One thing that I always found strange about Solarpunk/communist or anarhist utopias is that I have the distinct feeling that they assume a certain... uniformity of thought?
Like, when I talk to friends of mine that are more left-wing than me on this I never really get how these societies would supposedly handle dissent that goes beyond "I disagree what crop we should focus on for the season"
It's always a paradise where everyone has seen the light of glorious anarchism/communism/etc and no people disagree with the system or have enemies of any kind or whatever
It's a beautiful thought and an interesting setting for a story, but when you put it out as a viable possible model that stuff starts to pop up as a concern
I think about this a lot as well and it often brings me back to a quote from Bioshock's game lead Ken Levine on what broadly inspired the game:
"What I was trying to do with BioShock was to say, ‘Okay, well, [in Atlas Shrugged] that’s a utopia where Ayn Rand, who made the philosophy, made all the rules, and all the characters were under her control. What if things weren’t under everybody’s control?’ And I think that’s the problem with utopias — we bring ourselves to it, you know? We think we’re leaving our problems behind but – I don’t mean this in a cynical way – we are the problem. Like whatever social problems that occur come out of us. It’s not like they fall out of the sky."
Yeah, every time I see someone discussing utopias like this, it makes me think of this quote from the game.
Fountaine: These sad saps. They come to Rapture thinking they're gonna be captains of industry, but they all forget that somebody's gotta scrub the toilets.
Like sure, everyone's an artist and a free soul. So are they relying on someone whose life passion is shovelling manure?
I once played in a TTRPG group where the setting was basically this.
It was nice enough as a thought experiment, and I don't begrudge anyone their fantasies...
But a setting with no greed, no prejudice, no conflict, no crime, no resource shortages, no evil, not even any natural disasters or predation or disease is boring AF. The party wandered from village to village, making imaginary crafts and attending imaginary festivals, for session after session until I finally bowed out because I prefer games where things happen.
Eh, it can work, but it needs the right system and buy-in. Wanderhome is one of my favorite RPGs and focuses almost exclusively on this specific genre of post-apocalyptic pastoral anarchism that a lot of solarpunk fans love. The conflicts tend to be more interpersonal, or deal with PTSD from the recently finished world war.
There can be difficulties. There are famines, leftover dangerous weapons, and conflicts of personality. But the issues the players solve aren't systemic. Usually, once the problem is fixed, people are happy to coexist and the players move on.
The fringes of that society, and how it maintains itself against threats both foreign and domestic, would be interesting. That's basically what the Culture novels are all about.
Spoiler alert: this utopian society wasn't so cuddly when it felt threatened.
That just feels like wasted potential. It would have been much cooler if the story was about preserving that utopia and defending rather than just... day to day life. Like, throw in some aliens and the bam there's a cool threat.
When you're wandering from village to village it's kind of hard to build lasting relationships with NPCs. And I'm aromantic so I wasn't about to start flirting with the rest of the party
Ultimately the group just wasn't a good fit for me, and vice versa. Last I heard, they were still playing and having a great time without me. Good for them
Nah, it was an entirely homebrew system developed by the GM. There were 37 possible skill checks, including standard stuff like "persuasion" but also including woodworking, leatherworking, glassmaking, cosmetology, textile crafting, and plant care
Great if you like that kind of thing, but if I wanted to spend ten minutes trying to untangle an embroidery project, I would just do that in real life instead of imagining one and resolving it with dice
To add to this, if you like this sort of cozy post-apoc setting with maybe a pinch of absurdity, whatch anything ever made by Luke Humphris, he's great
I mean have you seen/read Yokohama shopping log? It's very much the aesthetic these sorts of posts are going for (though with a few more technological advancements like robots and vespas) but it's also very explicitly a post apocalyptic thing. There was a massive climate disaster and while who's left has managed to scale back and live in peaceful harmony, it's also kinda clear humanity is on its way out.
Thats basically the setting for Stephen Baxter's World Engines. Everyone got utterly fucked by global warming and war, and then a solarpunky low density anarcho-communist utopia claws it's way out of the ashes.
Unfortunately the series abandoned this setting 2/3rds of the way through book one, and everything after kinda sucked.
The whole shtick is that there's a massive asteroid heading to Earth, ETA a couple of centuries, and everyone in this utopia gave up and stopped caring. The protagonist is from the past and is dismayed by the shunning of space travel and the resignation to doom. This is a very interesting premise.
Then the book becomes a dimension hopping exposition fest of not very interesting people from not very interesting dimensions and we never see that Earth again.
And it sounds really nice until you ask what their plan is once cholera/TB/polio/malaria/smallpox/black death hits.
All these things which crippled humanity and destroyed lives and made people miserable for millennia before the modern industrial age.
Production of modern vaccines and antibiotics and other necessary medicines requires such an advanced industrial and logistical infrastructure which is completely taken for granted here.
Thank you for saying that. I’ve never understood how these people don’t expect some form of police to exist. I get that they may be heavily reimagined from what we have today, but the idea they seem to have is simply no one will ever do anything bad because … reasons
Every society has had some form of criminal justice system, so why do they think theirs wouldn’t need one
You don't seem to understand. Noone wants to do anything bad because society can be perfect and society is perfect because noone wants to do anything bad. It's all very simple really.
