NationStates Jolt Archive

Context:

The Kingdom of the Geletians is a vast Celtic empire covering more than ten million square kilometres of the continent of Sarnia and home to five and a half billion people, long fractured and dominant over most of the continent through cultural and linguistic similarity but not political affiliation. The C20th brought foreign imperialists such as the Azazians to Sarnia, which previously was shared by the Geletians with precious few other civilisations. This prompted a drive to unity amongst the Celts and a belated and grudging embrace of the industrial revolution and of the global market, bringing the rise of a bourgeois class and the destruction of Celtic traditions such as communal ownership of worked land, and an assault by the great monotheistic faiths long resisted as blood enemies of the Geletian race.

The Igovian Soviet Commonwealth is a quite separate and much smaller society centred in Finland and incorporating Murmansk Oblast and the Estonian archipelago in a Commonwealth established only as recently as 1941 under the guidance of radical opponents of the defeated Fascist Lapua Movement and Russian refugees from Kronstadt, not to mention a few interested Welsh Owenites. It was briefly subject to meddling on the part of the new Geletian kingdom when a Prince Llewellyn attempted to subvert the revolution and lead a faction in civil war with the support of western powers (notably Iansisle), only to be defeated by the Igovian Soviets, who continued to cut an independent path between the reviled capitalists, social-democrats, fascists, and bolshevists of the world.

At this time, Beth Gellert does not, strictly speaking, exist [except as an Anglicised spelling of the name of a Welsh village].

This thread, for anyone interested, deals with the culmination of a queer sort of revolution in the Kingdom of the Geletians, where people have come to despair at the divorce forced between them and their powers as workers and at the epic myths of the capitalist miracle.

Over the course of this last year the mighty Kingdom of the Geletians has been beset by internal strife. Strikes have long been common across the land and typically have been put-down by force of the police or of private security forces, or else the participants have been allowed to sink into poverty with minimal state support until their strike was broken. But it is only this year that a new phenomenon has been perceived and associated with the labour movement.

Workers (put out of employment by company bankruptcy, down-sizing, and out-sourcing to poorer countries that had turned much of the Kingdom into a post-industrial wasteland concerned with financial services and no real production, and by the other profiteering of capitalists) had suddenly siezed their disused places of work. Mines had been first, but factories soon followed. Pawnshops that had taken the tools of those unemployed people desperate to make enough money to get-by had seen their windows smashed and doors broken-in by mobs taking back those tools and heading back to work: without the say-so of the owners and the upper-managers.

Following these examples workers still in the employ of capitalists who remained in business had locked-out their managers, ignored the instructions of directors and shareholders, and taken control of their own work.

Private security forces had been deployed against the workers, but many recruits had given-up on realising that they were being shut-out of the economy by those who actually took part in it. The courts had ruled against the workers many times and ordered-in the police, even against such as the miners at the ex-Pennymount estate in the Sygun Copper Mines district, who had taken-over mines abandoned by absentee owners who rarely paid taxes and absconded with millions inspite of great business debts. But the authorities were finding that in more cases than not the workers had local communities firmly on their side, and police teams sent to arrest workers or re-possess tools and factories were typically met by hundreds, even thousands of local residents refusing to let them pass.

Now everything was coming to a head.

The Kingdom of the Geletians, a parliamentary democracy in which the chief of state -Adiatorix, in essence the champion among kings and subject of his nation's title- exercised a little more power than his ministers might have liked, thundered along for years with its hands clasped tight around something called the market. Since Adiatorix dragged the Celts from their ancient way of life to this one Geletian traders and producers -or rather those risen to think for and profit from the output of producers- spent their days trying to figure-out how this new market would receive their offerings. The state boomed and roared, one of the richest on earth, arm in arm with the market that retrospectively adjusted itself to correct for the mistakes of these capitalists, and hundreds of millions in the crowds of this Kingdom staggered about in its cities, increasingly prone to wonder what their three shilling an hour cleaning job really contributed to that national wealth.

Not much. They felt useless. But they were Geletians, not Catholics or Muslims or some other brow-beaten species, despite the best efforts of foreign missionaries and state initiatives. They wanted to contribute, they were able to contribute, but the market did not want them.

