Anarchists

The anarchists are a growing social movement, formed in the aftermath of the Caelester Earthquake, advocating for a society of equals and an absence of centralized power. Traditional movements all assume the necessity of a governing body as a necessary factor to set and maintain laws in any civilized society. However, in Caelester, this assumption has largely been proven false: the royal family that ruled the city before the earthquake were killed in the collapse of the royal palace, and a series of accidents have led to the deaths of many other authority figures, and yet the citizenry have come together like never before and reconstruction efforts have made significant progress.   Inspired by this success, the Anarchists believe that this leaderless state is the only free and natural state of society, and that all hierarchical institutions are inherently coercive and authoritarian, abusing control over the lower ranks in order to increase the wealth and power of the higher ranks. They argue that instead of seeking to reestablish some form of this structure, Caelester should seek to establish a true free city rather than a city-state, with industry and agriculture managed as collectives.   The ideal of a Free City of Caelester is generally argued to take the form of an interdependent community, wherein people work together to ensure the needs of the entire community are met. Monetary trade under this system would largely be limited to external relations - selling goods produced in excess of the city's needs, while purchasing those goods that the city cannot produce enough of. Ownership would be evenly distributed among relevant parties - a trading vessel would be owned by its crew, the farmlands around the city by the farmers who tend those lands and so on.   Those who promote the anarchist ideal have not yet come to a conclusion regarding how to enforce social norms. Most argue that a collective society like this would render crimes of desperation far less common; there is, for example, no need to steal bread to feed one's family if food is made freely available. However, most recognize that there would still be those who are violent and others who would attempt to game the system to their benefit at the cost of others. Some argue in favour of allowing individuals to act as they wish to defend society as a whole, while others argue the ideal of equitable punishments for equivalent crimes must be maintained in any fair society, and have proposed a variety of options as to how such a system might be managed without centralizing authority in a state-like entity.