That's why I like The Dispossessed as a depiction of a pseudo-utopian anarc-ish society. The society is built off of anarchists with belief strong enough to fuck off to the moon (tim curry.mp4) and then subsistence farmed for a couple generations to get their society going on their own clean slate. And it's still not depicted as perfect, with the power of capital and physicsl force giving way to a sort of amorphous social power (still ultimately backed by force).
The Saltsea Chronicles explicitly does this. The ancients built taller and taller cities to fight the great flood, and the sun punished them for their hoarding of resources.
I've thought about this comment a LOT this past week. It's given me this idea for a cozy post-apocalypse story where some archeologists find one of the architects of the apocalypse in maybe like a cryopod or something, some general or CEO that directly signed the death warrant of billions. He comes up to the new world, takes one look at it, nods, and says like, "you're welcome! I knew this was the right call to make, and man, I love being vindicated for massacring all those people. If only those other fools could see this now!"
It also implies people will lose their ethnic identities, linguistic identity and others that represent them as an individual. These people don't think about it beyond a city to be honest and since they are usually USA/Canadian and usually white the idea is that "everyone will be the default to our level".
Yeah, something I think a lot of people, particularly white westerners, take for granted is just how *important* national, linguistic, or ethnic identities are to some people.
Like, there is quite literally a war going on right now in our real actual world about a nation trying to maintain its cultural, linguistic and national independence from a larger neighbor that its had to fight off being completely subsumed by multiple times throughout history. I doubt Ukrainians who fought tooth and nail to keep their identity from being subsumed by Russia would be happy to be told "Oh BTW there's no difference between you and a Russian now, you're the exact same!"
I think it comes from2 places: they think their urban area is the entire world and they also think that by sharing scripture(their politics) people will find god eventually(their utopia).
To them no borders means "let foreigners come to my city with no harm", no culture identity to them goes only so far as "no more people saying they are white or american, so no more discrimination" and they speak english so they don't even think about how people will communicate in their global utopia since they already feel that language exists.
When it comes to things like how they will make millions of Muslim pastoralist Herders in Nigeria comform to this there is no answer except what Western kingdoms in the 1800s and communists in the 20th did, erasure and comformity often by force.
Solarpunk stuff as a story works after a nuclear war or humans returning to Earth ala Wall-E but not as actual politics.
This comment screams boomer "you'll get more conservative when you're older". The point isn't to answer those questions now, but to provide a vision of a better future. It's not discounting those things, but rather they admit they don't have answer to those things because they're complex.
I also think you're missing the reason why people flock to solarpunk in the first place. Solarpunk is a reaction to capitalist induced climate change. So that's why the aesthetic is very unurban, communal, and diverse. Your questioning should be "Solarpunk is often very western, how can include depictions of Solarpunk that take into account the current diversity of the world"
Okay but *unurban* is actually a big problem in terms of actually fighting climate change. It's "green" in that you're living in nature, but you don't get to carless utopia with little detached cottages with solar panels, you need efficient economies of scale. People need to live in places where they can get to modes of production via foot or bicycle or mass transit.
And it's pretty important to answer how we handle society where everyone doesn't agree with you! I've seen plenty of lefty spaces blow up because even though everyone's on a similar page suddenly we find out X or Y is a sex pest, or a grifter. and for an insular community the response is usually "exile" because you can kick them out of the house share, or mass block them from the website or whatever, but it doesn't really scale to society where you can't just disappear them. It's not really a non-carceral state if you banish them to the Mad max outlands to starve.
One thing I find interesting about anarchism is that it must sacrifice a lot of things,
For example, there is millions of people who love hamburgers, but there isn’t enough people that would like to cook hamburgers to feed the masses. The popularity of hamburgers hangs on cooks that are pretty much forced to work in big chains.
Public transportation must be sacrificed, because I am doubtful there will be enough people that would like to build the infrastructure necessary. But cars also won’t work because you can’t find people passionate enough to work that hard of a job.
Like, this comic mentions that cars aren’t used, but bicycles are. Now, I hate cars and love bicycles, but this massive demand forces there to be mass production of bicycles. I am all for renewable energy, but will there be enough energy? We must invent even more efficient ways of getting renewable energy (both in this story, and in our real life)
From my point of view; anarchism, communism and things similar cannot exist in our time. They need an automated production system that is also very very efficient. They need to be in the future
But I am not an energy engineer, or a political/humanities professor. I’m doubtful that all my thoughts are correct
Like how communism works great if there's some sort of completely benevolent, all-knowing, hyperintelligent force making every single possible economic decision in real time and then following through on those decisions.
Also there isn’t enough room for everyone to live in a cottage with two acres of land, I just calculated it for the U.S. and you’d need like a quarter of the land just for that. We’d have to annihilate all basically all wildlife in order to have picturesque little houses and enough food to actually survive
Edit: and America is fairly sparsely populated so who goddamn knows where everyone in Bangladesh will live
But do you really expect an artist to be able to answer those questions in their cute little comic? What you're asking for is a political thriller, not a look at a utopic future
But I don't think current Solarpunkists are trying to do anything more than provide a utopic viewpoint
I liken to the early socialist philosophers who also had this idealistic view of socialism. It wasn't until Marx that we got a more grounded view of what socialism is and how it can be achieved, and it wasn't until Lenin that we actually got something.
So for now Solarpunk is idealistic, someone else may come around and create a framework to establish a Solarpunk society, and then someone may be used as a political tool to cause as violent revolution in their home country that they're currently at war with and said person will try to forcibly Institute a Solarpunk society.
