Koslovics

The Koslovics were a prominent human political movement in the 22nd century representing a resurgence of communism, specifically a variant based on a widely-circulated manifesto by the Martian political theorist and revolutionary Vladimir Koslov. Originally a mere faction of a wider neo-communist movement on Mars, the Koslovics eventually eclipsed all of their rival groups. The Koslovics were active throughout the Sol system, and even had influence on Earth itself through a handful of nations and militant groups opposed to the United Nations' increasing rule. However, it was on Mars that they were most prominent, establishing the largest singular polity the planet had seen up until that point and considerably building up the planet's industrial capacity in the years preceding the Interplanetary War.

Overview
"The choices before us are infinite in variety, indeed, they reach further and branch faster than the human mind can cope with. But the greatest decision of all is a binary one. This is the nature of the dialectic. We can choose to harness the power of the algorithm and the nascent potentiality of the true artificial intelligence. With these technologies, we can bring about a truly egalitarian order. Or we can choose to maintain the same broken capitalist system that has exploited laborers for thousands of years. You must choose to advance the revolution, or you default to counter-revolution."

- Vladimir Koslov, from a speech given at the Second Interplanetary Coordination Council

The Koslovic ideology, sometimes called Koslovism, blended classical Marxism with space-age techno-utopianism which had taken root on Mars at the turn of the 22nd century. Koslov postulated that the scarcity still present in the interplanetary economy was artificial, and a utopian society that removed that scarcity was already within reach, perhaps as soon as within a single generation. His stated end goal was a form of stateless anarcho-communism in which automated systems would replace the need for human labor, thereby creating a truly egalitarian society. Despite its firm roots in the past, the Koslovic ideology was widely hailed in its time as the ideology of the future and had many sympathizers even on Earth in its early days. In practice, no Koslovic group ever reached these goals. A small circle of authoritarian officials, mostly military, held supreme power in the movement overall, and although basic forms of internet democracy were used on a local scale, these predated the rise of the Koslovics. Where many colonists had once been exploited by megacorporations, they now toiled under the relentless Koslovic war machine.

In the immediate sense, the Koslovics garnered most of their support base by advocating for the emancipation of the working classes on the off-world colonies and the collectivization of corporate factories and mining efforts, followed by the eventual establishment of a pan-human communist state. Their grievances were not entirely illegitimate, as Earth-based megacorporations held disproportionate power across the Solar system, often more so than many national governments, while the UN was largely unable (or unwilling) to regulate their excesses or ensure humane working conditions for their laborers. This also earned them the support—either overt or tacit—of many of the laborers who endured squalid working conditions on various off-world outposts, but also the sympathies of various academics and activists on Earth, before the movement's violent activities and the rise of Earther patriotism spurred by the rise of the UNSC starting in 2164 turned public opinion against them.

The Koslovics were notoriously eclectic, comprising dozens of local movements ranging from street thugs and rioters to the full-fledged militaries of the Koslovic states on Mars and Earth. Although there were various localized groups and distinct worker revolts across the Solar System around this time, many of them unconnected to the Koslovic ideology, they were generally understood as being part of the overall Koslovic movement; as well, Koslovic agitators would frequently co-opt unrelated movements under their banner. On Mars in particular, the Koslovics were famed for their technological experimentation; after taking over the high-tech corporate factories there, they pioneered many novel types of weaponry and combat automation in an effort to reduce the need for human labor. However, the fall of the regime would also reveal unethical human experiments with cybernetics, performed in the hopes of creating a real-time network consciousness. Allegedly, this would have allowed each citizen to vote on all matters of society at all times (a goal shared by the later Technarchists), though many suspected the technology would have been used for surveillance and control.

The more overtly transhumanist aspects of the ideology were one of the largest rifts within the greater Koslovic movement. Despite being one of the main theses of Vladimir Koslov and the rest of the movement's ideological elite, these elements remained esoteric and partly foreign to a large portion of the group's working-class adherents who largely saw the Koslovics as a means of emancipation. These rifts would cause friction and disagreements as some of the working-class members (who ended up responsible for most of the active roles in the revolution, such as the actual fighting) assumed more prominent roles within the overall movement.

