like, granted you’ve got the mazov’s socialist sausage grinder jokes (which are, to be clear, funny as hell), and communist harry is hardly held up as an exemplar revolutionary spirit (‘are women bourgeois?’), 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 – Moralists don’t really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn’t change – 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.
this isn’t the kind of commentary written by someone who thinks that ‘moralism’ is salvageable, or wants the player to take up the critiques offered by the game and ask what a better ‘moralism’ 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 isn’t change, it’s control.
on the other hand, early communist references—the ‘mazovian socioeconomics’ thought, the mission to start ‘building communism’ which suggests that 0.0001% of communism has been built—emphasise communism as failure not as a smug little ‘see! communism doesn’t work!’ centrist chuckle, but to set the groundwork for the revolutionary optimism that characterises the spirit of the communism quest’s closing moments. the inframaterialist tower is able to stand up, if only for a few seconds—the theoretical debates taking place in the communist reading group aren’t 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 history—its very imaginary is one of historical materialism. the miracle from the west—ie. the insulindian phasmid—is a disruption of the historical continuum, an essentially communist imaginary.
like, disco elysium isn’t 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. it’s not a ‘satire’ of communism, it’s an assessment and a promise of optimism.
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