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GAME INFO

Kapital: Sparks of Revolution28th April, 2022

Platform PC

Publisher 1C Entertainment

Developer Lapovich Team

Kapital: Sparks of Revolution is purportedly a game about class struggle, set in the backdrop of a ruined capital city in an unnamed country after a war. A great war, one could say. I'd say it's meant to be Belarus - or some other eastern-European country - post World War One. I wouldn't be surprised either since the developer, Lapovich Team, is Belarusian. It's also possible the game has told me what the setting is, and while I couldn't swear to it, my subconscious could be yelling out the correct answer.

Either way, it's not important. You're starting from the beginning, just with the advantage of knowing where the technology will go. The aim is a simple one, keep your resources balanced and keep the three social classes happy. These three classes are the Workers, the Bourgeois, and the Nobles. So far, so 1917 Russia.

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Let's talk about classes. The sad reality is that even in a supposed communist state, class systems still exist. Communism, if it worked as it is on paper, would no doubt be the ideal way to live. Everybody would be equal, and nobody would be left wanting. Universal healthcare and social welfare is, factually, a good thing. The states to have claimed themselves as communists never were, and the current "Communist" state, run by the Chinese Communist Party, is not communist. No country has ever been communist, and no country ever will be. This is something that Kapital: Sparks of Revolution sort of gets across, or I saw this while playing the game.

The name isn't missed on me, clearly pointing toward Karl Marx's work, Capital (Das Kapital, in his native tongue). This blunt nature is visible throughout the campaign, which is essentially the sandbox but gives you some specific orders on the way and forces you down particular paths. For example, having your the train - your source of grain - getting hijacked, pushing you to research a specific technology and then sending folks off to rescue it.

Another difference is the text-based dialogue with these specific missions and progression beats. You've got a character representing each of the three classes, with extra characters representing the healthcare system, the secret police, etc. Most of the time, you find the working-class representative having a go at the nobles, with some quips at the Bourgeois. Other times, you'll find a former soldier pushing you to take as many authoritarian choices as possible. It's all but showing you, possibly without meaning to, why Communism will never work and why humanity is screwed: people are self-serving and have far too many vested interests.

So why have I spoken about all that, only loosely linking it into Kapital: Sparks of Revolution? I've already dropped you that hint; the campaign and the sandbox are essentially the same. They use the same map; it's just that you get to change a few starting aspects on the sandbox and have a bit more freedom in which direction you want to go in the progression of your city, all while managing the balance of your people.

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Managing this balance will not be new to people who have played other city-building simulators before. You've been balancing population happiness repeatedly in the past, just with different labels (Residential, Commercial and Industrial in Cities: Skylines, for example). Here in Kapital: Sparks of Revolution, you're doing the same, and for the most part - if you've got the resources - you'll not struggle. Then again, I'm saying that, but one of my games ended in a mass riot. The nobles were the ones rioting; the bunch of needy gits that they are, wanted me to clear up the hundreds of corpses on the street, having all died of starvation.

My capital sounds more like a Belarusian city the more I talk about it. I've got the great famine of Russia of 1920-21 (Belarus was a part of it back then) on my mind. You have some tools for improving happiness, such as places for drink, ones for food and some shops. The workers go to one particular type; the bourgeois and nobles got to the other. Then it's just a case of making sure you have the resources. You can use the printing press and spend a great deal of money for a +10 boost, a bit of propaganda.

Also, make sure to have an efficient police force to solve crimes. You can interfere and determine which investigations they'll focus on, too. Maybe I should have focused on the case of the dead Noble? Possibly not, because you're also competing with corruption in every single government building, even the bloody hospital. It's an interesting tweak that reduces the efficiency of the particular facility based on the corruption level. You can only go on a corruption purge for one building, and it's got a fair cooldown. That and I often forget to go on a corruption purge.

You've always got more on top of your need to balance an ever-growing population, one growing even when people are dropping like flies and their corpses littering the street. You've also got to keep up with your research of more advanced buildings, ensure your workers are in the warehouses building up your resources and remember to enact new acts. It's in line with other city-builders, just not as detailed as the more extensive ones.

