Proletariat

A key element of socialist thought (and most feminist thought also) is that people aren't automatically asshats based on a reading of class (and gender) in society. People are on balance not that bad, basically, and we shouldn't give into social darwinist ideas of us all being out to cull the weak or whatever. This doesn't mean it is a given that everything will be fabulous in a classless and stateless society, because there's lots of different models for what that looks like and pathways to get there. But this is why for the anarchist school of socialism the means is not separable from the ends - it's not enough to get rid of class rule because it really matters how you get there and the lessons that people broadly learn along the way. Some of the examples that we can point to about anti-social behaviour being driven by class are in fact quite contemporary. Where I live there are almost no women in prison for violent offences - the absolute majority of women in prison haven't been charged with a crime but are on remand or couldn't pay a fine. The remainder are there mostly for drug related offences, or theft related to poverty, and most have experienced severe domestic violence. If we raised welfare payments to above the poverty line, and decriminalised drugs, then we'd essentially abolish women's prisons in my country simply with the kind of basic policies people associate with Greens parties and that's wild to think about given those kinds of simple reforms are well short of a revolution. And there is a consistent pattern that the kind of interpersonal violence that we take for granted - as well as the systems of state enforcement expected as a response - isn't automatic. First Nations peoples in classless societies are no monolith, but many participated in societies where the kind of conflict referenced simply didn't happen in a way that we see as given today. Not because of some noble spiritual thing (that kind of romantic notion can get a bit racist as if First Nations are pixies), but because private property was not enforced via class rules. This isn't to say things were perfect either, but the point is that our future isn't set in stone. As far as your historical reference, it's worth noting that in readings of history Marxists and anarchists don't simply argue against capitalism but class rule which began from the point of agriculture and accumulation of goods which is around the time of the conflict you've cited. But I'm no archaeologist so I wouldn't want to venture in depth. If you want a guide on abolition of the prison system and how to deal with violence, this is a good text written by some left liberal lawyer types. It's by no means revolutionary, but does provoke thought if this is something you're interested in reflecting on https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/

Number 2 is the one from outside the Cosmere, and likely a young adult one that was done as a gift to his son. Number 4 is likely going to be on Ashyn as there's some kind of floating city on it, and Brandon has spoken about wanting to do it plus it fulfils the criteria of a new world. The other two I'm going to suggest are Obradai and the world of the Aethers, and one of those will be a romance themed one for his partner.

I think this would have limited utility unless you could survive spiking yourself since it seems like you can't burn it. Which seems strange since Hemalurgy doesn't otherwise have 'locks' on it. There is this WOB here:

The radiant (Edgedancer or Lightweaver) basically needs to kill a fullborn with one hit with Soulcasting, and inhale the stormlight and surgebind faster than it takes for a fullborn to tap speed. Speedsters of a sufficient level almost always win any superhuman combat scenario if you take characters out of their narrative context. If you check out comic book forums that have similar debates you start to see that characters like the Flash just murder everything else if you get rid of the narrative constraints. An armed fullborn is simply hundreds of times faster than anything we've seen on any other Cosmere planet. Their only deficiency is that they're not very versatile as far as ranged attacks go, nor are they really capable of buffing others.

I actually would go with bendalloy, because being able to move the time bubble would make it a pretty powerful ability followed by steel or bronze. While getting steel sight would be valuable, but that seems to come with the loss of an eye, and allomantic steel and iron could otherwise be more cheaply empowered by f-iron. Brass and zinc seem like it's barking up the wrong tree in that what you want is more subtlety rather than power. Pewter and tin could be quite harmful. Aluminium, duralumin, and gold all seem quite useless. Bronze gives the ability to pierce copper clouds (and presumably Aviar protection), meanwhile extra copper is only useful if someone has extra bronze at hand and the effect can be gotten by working with another person using a copper cloud so is a bit of a wasteful way to get same result. Given how weak electrum is seems like you'd need a few spikes to get close to atium functionality.

Perhaps the fact that they came through the Everstorm rather than through the standard methods outlined in the pact changes the situation?

