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Apologies for the delay in publishing this. The list of articles at the end is my excuse.

In this third and final part of our interview with Phoenix Quinn, he talks about the Socialist Freedom Party and gives us a final word of advice.



When you were eBorn, SFP was already established and was growing under the leadership of Osmany Ramon. As the keeper of the party’s history, how do you see the party has changed since 2009, and what remains the same?

Under the guidance of the great teacher-leader Osmany Ramon, the Socialist Freedom Party kept to much more of a "hard-core" Marxist perspective than it does today. I don't mean to blow that out of proportion. People clearly understood that it was a game and that the main point was to have some fun.

But back then there was a kind of economic system that one could study and examine in interesting ways using some of the canonical Marxist frameworks. For example, Ramon wrote a very interesting study on the mechanics of exploitation and alienation. He -- along with others -- also carefully studied and took advantage of available mechanisms for leveraging collectivization to benefit a group, rather than a single owner or player.

We even tried to develop a general theory of the crisis of capitalism in eRep at one point, but had little more luck doing that in here than in real life. It has become startlingly evident that Global Capital exhibits the liquid-metal characteristics of an advanced Terminator much more so than the "tottering broken machine" meme of classical Marxist and especially Leninist thinking out here in the real world. In eRep, it simply changes the rules of the game whenever it sees a drop in MasterCard use -- which is basically the same thing.

Anyway, when V2 came along, much of that kind of e-Marxist analysis was no longer worthwhile. Since then the breadth and depth of the economic module has shriveled up to such miniscule proportions that most players with a strong interest in modeling socialist or anarcho-syndicalist economic structures in eRep simply quit playing because there was really very little to do that was the least bit interesting.



Personally, I had left my obsession with Marxist economics behind quite a few years before starting to play eRep. I sort of inserted myself into this milieu with the intention of dissuading people from Leninism, in particular, and drawing them into a more critical-thinking path along "traditional" situationist and Gramscian lines, as well as the kind of decentralized, anti-authoritarian critique of enclosure, theories of horizontal autonomy and so forth that you find in Harry Cleaver's "Reading Capital Politically", in the work of the Italian autonomist-marxists, and in the practice of groups like the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and more recently in the municipalist turn taken by the People's Protection Units of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party in Syrian Kurdistan.

I'd studied under Harry Cleaver in college, had been exposed to a great deal of situationist literature in the late 70s and early 80s, became a dedicated agitator/propagandist for ACT UP in the last 80's, and then my son became a great admirer of Sub-Comandante Marcos after the 1994 uprising, so I had had many opportunities to think about alternatives to "classic" Marxism long before getting involved with the SFP.

I was also a great fan of Buckminster Fuller, to the point where my Dad and younger brother would often beg me to stop talking about him when I would launch into a tirade about "turning weaponry into livingry" during a family gathering over a holiday meal... In fact, it was an early fascination with Bucky's "World Game" idea that led me to click on that ad for eRepublik.... thinking it might be something along those lines. (Sadly, not.)



What has grown, developed, and survived, through many twists and turns, within the Socialist Freedom Party, I would say, is the delightful political spirit of what the Zapatista's once defined as "Women's Revolutionary Law" or what more recently they described as "Horizontal Autonomy".

The American libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin described it as "social ecology", "libertarian municipalism" or simply "communalism". It all makes sense to me because it's basically how my Mom defines a family: everyone gets a say, respect each other, do your chore and don't be a dick.



If you were starting again as a new player today, what would you want to know, and how would you approach the game? Would PQ be a different bird?

As you know, PQ is actually an ostrich who has learned to speak humanish. Quite an odd duck. I have no idea really how I would approach creating a new flight plan. For me, eRep and PQ are indistinguishable. The game IS playing this character.

I dunno. Maybe I'd be reincarnated as a Pirate Queen?

What final remarks would you like to make to our readers?

"Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices."


We want to thank Phoenix Quinn once again for sharing so much with us. There is a wealth of material out there if you want to learn more about this rara avis. Here are some links to get you starte😛

An early interview

PQ’s wiki

His newspaper, currently titled Players Quarterly

Because he has been so prolific, here is a short and rather random selection of his articles, in no particular order, but there is much more to be mined from his works.

An interview with Osmany Ramon
El dia de los eMuertos
Free Univesity graduation
Fanfare for the common man
Re-creation
A failure of the imagination
The straight test
Analysis of classes in eRepublik
eRepublik psychogeogaphy
Revolutionary tool kit
Meditation on Nazim Hikmet
Stir it up
Mayhem erupts
Manifesto of the anarcho-syndicalist movement
Winds blowing wildly
Five tribes of eRepublik
Make me one with everything
Collected works and selected quotations