I can't say that aesthetically, admittedly. Kapital: Sparks of revolution is a good looking game, having that bit of extra colour that makes it pop when the populous lob Molotov Cocktails at your palace window. The designs of structures show good attention to detail, but the little things such as the people add to the effect.

The best I can honestly say about Kapital: Sparks of Revolution is that it's got the features you'd find in any good city builder. It's even got something extra thanks to the corruption system, but it doesn't have that depth to propel it to greatness. It doesn't help that there's only one map. The on-the-nose dialogue in the campaign is just that, but understandable if only to push the setting, not that it has as much impact as I think it would like to have.

All things considered, I can recommend Kapital: Sparks of Revolution as a perfectly serviceable city builder. If you like that sort of game, you'll have a decent amount of time with it, and sometimes that's more than enough.

6

Kapital: Sparks of Revolution is a perfectly serviceable city building game that attempts to add class struggle and other aspects such as state corruption and intervention into the mix. While it doesn't achieve everything it set out to do, the ideas are there and offer something interesting to play. Where it added some of these interesting ideas, it has also sadly skimped on other core areas; there is only one map, and the balance isn't great with the game constantly threatening to overwhelm you. All things considered, I'd still recommend it for fans of the genre, just with the knowledge that it isn't the most detailed and better options exist.

Originally posted here:
Kapital: Sparks of Revolution Review Communist City-Building? - Wccftech

According to recent research, homophobia in Georgia is not just linked to religiosity but also to the countrys communist past.

Peoples values and attitudes are shaped by many factors, religion and historical experience being important among them.

A paper we recently published in the International Journal of Sociology suggests that Georgias communist past is associated with higher degrees of homophobia just as religiosity is.

However, the experience of a communist past also moderates the impact of religiosity on homophobia. In post-Communist countries, an individuals religiosity has a weaker effect on liberal attitudes toward same-sex relations than it has in countries with no communist government in their historical experience.

To show this, we used data collected between 2017 and 2020 in 17 countries through the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). The countries were selected to ensure that different religious denominations were present that both had and did not have a communist past.

Under communism, same-sex relations were either illegal or treated as a psychological disorder. This may explain why post-communist societies are less tolerant towards same-sex relations. In the post-communist countries in the sample, 44% of people perceive sexual relations between two adults of the same sex as always wrong, in contrast to 15% in their non-post-communist counterparts.

Organised religion is often the dominant force against queer rights globally. A regression analysis shows that religiosity is an important factor affecting homophobic sentiments: a higher religiosity level is associated with lower tolerance of queer people.

Another important factor affecting tolerance towards queer people is societys historical experience: individuals in post-communist countries are 0.6 points less tolerant on a four-point homosexuality-tolerance scale, compared to their counterparts in non-communist countries.

The effect of religiosity on homophobia is weaker in post-communist countries, where the difference in tolerance towards same-sex relations between the most and the least religious individuals is smaller compared to the similar difference in non-post-communist countries.

Thus, religiosity appears to encourage homophobia. So too does a communist past. While religiosity also drives homophobia in post-communist countries, it does so to a lesser extent. This appears to stem, in part, from people in post-communist countries being more homophobic across the spectrum of religiosity.

This article is based on a paper, which was published in the International Journal of Sociology.

The views presented in this article are the authors alone, and do not reflect the views of CRRC Georgia or any related entity.

Read this article:
Datablog | Both religion and the county's Soviet past contribute to Homophobia in Georgia - OC Media

A compromise on abortion

You dont have to be pro-choice to oppose overturning Roe | Column, May 5

I am an educated, retired teacher and educational leader who is politically Independent. Not a fence-sitter, as many on both sides would call me, but a true Independent. I see positives (and negatives) on both sides of the table. To that end, I would like to suggest a compromise. Let me preface that suggestion with a few facts: Republicans, you will never end abortion; you can only end legal abortion. You may not even substantially reduce the number of abortions. Democrats, you need to come closer to the middle. Of course, conservatives object to late-term abortions and partial-birth abortions. Most of us do. They are inhumane. So, heres the compromise: Women suffering (and suffering is the correct term) from unwanted pregnancies have 16 weeks (four months) to abort safely and legally.