It seems like a waste of a metalmind to use it for half shards or shard plate, tbh. You invest your personal energy into something and then it gets chopped away in a few hits. Seems like if you have a metal rich planet like Scadrial then you should just use aluminium as an anti-shardblade measure. As far as using Scadrian investiture I think we kind of have one of those with Nightblood. He's clearly aligned with Ruin - he riots people, projects into their minds, is end-negative toward investiture, and even leaks that black mist. But I don't think users of Ruin or Preservation's investiture could create a weapon like that unaided.

In terms of the Lord Ruler the only options seem to be to either kill him instantaneously or somehow exhaust/remove his metals. I can't see an Awakener pulling that off. If every Fused in existence attacked the Lord Ruler, then the sheer repetition of it might take his metals down to a killable level of charge I reckon. And if they had a suppressor fabrial (like corrupted Sibling) they could block him using Allomancy whether directly or via compounding. Alternatively for a one hit kill, then I think you would need a speedster with a shardblade so like a twinborn with A-Pewter and F-Steel using Nightblood would have a good chance.

I think it could actually serve her purposes and someone who does it wouldn't get the freedom they expected. Like Returned are created to sacrifice themselves at key moments anyway, and stealing an entire splinter would surely steal the mission she's allocated as well given she could go right through the holes created by the hemalurgy to directly communicate with whoever it is now that they carry the splinter. I reckon the bigger issue is you'd probably need a lot of atium to hold an entire divine breath, and I can't imagine being able to be discreet about a piercing the size of a football for e.g in your body or whatever and it seems like it'd be easy to be dislodged in a fight...

It's the balance of forces - the Fused are honestly so much weaker than the Knights Radiant, meanwhile most Allomancers on Scadrial are Mistings who are hunted and are small number of Mistborns in the nobility who struggle to go toe to toe with an Inquisitor. Kelsier's victory over one is seen as exceptional.

It would make sense. Both the Returned and the Heralds are splinters stapled to dead bodies, and in the case of the Fused a singer dies and the cognitive shadow inhabits the remains.

The Ryshadium can bond spren so I don't know that lacking a gemheart is even the hard rule that we might suppose for bonding lesser spren. What might be harder is that the hemalurgy seems to repel spren, and given how the mists shied away from hemalurgists in the time of the Lord Ruler, then it could prove to be a barrier for the Kandra to attract the spren.

It depends! The Metallic Arts and Awakening can both work anywhere in the Cosmere, and if you can get the Aviar off of their native world or the sand from Taldain then things can become viable there. But most of the magic on Roshar is more or less restricted at present as neither Stormlight or spren can be taken off planet right now. The magic from Elantris is also restricted to location, but it seems like the Ire have their own work around to this issue, and seons can get off world even though spren cannot.

I think Sazed's relationship with North Scadrial is probably the best that you could hope for with a deity, though he royally messed up the South, and part of his benevolence is honestly tied up in his paralysis caused by the opposing shards. The issue in judging them kind of comes down to whether you think the ends justify the means, or are created by the means. Pretty much every Shard that's well intended is comfortable with really harming a whole bunch of people to reach their goal and to a degree there's a question if Endowment, Preservation, or Cultivation's 4d chess with human lives is better than tOdium's desire to 'save them all'? And Honor was self-sacrificing, but bound two species into an almost eternal war that one way or another risks genocide.

It's clearly not corrupted investiture as we are familiar with re: Trell and Odium due to its black colour, and in particular it's not corrupted Breath which is 'sticky' in the sense that any holder of Breath that is or once was living must willingly surrender it. Breath doesn't leak like Stormlight or the mists. I'd suggest that it's just brutally destroying Investiture from other Shards and producing concentrated Ruin at a slightly lower rate of return - that's the nature of the corruption and consumption. As the resultant colour isn't that different whether it's Breath, Stormlight, or Voidlight that Nightblood feeds upon I also don't think the smoke is a hybrid light, and I don't think it became that way due to devouring something of Ruin given that's not really how Ati's investiture worked (Hemalurgy was about destroying and coopting bits of Preservation). If it was of Endowment it isn't any longer - it's essentially a Ruin spren now - and I'm guessing it was based on the visualisation and command that was given and perhaps the metals in Nightblood are not what Shashara and Vasher believed.