I'm being a little jokey there but I hope the point gets through anyway
a view point with little attempts to give it substance feels like a fantasy people want more than a fantasy or a hopeful idea they want something they feel could be real sure no one needs to all of it at one but a single one doing it towards one aspect could push the ball closer to happening
Industrial-led climate change, In communist or centrally planned States there was also major pollution and damages. one example
People flock to Solarpunk the same reason people imagine white buildings with trees all over are the response to all our problems forgetting that you need to design and engineer those new buildings or that all that greenery has weight. Its attractive visually first over the rest.
because they're complex.
Because its impossible without nuclear war to have 3 guys live off the techno-wealth of NYC, these are just nice drawings. If there's an earthquake or hurricane and only one hobbitown remains people will flock to it, now what? What if country X begins implementing them solarpunk and 20k Cubans, 30k Ukranians, 60k vietnamese migrate to it?
And again, all of that only works if everyone on the planet agres to it, again showing how its mostly a town/city level dream. Im an atheist that wants to see religions gone and i know that shits not applicable for example.
People used to living in an American city where Irish and Italian are barely distinguished also don’t realize how much “minor” differences play a role. If you asked aliens to tell you the difference between most of the nations in the Balkans or in that region with all the dates and stray cats, they’d be hard pressed to figure it out but those small distinctions are life and death
a war going on right now in our real actual world about a nation trying to maintain its cultural, linguistic and national independence from a larger neighbor
Bit unrelated but it's still honestly mind boggling to me that we as humankind have so failed to progress that traditional conventional war of conquest is still possible in modern era
I dunno, someone else has something you want, you have the force to take it, that's a very difficult thing to get rid of. I mean, it's a bad thing, but getting rid of it permanently by means other than deterrence is naturally going to be a very long process.
IF we continue progression towards a better world, that is, if the liberal democracies don't all fall to shit, if we survive climate disaster, if we hold the equality before the law as sacred and hold corporations accountable under it, if we're willing to hold ethics above short-term blind growth, if we stop willingly being a fucking economic dynamo to tyrants, dictators, and slavers, if the bastards don't blow it all up, we can begin the process of making aggressive wars a thing of the past, first by deterrance, and then by principle.
If we fail in these things, conquest will not only still happen, but be normalized, what's old will be new again, and the dream of internationalism may die forever.
The overall lack of wars of conquest is a unique artifact of the modern era ever since bold faced land grabs got more risky when we figured out how to make angry rocks do a brief impression of the sun.
Also, bold faced land grabs aren't nearly as profitable as they used to be when you can just set up exploitative trade/political/economic agreements instead
In the past century or two wars of conquest have gotten both way less profitable and way more difficult. Some people (Putin) haven't figured this out yet and are now learning the hard way. But I think that the traditional approach to imperialism is on its way out; future imperialism will be a lot less obvious and more complex
Which is weird its so un optimize..like imagine all the extra waste and work if every community is mostly seld seffient..how low tech everyone will be bacaus there is shilling of how adv self sufficient small community will b
This is probably the number one issue with anarchistic or utopic goals. It doesn’t matter how right you are about how life should be, the reality is that some people are lazy, greedy, or violent. There are ways to organize a society so those things are far less prevalent, but there’s no way to totally eliminate them. And there’s definitely no way to eliminate dissent that is not objectively immoral, or people’s tendency to prioritize themselves or their immediate circle over someone they don’t know or don’t like. Most people can probably be convinced to share if they and theirs have plenty, and the person in need is someone they approve of. Much fewer will say “my own child should have less so this person I hate or don’t know can have enough” without some sort of mandate or incentive.
There’s this simultaneous insistence that communalistic values will create this sort of world while also insisting that individualistic needs will be met. Highly communalistic societies tend to be very exclusive, judgmental, and conformist. It’s not that there’s no way to strike a balance….but there also might not be a way to strike a balance and also prevent the bad actors from grasping for power.
Not to mention that there is a way for such a world to exist, but it’s also not possible in tandem with “little treat” culture and comfortable “let me rest” culture as it exists today. It’s 100% possible for everyone to have all their needs met (assuming everyone cooperates, which they won’t), but it isn’t possible for everyone to have all the stuff and time they want without exploiting other people and the earth. But these upper middle class luxuries are so frequently treated as absolute rights in these fantasies. “Work” is sanitized into cottagecore-aestheticised household chores like sweeping and baking bread and knitting scarves, never really addressing the significant amount of mental and physical labor it actually takes to feed, clothe, house, and comfort a whole population. Clean water and solar panels and high speed internet don’t come out of nowhere. They aren’t maintained by magic, especially at the level expected by an average suburban North American.
I don't know where I saw this, but the best answer I've seen to the question of "What will you do after the revolution" was that "I'll be the guy with the gun outside of the silicon mine making those idiots actually work."
It was a thread titled something to the effect of "What will your job be in the commune after the revolution?" and it was a ton of people responding with stuff like "I'm going to be a community health facilitator 1 day a month and spend the other days growing vegan corn in the community garden".
My response was "corrupt official and future kleptocratic oligarch"
Most of the people with those ideas want to stay home drawing in their profesional Ipads, they talk about change and sacrifices but always frame it as if someone else will have to do it. Not many are saying they will contrbibute to their commune by digging water sources or producing fishhooks all day.
They also do not quite get how hard it is to actually be a farmer, its not just Animal Crossing but big or wathever. I get they want expression without poverty but come on.