With todays technology, no one can say, after four missed periods, nausea, etc., that they didnt think to take a pregnancy test. Women must take that much responsibility. The exception, of course, is a risk to the mothers health. Even rape and incest should be able to be addressed in four months. This way, everyone wins/loses equally. There are no great solutions. Unwanted pregnancy is a true tragedy. But its not going to stop happening, and we need to meet in the middle to respect everyones needs and rights.

Lynn Rourke, Dunedin

New law requires school lessons on victims of communism | May 10

So our governor is touting a new law requiring schools to offer lessons on victims of communism. How admirable! But heaven forbid a teacher should even so much as mention victims of racism. Yet racism has had a far more persistent and profoundly damaging effect on our nation than communism, and our schools are forbidden to teach all of those facts.

Elenora Sabin, St. Petersburg

New law requires school lessons on victims of communism | May 10

Im glad Gov. Ron DeSantis wants children to learn about the dangers of communism. Maybe next he can teach our children about the dangers of pandemics and the 70,000 who died in the state because of the incompetence of publicly elected officials.

Michael Zaccardi, Palm Harbor

Read the rest here:
Here is a fair compromise on abortion | Letters - Tampa Bay Times

Following the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization case, left-wing organizers have swept into action, launching rallies and events designed to put pressure on the justices. Over the Mothers Day Weekend protestors forced Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito to an undisclosed location and carried out disruptive demonstrations outside and in some cases inside a number of churches including New Yorks St. Patrick Cathedral, where a picture of pro-life Catholics blocking the entrance to the church from screaming protestors went viral.

In a number of pictures and videos from the Mothers Day protests, abortion protestors were seen wearing green bandanas, shirts, and holding green banners, part of a #Green4Abortion campaign. The color choice was even endorsed by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who tweeted out an announcement for a protest in New Yorks Foley Square with the instructions wear green.

The organization responsible for the hashtag encouraging supporters to wear green is Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights which launched a week of action beginning on May 8, Mothers Day, including an emphasis on Actions Outside of Churches.

Rise Up 4 Abortions Twitter page shows them playing a major role in protests in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Chicago over the weekend, with additional protests planned May 14 in New York City, Chicago, Austin, Honolulu, Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston.

While the lefts ability to rapidly throw together color-coordinated protest groups is well known, in this case, there is more to Rise Up 4 Abortion than meets the eye. An examination of the groups website suggests the group is little more than a front for the radical Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a Maoist organization founded by 60s radical Bob Avakian, a former leader of the Anti-war Students for a Democratic Society.

For starters, the group references leading RCP member and Avakian devotee Sunsara Taylor and directs donors via Paypal to World Cant Wait Inc., another organization co-founded by Taylor. World Cant Wait also shares a mailing address with Refuse Fascism, another Taylor-led RCP front group that organized Antifa-style protests aimed at the Trump Administration. The Rise Up 4 Abortion page even includes a link to Revolution Nothing Less!, an RCP Youtube show, based on Bob Avakians new Communism.

The RCP has historically played a front and center role in orchestrating violent riots, including the 1992 Los Angeles Rodney King Riots and the 2014 Ferguson riots, where the Daily Beast called them the communist agitators trying to ignite Ferguson.

The Revolutionary Communist Party is no mere liberal wine moms, despite urging people to vote for Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Instead, the partys constitution says they openly seek, a revolution that overthrows this system and the capitalist-imperialist class that embodies and runs ita revolution that will immediately establish a new power.