The evidence for this assertion seems a bit weak. There are no known religions built around Endowment on Nalthis. The majority of religious people on Scadrial worship Kelsier, not Sazed. Cultivation was the only active Shard on Roshar for some time and wasn't a mainstream figure of worship. Autonomy is worshipped on Taldain, but equally it seems like Autonomy is not worshipped in the Drominad system. Obviously the situation is more complicated with dead Shards as in the situations of Threnody and Sel. Having power and being the centre of a religion are not the same thing. And no, but you don't have to have a society without any expectation about behaviours in order to have freedom of religion. It's still freedom of religion even if far right Christians can't ban gay people from school, right. Freedom of religion is not the freedom to impose religion on others.

I'm not sure this is a huge obstacle given that the metallic arts can already be used via feruchemical fabrials. As a result there might be some people who are more adept at using them (the rare person who can use multiple abilities on their own), but if the technology is democratised than there's no reason it'd be anything different than having an education in a specific field like a nurse as opposed to a teacher or a mechanic.

I feel like the metallic arts are just generally easier to integrate into daily life as hacks with a reasonable degree of independence, whereas with surgebinding I'd have to walk around glowing with a giant weapon and constantly having someone hovering over you. The abilities as a Mistborn (or full Feruchemist) are also just so diverse. The same person can use pewter to get through long shifts at work or all nighters for study, use cadmium if someone's had an accident while waiting for an ambulance, use brass to de-escalate a violent customer or partner or whatever, and gold to help confront past problems. There are obviously huge benefits to surgebinding, but they just don't fit into daily life in quite the same way with the same range.

I think there's a probably a few things to untangle. This moves the goal posts, because I think there's a few incorrect assumptions. It's worth threading this back from your beginning points about freedom of religion and understanding how we got here. The argument that you're making is that freedom of religion is impossible in the Cosmere, and you've essentially combined religion and the Shards. But this doesn't work with an actual definition of freedom of religion and that's why these debates about definition and ethics are coming up. We know for example that the majority of shard worlds contain a plurality of religions with a varying degree of freedom of practice that is not unlike our own history considering the religious sectarianism on Nalthis and Sel, the more pluralist experience on Scadrial, or in between experiences like Roshar where atheism and other religious practices (for e.g Horneaters) are permissible if disdained. There's no reason that the peoples of the Cosmere can't experience freedom of religion as we understand it since many of these conflicts seem as much driven by feudalism and sectarianism as anything else, and that's a very human problem. Even in circumstances where Shards actively intervene as religious figures a measure of the religious freedom principle does remain intact. Sazed stewards a world where the most popular figure of worship is Kelsier who has dramatically changed the trajectory of South Scadrial (granted extreme powers as it were), and despite his mild disapproval he allows it, and he only begins to intervene in regards to Trell's violent incursion which is a matter of invasion not worship. On Roshar we have Cultivation as a marginal figure of worship at best amongst humanoids with the majority of people worshipping either spren, a splintered shard, a rival imprisoned shard, or some combination. The issues you've cited from your examples are not a given even if they are possible. Your examples and arguments about Shards making freedom of religion impossible therefore only really holds in the very specific situation where there are at least two Shards in one society and they are violently in opposition to one another and are actively involving themselves in religious practices. As we know that not all planets have Shards let alone multiple ones, not all Shards are violently in opposition to each other, and not all are inclined to religious activity, then this argument doesn't really work.

Yes. Freedom is something we experience collectively in the positive, and if one person has the right to oppress someone else then there's no inherent value of freedom. People may well be free to worship Trell as part of a principle of freedom of religion, but they are not free to extinguish the freedom of religion for those of other faiths. I'm not sure this is true, but it's actually not the point. It's about the logic behind your premise that there is no freedom of religion if Trell's followers can't perform a violent uprising against Harmony. This clashes with the principles of religious freedoms espoused amongst secular societies as we know it.

