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Faction: Anarchist

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Thu, 2017-07-06 14:06

MAD Crab

Faction: Anarchist

Quote:
Anarchist: You believe power is corrupt and favor voluntary, non-hierarchical organizations based on [b]direct democracy.[/b]

That's... not what anarchists are. That's not even what anarchists are in Eclipse Phase. Direct democracy means "the majority will is done." Anarchy means "I decided that it needed to be done, so I did it." That's pretty different.

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Thu, 2017-07-06 15:36

o11o1

yeah, rather than "direct

yeah, rather than "direct democracy" (Which is more like how Titan does things) I'd use the phrase "personal responsibility and debate" but even then, it's something probably varies a lot between anarchist. I really think that "Automatist" is a truer term for what they're really wanting to do.

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A slight smell of ions....

Thu, 2017-07-06 22:35

ubik2

A direct democracy certainly

A direct democracy certainly would qualify as anarchist. Unfortunately, I've found that different people have completely different ideas of what an anarchist is, and I'm not quite sure what the Eclipse Phase version actually is. I've generally assumed it's mostly anarcho-communism, which does favor direct democracy (as does anarcho-syndicalism). It may be intended to encompass the wide range of political beliefs that comprise anarchy, and I suspect some of these (anarcho-capitalism) do not favor direct democracy. In particular, based on some of the flavor content, I assume the Extropians do not use direct democracy. Wolff's "In Defense of Anarchism" doesn't see direct democracy as a goal. While he is strongly opposed to representative democracy (integral to this is a hierarchy, which anarchy rejects), his concern about the tyranny of the masses leads him to also reject direct democracy. Edit: Changed right-libertarian to anarcho-capatalism, since I think Eclipse Phase uses the latter term.

Fri, 2017-07-07 21:23

RobBoyle

ubik2 is right, we mean

ubik2 is right, we mean direct democracy in the sense that people are directly involved in the decisions that affect them, rather than having representatives. Having been involved with several anarchist collectives, that is absolutely terminology that we used. And yeah, we steer EP anarchists towards anarcho-communism more than other variants.

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Rob Boyle :: Posthuman Studios

Thu, 2017-07-13 00:18

TheGrue

Thematically EP's anarchists

Thematically EP's anarchists have always seemed to me to resemble Reynolds' Demarchists more than what I've understood "anarchy" to mean in the 20th century.

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Thermonuclear Banana Split - A not-really-weekly Eclipse Phase campaign journal.

Tue, 2017-07-18 19:45

MAD Crab

Quote:A direct democracy

Quote:
A direct democracy certainly would qualify as anarchist.

Quote:
ubik2 is right, we mean direct democracy in the sense that people are directly involved in the decisions that affect them, rather than having representatives.

You can call an apple an orange, but all you're going to do is confuse people. That's not anarchy. Direct Democracy means voting and group action, which is the opposite of anarchy. It's not even how Posthuman used to describe EP anarchy.

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Tue, 2017-07-18 21:11

ubik2

The opposite of anarchy is to

The opposite of anarchy is to have a ruler, but there is no restriction on order. You may be interested in Anarchist schools of thought A better analogy might be that you can call a tomato a fruit, but it will confuse people who generally consider it a vegetable.

Wed, 2017-07-19 01:57

TheGrue

So, in the terminology of EP,

So, in the terminology of EP, what is the difference between "anarchism" (meaning anarcho-communist direct democracy), and a techno-socialist cyberdemocracy like the Titanian Commonwealth?

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Thermonuclear Banana Split - A not-really-weekly Eclipse Phase campaign journal.

Thu, 2017-07-20 17:10

Decivre

I think the bigger problem is

I think the bigger problem is that anarchism, as a philosophical school, is extremely broad in political sciences and encompasses an inordinate number of possible societal structures (the only commonality being the lack of a state), while "anarchist" in the colloquial sense tends to refer specifically to anarcho-communist or -syndicalist branches of thought.

TheGrue wrote:
So, in the terminology of EP, what is the difference between "anarchism" (meaning anarcho-communist direct democracy), and a techno-socialist cyberdemocracy like the Titanian Commonwealth?

The Titanian Commonwealth still has a formal governmental structure (especially with regard to its Kroner economy), which explicitly makes them non-anarchist. Beyond that, it gets pretty blurry. The Commonwealth seems to offer its citizens significant freedom in comparison to the Inner System, so the differences may be largely scholarly beyond that.

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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]

Wed, 2017-07-26 04:33

#10

knasser

ubik2 wrote:A direct

ubik2 wrote:
A direct democracy certainly would qualify as anarchist.

Maaaaaybe. But the reverse is not necessarily true. Anarchism means a lack of state / centralised power. Most of the ones termed "anarchist" in EP seem to me to be anarcho-socialist and anarcho-communist. But there are quite a lot of other things that also qualify as anarchism. In my experience, Anarcho-Communists and Anarcho-Socialists love to present their beliefs as the Real Anarchism. Also, a direct democracy is not necessarily anarchist. If anything, I'd say given the tribal nature of the species it is likely to be even more persecution-loving and individual rights reducing than representative democracy. "Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)." Representative democracy respects the above more than Direct Democracy which is much more prone to "mob rule". In that sense, Direct Democracy may even be further away from anarchism than Representative Democracy, speaking in terms of outcomes.

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"We're here to save the planet. But not for free."