Avakian has called the overthrow of U.S. imperialism and the establishment of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat the greatest contribution to the world revolution that can be made

Despite their Communist orientation the group clearly has no problem seeking funding and support from Democrat billionaires like George Soros and Tom Steyer, according to a June 2020 undercover video by Project Veritas showing Refuse Fascism organizers discussing fundraising efforts. Other support for RCPs Refuse Fascism project came from the Alliance for Global Justice, a 501(c) with historic links to the communist Sandinistas.

Ironically, not everyone in the pro-Abortion coalition is excited about marching alongside overt Maoists. D.C. Anti-Fascist Action, a Washington D.C. based Antifa group, posted a series of tweets condemning the RCP as a cult:

The Antifa account went on to link a Twitter thread calling for RCP signs and banners to be taken down.

Tension between anarchist groups and more hierarchical communist groups is not uncommon among the radical left, but it does raise important questions. If even Antifa knows that the presence of the RCP at protests is bad news, why cant Hillary Clinton and other Democrats come to the same conclusion?

Kyle Shideler is the director of the Counter Islamist Grid, an initiative of the Middle East Forum. Kyle has worked for several organizations involved with Middle East and terrorism policy since 2006. He is a contributing author to Saudi Arabia and the Global Islamic Terrorist Network: America and the Wests Fatal Embrace, and has written for numerous publications and briefed legislative aides, intelligence, and law enforcement officials and the general public on national security issues.

Read the original here:
Hillary-Endorsed Abortion Group Targeting Churches Is A Front For Revolutionary Communists - The Federalist

In a small cemetery nestled in the Apennine valleys of Italys Emilia-Romagna region, about a hundred people of all ages gather. The persistent rain leaves four unmarked red flags drenched. A visibly moved man lovingly places a fifth flag on the coffin: it is the red and black banner of the Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo, the anarchist union that waged the resistance to Francoism from 1936 to 1939. From under the umbrellas rises the hymn of the Internationale, then someone selects a song from Spotify on a smartphone and turns the volume up to the max. I seem to recognize Sepultura, a Brazilian death metal band.

On April 18, Valerio Evangelisti, author of more than thirty novels translated in more than twenty countries, as well as an infinite number of short stories, essays, articles, and prefaces, died at age seventy. On the day of his funeral, the trade unions had called a demonstration in Rome with the slogan: Lower your weapons, raise your wages. A banner carried by dozens of workers reads: From the factories to the ports, we shall be all! Ciao Valerio! The slogan We shall be all belongs to the Industrial Workers of the World and gives the title to one of the novels that this writer from Bologna dedicated to the heroic struggle of the American revolutionary union.

This was not the first time that social movements had taken up Evangelistis books as their own: a decade ago, the Book Block students took to the streets with large book-shaped shields to defend themselves from police charges. Their message was clear: our imagination defends us from your violence. The titles that came out of this writers pen were also present on their covers. Id much rather see myself on these shields than win the Strega award, Evangelisti commented. Ive never been so proud as when I saw myself up there. Strega, in addition to being a saffron-colored herbal liqueur, is Italys most prestigious mainstream literature award. But there was very little mainstream about Evangelistis life.

He began to serve in the revolutionary left-wing parties in 1969, earning the nickname So Long (as he was called, in English) on account of his height: In those days we were essentially referred to by first names or nicknames, he said. Last names were for the police. Nobody else asked for them. When in 1977 those political groups headed into crisis, becoming institutionalized or dissolving into the workers autonomy movement, Evangelisti continued his militant activity by participating in dozens of committees and then, in the 1980s, in the nascent social centers.

These territorially based organizations were the spontaneous response to the fragmentation of what had hitherto been the subjects of social revolt, with the end of the Fordist cycle of accumulation. Occupying disused buildings to turn them into meeting places, where music was made and film forums were organized, made it possible to resist even if only partially repression, political reversals, and the rampant plague of heroin. Through them, the heritage of the struggles of the previous decade was passed on to younger generations.

Evangelisti, however, had a second, a third, and even a fourth life. After graduating in political science in 1976, he continued to pursue academic research, publishing volumes and essays on history concerning the Jacobin plebs of Bologna, early Italian socialism, the anarchist band Bonnot, and punk cultures. He had also won a contest to be admitted to the Superior School of Public Administration, in 1981 becoming an executive civil servant at the Finance Ministry.