It could be good as a method of birth control and preventing yourself becoming pregnant in the first place if you don't want it happening. But I think the more difficult thing would be causing an abortion - if your body kept healing while trying to induce a miscarriage the whole thing could be really unpleasant.

On atheism, we are in a society where the entities worshipped are verifiable but what is contested is whether they're truly divine. The Ghostbloods and the Survivorists would both agree that Kelsier exists, but one would see them as a god and another as a powerful guy in charge. Some people worship the Returned, and others see them as vampires. Horneaters see spren as gods, as do Singers kind of, and Alethi mostly see them as pretty mundane. Presenting evidence to an atheist that a Shard exists (a being that was once human, and can still be killed and captured by humans) still allows for a variety of different conclusions. TBH it would not surprise me if Hoid was an atheist given how low of an opinion he has of the Shards. No secular state in the world contains the codes of the religion as divine law, and some prohibit discrimination on that basis. It's possible to have freedom of religion, for example, but also ban homophobic, racist or sexist discrimination in the workplace even if a given reading encouraged by a religious denomination encouraged discriminatory attitudes. Just because gay people teach in schools doesn't mean more fundamentalist denominations are being criminalised. On that line of reasoning it's perfectly reasonable, IMO, for there to be a freedom to worship Trell and a rejection of Trell's followers extinguishing the religious freedoms of others by rebelling on Scadrial. The freedom to worship to Trell, and the freedom to oppress Survivorists or Pathists is not the same thing.

^ This. He kind of spelled this out with Kelsier's attempted overthrow of the ruling class on Scadrial, and then Vin and Elend just became the new ruling class. If Scadrial transitioned to communism after that, then it would've been hard to tell much of a story.

I think it's worth checking out Malatesta, and propositions by the Friends of Durruti for the Spanish revolution as there's some definitional problems here in your post. One of the fundamental principles of socialist thought is that people are generally cooperative and do not have a vested interest in cruelty toward one another when separated from hierarchical systems like capitalism (including state capitalism as implemented by Stalin). The idea is then to have a socially transformative that is ongoing in the dismantlement of that system, and that means the oppressed classes (workers, peasants, those completely excluded from the economy) overthrowing the ruling class as part of it. This is an imposition of will by the masses against the ruling classes. Where anarchism differs from other schools of revolutionary socialism in terms of force is not expressing this in a central state structure that has a layer of police, politicians etc. but this doesn't mean that there wouldn't need to be (rotating and democratic) militia in the short term to deal with fascists or whatever. In fact one of the most effective militia during the Russian revolution involved the leadership of Nestor Makhno, an influential anarchist. And the inequality of skills and capacity is not really a thing that undermines anarchism. Arbitrary inequalities like wealth or gendered restrictions etc. would cease to exist in communism (and anarchism is a theory of how you get there), but anarchism is not counter-posed to rules. Nothing about anarchism is connected to chaos. It's hyper-structured. But it comes back to the idea that you don't need cops to guarantee diversity in ability - cops actually over police and over-incarcerate disabled people - when you could just have a disability support system that's collectively run. There's also no anarchist state, failed or otherwise. Do you have any examples? I would also softly challenge this as well. Non-revolutionary anarchism is just radical liberalism, or libertarian strands of democratic socialism. Anarchism is by its very nature revolutionary as a school of thought. Being revolutionary also doesn't really mean you don't support reforms. Reforms, not reformism, is a common slogan. The issue though is that Hoid thinks genocide is justifiable in certain circumstances which isn't well, at all principled if he's any kind of left libertarian.

I don't think any characters could be described as anarchist. Kelsier - and the Parshendi - are the only ones who have any revolutionary perspective, though I would say it's hard nationalism on the Parshendi question. And if anything I think Kelsier and his crew are Marxist-Leninist Maoists with a strict command structure building coalitions of workers and peasants, even if the criminal element has the veneer of Bakunin's perspective on the lumpenproletariat. Otherwise most of the characters at best represent aristocratic reformers. However there might be hope with Venli in her redemption. A group of refugees that have rejected their god and are swearing oaths alongside fugitive Enlightened spren seems as good a basis as any for anarchism.