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 RaptorusRex wrote:
One alternative from the Minka Lesk novels: Goge Vandire cults/rogue Frateris Militia. Nothing's quite like the Imperium's own fanaticism biting the hand that feeds.

You have whole divisions if the inquisition that are at each others throats for heresy all the time.

 Andrew1975 wrote:

 RaptorusRex wrote:
One alternative from the Minka Lesk novels: Goge Vandire cults/rogue Frateris Militia. Nothing's quite like the Imperium's own fanaticism biting the hand that feeds.

You have whole divisions if the inquisition that are at each others throats for heresy all the time.

Which is part of the dark satire that is the basis of the entire 40k setting.

"Heretic!"

"No, you're the heretic!"

"Both of you are heretics!!!"

A high proportion of the now venerable lore was a bunch of elaborate in-jokes. It's like Evelyn Waugh in space.

-Guardsman- wrote:
Emperor knows that the citizens of the Imperium have no lack of legitimate reasons to revolt—massive wealth inequality, ruthless resource extraction, the Ministorum's religious extremism, conscription for wars many lightyears away, the general apathy and incompetence of the authorities, etc. Yet in the fluff, whenever there is an uprising trying to overthrow a planetary governor, no matter how justified, it always turns out to have the taint of Chaos, genestealer cults, or something similar.

Next thing you know, the oppressed citizens are now blood-thirsty monsters who can be butchered without guilt so that the status quo may be restored.

I think it would be plausible for a planetary governor's propagandists to deceptively paint a revolution as being Chaos-influenced, in order to obtain military support from off-planet under false pretenses to help the governor deal with the fallout of his own failed policies. It would certainly fit GW's political satire about tyranny, instead of coming across almost as an endorsement of the Imperium's tyranny.

.

I think it is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Not all Chaos-affiliated rebellions start as Chaos-affiliated, but Chaos infiltrates them later. They are kinda good at that sort of a thing.

Also, Imperium is not really tyrannical. It is closer to the Holy Roman Empire than anything.

The IoM is basically one giant protection racket composed of extraction economy member planets and heavy state ownership.

There is nothing quite like it in real history. Mostly because it would immediately disintegrate without the pressure of so many external threats.

The IoM doesn't directly oppress the population, rather it oppresses planetary governments and those in turn oppress their population so they can fulfill their quotas.

On a Planetary Governor trying to paint an uprising as Chaos driven? He’s typically dead either way.

Necromunda is an excellent view into the relative minutiae of 40K. In short? As a Planetary Governor you’re mostly left alone to get on with your job, and nobody especially cares so long as you meet your tithe. Certainly the wider Imperium is much too busy to worry exactly how you met that tithe, and so needless suffering is rife.

Rebellions are as a result far from uncommon. But as I said earlier? Just Humans lack the networking and organisation Chaos and Genestealer Cults bring to the table. And so are super easily put down with just a smidgen above the day to day brutality - which in turn soon knocks the wind out the sails of anyone thinking of picking up where your cold dead hands left off.

 Tyran wrote:


The IoM doesn't directly oppress the population, rather it oppresses planetary governments and those in turn oppress their population so they can fulfill their quotas.

Well, aside from the centralised oppression and enslavement of psykers, then the Imperium gets right on with direct control as much as possible. It is obviously pretty poor at this on the whole due to the numbers involved, but it tries.

They don\t. They never have always been. It\s just the marketable kinds since there are model ranges associated with it to sell.

 Tyran wrote:
The IoM is basically one giant protection racket composed of extraction economy member planets and heavy state ownership.

There is nothing quite like it in real history. Mostly because it would immediately disintegrate without the pressure of so many external threats.

The IoM doesn't directly oppress the population, rather it oppresses planetary governments and those in turn oppress their population so they can fulfill their quotas.

Do the planetary governments oppress the population to fulfill quotas or to fill their own pockets? I don't think that planetary tithes are necessarily brutal and punishing. We don't really have a gauge for what they tithe is. However considering that from what I understand the Imperium only wants resources and not currency...a system, much less a planet could pay a resource tithe without becoming economically crippled. In our system we could give them all the resources of several uninhabited planets before the tithe even bothered us.

We don't really have to look to the stars or fiction to see the ruling class needlessly oppressing the general public out of pure greed.

As stated the Imperium functions basically just as a protection racket, its not an extorsion racket as it does actually attempt to provide protection from a huge array of threats. How a government rules the world is completely up to the the world...well until they muck it up.

