Wow the editing at 1:27 is a 1:1 clone of the pre-mission screens from Call of Duty: Black Ops. I am fascinated by how good Iran’s western-facing propaganda is. They understand US pop culture better than the DoD propagandists do.

I meant the rhetorical focus and fixation on them by people in this “discourse”

I think the reason people, including myself place so much emphasis on them is that it seems like they were not just done to advance socialism, but create a tradition of self-governance among the people in case a capitalist restoration event occurred. Makes sense because there were like 6 coup attempts since the start of Chavismo. These coup attempts could not have been foiled without popular support.

It makes sense to me to differentiate between the formal government of Venezuela, and the communes, because in my opinion the formal government will always be prone to infiltration by compradors. Whereas the people’s organizations are going to be more radical.

He doesn’t need to do info war against western Marxists

He does info war on western rightists and is using the FBI and Homeland Security to target western leftists so I don’t think anything is beyond the pale. His level of control over Venezuela isn’t really relevant to splintering the left’s support for Venezuela/throwing the wool over their eyes to support a colonial administration. But I think everything is an infowar so that’s my bias.

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You may have information that I don’t, but I don’t think the communes are post-hoc justifications. The colectivos were pretty instrumental in stopping the Guaido coup as far as I am aware, and have been important in the distribution of goods within municipalities. Most of what I know comes from the Corporate Coup book by Grayzone reporter Anya Parampil. If you have information I don’t I’m willing to change my mind but I will continue to reiterate that we don’t have enough information to make any definitive claims at this point. I think Narco Rubio is smarter than people give him credit for. He seems to be the smartest person in this administration and I would expect part of his campaign against the Latin American left to be a COINTELPRO-style information war to make western leftists doomer about the whole situation.

I agree with that, however the caveat I give is that (at least I, personally) don’t feel that I have a full enough picture about what is going on.

https://venezuelanalysis.com/opinion/delcy-and-trump-it-is-what-it-looks-like/

VenezuelAnalysis was my go-to source of information, but even they don’t know what is going on. The intelligentsia within Venezuela seems to lean towards “Delcy is playing 6D chess you guys”, but the intelligentsia are not the proletariat. They typically skew more conservative.

If the economic and military power of the communes is being strengthened, or Marxist cadres are being trained while Delcy is inviting foreign capital into the country, I would consider that a positive sign indicating the intent of future escalation with the US. If the communes are being undermined that is a negative sign. I referenced Parenti’s criticisms of China in another comment.

Thanks for expanding on this.

True! But they did attract western capital by severely cheapening their pool of the most valuable resource - Labor. I wouldn’t make that parallel, but they did make this huge concession temporally in order to absorb Capital, and workers did suffer a lot because of it.

Yes, what the PRC did is arguably worse. Allowing their people to be exploited by the US empire, not just their natural resources. Even then the environmental degradation could be considered as allowing for the exploitation of resources.

is a situation that an organized and unified communist party with access to weapons can exploit.

Exactly, it creates economic leverage for future revolutionaries. Cuba had to have US capital within its’ borders to nationalize.

Both sides of the argument have valid points. We can speculate all day but ultimately it is up to the Venezuelan people to uphold their revolution and we can only speculate at the forms it will take from here on out.

it is existential, the lower levels and populace just hasn’t realized it yet

I agree. I think that the quality of life is still relatively high (in the sense that the US is not bombing them every single day) and the average person thinks “maybe it won’t get any worse than this”.

Then the revolution was already lost and a rotten facade.

I think under this logic, the revolution was lost under Chavez because he refused to move past social democracy and militarize at the level that would have been needed to deter the inevitable US aggression. At the same time, we can understand that the historical conditions likely prevented him from going as far as would have been needed to safeguard the revolution. Maybe it was naivete, maybe he was just playing the hand he was dealt.

I am not defending Delcy, I personally think she is not a committed revolutionary and is a liberal and a comprador. Maybe she is playing 6D chess, I don’t know. What matters though is what the masses are doing. Are the masses deciding amongst themselves that it’s worth overthrowing their liberal colonial government and carrying out a prolonged guerilla war against the US? I don’t know. We will have to see what happens. Arguing about “the revolution is lost billions must be extracted” is kind of pointless, especially by gringos like me, because I don’t know what is going on. Maybe the people are organizing drone corps to blow up US refineries and cut the tendons of the liberal government. WE LITERALLY DON’T KNOW.

