Loved the Svensgaard profile. How about the Free Drones?
Foreman Domai seems to be a character ripped straight from Marx at first blush, but that's a reduction of his character to a stereotype, and Firaxis did a good job trying to really flesh out the factions and the ideologies they represent in the game. Domai is no exception, and as we'll see, he explores some of the successes and failures of the labor movements - and isn't just a stereotypical Boris.
Domai's backstory has been formed by terrible happenings. A brilliant mining engineer by trade, a cryopod malfunction ended with him getting poisoned by toxic fumes, which eroded much of his mind, and got him reassigned as a common menial. His rehabilitation was a painful process, relearning how to talk and repairing the Swiss cheese that his brain had become. The long hours and difficult working conditions instilled within him a burning resentment for the elites of Planet, who exploited the labor of the drones and shared in little to none of the spoils. This is in part represented by Karl Marx's theory of alienation, that a worker loses the ability to act as a fully realized man in the economic sense because his actions are directed to the goal of the bourgeoise in the pursuit of surplus value, and that they lose the ability to relate to their labor due to not receiving the benefits of said labor - only the bourgeoise benefit. This high-minded (and often circular) argument aside, plenty of people in large organizations lose the sense of their jobs fits in to the larger scheme, from soldiers who can feel like cannon fodder to factory workers who labor in repetitive tasks for a pittance. Plenty of morale-building events, jokes about morale events from a former active-duty aside, does try to serve a function in connecting the tasks with the greater overall sense, whether it be as simple as a team get-together or large team-building exercises. Domai dispenses with the corporate summit and instead works in a societal sense to ensure that the worker's labor is acknowledged and respected, affording his people not only recognition, but dignity. Domai in this case shares one of Sister Miriam's most positive character traits: a genuine interest in the well-being of the people under his care. While Miriam uses religion as a social fabric, Domai unites his people through work, by both valuing their productivity in a concrete sense (he gets a +2 to industry, after all - he clearly values and invests in the quality of his people's labor) and by improving living standards. You know you are valued in the Free Drones, and you won't be exploited by the other faction leaders whose pursuit of their goals doesn't look to value your own labor, and can be seen as an active detriment. The proof's in the pudding that Domai's rhetoric has concrete foundations: he has less drones by quantity. He's clearly doing something to make sure that they are content.
In some ways, Domai is completely right, the quick-and-easy way to deal with drones in Alpha Centauri is nerve stapling to keep them in-line - destroying their higher nerve functions via specialized torture; it is only natural to want to rebel at that. Drone riots aren't just mindless problems - while drones can be self-destructive when they riot, if the player builds a drone management building during the riots, the drones produce to end the grievance, which is sensible. When the leader acquiesces and says: "Alright, you've made your point, living standards aren't good, let's devote our available resources at this location to building a Recreations Commons," the drones immediately go and build. Domai is focused on a Future Society that only the Consciousness matches, and it's arguably one of the most optimistic futures in that he values Eudaimonia. Domai clearly wants every person in the Free Drones to feel uniquely valued and fulfilled, capable of determining their own happiness and finding fulfillment in that. A Domai that fulfills Eudaimonia sees an impressive +4 industry and +2 economy, meaning that every laborer is skilled and wealthy (hitting that +1 energy/square means a humming economy), creating the workingman's paradise that writers and philosophers in the labor movement have conceived of since the early days of utopian fiction - the Star Trek TNG ideal where the full flourishing of mankind becomes apparent.
However, nothing stops the Free Drones from nerve stapling their own drones save having a Police rating lower than -2 the same as any other faction - Domai can easily repeat the abuses that the drones suffered on his own. In this sense, the only thing that's really changed is the rhetoric of the person in charge; the abuses still repeat themselves. This matches our own history - the Soviet Union purported itself as a workingman's paradise but in practice, had a very low standard of living for their laborers compared to the capitalist powers; many of whom saw the standard of living rise significantly with a commensurate drop in poverty during the 1950's following the Second World War. The right to protest was strictly curtailed in defiance of the very same labor protest movements that birthed the February Revolution that dethroned the Tsar. Lenin frequently extolled the need for class conflict against the bourgeoise, but brutalized the proletariat in a ruthless effort to ensure that no other group could amass power to overthrow him the way the Bolsheviks overthrow the Kerensky government. Other socialist and communist governments in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia were brutal dictatorial police states, exploiting their workers and keeping them in poverty while confiscating the fruits of their labor to personally profit themselves and their key stakeholders to maintain their power.