"I told you, we’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as sort of executive officer for the week…but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting…by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs…but by a two thirds majority in the case of more…"

Yeah yeah, OK, did you pay the tithe...great, we will be moving on. (Coconut sounds)

Both really. Governments build around extraction and exportation of resources tend to be highly corrupt as their people don't really matter, only that the resources flow.

Moreover the fact that there is a constant outflow of resources means that there are few resources left for self-investment and improvement. The IoM may not care about money, but they aren't exactly paying for what they take either.

But what really makes the tithe system its particular case of fethed up is the IoM's dysfunctional bureaucracy. On paper the tithe is set according to the capabilities of each world. In practice the Administratum cannot find their own ass most of the time, thus the tithe quickly becomes obsolete.

If you are lucky you were able to develop your capabilities since the last time the tithe was set and thus you are underpaying the IoM. If you are unlucky, you have lost capability to pay the tithe (be it because of war, disease or disaster) and thus are trapped in an economic spiral. Or maybe some sleep-deprived adept simply made a mistake somewhere.

Plus there are emergency tithes if a large war breaks out in your subsector (or sector for a very large war). These are supposed to be temporary but they can easily cripple a world's economy before they are lifted.

It isn't unknown for lightly populated worlds like agri worlds to suffer significant manpower shortages if they are forced to raise emergency Guard regiments for a nearby war, which then impacts their ability to meet crop tithes.

 Tyran wrote:
Both really. Governments build around extraction and exportation of resources tend to be highly corrupt as their people don't really matter, only that the resources flow.

Moreover the fact that there is a constant outflow of resources means that there are few resources left for self-investment and improvement. The IoM may not care about money, but they aren't exactly paying for what they take either.

The Imperium doesn't pay for the tithe but it can pay for any extra that is exported off world as trade. Necromunda for example is described as paying its tithe in manufactured goods and weapons for the Munitorum, but it exports more than the bare minimum and the Administratum is described as basically getting a discount on the amount sold as effectively the tithe. In other words, it gets 10 trillion lasguns for the price of 9 trillion lasguns.

This wealth though does not get down to the actual working class and seems to be used by the ruling and noble houses for luxuries. It seems some gets used as a bare minimum to maintain the imports of raw materials and supplies to enable production and life to continue, but otherwise it seems the rest all gets skimmed off or lost to middlemen and corruption.

 Andrew1975 wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
The IoM is basically one giant protection racket composed of extraction economy member planets and heavy state ownership.

There is nothing quite like it in real history. Mostly because it would immediately disintegrate without the pressure of so many external threats.

The IoM doesn't directly oppress the population, rather it oppresses planetary governments and those in turn oppress their population so they can fulfill their quotas.

Do the planetary governments oppress the population to fulfill quotas or to fill their own pockets? I don't think that planetary tithes are necessarily brutal and punishing. We don't really have a gauge for what they tithe is. However considering that from what I understand the Imperium only wants resources and not currency...a system, much less a planet could pay a resource tithe without becoming economically crippled. In our system we could give them all the resources of several uninhabited planets before the tithe even bothered us.

We don't really have to look to the stars or fiction to see the ruling class needlessly oppressing the general public out of pure greed.

As stated the Imperium functions basically just as a protection racket, its not an extorsion racket as it does actually attempt to provide protection from a huge array of threats. How a government rules the world is completely up to the the world...well until they muck it up.

"I told you, we’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as sort of executive officer for the week…but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting…by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs…but by a two thirds majority in the case of more…"

Yeah yeah, OK, did you pay the tithe...great, we will be moving on.

For sure the Tithe is, from an objective point of view, reasonable. And likely at least on paper is always within the means of the planet.

Buuuuuutttt toss in maybe some bureaucratic screw up(a calculation error or maybe a unforseen disaster befalls the planet which reduces its productivity) and a Planetary governor who is of course going to line his own pockets on top of it(the Imperium after all isn't paying him, his compensation is the ability to rule the planet as he sees fit) and you've got plenty of legitimate reasons for a planet to rebel.

Plus you might find it difficult to convince a civilian populace that their resources and young soldiers are going off to fight a necessary war, a war they can't see any evidence of. Its not like their soldiers come back much if at all. Even those who survive their tour of duty most likely settle wherever they happened to be, they're not going to bum a ride home.

 Grey Templar wrote:

For sure the Tithe is, from an objective point of view, reasonable. And likely at least on paper is always within the means of the planet.

Buuuuuutttt toss in maybe some bureaucratic screw up(a calculation error or maybe a unforseen disaster befalls the planet which reduces its productivity) and a Planetary governor who is of course going to line his own pockets on top of it(the Imperium after all isn't paying him, his compensation is the ability to rule the planet as he sees fit) and you've got plenty of legitimate reasons for a planet to rebel.