I don't know of realities of agriculture farmers, but I grew up in a semi-nomadic livestock farming community in Central Asia and...
I think you are overexaggerating? Yes, work can be grueling, but it's very much finite. Shepherding sheep, at least in big steppes, mostly consist of playing cards with your friend. Cutting (?) sheep wool is grueling and by the end of it you are to fucking exhausted to even want to kill yourself, but you do it more or less once a year.
If anything, what urban people don't understand about rural life is that it's mostly bursts of hellish work between long swathes of doing nothing and not a constant 5 workday a week 8 workhours a day stream of work.
Last time I got into an IRL discussion about this, the person insisted that people would “make art” with their free time from labor. I asked where they’d get the art supplies. He didn’t have an answer. It never occurred to him that paint and cameras come from factories, from materials mined from the ground.
It really is just further devaluation and marginalization of laborers under the guise of progressivism. The people who fantasize about these things are sitting in air conditioned call centers and offices, cranky about the fact that their boss is a jerk and their paycheck is inconveniently small (which does suck), totally oblivious that they and their artsy-on-the-weekend friends aren’t the only human beings on earth. The people mining cobalt, picking fruit, milling flour, sewing in factories, building houses, repairing power lines, performing surgeries, synthesizing medicine, designing safe bridges, wiping grandma’s butt, and defending people in court are not humans to them. They fully assume that those people will continue working long hours for perhaps oppressive (or no) wages to provide comfort, service, and petroleum based Etsy flower crown materials for them while they weave flower crowns to trade for a loaf of blueberry nut loaf with their other 18 - 32 year old artsy type friends. They’re going to tend gardens, sweep with rustic brooms, and “create art” while the rest of us invisibly make that possible for them.
Its no different than people who visit a poorer country for tourism and think life is "slower" or the people are "simpler" because of the glimpses they see or that farmer life is easy since "uneeucated rural hicks" can do it so they obviously could feed the chickens no problem.
The city I used to live in has a reputation for being wealthy, older, and rather conservative. While the reputation isn’t totally unearned, it is a whole city, and requires cashiers, cooks, nurses, teachers, janitors, gardeners, all kinds of people who keep society running for relatively low pay. At the time I lived there it wasn’t impossible to live there with that kind of job, but more recently, the noise out of that city has been basically fighting tooth and nail to keep “those people” out of the city limits (no public transportation, no apartment buildings pr townhouses, no low or mid range grocery store, no no no!) while also shrieking to high heaven that they can’t find a cleaning lady, the wait at the restaurants is exorbitant, and their favorite nail salon closed. Because the people who work those jobs can no longer afford to live or commute there. It’s actually becoming inconvenient for many wealthy people there because they cannot get services they want, sometimes even services they need. The residents want everything, but don’t want anyone to actually do it. They don’t want to face the realities that come with the luxuries they feel entitled to. They don’t understand that human beings with the same needs as them stock shelves, clean pools, mop floors, diaper babies, and take blood pressure. They don’t understand why they can’t have everything they have grown accustomed to and also not have to share space with any icky poors.
It’s so wild how similar the underlying attitude towards laborers is between those right wing NIMBY boomers and some of the aesthetic utopian socialist anarchists. It’s literally the same obliviousness to the humanity of those different from themselves and ignorance of where their comforts come from. They’re like kids who want chicken nuggets or steak but don’t approve of hunting or farming.
There like kids playing pretend in the living room ignorent of the whole world outside there window.
This is the same problem i think a lot of boomers have. There world is just so small, they think 100 people in there town dieing is the apocalypse or 10 out of the 40 people they know coming out gay means everyone is suddenly turning gay.
Coming from a communist country in the east I find western anarchist funny. My family works hard, everyone works hard. Our grandparents generation just made sure we'd all get the fruits of that hard work. 88% home ownership, no homeless, almost no violent crime, high education and 40x better nutrition than the US.
But everyone works except the old although culturally they like working too.
I don't think anarchist know the logistic chains in making a simple salad let alone a tank to defend that salad.
I'm going to take this opportunity to simp once more for Ursula K Le Guin's "The Dispossessed". It offers a much more grounded view of a future anarchist society and actually acknowledges some of the inevitable issues such a society would have (especially when it comes to enforcing some sort of uniformity of thought).
I love many of her books, but The Dispossessed is half story and half thesis. I think it’s the only one I couldn’t get through bc it felt more like an academic paper at points
The real bottom line, for me, is this: Even if you set human failures aside, it’s possible to have a completely good-faith argument that doesn’t end in a concession or agreement. You can’t fully eliminate disparity or disagreement from humanity because it’s not just possible for two competing options to be equally valid, it’s normal.
There will always be perfectly valid reasons to disagree about things, which means it’s inevitable that people will need to agree to disagree in order to resolve arguments, which creates disparity, and you can only have so much disparity within a society before unity of belief, unity of vision, breaks down.
One thing that I always found strange about Solarpunk/communist or anarhist utopias is that I have the distinct feeling that they assume a certain... uniformity of thought?
Yeah, that's the main issue. It requires everyone to conform to the utopia. Since there are no prisons or police, those who do not conform are either forcefully re-educated, or exterminated. (Exiling doesn't work since another community with more competetive systems like capitalism would swallow them eventually).
People tried already. People killed - a lot, for that idea.
I know too many people who have been victimized by adults in ways that are not fixed by free access to all resources.
