Solar Punk is just another version of the Nordic model

Okay, to be more serious, my main vibe from looking at solarpunk art is that the artists aren't involved in production, especially industrial production. Ultimately, I wonder how production is handled in a solarpunk society. There's essentially two ends of a spectrum: industrial production and artisan production.

Industrial production means factories, and I struggle to find any meaningful difference between a solarpunk factory vs a futuristic factory vs a cyberpunk factory. All futuristic factories converge to a design of being:

Autonomous
In near/complete darkness
Filled with inert gas

And since a society is ultimately organized by how production is handled, then there's really not a whole lot of difference between a solarpunk society and a more generic futuristic society. Less chrome and more trees I guess? From a purely aesthetic perspective, you turn a futuristic factory into a solarpunk factory by photoshopping a bunch of trees right next to the factory and replacing a field of invasive grass with a field of native wildflowers. But the actual interior of the factory would be identical, and a faithful depiction of the interior of a solarpunk factory would be identical to a faithful depiction of the interior of a futuristic factory.

Artisan production is the other end, and that's where the fashy vibes come from, especially when artisan production is artistically extolled by artists living in a settler-colonial society where the ideal form of living is larping as a yeoman homesteading pioneer living on stolen Indigenous land. Even "communal living" doesn't cut it because artisan production can't keep up with industrial production, meaning the outputs of artisan production often goes to the immediate community and the immediate community only. And if you live within a community that lacks the means or ability to produce that particular commodity because your skin color is different or you live in an arid desert? Well, tough shit.

I gotta agree on the artisan production as idealized by people inside settler society often having fashy vibes, especially when people start talking about setting up a commune in the woods for their friends.
Just from image searching a lot of the art does seem to just be futuristic building+trees, but where are the animals? gimme a big field of bison just living their lives next to a towering hive-city without sprawling suburbs and some trees please!

looks at the 180+ comments from a post about how solarpunk sucks and is reactionary

Hexbear is not ready for the post about how cyberpunk sucks and is reactionary.

I wonder why there's nearly 200 comments in this post

This thing had 3 comments when I went to bed. Did Yogthos rile up the libs again?

EDIT: Nope, just another struggle session.

It's a nice change of pace from our usual AI struggle session though. :)
- This might be the AI struggle session in disguise, because when I googled "solarpunk" to figure out which side I was gonna bat for (I already knew the genre but I wanted to make a point about what most people that are just learning about it might see) it was all AI generated. Ironically, I know you land more on the pro-AI side of things, that immediately galvanized me in the anti-solarpunk side.

Solarp8nk could be an actual thing if it was actually punk in any way. Like a critique of the greenwashing many companies and countries like to do.

that fucking yogurt commercial. that's like the Black Book of Liberalism for me right there.

One of the core issues in Marxist ecology is the separation of town and country, how we unevenly develop urban/rural systems and the increased toll that takes on natural ones as a result. We need degrowth, decommodification, and a biocentric reintegration of those three systems. Solar punk is just an aesthetic but alongside art nouveau it's the kind of aesthetic you need to communicate a better way of life. If people just see their treats being taken away they turn reactionary. If they just see the climate crisis as an inevitable apocalypse, they turn reactionary. Solar punk is a non-reactionary example of the neo-luddite garden cities we should be moving toward. It's much more holistically anticapitalist than other punk or traditionalist movements, and it's pleasant when we need radical optimism and significant lifestyle changes that otherwise seem difficult.

The task of a Marxist with a movement like that is to identify the things people like about it and situate it in theory. There's a solid 100+ years of theory on those themes which tie them into larger and more practical things to organise around. Solar punk is a vehicle to get people interested in socialist urbanism and critical ecology, not some utopian goal in itself.

Personally think we should all live in massive arcologies built for a billion people and the whole world other than these massive arcologies should be returned to the wild.
- Separation from nature is the root of us not understanding our interdependence with it. When it's something we interact with daily and rely on, stewardship becomes an ethical cornerstone that people intuitively understand. Engels said the solution was an even population distribution, and while I think that's another form of over-development I think it hints at the best solution. High density, pedestrian-focused garden cities surrounded by common land. Heavy funding for rural communities and collectivised, nationalised resource extraction to decouple it from profit. Production for need between co-ops, home economy with the commons, state-sponsored public artisans, and nationalised industry. Healing the division of labour by blurring the lines between the office worker, farmer, scientist, and activist through how people engage with their landscape.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqJJktxCY9U This video really captures the good part of solar punk for me. They're mastering nature but not dominating it. They need a tremendous number of diverse skills to maintain that homestead lifestyle, but that's a liberating education rather than one that forces them into some professional niche. The technology and surplus exist for need and community enrichment. That massive urban arcology is there in the background of the equally desirable rural life, but it's an urban forest with parks between dispersed skyscrapers. It doesn't do a great job of highlighting what a biocentric landscape would look like, but it at least shows biodiversity as beauty and agrovoltaics as eco-utilitarian production.
  That and the 400~ page books by David Harvey or John Bellamy Foster reach the same conclusion for what 21st century socialism will have to resemble. If I made the anime version of the most radical environmentalist critique I can make it'd just be a prettier version of that.
- Arcologies would be amazing.