Plus you might find it difficult to convince a civilian populace that their resources and young soldiers are going off to fight a necessary war, a war they can't see any evidence of. Its not like their soldiers come back much if at all. Even those who survive their tour of duty most likely settle wherever they happened to be, they're not going to bum a ride home.

The original baseline tithe maybe within the means of the planet.

However in these post-Rift times and with the Indomitus Crusade going on, all sorts of extra emergency tithes are levied. In the latest BL novel Iron Kingdom, it describes how the offsets granted against future tithes may be useless or only symbolic due to the magnitude of these extra tithes. An example is given of a world literally entirely depopulated and stripped of any useful machinery in order to replenish losses for an Indomitus group commander. A waiver of all tithes for the next 20 Terran years is granted by the group commander, who is empowered by Guilliman to do so, but this is all meaningless since there is nobody left on the world.

 Tyran wrote:
The IoM is basically one giant protection racket composed of extraction economy member planets and heavy state ownership.

There is nothing quite like it in real history. Mostly because it would immediately disintegrate without the pressure of so many external threats.

The IoM doesn't directly oppress the population, rather it oppresses planetary governments and those in turn oppress their population so they can fulfill their quotas.

Except for literally every single state in history. Feudalism in particular was a protection racket, where peasants paid tithe in exchange for protection, then minor nobles paid to larger nobles, and so on all the way until the king.

Imperium is essentially a feudal society.

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:

Except for literally every single state in history. Feudalism in particular was a protection racket, where peasants paid tithe in exchange for protection, then minor nobles paid to larger nobles, and so on all the way until the king.

Imperium is essentially a feudal society.

Not really no. It shares similarities, but it isn't a complete fit.

There is no king (just a corpse god that only talks a little more than the average corpse) and planets don't quite fit as while they provide tithe they also provide military resources. In feudalism, peasants were military weak and mostly irrelevant, otherwise the whole thing would have collapsed under peasant rebellions.

Moreover one of the defining traits of feudalism was the sheer power nobility held, and in the IoM the nobility is mostly irrelevant beyond the planetary scale.

Power instead is found in the several institutions that organize the IoM, which is unlike anything in the feudal system.

I’m with Tyran on this one.

The Imperium has wildly varying types of planets and planetary societies. Generally speaking, provided your tithe is complete and on time? The Imperium as an institution is happy to leave you be.

An Agri-world’s population is going to have a very different life to those on a Feudal, Feral, Hive or Industrial world. And by no means is there going to be particular standardisation.

The job of a Planetary Governor is to ensure the tithe is met, and the planet remains loyal. Those two tasks are kind of intrinsically intertwined.

One Agri-world might see fit to placate its population with “double rations and whisky for all!” the Governor recognising a well fed, happy population is an efficient one. The next might be far more draconian, using its PDF to terrorise the workers into ever harsher conditions. Even on Hive Worlds, the exact standard of living is gonna vary depending on how old it is, I suspect. Certainly a relatively young Hive World is going to have a better external environment and resources than Necromunda, which is a Hive World pre-dating the Age of Strife.

Then there’s also their positioning on the wider Galactic Stage. Not every world in The Imperium is near an Orky stronghold, Tyranid Hive Fleet, or will have much in the way of Webway Portals. Those worlds are likely more or less untouched by the wider tribulations, and so just sort of….potter along, mostly untroubled unless disastrous weather threatens a harvest and thus their tithe being met and so on.

I assume that there are uprisings that are not Chaos/Xenos influenced that are regularly reported as Chaos/Xenos influenced because no one would ever dream of rising against the perfection of the Imperium unless it was due to Chaos/Xenos influence that makes it necessary and justified to eradicate the uprising to remove the Chaos/Xenos influence.

 Tyran wrote:

Moreover one of the defining traits of feudalism was the sheer power nobility held, and in the IoM the nobility is mostly irrelevant beyond the planetary scale.

Sort of.

While the nobility had a lot of power on-paper, there were a surprising number of checks on their power which moderated their excesses.

A lord could of course tax his peasants as he saw fit but if he did so excessively, they would up and leave. Find a lord who treated them better. Sure, their lord could chase them down, but his power and authority ended at his property line from a practical point of view. A peasant who ran to a rival lord would be sheltered as that lord would have incentive to gain another peasant for himself. If the peasant ran to a town much the same could occur. The town would hide the peasant and there were binding laws in most places that a once a peasant lived in a town for one year he was free of his feudal ties. This is where the expression "Town air makes one free" came from. And once Feudalism developed a little more peasants weren't even legally obligated to stay anymore once the Tenent system came about.

