic and foreign policy agenda, established the balance of power and division of labor between the local syndicates and the national manifolds in the key industries, facilitated an immense transfer of wealth to the marginal areas of the national economy in the Great Plains and South, and created the class distinction between coordinators (management brainworkers) and proletarians (subordinate workers of all kinds). In theory, the system relied upon decision-making from below; hence power being vested in elected councils and managers in all levels of the economy, from the lowest syndicate to the Council of the National Economy itself. In practice, however, the educational and political connection requirements for advancement in the associated bureaucracy and political offices meant that guarantee of immediate recall and the requirement for most decisions to be ratified by the full-membership of the body were relatively weak. Because of the information advantage they held, elected coordinators actually wielded disproportionate power; far less than their capitalist forebears, but still enough to be able to constitute a definite class interest separate from the rest of the proletariat. In the 1930s and 40s, membership in the Party was almost certainly a prerequisite for any sort of career in management. In many cases, the important management posts in most key industries were held by de facto party appointees. The opposition parties were almost totally shut out of the syndicalist economy. Only the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party backed candidates and alternate programs within the trade unions with any degree of success. Most often, they ended up supporting WCP official policy anyway. It should be noted that the disparity in political power did not immediately translate into a disparity in economic privileges. The UASR, as a “democratic totalitarianism” in this period, functioned to redirect a considerable amount of personal effort towards public, ideological goals. The guiding doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Secretary-General Upton Sinclair named Marxism-DeLeonism in his 1933 Program of the Workers’ Party in Power, forced all individual ambitions to be subordinated to an impersonal “historical inevitability.” The Party, as the most advanced section of the class, had a duty to push society towards the higher stage of communism. So long as it could be shown to be related to this telos, then literally anything, no matter how base, could be justified. Conversely, deviations from this, especially for personal gain, were considered counterrevolutionary. Consequently, the Party zealously policed its members for deviations. The Party could not reach homogeneity like the Bolsheviks did under Stalin because there was no charismatic leader figure serving as the locus of power in the Party, to forge it into a vehicle for the head to guide and reshape the universe. This function was instead filled by the Party as a whole. Nevertheless, the boundary between acceptable debate and deviation was always fuzzy and constantly shifting. It was easy for an individual to run afoul of the collective consciousness, and end up a social pariah. It is important to understand the role ideology served in moderating and lubricating the functions of the economy in its formative years. Though it was a sword that cut both ways, it played a crucial role in the American national recovery, and creating the forms and expectations of the new economic system. And as that ideology waned, class stratification became more definite, and with it came a new class struggle within socialism. Without the ideological control, turning power into privilege became easier. Sacrifice for a nebulous collective good became harder, especially when it seemed to only serve others’ privilege. The core of the American economy in this period was a hybrid between bottom-up matryoshka[1]of anarcho-syndicalism and top-down central planning. The two most important bodies in determining the plan, whether long term or immediate, were the Council for the National Economy, and the State Planning Commission. During the 30s and 40s, the former’s role was decidedly subordinate to the latter, though it was also considerably more politically independent. The CNE’s primarily role was facilitating the collection of information. When initial attempts at a purely material/energy plan failed in 1933, the planning system resorted to prices based on labor accounting, preserving the monetary system. With the adoption of Langist price mechanisms based on more neo-classical price theory in the mid-30s, the CNE’s primary duty shifted to collecting information on shortages or surpluses of end goods and raw materials. StatePlan would use the information collected to set and modify prices, which would then be implemented. The reintroduction of market mechanisms and prices would have considerable ramifications in the future, but in the near term, it allowed rational pricing, and an efficient allocation of goods and services to meet national goals. Since StatePlan was an arm of the All-Union government, it was rigidly controlled to meet the national aims of the Party in this period. Consequently, the CNE and StatePlan were also tasked with coordinating the spending of R&D money, and the distribution of the results among all industries, even those outside the plan. They also provided research on the macroeconomic effects of public investment, and the lion’s share of the work developing the longer term plans like the Five Year Plans, and longer term plans for