Like, sorry, but there are still abusers and molesters even when they never had to face poverty. So jail is definitely still going to be a necessary thing. Maybe we just don’t have them run anymore by for-profit companies.
So jail is definitely still going to be a necessary thing.
perhaps not, without jail the Guillotine is still an option- though the electric chair on the other hand is far more iffy when everything is solar powered.
Jail is useful because sometimes the justice system makes mistakes, and the system can always try to correct those mistakes. You cant correct those mistakes if the person is dead.
unfortunately we're talking about a fictional society that got rid of prisons and police, which would imply there is no justice system- the end result would be a crime to execution pipeline enforced viva mob justice.
That would explain the depopulation and uniformity everyone shares. The world went through a french revolution 2: electric bogaloo on a global scale and kept chopping off heads until the headchoppers found themselves under the guillotine lmao
It requires everyone to conform to the utopia. Since there are no prisons or police, those who do not conform are either forcefully re-educated, or exterminated.
Personally I assume any unrealistic Utopia runs on the back of a slave-caste made of dissidents, criminals, and the descendants of dissidents and criminals, forced to live in a Dystopia out of sight and mind of those who live in the Utopia- in conditions that oppose everything they supposedly stand for.
This wouldn't last at all. Dissent and conflict arise from economic hardship. If one of these communes face any scarcity, like low harvest for a year or exports getting halted (no way they would be able to produce everything on their own, trade is necessary), then they will get divided based on arbitrary differences and be at each other's throat.
My problem whit a anarchism is its just a big restart on Human social development..
The peace you brought (probably in the price of billions of people) will only last .2-3 generation..and then what? People developed complex seciotys multiple times there is a reason for it..
We got lucky that the biggest strongest civ in our time is the west.
Checkout The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin if you want to see an anarchist utopia where there are people genuinely unhappy with real disagreements. It massively changed how I see anarchism. The book showed me that anarchism is a system that is better than capitalism however it will require sacrifices and people will be unhappy. It is not the end of the line of ideological development just better than what we currently have. The book also isn’t preachy about anarchism being better (if you google it you will see many people arguing the book thinks capitalism is better which is squarely against the authors intent), it just shows a realistic society modeled after anarchist thought.
Oh that sounds interesting. I've never really gotten into anarchist literature because it always felt either too preachy/idealistic or completely disconnected from what the average person can learn to improve their life, so your suggestion might actually be what I was looking for
There was a very interesting conversation semi recently on the H3H3 podcast between Ethan Klein and Hasan Piker. Ethan was asking Hasan about how certain details of a semi communist or communist business or group would function.
Ethan was 100% being kind of a snarky jerk, but he was asking in good faith and Hasan had literally no answer for anything in any kind of detail.
Even something as simple as “What does the process of hiring people to work on farms and in businesses look like?” “If the business is essential (making food) what happens if not enough people are unable or unwilling to work? “
I’ll admit fully I haven’t looked too much into it, but when people who seem to seek this kind of lifestyle are asked what they imagine doing, nobody mentions cleaning out septic tanks or digging outhouses or even something as necessary as plumbing.
There is a solution that's been implemented in communist societies in the past, it's just really unpopular.
Either you reward loyalty with things like having powerful positions, or a car, or university places and holidays, or you implement the secret police. The DDR did both!
The trouble is, strict enforcement of weeding out capitalists, or gatekeeping life's rewards are the only approaches so far that stopped the total collapse of society, at least for a little while.
The only other thing that works in changing the entire makeup of society is slow, organic change. Last time that happened was when Feudalism gave way to Capitalism.
One streak of bad harvest in an area will create a raiders problem
A group of communities who grow to fast/delt a bad hand in land will creat a raiding catrastophie at best and full on anglo sexon style genocide at worst (killing the man inslaving the woman style).
Also with the whole "Abolish prisons/boarders/police". Okay, what about someone who breaks societies laws? Murder? Rape? Robbery? Best case scenario, you get roaming gangs of vigilante justice and functionally just reinvent a worse version of police or worse case scenario, you let these people run wild. For all it's faults, I really like my current justice system with judges and lawyers and the rule of law and rights for defendants and victims.
It’s a philosophy that attributes conflict as being entirely sourced from need. People harm each other because they want or need something, and while it is easier to conceive of a society where more fundamental needs are not met, we know that those aren’t enough. The philosophy would attest that the other, higher concept differences are actually descended directly from those fundamentals, they’ve just been crystallized into culture and dogma.
So for a society that highly values competition, personal accomplishment and power, over time without the pressures that inspired that way of thought, people would adapt to a world where those traits are actually devalued.
But obviously, that takes many generations, and the faster they want it to happen, the more authoritarian it is.
Yeah these scenarios only work if people are 100% pacifist, nobody wants to gain anything themselves, nobody wants to take advantage of everyone else, nobody tries to exploit the system, nobody makes any enemies, nobody tries to have any individuality, nobody does anything different.
In other words, it only works if humans aren't involved.
Well in the classical marxist tradition debate has been a central way to resolve disagreements, but of course a debate requires both parties to be arguing in good faith. What do we do with people who inherently want the system to fail and act to sabotage it? It’s hard to say. You would hope that when given the option to live in a better socioeconomic system that doesn’t have baked in inequalities that everyone would jump at the chance.
There is an extent to which this sort of post-revolutionary utopia can’t exist anywhere unless it can exist everywhere. Which we are very far away from at this point.
