# On The Status of Gambling under \$o¢ial$m (please make this in a silly font that evokes emotions of gambling, danger, risk, and casinos) ## SUBTITLE: A Fermented Thought From The Mind of Miss Persephone Socialism is a serious topic that's all the rage these days. As a communist myself, I've decided to dedicate my life to it. (NOTE: the author is being completely sincere here. She is not lying. Literally she eats, breathes, drinks, and shits communism 24/7. Please feel free to message her any time about your favorite Quotation from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung!) Many other people, to varying degrees of commitment, feel that socialism is the only solution forward. In Socialism, the answers to all of our problems are evident. Housing, Starvation, War, Poverty -- you name it, socialism will solve it! There are a dime a dozen schemes for how to address all these issues. But it's not quite as easy as one might think to bring about socialism. After all, we're going on three centuries here in AmeriKKKa and in the year of our lord Anno Domini Two Thousand And Twenty Four, we have a choice between a Mussolini-like fascist and a senile geriatric genocide enjoying neoliberal corpse resurrected by a Necromancer. The closest we came was Bernie Sanders, and that guy's a milquetoast social democrat by all means! Many smart people have written millions of words on these topics, and so I don't want to spend much more time on them. What I do want to spend time on, however, is a topic I feel is very important but under addressed: the status of gambling in a socialist society. If the goal is eventually to get rid of money, what happens to all the casinos? What about the lotteries? The roulette tables? The craps dice? The snake eyes and the jokers? That's what I want to write about and think about today. Persephone likes to think outside the box, and address the tough issues, so here goes. Many people often also speak of the costs of socialism. They argue revolutions are dangerous, they're too risky, too difficult to implement, they violate human nature. I think all of these arguments are bullshit myself. But there's one argument that absolutely nobody except myself has ever made, which I think is persuasive. That argument is: gambling would be eradicated under socialism. As a gambler and someone who enjoys rolling dice and performing ritualistic dances after rubbing a lucky talisman, the prospect of losing one of the worlds greatest hobbies and get-rich-quick schemes would be devasting. It's like a giant crack in the armor of my own Maoist ideology, I must admit. Are gambling and socialism really all that different? I would argue not. After all, the way I see it any form of socialism will require a revolution. And I can't think of anything that defines gambling more than a revolution. You're literally going "All-In" with the fate of an entire society in your hand. When it's time to shove those chips across the table, will the bourgeoisie have the royal flush? Or will us revolutionary communists played our cards right and win with the full house? Two of the worlds most decent cisgender heterosexual allies -- a couple of portly bald Asian philosophers by the names of "Vladimir Lenin" and "Mao Tse-Tung" -- have written volumes of books on the this precise topic! And one common theme in all those books is that revolution is, indeed, a gamble. However, it's a bet where we can sculpt the odds in our favor. But I didn't come here to talk about the science of revolution. I only brought it up to emphasize that gambling and socialism have a lot more in common than you might be led to believe. I want to talk not about gambling as a metaphor, but rather the actual activity of gambling itself. I want to address the issue of what will happen to really fun games like Craps, Roulette, Baccarat, Backgammon, Pai Gao, Poker, and Slot Machines. What do we make of them? Here's my thoughts on the matter. There's two general kind of gambling activities. They can be broken down into categories of Social and Anti-Social. What do I mean? ALlow me to elaborate with a few examples. Anti-social gambling is something like video poker or slot machines. They are anti-social because there's literally zero human interaction. The expected value of slot machines in particular is God awfully atrocious -- something like every one dollar you bet, you caa expect to lose twenty cents in the long run. That's absurdly bad! Video poker, if you're skilled and count casino comps (free hotel rooms, free buffets, free drinks, etc) as earnings, you can actually profit from. Blackjack falls into this category too. Although you might sit next to a table of people, you don't really interact with someone while playing blackjack. You just say "Hit me" as if you have a kinky fetish for getting the shit beaten out of you by a wage laborer in a tuxedo shirt. Anti-social gambling is bad and I would argue should absolutely be eradicated under socialism! It's not very social. It's just a great recipe for someone to lose money. I suppose if you really like the various slot machines I could write a python program for you. In fact I will write one for you write now. Hold onto your horses! Here it goes: ``` from random import randint x = randint(0,1000000) print(x) ``` There ya go. I just wrote a slot machine program for you. I'll leave it open source in the Gurge, so you can legally and lawfully run this slot machine program on your computer. You can have that under socialism if you want. But no slot machines! Bad! Then there is social gambling. Social gambling is good, because it is a social activity. Think of a craps table. You have a bunch of people talking to each other, having a good time, sharing drinks, discussing their favorite lucky talismans and collaborating over dice-rolling strategies. Craps gets the juices flowing. It's a truly collective activity. This kind of gambling is good, and should be encouraged! "But Miss Persephone!" the astute reader might say. "I get what you mean, girl, but how does any of this work without money?" Dearest Reader, I'm so glad you asked that question! I think the answer is that we could have a community board of centrally maintained Gambling Points. They aren't money or anything. They're just points that you accumulate for bragging rights. And that's the points you wager with. You don't buy anything with them. You can't sell them. They're just purely for bragging rights. Maybe the most skillful gamblers can get a trophy or something. But I think that would maintain the spirit of gambling. What do you think, reader? Feel free to DM me your thoughts either on Instagram at @ksbolshevik or on Twitter at @FentanylSoup about gambling. I'd love to start a conversation!!