Listen, if your hopecore fanfic art doesn’t sufficiently conform to the standards of socialist realism as to please your Soviet’s censors, it’s basically just fascist slop sorry I don’t make the rules

correct

This is very silly.

Deeply unserious, even.
- Whoa, hold it, it's just a bad take.
  "Depicting results of labor while keeping the labor itself hidden is a fascist style" is just not a sturdy argument and should be corrected.
  If they had said that "solarpunk is to some degree based on a longing for the wild frontier, and the foundational aspiration in settler colonies toward frontier life is fascist", they'd at least have a good point, but a bad take is not worth excising someone over.

what percentage of solarpunk art contains the people who live in or work in or build its subjects

I looked at google images and it's not close to 0% and I have no idea what's specifically fascist about pictures of solar panels covered in tree leaves if you forget to add the person in overalls holding a hammer.

Ecomodernism is heavily associated with libertarian/fascist fringe politics through Zaha hadid and her firm. Solarpunk takes heavily from ecomodernism
That's what i got, but I'm not really an architecture or art guy

Everyone I've ever known into solarpunk has been a socialist. Collective action for housing, food, water, and energy production to all has always been their main goal, with ending exploitation by oligarchic control over those resources as their main entry point into the genre. I'm sure there's plenty of lib bullshit like literally every aethetic choice but this is just trolling tbh

[thing you are invested in] is actually somewhat [thing that you would hate to be associated with]

this is just a generic Twitter troll post, right down to the hedging intended to keep the argument going in the replies

Art is fascist when I assume it doesn't depict humans

Goofy because Solarpunk (while idealist as @Chapo_is_Red@hexbear.net points out) is more interested in human involvement and labor than any other "-punk" aesthetic.

Solar-punk feels like of like an inversion of socialist realism to me. Socialist realism celebrates the worker as creator with muscles straining, tools in hand, actively building the world. Labor is heroic, collective, and visibly transformative. The aesthetic screams: WE made this. On the other hand, solar-punk envisions society after the work is done with comfortable citizens enjoying green tech built by unseen hands. The aesthetic whispers: Look what grew while no one was laboring.
- So all art featuring architecture that doesn't have it actively being built or features someone holding a hammer in the foreground is fascist?
  Is this fascist?
- All I'm getting out of this discourse is Solarpunk art needs more twinks or bears (pick yer poison) in dirty overalls installing solar panels and geodesic domes
- What, so you're saying:
  Westerners need to fantasize less about the complete reorganization of society into something utterly unrecognizable and focus more on how to take control over the ugliness that already exists so that they can chart a better course for their countries, as China has.
  That being said, it's a huge stretch to compare it to social fascism. While it is political in nature, I feel its merits lie more as a literary and artistic counterbalance to dystopian worldbuilding in the west
  Honestly, taking it as its worst, an aesthetic artistic movement is based on aesthetic, and frankly I don't see a lot of harm in that, at all, but it's not good if one is stuck on it, as an end-all
  I think its role is similar to that of religion, albeit more benign
  Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
  The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
- Socialist realism celebrates the worker as creator with muscles straining, tools in hand, actively building the world
  Do you actually have a conception of Soviet & socialist art outside of the Western propagandistic portrayal of it? Now, I'm not an art historian or anything myself, but I'm pretty sure it was not in fact a Japanese bara manga about big sweaty workers with their hulking muscles swinging hammers around. The Soviet Union was a big country, with many separate republics and ethnicities (hence the name!), and I'm sure a variety of styles and artistic movements.
  The Soviets were also pretty big on resorts with spa-style facilities, so portraying workers as only ever working wouldn't have even necessarily been the ideological line, especially after the Stakhanovites went out of fashion. And a bunch of socialist realist paintings aren't of workers at all, they're just Stalin or other important figures standing around looking cool

twitter users:

is this fascism?