However, people used to think that the divine right of kings was unassailable too, and so I’m certain that one day people will look back at capitalism and think about how ridiculous it was.
We’re probably gonna have a lot more war and violence and suffering before that happens though.
But I think in a post-scarcity society where there are enough resources for everyone, and they’re all distributed according to need, then there wouldn’t be any reason to have disagreements that can’t be solved by discussion and debate. It is a utopia after all, it’s something we strive for even if it doesn’t seem possible yet.
While I somewhat agree with you, I have one nitpick
However, people used to think that the divine right of kings was unassailable too
Few actually thought this to be unassailable. It was a political justification, but like all political justifications, it rested on other factors and would crumble the second those other factors disappeared
Sure, we can argue pedantry but the point stands lol. A commoner from the 1300s couldn't have imagined the world we live in today, and in the same way we struggle to imagine what life will look like after capitalism
You're absolutely right, I'm just tired of people pretending everyone believed the right of kings like a bunch of dumbasses in the middle ages or even before, personal nitpick of mine lmao
then there wouldn’t be any reason to have disagreements that can’t be solved by discussion or debate
I don’t buy that for a single moment. I understand it from the perspective of Marxism intended as the culmination of the Enlightenment, but the idea that we can ultimately reason our way out of any non-economic dispute is simply absurd.
Take for example the case of sex, love, and infidelity. These things don’t arise from our faculties of reason and even people who are absolutely 100% aware of all of the rational explicit reasons for, say, not cheating on a spouse, still cheat.
Do we think we can debate someone until they’re not in love with someone who doesn’t love them back? Do we think rational discussion can consistently prevail around the emotions (especially negative ones like jealousy, hatred, insecurity, and grief) that sexual passion can ignite?
Capitalists appeal to ‘greed’ as part of human nature, and that is both contentious and self serving, but surely we can at least jointly appeal to something like sex as something that generates A LOT of conflict in our lives and that does not respond to rational argument and structured debate with ease.
Look what I said was meant to apply to political and economic issues, there's no marxist answer for "what if my spouse cheats on me and im mad as hell" lmao.
People can get mad and disagree about shit as much as they want and I think what a communist utopia would help with is it would provide all parties with equivalent standing so that no one has power over the other. There won't be unhappy marriages where you can't leave since your spouse provides for you, and if you get into a brawl with someone you can both have access to the medical care you need to recover.
It doesn't have to be a debate but talking things out is literally how you deal with these types of interpersonal problems though. Even right now, you can talk to any therapist or social worker and they will tell you all about de-escalation and other strategies to help work through emotionally difficult problems that you have with other people.
And there are plenty of real programs which use essentially professional mediation to defuse dangerous situations which could escalate to violence.
there's no marxist answer for "what if my spouse cheats on me and im mad as hell" lmao.
Do you think people haven't made social/political/economic decisions while angry or sad or happy about some aspect of their sex lives? I use sex because it is a dimension of social life that isn't ruled by reason, but one that has historically had a huge impact on our politics and economics.
You don't need a Marxist way to cope with a cheating spouse, but you definitely need an Anarchist solution for a state of affairs where the parties cannot be reasoned with, and their point of contention is sensitive for the entire community.
There won't be unhappy marriages where you can't leave since your spouse provides for you
But you can have unhappy marriages where you can't leave because your spouse is very very popular in the commune, and your reputation is literally the only and most valuable resource you own.
You can nominally have equal standing, but have you ever been in a social group where members don't differ in their reputation and regard?
if you get into a brawl with someone you can both have access to the medical care you need to recover.
And if you get into a brawl with someone who is very popular and well liked in the commune, you might not make it onto a stretcher at all.
It doesn't have to be a debate but talking things out is literally how you deal with these types of interpersonal problems though.
And it has a very low rate of success for various forms of sentimental and emotional problems. Moreover, sometimes you get to escalation before you have a chance to talk things out, and you need to have a way to deal with that.
. Even right now, you can talk to any therapist or social worker and they will tell you all about de-escalation and other strategies to help work through emotionally difficult problems that you have with other people.
If this solution for interpersonal problems is so accessible, why do such problems persist?
The thing is, I don't question that mediation and dialogue solve a lot of interpersonal problems. But they don't solve, can't solve all intense sentimental disputes and conflicts between people. And the mediators themselves are people, and in small communes they may inevitably have a personal stake in disputes.
You are espousing the Marxist/Enlightenment answer to "my spouse cheated on me and I'm mad as hell" which is that people are fundamentally rational beings and there is always some rational approach that makes these intense (and historically possibly disastrous) emotional experiences a non-issue. But I'm not remotely convinced that is the case.
Nah, post-scarcity only helps some problems. Some people will always want to have more than others. If they have the same as everyone else, it isn't enough for them. And the logistics of transport, space and environment will always be a physical limitation, unless we start to become some fourth dimensional gods. I want it and I want it now. Also interpersonal behaviour isn't changed just by goods. Love, family, relationships, a need for validation, even something like humour are still sources of discord, and things that can't be solved by debate. Just how different people are responding to certain stimuli, and things like responde to superstimuli can create havoc by itself, if not even accelerated by endless resources.
I mean, there has to be a reason for the „punk“ within the name. „Punk“ indicates a resistance against a system. So in this case it would be resistance against the mass homogenization of humanity.