significant industries. As a whole, the system had a built in bias towards long-term priorities. This became an occasional source of conflict, sometimes severe. The planners were not above plowing entire industries under to reallocate the capital goods and labor towards more productive projects. Even with state support and retraining for the unemployed, this would cause considerable distress. Notably, in 1935 StatePlan announced the beginning of a phase out of the entire traditional telegraphy industry in favor of faster, more efficient automatic message routing through Telex, and the replacement of traditional telegraph operators for faster teletypes that required much less training to use. Though there was considerable protest by the Telegraph Union, the Premier made it clear that no one would be standing in the way of the march of progress. Within the system of plans, though, there is often considerable autonomy for individual components in the economy. The plans consisted more of development goals and setting industry standards than a set of marching orders, and innovation was encouraged and rewarded. All-Union law established a new patent system that rewarded inventors and innovators for developing new products, technologies and production processes, immortalizing the inventors and establishing what was, in 1930s prices, a considerable cash bounty for successful innovations. Large portions of economic activity were more or less outside the plan. This sector of the economy is referred to as the cooperative sector, and operates as a socialist market economy. A considerable amount of the consumer goods industry, particularly the smaller scale and lower technology sectors, fall into the cooperative sector, with some notable exceptions, which chiefly consist of industries that had formed monopoly trusts prior to the revolution such as tobacco. While most raw materials fall within the planned sector, agricultural goods are in a gray area in between the two. While heavily regulated, much of agricultural production occurs in cooperatives and communes, with the balance being split between state-managed farming complexes in the land most damaged by overfarming and the dustbowl, and small freeholding family farms. In spite of this, the price of most agricultural goods is subject to planning mechanism. StatePlan’s final role was economic accounting, another task which required considerable coordination and input from the syndicalist apparatus. In many ways, the UASR and the Soviet Union were world leaders in this respect, having established systems for national accounts of economic activity before any of the capitalist rivals, even those which engaged in a considerable level of dirigisme. In the UASR, this system was first established in its prototype form in late 1933. It was formalized in 1936 as the Social Product System, and subsequently adopted by allied socialist states in the Western Hemisphere (Mexico, Quisqueya, Haiti, Nicaragua, Chile, Panama and Columbia). SPS differed considerably from the alternatives developed in the capitalist West as well as the Soviet Union. Unlike the Material Product System developed in the Soviet Union, it did not ignore service labor as essentially unproductive. While they shared the common Marxist goal of tracking productive activity, American Marxist economists considered their Soviet counterpart’s fetish with material goods to be a vulgar misreading of Marxism. Services were part of socially necessary labor. The primary account in the SPS system, Net Social Product, was based on an attempt to measure the real vitality of the economy without the arbitrariness that was included in capitalist GNP, which ignored factors such as externalities, non-market transactions, non-monetary economy, and uneconomic growth. SPS also included several other important measures of the national economy in its initial iteration, and more were developed as the system was refined over time. One of the most important measures was Social Asset Value; if NSP was the income statement, SAV was the balance sheet, measuring the value of productive capital assets in the national economy. Consequently, the UASR’s in-universe accounting would be unintelligible to an observer from our timeline. It must be noted that most of the measures involved in SPS are also more complicated than their OTL counterparts, because they rely upon judgments of whether economic activity accomplished one of five (later six) criteria, and how they are weighed against one another:
The State of the Soviet Economy 1938 is a crucial year in the development of the pre-war Soviet economy. Gosplan has begun trialing the American pricing system to overcome inefficiencies, in spite of reluctance by Stalin and the nomenklatura. While trade and development assistance from America has been a boon to the Soviet economy, the end of autarky has threatened the Stalinist power structure, and necessitated the weakening of the rigid ideological control that had hitherto insinuated itself into all facets of life. The counterreaction to shore up the weakening ideology has been brutal though, necessitating an increased reliance on the use of violence to prevent certain ideological breaches, to say nothing of the purges in the party and military to sate Stalin’s paranoia. Trade and technical assistance had served to correct a considerable number of deficiencies in the Soviet economy though. Most notably, American engineers supervised the rebuilding of the Soviet rail system to industry standard, enabling higher speeds and greater loads compared to the previous