Shit, the Trots were right
If that was the sum of Soviet aesthetic then you might even have a point. However, the bulk of Soviet art celebrates the worker. On the other hand, labour is entirely invisible in pretty much all the solar-punk aesthetic.
- i apologize in advance, the maximum comment depth was reached, this comment is a reply to https://hexbear.net/comment/6331483
  i brought it up as a counter example to the dispossessed on soviet sci-fi, before i ever called the dispossessed a foundational piece of solar-punk media
  but i will agree that at the time, the concept of communism becoming a interstellar society was very real to those living in the USSR
  in the material circumstance of ursula living in cold war era america, anarcho-syndicalism being applied to build socialism in a theoretical future interstellar capitalist system seemed much more plausible, which is also why the dispossessed had a second boost of popularity when solar-punk started up as a movement in between the dissolution of the USSR by capitalist encroachment and the rise of china as a second communist superpower
- of the first eight image results on google, six of them have people in them, and of the ones that have people in them, 4/6 of them show labour idk what you're talkign about lmao

Imma be real, I can't see the point in debating about the political tendencies of aesthetics. It's literally fiction. It doesn't have to adhere to reality and so can be appropriated by anyone.

Treatlerism
Treatskyites

Solarpunk is just "what if we did futurism with lots of trees or literally just solar panels?"

Futurism is sci-fi (sometimes a little fantasy) and can therefore mesh with any political tendency except maybe the most purist of reactionaries / primitivists.

I'm not sure how you'd even know the people in the place built it. Let's say you have a big shiny complex full of trees and people. If the people built it, do they have to wear overalls and safety helmets or can they wear casual clothes? How can you tell that a person in an image built a structure unless they're actively building it or just finished building it?

Futurism is sci-fi (sometimes a little fantasy) and can therefore mesh with any political tendency except maybe the most purist of reactionaries / primitivists.
I mean, other than Russian futurism that was tamed by Leninism before quickly dying out as an art movement, futurism developed into the aesthetic of fascism.
- The Palazzo Brasch says, "si si si si si si" to you.
  100% correct on futurism as a distinct art movement. I'm using a loosey goosey reference to it, really, which includes solarpunk hyperrealism and so on.

This is fascism because it depicts evil red fash tankie utopia, I am very smart

pushing someone in and out of the frame looney tunes style and watching the fascism alarm go off once the number of mandatory hammer and sickle-wielding workers reaches the minimum threshold
- The "Duck season!" / "Rabbit season!" bit, but it's "Ecosocialism!" / "Ecofascism!"

Wall-E is ecofuturist, and both depicts capitalism as a social ill, and emphasizes the hard work that the humans put in to make Earth livable again post-apocalypse.

I don't have a point to make, I just like Wall-E

^ᶦⁿ ^ᵗʰᶦˢ ^ᵉˢˢᵃʸ ^ᶦ ^ʷᶦˡˡ

I have nothing to add, but I liked Wall-E too!
It stars a little movie nerd with a decaying body
^he's ^just ^like ^me ^fr

Oh and btw we're doing Neo-Andean architecture for our socialist society, please make the necessary arrangements.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/03/freddy-mamanis-neo-andean-architecture/

the famous fascist artform of, uh... landscape painting?

"EVERY PAINTING MUST FIT A QUOTA OF PEOPLE IN-FRAME" is a take that even actual state censors in communist countries didn't have, truly we never stop innovating

posting the rest of these on Imgur since I'm tired of waiting on the rate-limit: https://imgur.com/a/zVOjY4E

You're missing the point. There are people in-frame often, just not the people who did the building. It's just artists and other quirky culture aficionados whose lifestyle is founded on the work of laborers who are rarely considered and certainly don't receive the same lionization.
- The tweet very specifically says "the people who live in or work in or ...", it's not singling out just workers at all! You're arguing a completely different point.
  Also, how the fuck do we know what the people in-frame are? By what metric did we determine that they're "culture afficionados" and not workers? They're not actively swinging hammers in the image?
  And what's wrong with artists anyway, socialist countries obviously had plenty of those??
  And, even if they were workers, they probably wouldn't be the ones who built it anyway! Construction is its own separate sector of the economy, most workers in socialist countries aren't in construction and thus live in homes they didn't build themselves, like, what are we even talking about here?
An Imgur link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.
imgur.artemislena.eu
rimgo.projectsegfau.lt
imgin.voidnet.tech

So idk anything about solar punk, but I did an image search for it and about half the images have people in them and none of it seems particularly fascist?