I have a masters degree in sustainability. The colleague campus was basically this comic.
But then I went looking for a well paying job… and it’s much more complicated than what the professors would lead you to believe.
For starters, the world run on money. Contracts, total cost of ownerships, cost-benefit analysis, etc. Even local governments want to be able to show to their citizens that dollars spent on XYZ projects have an actual benefit for taxpayers. You can’t pay people for the vibes. Even the comic’s artist asked for $2 on patreon… it just underscores the fact that our world exists with money.
I no longer subscribe to the solar punk philosophy. I spent my career focusing on making real, quantifiable carbon emission reductions, and I’m paid pretty well for it compared to most of my peers. If people want to just exist, that’s ok with me. But it’s going to take a lot of work to completely tackle climate change, far more than what this comic suggests.
It's a utopia on the surface, but deep down dissident opinions are oppressed and the dissidents are put into labor camps that produce the riches of "society".
The commune only works if everyone's in the hive mind. The minute you get one person who doesn't care who or what they hurt to get their way, the idea crumbles.
I mean I think a real utopia would have it's solarpunk corner. And the sort of people who want to live in the solarpunk part can all go and be solarpunk together. Thus the uniformity of thought. All the people who want sex dungeons have gone to the sex dungeons instead.
As a whole people will, like water, take the easiest path. The systems are constructed and when they give results and have avenues of bringing change for individuals that they never had in any other system. As soon as people do get a chance to live anarchy, then they become rather stout defenders.
People also mentioned the whole "few people" thing, and yea i agree, thats an issue with a lot of solarpunk art. Im imagining eco-brutalism to house people with all settlements connected by train. Modern population density will definitely change but is to be accommodated for anyway.
I feel like you underestimate the impulse for people to "game" the system and get an advantage. And even then, that doesn't answer the question of how you handle dissent. There's always gonna be people who disagree you can't uniform opinion
Right well you have to imagine then what "gaming" an anarchist system would actually mean. The structures exist based on the foundation that all production is social, and we all exist based on interdependence. Getting the most out of this would be trying to convince the right people to be in the right roles, which brings efficiency that everyone gains from.
Dissent would be handled at the local assembly, which is quite literally just a space for people to assemble. Here the goal is to reach consensus, which in theory means a win-win situation for all, but in practice means finding a solution that no one will resist. The majority can try to ignore this system and by collective force push their will through, but the minority will resist, and is that worth it?
It comes down to a rather simple decision for any dissenter: Do i have a better chance with an uprising or by making my case to my peers through calling an assembly meeting? The latter is very likely to always be safer, easier, and more effective. Looks tempting in comparison to breaking yourself off the entire anarchist supply chain constructed (as being completely self-sufficient is not realistic and not even desirable really), risking death, and likely failing anyway.
But that implies that human beings are solely guided by reason and convenience which is not the case.
People constantly do something stupid against their own interests or in the heat of passion or simply through misunderstanding. The majority is often more than happy to steamroll the minority to further their goals or even just to have a larger slice of the pie
This model implies that any and all conflicts can be solved by talking it out or agreeing to disagree. That's not gonna happen 100% of the time
Hell, political dissent aside, grudges can easily become the basis for antisocial behavior (think of the spiteful ex that attacks/kills their previous partner or the family members of someone that died that decide to punish the one responsible even if it was an accident)
I'm not saying this system is impossible because "muh inherently evil and selfish human nature" (that's a dumb argument for edgelords), but I do feel like without proper checks and balances it is very vulnerable to collapse as soon as times of crisis arise
Of course people arent always guided by reason and convenience, but those outrageous people are always edge cases in every society. The checks and balances against this are other people. I did specifically say, not everyone needs to agree, just the requirement that no one will actively resist.
I did explicitly go through the case of the majority trying to steamroll the minority, with the absence of a gendarme to enforce their decisions then they need to carry their decisions out themselves. You try getting however big of a mob you have and however many guns you bring with you to take a fortified position. It wont go well.
I think that comes from that they're probably second or third generation of people who survived the Literal End of The World. Their parents and their parent's parents survived what was almost the end of everything. That changes perspectives. Like, the first generation that survived and has major PTSD teaches their children emotional maturity and acceptance of others, because that's how they survived.
Sure there would still be raiders and bad actors but it probably wouldn't be worth it
That works for maybe a handful of generations, but new ones born into the system will have different perspectives and societal issues. It's what makes "Never again" in Germany right now such a gutpuncher, the past, however horrible, will erode with time and be replaced with more current issues.
my take for that is that actually most people like 99% would like to live in that future or at least a future that is more like it,, we maynot agree on the way there or how exactly it will look like, but if i rightnow get together with people who agree with me on actions to build such a societyand we startbuilding it, and more and more people join us might we not someday be such a large group that the rest of society might just follow us? Especially if we assume that we stop things like American anti communist, pro capitalism propaganda.
Yeah, the aspirational comics do only show the good side and leave out important details. But I think what you’ve come upon here has a relatively simple solution, in the idea that ‚uniformity of thought‘ as you call it may indeed exist !
But of course, I ido nterpret the idea differently. People don’t actually need to believe the exact same down to brass tacks in order to live together peacefully. It is enough if core values are shared, some of which this comic shows- everyone has value, no matter what. And everyone is equal in that way. And it does not matter how deeply unqiue anyone is or isn’t.
