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I've started thinking properly about my next PD game - Central Committee! - and would like some thoughts about it from people who know trotskyite parties better than me...

The game is a set collection game, played with cards. The cards will each have a party member on them, and the aim will be to get together the winning slate for election to the central committee. I need to work out the mechanisms that will allow people to change their cards but I want to play on the splitting thing of course so I'm going to try to get people to effectively trade cards in some way by joining and then splitting.

I could really use some help with the theming though.
I'm thinking the cards will have stats - a type of person (academic, young pretender, retired activist, I really don't know what the stereotypes should be) and various identity markers (gender, race, sexuality, I don't know what else or if I have those three and then on some/all have one or two other identity features like visible disability, pfwc or perhaps other kinds of perceived bonuses).

So thoughts please on the stereotypes you expect to find on the platonic ideal of a trotskyite central committee.

Also is there any kind of general number for how many people sit on a central committee? This'll have to be governed by the nature of set collection games ultimately, which I think is probably something like 5-7 to collect, but if there's a usual (or even better ideologically/historically defined) number of people it would be good to match that.
 
BigTom said:
I've started thinking properly about my next PD game - Central Committee! - and would like some thoughts about it from people who know trotskyite parties better than me...

The game is a set collection game, played with cards. The cards will each have a party member on them, and the aim will be to get together the winning slate for election to the central committee. I need to work out the mechanisms that will allow people to change their cards but I want to play on the splitting thing of course so I'm going to try to get people to effectively trade cards in some way by joining and then splitting.

I could really use some help with the theming though.
I'm thinking the cards will have stats - a type of person (academic, young pretender, retired activist, I really don't know what the stereotypes should be) and various identity markers (gender, race, sexuality, I don't know what else or if I have those three and then on some/all have one or two other identity features like visible disability, pfwc or perhaps other kinds of perceived bonuses).

So thoughts please on the stereotypes you expect to find on the platonic ideal of a trotskyite central committee.

Also is there any kind of general number for how many people sit on a central committee? This'll have to be governed by the nature of set collection games ultimately, which I think is probably something like 5-7 to collect, but if there's a usual (or even better ideologically/historically defined) number of people it would be good to match that.
Click to expand...

seventh bullett is right that Trotskyists never, ever, say Trotskyite! That's the Stalinist term. Even "Trotskyist" was only grudgingly adopted, as early Trotskyists didn't accept that there was any difference between Trotskyism and Bolshevism.

On Central Committees:

1) Many, probably most, Trotskyist parties don't have a body called that, but most have a body that more or less has the same role.
2) The Central Committee, or nearest equivalent, is not the top leadership body. It is, as in the Communist Parties, a large body including both the core leaders and a wider range of second tier leaders. The British SWP is very unusual in calling its actual top leadership body the "Central Committee". A subset of that body, called the Politburo in Communist Party tradition and in a handful of Trotskyist parties, but more usually called the something like the Executive Committee is the smaller top leadership body.

So in, say the English and Welsh Socialist Party, the National Committee (Central Committee equivalent) has maybe fortyish members. A subset of about a dozen of them form the Executive Committee. This would be more or less the kind of arrangement you'd see in most of the larger Trotskyist groups around the world (say those of more than 1,000 members), but there's no guarantee that any given group will fit that mold and even if it does fit, the names of the committees vary a lot. The Central Committee equivalent in the Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste is called something like the National Political Bureau, for instance. Very small groups might just have a single small leadership committee, more akin to the type of setup you are thinking of. The SWP is, I think, the only relatively large Trotskyist group with that single small committee leadership structure.

Basically, I think you'll have to ignore authenticity a bit if you want to use the more resonant name "Central Committee" and have it be both manageably small and the actual top leadership. Or just pretend that the British SWP is more representative than it is.
 
Stereotypes:

The ageing founding leader of the group, in British groups nearly always originally an immigrant (Grant from South Africa, Cliff from Palestine, Healy from Ireland).
The number two who has been there from early on and who might be loyal or might be chafing at always being in their shadow.
The preferred successor, much younger.
The retired convenor of a factory in an industry that no longer exists (or retired miner).
The apparatus man, with little discernable interest in politics except in so far as they effect recruitment or party finances.
The ambitious minority faction leader who the rest would like to expel.
The academic.
 
Also if you are going to make a game where victory depends on assembling the correct leadership, you really need to rip off the bit of the Transitional Programme where Trotsky says:

"All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet “ripened” for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership."

He wasn't actually talking about the same thing, but fuck context, it's too appropriate.
 
Again, thank you :) I'm mulling over your first post still, I have a vague idea I might try to work out which is to have the players working cooperatively to amass a big set together, rather than individually for a small set.
 
BigTom said:
Again, thank you :) I'm mulling over your first post still, I have a vague idea I might try to work out which is to have the players working cooperatively to amass a big set together, rather than individually for a small set.
Click to expand...

You could have two sorts of victory.

Party victory - where you assemble a leadership you believe to better than the other competing vanguards who you challenge (maybe the weakest party at the time of the challenge is excluded form the game).

Class victory - where a collective leadership is assembled between agreeing participants which has to meet a set criteria for successful revolutionary leadership.*

*The same criteria would be used for the party victory; the object being to meet more of them than your competitors/opponents rather than meet all of them.

Having two sorts of contest would encourage tactical and strategic decision making.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice
 
It's moved on slightly but if I remember correctly Stalinism was coined by Lazar Kaganovich but mocked and rejected by the man himself. After all, he was merely Lenin's pupil albeit his best one.
 
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