Further complicating the picture of Domai is that his arch-rivals in gameplay do not mirror who they are in lore, which don't mirror at all with the traditional labor-vs-capital dynamic. According to the dynamic, Domai's rival should be the John Galt archetype CEO Morgan, who most clearly represents management, and Zakharov who would oppose Domai's hatred of "blue-sky research" and has his drone problems. Yet nothing stops Domai from running a Free Market or Knowledge and becoming CEO Morgan's or Academician Zakharov's friend. In gameplay, Domai would run afoul of the Cybernetic Consciousness (who oppose him on societal visions for a far future, Eudaimonia vs. Cybernetic) and the green factions (who value green economies, which Domai cannot run). In a way, Domai running afoul of the Cult of Planet and Gaia's Stepdaughters makes sense, Domai focuses on industrialization without the ability to mitigate with social engineering choices that would quickly create a massive ecological footprint that these two would oppose. This mirrors socialist movements in our own history, both in their own ecological damage which could be quite significant as was the industrial pollution in Central Asia, and in the socialist movement's struggle to appeal to rural peasants as they typically favored urban industrial labor as their focus and dismissed concerns of rural farmers, and peasants violently rejected the agricultural collectivization initiatives from Ukraine to Nicaragua. In the lore, it's actually the Human Hive that Domai is most angry at - it was the Hive who brutalized him and provided the bodies for Domai's first drone revolt that founded the Free Drones. But nothing stops Domai from running a Police State every bit as restrictive as Yang's Hive. So in this, we see that Domai doesn't fit the traditional conception of the workingman hero, but that's because he's a blend of ideas from the labor movement throughout history. There have been labor movements and ideologies that were themselves fiercely anti-communist, notably with the UAW's Homer Martin, the CIO's expulsion of communists in the late 1940's, and the US labor movement's push out of Soviet influences from the European labor movement in the greater context of the Cold War. Similarly, there have been labor movements which pushed away from full collectivization of the means of production to co-determination, workplace democracy, and other movements where labor has a mandatory portion of say in operations. Still other arrangements look to improving worker compensation and investment in the company with profit-sharing arrangements such as the Scanlon plan, brainchild of steelworker Joseph Scanlon, a fixture in the 1930's and 1940's labor movement. So Domai, in essence, is a grab-bag of the labor movements greatest hits and shame reel, depending on your social engineering choices.
Domai cannot run Green economics, which means on some level, his focus is industrial development, and likely that means he runs into problems with Mind Worms that he can only mitigate by directing his labor into the production of Centauri Preserves, Hybrid Forests, and other facilities to raise his "clean mineral" score lest he get overrun with demon boils when Planet strikes back. A Planned Economy Domai likely runs a socialist economic model with direction set by his planning department. A Free Market Domai likely pushes for private property and ownership with profit-sharing in place and workplace safety kept in check by a union-driven auditing board, allowing for great wealth to be generated, with the idea that "the people determine what they want" as the guiding philosophy behind the market providing worker fulfillment, similar in many ways to the post-Second World War economic boom in the United States, France, West Germany, and Japan.
A Democratic Free Drones probably runs closer to syndicalism, with representation determined by industry and the labor unions acting as political entities for workplace democracy and as political parties in Domai's government. A Police State Free Drones runs similar to the Soviet Union, with high degrees of repression to prevent disastrous drone strikes to prevent the highly-industrialized economy from collapsing due to strikes. A Fundamentalist Free Drones probably mandates meetings devoted to ideological indoctrination and holds a secret police to watch the labor movement for signs of dissent and purging dissenting thought, a classic hallmark of the Stasi in East Germany.
For Values, a Power-focused Domai likely strongly attaches to the classic class conflict message that Trotsky articulated in his ideas of permanent revolution, and so a state similar to War Communism during the Russian Civil War arises. For Knowledge, Domai likely stresses research that provides demonstrable effects in creature comforts and industrial production; he might scoff at the purely theoretical (much like Morgan does in his admonition against ivory tower intellectuals), but he would probably enjoy more material gains such as better production, better armor, better warning systems against the Mindworms, and so on. For Wealth, Domai probably values high wages as a physical demonstration of his commitment to the elevation of the working man - a twist on the Veblenian "conspicuous consumption" idea where the society demonstrates its ideals via public display.
For Future Society, Domai is geared to pick Eudaimonia as mentioned - it becomes the realization of the totality of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Whether that be the Marxist "new man" or the Platonic Academy ideal of Eudaimonia, the concept is that mankind can determine its own fulfillment, and it does so. Much like Aki Zeta-5, a different pick in Future Society means the ultimate failure of achieving the vision. For Cybernetic, likely it's due to roboticization rendering human industrial output unnecessary - Domai engineers his own obsolescence, and a concession to Planet's voraciously violent retaliation at Domai's ecological devastation. Thought Control has Domai become every bit the tyrant his hated rival Yang is, finding control too important. In a way, this most clearly resembles Nikita Khrushchev in history, who forcibly medicated dissenters and categorized opposition as a mental illness - the technology afforded by the final future allows for this to become reality. If Eudaimonia is Domai taking up the fully automated luxury TNG meme to its hilt, Thought Control Domai is perhaps one of the greatest and most tragic failures: where every worker is Genejack, and Domai has to make sure that the Free Drone beanstalk stays uncut.
Thanks for the question, Anon.
SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King
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