Furthermore, each lord was in a rivalry with both the King and other nobles and also had to contend with the Church. Mistreating your peasants might have short term gains, but in the long run it was a bad idea so it rarely happened to the extent many people imagine. Feudalism was in many ways the predecessor to our modern idea of checks and balances.

But yes, this still means that the Imperium has little in common with Feudalism. Its more like how Russia operated under the Tsars.

Plenty of secessionist forces (like the severan dominate or Badab before huron publicly went off the rails) exist plenty in the background but books and rules exist primarily to sell models so they want to use one of the 'rebel' factions rather than just guard with a different paint job.

There's also an issue that chaos/xenos are a good source of 'external' power - revolts rarely succeed in winning independence without outside support

 Tyran wrote:

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:

Except for literally every single state in history. Feudalism in particular was a protection racket, where peasants paid tithe in exchange for protection, then minor nobles paid to larger nobles, and so on all the way until the king.

Imperium is essentially a feudal society.

Not really no. It shares similarities, but it isn't a complete fit.

There is no king (just a corpse god that only talks a little more than the average corpse) and planets don't quite fit as while they provide tithe they also provide military resources. In feudalism, peasants were military weak and mostly irrelevant, otherwise the whole thing would have collapsed under peasant rebellions.

Moreover one of the defining traits of feudalism was the sheer power nobility held, and in the IoM the nobility is mostly irrelevant beyond the planetary scale.

Power instead is found in the several institutions that organize the IoM, which is unlike anything in the feudal system.

I'm quite certain you can find feudal societies with no king (republics were quite widespread, though many did indeed acknowledge a king). And in feudalism too, cities had to provide both taxes and military resources - for example, Klokoč in Croatia had to send the king, in times of need, 15 armored cavalrymen and 100 infantrymen. As a matter of fact, such "military tithe" was precisely how feudal armies were formed in the first place.

Peasants are militarily weak and mostly irrelevant in Imperium as well; armies are mostly comprised of professional soldiers, though that varies from planet to planet.

Agreed about nobility being mostly irrelevant beyond the planetary scale, but on the flip side, anything beyond planetary scale doesn't really matter for individual planets either. And in feudalism, nobility was not all-powerful either. There were checks on their power: in fact, feudalism had significant system of "checks and balances". Nobility were only one of major factions; king was another, Church was the third, and with time you also got free cities as the fourth. And none of these factions wanted any of the others to grow too powerful.

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:
Agreed about nobility being mostly irrelevant beyond the planetary scale, but on the flip side, anything beyond planetary scale doesn't really matter for individual planets either. And in feudalism, nobility was not all-powerful either. There were checks on their power: in fact, feudalism had significant system of "checks and balances". Nobility were only one of major factions; king was another, Church was the third, and with time you also got free cities as the fourth. And none of these factions wanted any of the others to grow too powerful.

No, sector governors are oftentimes hereditary noble positions.

Because these are easily resolved either by diplomacy or by force. The Ecclesiarch still holds a lot of people under its sway, so rebelling against the Imperium without its support is going to be difficult.

When Tau, Genestealers or Chaos forces are involved, things become much harder - and much more interesting to write about in a story.

There's also a Cold War analogy to consider, where any independence or freedom movement was viewed through the lens of that confrontation, and therefore usually dismissed as a plot originating in Washington or Moscow, rather than much objective analysis being carried out. The bureaucracies of the Imperium aren't exactly likely to consider that an uprising has valid reasons to defy their GodEmperor-appointed masters, when they can just reach for the 'HERETIC' rubber stamp.

OP

Because there is no hope in the grim darkness. A legit uprising like the Rebel Alliance would naturally come to represent hope no matter how many coats of grey you tried to slap on it.

Although….

In the 2nd edition Sisters codex there is a successful popular uprising led by Sebastian Thor that succeeds in toppling Goge Vandires regime of the Imperium. Think Paul Atreides from Dune. So it’s old lore, but he shows that a successful popular rebellion can not just occur but even overthrow the High Lords of Terra. However these were Emperor worshipping fanatics from the common people.

The book Kreig from Black Library has a lot of great writing about an anti- Imperial rebellion that fit this description.

I have to admit, for a Warhammer book it was actually quite thought provoking, and covers a lot of interesting topics like the morality of using nuclear weapons.

Was the Imperium the right side in Kreig's civil war? After reading it, I'm not so sure.

Bad writing.