This new occupation did not change his political attitude in the slightest: as he recounted on more than one occasion, he passed information to the grassroots unions as best he could, so that they would have as much ammunition as possible in their negotiations with the other side. But this revolutionary researcher who infiltrated behind enemy lines had also begun writing fantastical stories and novels, which he circulated for fun among friends and comrades.

This was soon met with success. In 1993, his Nicolas Eymerich, inquisitore won the Urania Award, a contest for unpublished works of science fiction, organized by Italys biggest publishing firm, Mondadori. The following year, the book became a bestseller in this field, and in 1995, a sequel was published in instalments in the weekly magazine of Repubblica, Italys second most read newspaper. Radio adaptations, comics, and video games followed.

Nicolas Eymerich was a Catalan inquisitor who really existed in the medieval era, but his literary transposition by Evangelisti makes him an educated, cunning, cruel, misogynistic, insectophobe, and especially schizoid character, in whose person elements of paraliterature, gothic, horror, space opera, cyberpunk, detective, Western, historical novels, and Bildungsroman converge. If Italian science fiction had hitherto been considered substantially foreign to the national tradition, it was born in its own right with this Dominican priest.

The style of the novels of the Eymerich cycle is clear, fluent, and without linguistic experimentation. The plot is articulated around various temporal planes: the fourteenth century in which the inquisitor lives, the later settings where we meet the scientist Marcus Frullifer, the psitronic spaceships, the three US states with a single army, and the Nazicommunists of the Rache in eternal conflict with Euroforce, the political front for the Eurobank. In this literary metaverse, Eymerich solves an enigma at each conjuncture and restores the Churchs reactionary order wherever heresy and subversion might risk taking root.

But why does the revolutionary Evangelisti encourage the reader to identify with a hero who, in the course of his inner journey, instead of redeeming himself, turns into a completely evil monster? According to Alberto Sebastiani editor of a monumental work that collects the thirteen novels dedicated to the Dominican his psychopathology, his coldness, his hostility to the Other, is in embryo the same as contemporary capitalisms own: Eymerich is a form of evil, a shadow. And it must be recognized. Thats why the reader, in his heros journey, must investigate the character, understand how he works and defeat him.

After all, not only the Eymerich cycle, but the Bologna writers entire oeuvre is configured as one enormous novel in which the forces of reaction and of rebellion eternally clash. However totalizing and desperate the scenarios evoked may be, the possibility of resistance is never completely silenced. Worthy of note is the final dialogue of Black Flag in which Carl, standing in front of the tanks reimposing domination by the powerful, cries out:

Its useless! Theyve already won anyway! The world is theirs! The future is theirs!

Sheryl answered: Maybe. The important thing is that they know that there are those who resist.

She advanced towards the wagons firing all six shots of the drum, in succession. Six silver bullets pierced the screaming metal.

Resistance is never futile: If the cause is just, the battles lost are the most beautiful, says an Irish teenager in the Western novel Antracite. Here the protagonist is Pantera, another serial character created by Evangelisti. A Mexican gunslinger, he is a quite different figure from the inquisitor, although they do share some common traits. While Eymerich is ready to eliminate anyone who questions power, Pantera is the hireling of his paymasters but, out of an irrepressible sense of justice, he rebels against those who commit abuses against the weakest.

In Evangelistis poetics, if the principle of rebellion is resilient in the face of power, it has the same weapon at its disposal as reaction does: the imagination, in this case serving to conceive a different future. Narratives, and especially those of popular literature, evoke archetypes, allow readers to make a journey together, and recreate the social bond destroyed by capitalism.

Evangelistis imaginary included fantastical figures (vampires, the living dead, ghosts, werewolves), but was not limited to this. His output also included many works of historical fiction without supernatural elements. Among these we should mention the three novels of the Il Sole dellAvvenire (Sun of the Future) cycle. This saga of a family from Emilia-Romagna tells the story of Italian socialism from 1870 to the early years of World War II, passing through the biennio rosso of factory and land occupations in 191920, Fascism and the years of the Resistance.