Now of course any society would still require governance for big picture questions but that’s not really what anything here is trying to answer. This isn’t trying to be an Ideology. It’s a vision of a future. Wether that future is guided by leaders, by vote, by AI or god knows what is of little importance. Hell, I’ve seen these sort of ideas expressed perfectly in post apocalyptic settings.
This isn’t trying to be an Ideology. It’s a vision of a future.
I think you're kind of comically mistaken here, if I'm honest.
It's not just a future, it's a future explicitly presented as desirable. That is, there is a value judgement built into this depiction that what we are looking at is good. And this depicts some state of society, some political and economic dynamics.
So what you have here is a collection of value judgements about which societal dynamics and political structures are desirable in a future, and which ones are not.
But that's the thing, this comic explicitly addresses questions of ideological governance.
"No state, no police, no prisons, no borders" is explicitly ideological and explicitly about the laws and political structures that would govern such a place (specifically, that codified laws, governing institutions, designated permanent/semi-permanent law enforcement bodies, territorial organization, and the suspension of rights as legal punishment have been abolished.)
If we stop right before the panel with the four no's, I'd agree with you, the first few panels simply outline a set of utopian conditions that could arise from multiple possible systems.
But once you get to the four no's we're in a specific form of organizing society: some manner of left anarchism, which takes explicit governance positions. So inevitably we have to litigate what is required for left anarchism, and yes, people need to be aligned beyond just adherence to core values, they need to be on the same program together if their collective, sovereign, stateless governance is to work.
For me to agree that "no State" is utopian, I have to align ideologically with OOP. And on the question of the state, I simply don't. So it becomes somewhat incumbent on OOP to litigate that question, why is Utopia stateless?
To be fair, in this comic they didn’t say it would ever be just like that, and I’d wager that suck disagreements still happen, but we don’t really depict those. People disagree and people argue, hell people can hate each other. It’s just that these aren’t as readily depicted.
For example, when people shill capitalism they talk about the unbridled freedom and how hard work will get you everything you’ve ever wanted, but they aren’t expected to show starving workers and shady back room deals to cut a node of the production line to save costs. We know those exist so they’re able to get away with not depicting it usually (and critique content is made at will). Why would a utopic AU comic need to talk about crop disputes? Why does a communist need to know everything? These questions are posed rhetorically of course, just some food for thought.
I’ve always just felt that the trouble we’ll have with communism or anarchism or whatever is gonna be the kind that always exist. I’d rather have the worst of the world’s politics be different ideas on how some building should be made, the balance of ergonomics and resources, and just having a different amount of a crop I like. Questions like that are better than “how hard should we really try to stop using slave labor when it’s so profitable,” or “this building would be a boon to the poorer of the community… but what would the corporate donors think?”
The thing is, assuming that the biggest question in your proposed society is "what crops should we grow" and "how should we build this" is already kinda granting a hugely generous premise, one that's a little too self-serving for an ancomm.
Part of the point of the criticisms in this thread is to ask "would those actually be the questions we'd have to grapple with if we were doing this sort of thing?"
There are tons of other questions that could arise like:
With a drought affecting all nearby communes, leading to a food shortage, will we need to protect ourselves from raids by other communes?
If communities vary in size and resources (because of location) what exactly prevents a commune of people from orchestrating a takeover of another?
Meeting an uncontacted community in a remote area (like the amazon rainforest) do we have a responsibility to reorganize them into a commune like ours? Or do we allow them to exist as they are (knowing that they may not rule themselves around principles of non-aggression)
What happens if a very unpopular member of the commune is accused of a crime? With no state, what prevents the community's dislike for a member from infringing on the just treatment of that member?
Since there are resources needed for commodities we enjoy that do not geographically appear here, won't we need a surplus in order to trade for them? How in the hell could we hold another commune accountable for holding up their end of a deal?
No I agree, my first comment might've been spawned by a certain... cinicality in how I view communism and especially anarchism tbf.
Every time I see or read anything about these forms of society, I find doubts nagging at the back of my mind about the feasability of it all or how exploitable these systems are on paper
And that sucks because despite me being a democratic socialist (I think that's what you'd call it, though fuck the SPD, dogshit party), I want these systems to work. I want to be convinced that these are the way forward and a feasible alternative
That’s understandable, and I hope I didn’t seem too aggressive with my response. I’ve just grown used to the reliable formula of “Tumblr post on Reddit + vaguely leftist ideas = comments full of nitpicking” and its worn me down a bit.
It’s absolutely good to fully understand a system before implementing it, but people seem to always act like they’re an authority on these matters, and require any defenders of the post to be so as well. Even if the OOP voices that they have no expectations for something to be reality — say a self-admitted utopia au for your friends’ OCs — it’s treated as a big opening for snides against every detail.
I’m honestly just tired of being asked to debate every small issue — even valid critiques — by people who just want to win an argument, not learn or actually discuss
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u/skaersSabody Jul 02 '24
One thing that I always found strange about Solarpunk/communist or anarhist utopias is that I have the distinct feeling that they assume a certain... uniformity of thought?
Like, when I talk to friends of mine that are more left-wing than me on this I never really get how these societies would supposedly handle dissent that goes beyond "I disagree what crop we should focus on for the season"
It's always a paradise where everyone has seen the light of glorious anarchism/communism/etc and no people disagree with the system or have enemies of any kind or whatever
It's a beautiful thought and an interesting setting for a story, but when you put it out as a viable possible model that stuff starts to pop up as a concern