History
The Koslovic ideology was born in the early 22nd century at the hands of Vladimir Koslov. Koslov was an Earther who immigrated to Mars at a young age in the second wave of the planet's colonization, but rapidly adopted Mars' cultural character. He lived through a through a rapidly-changing Martian society, experiencing and actively participating in the first wave of offworlder political philosophy. Koslov's work was emblematic of the zeitgeist of the first half of the 22nd century, wherein old ideologies which had failed on Earth were being reevaluated and updated for the space age; more specifically, Koslov's treatise hailed itself as the final development of communism; something that fixed the flaws of its forebears while updating its ideals to the postindustrial age. Koslov presented the thesis that, with the technological and social advances of the past century, communism was finally not only viable, but inevitable, due to a rising juxtaposition between an underprivileged underclass and the exploitative practices of various interplanetary megacorporations.

The early era of space colonization had ensured that a fairly large amount of power remained on the interplanetary workforce, as they were invaluable experts doing work no one else could. In a 2109 manifesto, Koslov and his cohort highlighted the spaceborne workers' importance to Earth's economy, and encouraged them to rise up against Earther capitalist interests before those corporations could undermine the factors that made the interplanetary workers' position so exceptional. The Koslovics predicted the trend of lowering wages as space travel grew more accessible, along with the buildup of private militaries to secure corporate interests following any signs of colonist unrest. For their models of social and political reform, the Koslovic ideology both drew from the cultural character of the colonies along the Argyre Planitia, Hellas Planitia and the Mariner Valley. They were inspired by the relatively successful implementation of industrial cooperatives on those colonies, seeing them as a sketch for "true" interplanetary communism, but postulated that the colonists should go further in pursuing economic independence from Earth-based corporations.

Around the 2120s, various factions emerged among the Martian socialists, with some believing that laborer cooperatives and unions should become stronger while still working in the framework of interplanetary capitalism, and this was a common view on Mars and especially the Belt. The Koslovics went further, declaring that interplanetary capitalism should be abolished altogether; it was not enough that the cooperatives were worker-owned when they were still effectively under the power of large multiplanetary corporations, and thus would likely be undermined at the first opportunity. However, most of the Martians and Belters remained largely complacent up until things started taking a turn for the worse; the Koslovic movement only started gaining momentum beyond its already-existing hotbeds once the wealth inequalities on the colonies truly began to turn into massive and irreconcilable rifts largely thanks to the ZGene crisis and overall recession. The eventual death of Vladimir Koslov himself in the worker riots of the 2140s cemented his status as a martyr for the cause, and his name the rallying cry of the entire movement.

With Earth's national governments mired in internal unrest and an all-encompassing climate crisis, the Martian colonies began to fall under the influence of the Koslovic ideology one by one, either due to the appeal of the ideology or the skillful infiltration of Koslovic agents and agitators into laborer organizations, until most Martian workers' unions were under political extremist control. The few national military garrisons that existed on Mars, the UN's meager colonial peacekeeping forces or corporate security found themselves wholly ill-equipped to handle the rapid escalation of the situation. The revolutionaries' seizure of corporate assets and widespread purges of UN sympathizers and corporate executives left the Koslovics effectively in control of Mars by the end of the 2140s. Despite the regime's brutality toward dissidents—real or alleged—Koslov's leadership spurred major advances on Mars. The regime is considered by some to have jump-started Mars' shipbuilding tradition by severely bolstering the planet's spacedocks in an attempt to rival those of the Earth nations. As well, the Koslovics' experimentation with new technologies gave rise to new warfighting technologies such as the Individual Combat Weapon System.

Despite its Martian origins, the Koslovic ideology was designed for pan-human appeal. The success of the Koslovics on Mars inspired dissident movements across the system, though none were as prominent as the Martian Koslovic state, and numerous rebellions were stifled by corporate security forces or Frieden death squads (in some cases, there was little distinction between the two). Following their successful revolution on Mars, the Koslovics sponsored and facilitated off-planet rebellions on Luna, the Jovian Moons, various asteroids, and even Earth itself, where select states in South America in particular were taken over by Koslovic-sympathetic political parties in the decades leading up to the Interplanetary Wars, forming the so-called American People's Combine. While the Earth-based Koslovics had some differences with those on Mars, they were part of the Koslovic Interplanetary Coordination Councils and the Coordinating Commission of the overall movement, as well as a major party in the Rainforest Wars.

While the end of the Interplanetary War in 2170 marked the end of the Koslovic movement as a formidable force, the ideology and its various offshoots saw various resurgences over the coming centuries. The movement's influence was such that any extreme left-wing movements have frequently been labeled as "neo-Koslovics" over the next centuries (usually in a pejorative sense), whether they profess to follow Koslov's ideology or not. Some of the Koslovics' ideas of a transhuman network government were adopted by the Technarchist movement in the 23rd century, though in contrast to the Koslovics, the Technarchists claimed to be apolitical or rather "post-political".