Edit: as an example, when you read about how Parenti wrote about China in the 90s he believed they had fully become capitalist restorations and the revolution was lost. That may have even been true for a large chunk of the bureaucrats and politicians in charge of China at the time. 30 years later though we see that it was actually a calculated play to concentrate western capital inside of China, by exploiting the labor of the Chinese people. I think Parenti was right to be upset. I also think China made the correct play for the longevity of their system.

You don’t need “escalation dominance” to win a war or colonizers

My caveat was that it needs to be existential. The Venezuelan people may not view it as existential. After the airstrikes, the Iranian people now see their war as existential, because it is. Their existence is a direct threat to Zionism. I am saying that if the people largely don’t believe that the Bolivarian revolution is important enough to defend with their lives, how does it make sense for their leadership to make that decision for them?

I won’t keep replying because I don’t really care to argue. I just think we don’t know enough about the situation on the ground. Ultimately I would like to hear the proletarian Chavistas opinions on the situation before I make any accusations as an outsider. It is possible they consider her a traitor. I also find it equally possible that they fear a war with America enough that they agree with the concessions being made. Their opinions are also likely not monolithic. Again I emphasize that I don’t know what the opinion of each class in Venezuela is on the matter, and I reserve judgement until I have more information.

If they aren’t willing to eat some airstrikes to maintain a nation

Seems like an over-simplification. Venezuela has zero strategic leverage. “Eating airstrikes” is only worth it in the calculus of power if you have the means to escalate, or if it is existential. Ultimately it is up to the people of Venezuela and if they don’t think it’s worth fighting then that is their call to make. You could make the argument that maybe the national bourgeoisie are the ones in power and they are going against the will of the people, but I don’t know enough about the situation on the ground to say that for sure.

Cuba flirted with liberalization of their economy under Obama, and even now have signaled to the US their willingness to make concessions. If we’re being realists we understand that history is a process and you can’t just will a resistance movement into existence. I understand what you’re saying, but realism cuts both ways.

On first glance it seems like copium, but is this not pretty much what China did? I don’t know, I have been holding off on forming any conclusions about Delcy or the Bolivarians because we just don’t know. Hope this is true and they yank the football away from the US during the next financial crisis lol.

How much of this flow is due to backi-channel agreements between the US/China/Iran vs Iran’s limited capability to hit US boats with their anti-ship missiles? Curious if it’s a capabilities issue or if China is trying to prevent the global economy from blowing up. Love your analysis as always.

Ok touchpad scroll should work now.

So it looks like unfortunately the renderer I used requires some system libraries that are on Windows 10 only. I’ll update the store page to take note of that, thank you for informing me. Let me know if you need a refund or anything.

The Lenin buff is indicated by a blue underglow, and doesn’t fall off immediately on leaving the statue range

Yep that’s intentional, they keep the buff for 30s after leaving Lenin range

After building the central refinery, the regular refineries seem to function as drop off points for it.

Yes refineries will send all their regolith to the central refinery which has a 2x conversion rate. Unfortunately the central refinery is probably the most opaque mechanic in the game, I think most players never had an issue with that though since you can intuit “big refinery go brrr”. I was going to add some pipes from the refineries to the central refinery to indicate this, but I had to say “no” to a lot of things and just focus on shipping.

I have been using Wine in Windows 7 compatability mode to test it since I’m on Linux, but it’s not 1:1. Were you able to get more info about what caused the failure?

Oh shoot, I don’t think anyone tested with a mac trackpad yet. I’ll look into it when I get home.

Thank you! A lot of this was due to feedback from the playtesters here. I gave myself a 3 month timeline to keep the gameplay as simple as possible and focus on getting something shipped with polish so it means a lot to hear you say that!

Yeah I’ll dm you

Ok Mac build is up. It should work on any CPU arch.

Oops, I need to update the itch.io description page. I am done with the OST for this project, but I do need music for a planned project that will take me a looooong time to get off the ground likely. Do you have a Soundcloud?