substandard rail beds and bridges. Improvements in transport greatly helped improve economic efficiency, and became an important part of Stalin’s 1938 campaign to reduce waste and inefficiency in agriculture. Though the usual complaints about kulaks were in the official Soviet announcements in the campaign, the real meat of the project was the reform of pricing and production quotas. Quotas and grain requisition were phased out steadily, and the size of each kolkhoz and sovkhoz was reduced considerably. The product and profit sharing, which were seldom properly implemented prior to reform, along with the private plot production, were phased out for salaries for kolkhoz members, and a system of bonuses based on production. While the Soviet government did not admit to any official wrongdoing for decades, the reforms were seen by the peasant population as a tacit admission of guilt by the government for the famine, deprivation and death caused by collectivization. However, they accepted the “blood money” because it amounted to significant improvements in rural living standards, even if it meant total proletarianization. Agricultural reform was controversial, but in hindsight it’s regarded as one of the few decent things Stalin ever did for the country, and even that was making up for a bad previous bad policy of his government. Counterfactual estimates on differential grain production credit the agricultural reform with a net improvement of seven million tonnes in grain production (81 million tonnes) in 1938, and a net improvement of seventeen million tonnes (90 million tonnes) in 1939. Reforms in transit, stowage, and processing reduced wastage by twenty percent by 1939, significantly improving food security for the Soviet population. The shift in pricing dramatically improved agricultural income, but as a result the Soviet state could no longer rely upon the hidden tax it collected from the formerly tremendous gap between the price paid to the kolkhoz for agricultural products and the price it charged wholesalers. Fearing a potentially counterproductive revolt by trying to recollect the missing tax receipts from the agricultural economy, the Soviet government instead shifted tax burdens to the industrial sector, and instituted smaller marginal taxes on the kolkhozy and sovkhozy. The 1930s as a whole meant considerable economic reform and growth in the Soviet Union. In 1934, the ban on foreign exchange was relaxed, and the ruble made convertible to the American dollar to streamline trade within the Comintern trade bloc. Trade agreements, including export markets for Soviet manufactured goods, soon came with the UASR’s Latin American allies. In spite of lingering hostility from the revolutionary period, and reactionary sentiment reaching a high tide in Europe, foreign trade was expanded with much of Europe starting in 1936. As an ally of the UASR, the quiet 800 kg gorilla in the room, the Soviet Union could not be regarded as a pariah, even by the most hostile of states. Bertold Brecht’s review of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, in The Daily Worker, 1 January 1938. There are those that would remark that an animated feature is nothing more than a child’s tale, not befitting any real analysis. I regard this view as disastrously short-sighted, for it ignores the roles that childhood fables play in the development of ideology and culture. While the stories we write for children are often simple and fanciful, they are the prototypes of most later stories. The comrades at the Disney collective have produced a wonderful proletarian fable with Snow White. While my purist comrades have condemned their innovations as a hatchet job on a classic fable, I consider Snow White to be a pure expression of socialist realism, and an impressive work of non-Aristotelian drama in its own right. Snow White begins with our eponymous heroine engaged deeply in her material circumstances. It does not permit a romanticist look at the medieval origins of the fable, and our heroine is a peasant girl at the cusp of adulthood. She undertakes the drudgery of serfdom on the manor cheerlessly, thrust into adult interdependence when the plague took her parents. Unlike the idealist Snow White of the old fable, our modern Snow White is the sum of all her social circumstances. While she submits to them, her consciousness is high enough that she does not accept them. The plot begins more or less traditionally for the fable, but with a subversive twist. The evil queen too is portrayed as the sum of her social circumstances. Beautiful, though beginning to lose the battle with age, the queen clings to the power and privilege of her position, enhanced by her beauty. When her magic mirror informs her that she is no longer the fairest in all the land, and that this honor now belongs to a lowly peasant girl, the affront to her noble ideology turns her vanity into megalomania. The queen plots to murder the young serf, ordering a loyal member of her household to abduct Snow White and discretely do away with her, and return with her heart as proof. But when he arrives, the young maiden proves to be more resilient and cunning than he had planned. She quickly deduces why the young man is at her door from his manner and regalia, and plays totally naïve, lulling him into a false sense of security. She cheerfully invites him into her humble abode, offering “a weary traveler” rest and refreshment. She then begins to seduce him, enticing him to begin shedding his clothes, and thus his weapon. While the framing of the scene is undoubtedly serious, it is