like, granted youāve got the mazovās socialist sausage grinder jokes (which are, to be clear, funny as hell), and communist harry is hardly held up as an exemplar revolutionary spirit (āare women bourgeois?ā), but things like the impenetrability of the reading group and its apparent disconnect from grassroots struggle + dismissal of anyone who lacks the intellectual capital to engage with them right off the bat is a gesture towards the tensions between abstract theory and praxis that exist in contemporary communist spaces. the line about how complaining about other communists is one of the most important parts of being a communist is more or less an inside joke. compare this to the barefaced contempt that the game holds for moralism:
KINGDOM OF CONSCIENCE ā Moralists donāt really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a childās toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isnāt change ā not even incremental change. It is *control*. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.Ā
this isnāt the kind of commentary written by someone who thinks that āmoralismā is salvageable, or wants the player to take up the critiques offered by the game and ask what a better āmoralismā could look like. you start the game in a world where a communist revolution was put down by an alliance of moralist foreign powers, clearly mirroring the invasions and coups and sanctions that have characterised the capitalist-imperialist responses to communist revolutions in the real world, and that above paragraph is what the game has to say about it. centrism isnāt change, itās control.
on the other hand, early communist referencesāthe āmazovian socioeconomicsā thought, the mission to start ābuilding communismā which suggests that 0.0001% of communism has been builtāemphasise communism as failure not as a smug little āsee! communism doesnāt work!ā centrist chuckle, but to set the groundwork for the revolutionary optimism that characterises the spirit of the communism questās closing moments. the inframaterialist tower is able to stand up, if only for a few secondsāthe theoretical debates taking place in the communist reading group arenāt useless, even if they are somewhat solipsistic. steban asks you: in dark times, should the stars also go out? if you know about the 2mm hole in the world, steban tells you that communism means to refuse to accept that the world has to remain like this. the student communists are insulated from on-the-ground struggle, but you can convince them to get cindy involved, and see them advertising for a meeting at a local coffee-house rather than their usual password-locked meeting-room. so much of disco elysium is about resisting the inevitability of historyāits very imaginary is one of historical materialism. the miracle from the westāie. the insulindian phasmidāis a disruption of the historical continuum, an essentially communist imaginary.
like, disco elysium isnāt naive about where communism has failed and continues to fail and may well fail again, but of its political branches, communism is the one which the game pins its hopes on. itās not a āsatireā of communism, itās an assessment and a promise of optimism.
pixelskylines
snowghoul
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
titsay