The writer weaves into these new adventures a phenomenology of class consciousness, dramatic, articulate, and not without humorous elements. Family separations, stories of emigration, unemployment, and poverty intersect with popular myths and the forms of an alternative sociality, produced by the class composition of time and place. Very interesting is the case of the cameracce (bad rooms) that allowed workers to cheaply drink and eat, to have places to meet and play cards after work. It is no coincidence that a character in the book sees therein an embryo of the future society. The authors role in the social-centers movement of the 1980s is strongly evoked here.

Evangelistis last novel was entitled Gli anni del coltello (The Years of the Knife). The revolution has been defeated and the patriots who fought for the Roman Republic in 1849 are dispersed throughout the Italian peninsula. They try again to attack the Habsburg-Austrian authorities in a plethora of farcical micro-insurrections, they delude themselves that the Savoy monarchy will aid the national cause, they quarrel among themselves, end up in prison, suffer tortures, and betray one another.

This is the narrative world in which a dark protagonist again operates: an ethical terrorist who kills in the name of the republic and the word of Giuseppe Mazzini. Dressed in a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat, Gabariol is a fierce folk hero who, through his long and bloody odyssey, never has a real change of consciousness. He always remains true to himself, even as events force him to confront the contradictions of the revolution. For this is a revolution that does not address the social question and continually pushes patriots into the bloodbath, to fulfill the calls for armed struggle coming from a republican party now transformed into the Company of Death.

Again in this work, the peculiar elements of Evangelistis sociological poetics recur: the taverns as fortresses of the antagonistic social fabric with their related popular food and wine culture, their songs and their imaginary; womens agency, with a surprising mixture of subversive radicalism and pragmatism; and the historical novel as a multilayered device, whose fluid and entertaining narration harbors a deep analysis of the human experiences that result from social conflict.

Reading this last bequest of the Bologna writer, our thoughts immediately turn to Italy in the early 1980s. We think of the expectations for a better world which lasted for a decade and vanished within a few months; to the militarization of the political confrontation; to the special laws; to the five thousand political prisoners; to the enforced disappearances; and to the rapes and tortures which were identified during trials but never followed by punishments for the guilty. Millions of men and women, after having tasted the thrill of an authentic life, turned back into the private sphere, into withdrawal, depression, heroin, clandestinity, self-referentiality, and then, in many cases, even into reporting on their former comrades.

Valerio Evangelisti had a past as a historian, and mastered the tools of scholarship. To these he added the imaginary models drawn from literature to push research further, and above all to forge weapons of rebellion. Despite becoming a successful writer, he never abandoned his political commitment, supporting the Sandinista revolution, anti-imperialist struggles in Latin America, and the movement against the unnecessary and costly environmental destruction caused by the project for a high-speed train line through the Val di Susa. His last battle was against the current military escalation: in video conferences he appeared in front of his vast library making the case calmly and with many historical examples against rearmament. We must not give up an inch, he insisted.

One of his creatures that he particularly cared for is still among us: Carmilla, a political-literary magazine that takes its name from the vampire that sprung from Sheridan Le Fanus pen. Evangelisti was its editor in chief until his last day of life. Born in a paper version in 1995, it turned into a webzine after a few years. It hosts reviews, serialized novels, humorous pieces, reportages, articles on political, sociological and philosophical theory; interventions by dissident writers, activists, researchers and other supporters of the imaginary way to communism.

A fitting expression of the importance of the imaginary to political struggle comes from Evangelistis preface to Jack Londons The Iron Heel. Here, he recalled how partisan commanders never failed to mention this book of social science fiction among the works to be read between actions. Im sure that in the backpacks and smartphones of the partisans of the future, there will always be a book by Valerio Evangelisti.

Link:
Valerio Evangelisti Used Literature to Point the Way to Communism - Jacobin magazine