The market drove invention, they were told, and remembered in the past hearing the same about whatever war in which their tribe, city, or kingdom happened to have involved itself. But they enjoyed war! They didn't care for this. They thought back to their ancient traditions in communal ownership of the land they worked and the tools they used. They thought about how problems used to be solved when they arose, and wondered about this fuss over the explosion of invention. A little investigation showed that it was a nonsense, that the Kingdom -like all the modern world- was innovating at a pre-industrial rate and hiding it by making existing inventions a little faster, or sticking two or more of them together in one compact package. No solutions were forthcoming when important questions were asked, certainly not when the subject was how the world might cope with the market's unprecedented hunger and the rate at which it consumed resouces good for millions of years before this great bourgeois age. The Geletian people were well educated, since the state -for all its productive momentum- couldn't control the vast territory so absolutely as its champions may have liked and most communities saw to their own daily affairs in a way not seen in the rest of the developed world, and they developed an awareness of the world and their place in it.

They were able to sit in their communities -many still lived in hill forts, all be it typically featuring all mod cons- and assess the world in reasonable terms and to co-ordinate action without governmental intervention. They listened to the arguments about overwhelming productive power in the market economy and to talk of motivation and inventive explosion, and heard about the Chinese and the Yaforites and the Azazian colonies and whatever other competition was forcing employment over seas and requiring them to work longer hours and push the age of retirement ever higher, restraining the minimum wage even as the highest earners grew richer. And they became angry. No! We only need work longer hours if you want more millions! To hell with you, you get nothing that you don't work for!

Less educated and more religiously and culturally beaten people abroad directed their anger at these foreigners as the new ruling orders wished only for them to be told that they are wrong to express what ammounted race hate, rendering their dissatisfaction essentially mute. The Geletians instead chose to ignore the ruling classes and go back to work in defiance of what capitalists and government told them about foreign competition. As to the exportation of employment? What of it! Geletians aren't employees, they are workers and have always been! Workers and warriors, at least. Invention? Yes, it was a simple matter to see that the rate was declining and the bourgeois miracle had fed simply off a dash to grasp the lowest hanging fruit, and now that all the simple ideas were realised the market represented no better means for reaching the fruit higher up, and contented itself with putting clocks in radios, music in phones, DVDs in cars, cameras in... phones, and internet connections in... phones. None of this significantly improved lives or solved the problems created by the rate of consumption that the market encouraged!

The last useful invention of the bourgeois age, internet, was now used to join hill forts in Fort Brennus to villages in Sygun Copper Mines, and students in Alaric Technical Institute with scholars in Porthmadog School of Industry as social and political dissent surfed the landscape of the Kingdom of the Geletians.

Police reacted to an internet posting about a planned business take-over by a workers' group. Four vanloads of uniformed officers -notably without numbers on their shirts- turned up. They were hit by Molotov cocktails and the haunting cry of Celtic warhorns as one hundred and twenty civilians descended upon them weilding the swords and bladed farming tools-come-weapons hung up by their fathers and grandfathers during the industrialisation and unification of Geletia. The police were killed almost to a man, and while one van escaped and a second was burned-out, two more were taken by the attackers and would soon be pressed into revolutionary service.

[Bump for the long-winded revolution. Hey, it can't happen over night, there's five and a half billion people involved.]

OOC:Why do you support the Kronstadt rebellion? The sailors of Kronstadt in 1920 were very different to the ones in 1917. The 1920 sailors at the Kronstadt Fortress were peasants with no socialist traditions or education who had come to Petrograd to fill the gap left by the deaths of most of the politicised 1917 sailors in the (American supported) Civil War. Their demands were unreasonable- calling for soviets without Bolsheviks, when the Bolsheviks had been the only party that supported the soviets from day one! ...not to mention the abandonment of all the progress of the revolution. The bolsheviks actions were justified because without the Kronstadt Fortress, Petrograd was vulnerable. Telegram me.

[Bump for views, though Sunday may not be the best time for it. Though a rambling 4AM telegram has been sent to address the Kronstadt issue, for the sake of anyone else interested, the Igovian Soviet Commonwealth does not buy Trotsky's self-serving cover about Entente spies and political ignorance, and does not believe in leading the masses like sheep behind political bigshots who will inevitibly... set the Cheka on them for expressing political and democratic growth or awareness. Igovians are more varied-communards than adherents to a specific left dogma, and will not be bullied into unrealistic unity of thought.]