also played for comedy, suggesting that due to her guile, our heroine is not in grave danger. Thinking the naïve young girl is an easy conquest, the retainer is blindsided and soundly defeated by a stout cooking pot to the head. Snow White is a heroine of the feminist mode, not a passive character like the old story. Using her wits, and a modicum of violence, she defends herself and doesn’t submit to aggression. Snow White recognizes the queen’s seal on her assailant’s person, and flees into the woods as a fugitive of justice. After several humorous encounters with animated forest animals, our heroine stumbles upon a small commune of dwarves, working diligently in the mountains to mine iron and coal, fell timber, and engage in other sorts of productive industry. The dwarves, all exaggerated personalities, first view the outsider with suspicion, but finally agree to let her join and work with them. She learns their trades, and also helps brighten their living conditions with her own skills. They prosper, and enjoy themselves in spite of their relatively crude surroundings. However, in the background, we see the results of the assassin’s failure. The queen, maddened by the failure of a trusted lieutenant, makes an alliance with practitioners of black magic. These necromancers give the queen the tools to take matters into her own hands while they steadily usurp her power. Within the fable, this new element is a clear allegory to fascist reaction, and while it clashes with the very materialist beginning of the tale, the use of heavy symbolism and allegory is perhaps unavoidable. To remove these elements would render the tale no longer Snow White, but something else. While the artists of the Disney collective are conservative in this regard, and have shied away from full-on socialist realism, the result has been at the very least enjoyable, and a considerably more advanced tale than the usual fable. As an artistic statement, Snow White is compromised in its vision through the use of magical elements, and it seems the creators were in conflict over whether they wished to present a properly materialist story or not. Our heroine’s own tale gathers more trappings of the idealist, romantic story of the bourgeois and feudal eras as it progresses, as she flirts with destiny and deus ex machine in the narrative. The heroine herself is at times a bit shallow, and every bit as pure as the driven snow as her name would imply, which I find to be too romanticist for the genre of proletarian fable it aims for. However, this is balanced by villainess’s pleasing complexity, even nobility at times. Were the perspective flipped, the queen would have been the Byronic heroine of her own tragic story. It is possible to sympathize with her, and the alienation that comes with her position of power and privilege. When I first heard of the project, I admit I looked dimly at the attempt to take old folk tales from European history and recast them in the light of modern materialist science. The exercise seemed to be a futile one, but having seen this attempt, I am forced to reassess my opinion on the project. While a totally original animated feature length production (I have no doubt that the Disney collective is capable of it) would have been a stronger undertaking, Snow White was not a wasted endeavor in art, and in these revolutionary times it is properly subversive. The fact that it is also amusing is a bonus. --- 1. Matryoshka is an in-universe English neologism, borrowed from the name of Russian nesting dolls. It’s used to describe a system of nested councils, where base councils elect delegates to a higher council, who elect delegates to a higher council, with varying numbers of iterations. It equally applies to the soviet system for politics, and the syndicalist system for economics. 2. The sixth criterion that was added in the late 70s was whether economic activity is ecologically responsible.
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#1513
July 2nd, 2012, 04:16 AM
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wow great update!
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photo of Barak Obama fisting his wife. http://www.alternatehistory.com/disc...1&d=1316063826
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#1515
July 2nd, 2012, 04:35 AM
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And this is why I subscribe. Bravo.
 So Snow White is animated, but not a feature-length production?
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#1516
July 2nd, 2012, 04:35 AM
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I'd be curious to see just how, exactly, this 'liberalization' works out in Stalinist Russia considering the Man of Steel's acute paranoia and conservationism.
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#1517
July 2nd, 2012, 06:59 AM
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#1518
July 2nd, 2012, 07:04 AM
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Awesome update! Keep up the good work!
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Pendulum Swing: America's Electoral Future
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#1519
July 2nd, 2012, 05:55 PM
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#1520
July 2nd, 2012, 06:27 PM
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Great updates Jello. I'm interested in what Orson Welles will be up to in the Hollywood Coops soon.
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Editing rast's A Shift In Priorities. Redubbed Quote:
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