Imo, it's an aesthetic. Ideologically, the worst I can call it is idealist.
- I think to that point, if we want to figure out how you get from solarpunk to fascism, you need to consider what it implies by its analysis (or lack thereof) of the actual material reality that's necessary to make the solarpunk vision come true and how that analysis/blind spots coincide with ecofascism.
  What's going on that made dilapidated buildings get overrun by plantlife? Is it massive depopulation? Are we idealizing that?
  What's the whole idea about self sufficient communities using technology to live in some kind of frontier? Is this class-conscious, or is it just repackaging settler mythology about frontiersmen and Lebensraum?
  And maybe the problem with it "just" being an aesthetic is that it leaves the audience to fill in the blanks for those questions, and I think the default answers aren't great.
- I'm in the same boat and so I find such charged characterisations pretty jarring. I at least appreciate people imagining a futurist aesthetic that isn't Silicon Valley minimalism, the "Society if" meme or grimy cyberpunk. I ignore any political programs that people tie into it.
Half of these pictures, if you were to politically analyze them in the context of solarpunk, are somehow quaint little farms but also wind power which if you'd cared about saving the earth is definitely not something you'd do. Optimally you'd want very dense urban enviroment mostly if not all to make sure as much nature as possible can be untouched and thriving.
- I thought about this line too, but there's also a lot of urban solar punk art or people calling certain talk buildings in Italy and China solar punk
- Optimally you'd want very dense urban enviroment mostly if not all to make sure as much nature as possible can be untouched and thriving.
  Just a heads up that the idea of nature = no humans, or rather, the divide between human spaces and "natural" spaces is also firmly rooted in white supremacy and colonial ways of looking at land and its role in production. Indigenous and global south people, even global north people in some cases have thrived in rural and wild environments while inhabiting them and participating in the biodiversity. The problem isn't people, it's extractivism. And if ecosystems will ever have a chance to recover it will be through regenerative and conscious practices, not by letting fields fallow and forests do their thing while humans live sequestered "outside" of nature.
- I disagree pretty hard with dense urban areas being optimal and that leaving land outside of cities "untouched" would be a good thing.
  Humans are nature and the entire planet is our home, which must be maintained regularly. This idea that we need to separate ourselves from the so-called natural world in order to protect it seems incorrect based on history. Many indigenous groups maintained thriving forests, grasslands, etc for centuries before colonizers showed up. Many other animals maintain their environments as well; beavers, elephants, etc. Humans are pollinators too!
  Obviously we do many horrible things to our environment, but that's not an innate human behavior. We learned to be destructive of our own environment over time and then it was spread everywhere through colonization. Many people went from being just another animal to seeing themselves as special and, largely through religion (not saying religion is bad, just saying it was used as a tool by the ruling class to indoctrinate people), were taught that everything and everyone existed to be exploited for resources. Capitalism is born out of this idea that we are not part of nature.
  I think alienation as described by Marx and others after him explains what I'm saying here in a different context and certainly in more detail. I also don't think we shouldn't mostly live in cities of some type, but we absolutely need people out in the world taking care of it. Moreover, I think at least a not insignificant number of humans simply cannot thrive in dense urban environments.
- but also wind power which if you'd cared about saving the earth is definitely not something you'd do
  That depends. (link is to probably the most principled/scientific solarpunk in existence)
Notice how solar-punk aesthetic envisions comfortable lives built on technology others created. It shows the result of labor without showing the labor itself.
- built on technology others created
  Whenever I saw it, I presumed it was stuff built and maintained by those depicted, and we were seeing the in-between as conditions reached a point where the relative downtime was enough that it was the majority of experienced time.
- Notice how solarpunk aesthetic envisions a lifestyle completely at odds with its productive forces. No, I don't think your household windmill is going to sustain that level of civilization! You will build 20 MW Chinese wind turbines and you will enjoy your high level of electricity consumption.

somebody tell Andrewism he's fash

Yeah, solarpunk is obviously a reactionary aesthetic. You can read the manifestos of its popularizers and very clearly see the class position of the art movement. How is lionizing the artisan and other middle classes, a reduction in productive capacity, and its desire to revive dead art styles outside of their historical context not reactionary? Stop with the solarpunk and "degrowth" and read more Soviet sci-fi and Chinese five-year plans.

fucked up part is the art isn't even good. it's barely an art movement. it's like, a subreddit at most.
- Is solarpunk art solarpunk if it was generated by AI? - millennia old Zen koan
putting degrowth in the same category to be dismissed is not serious. this is not the 1980s.
whats wrong with degrowth? solely educational question if you feel like replying
- It depends a lot on the context. Degrowth in the imperial core? Sure. In the periphery? Hell nah
  There was a relatively recent study about the responsibility about climate change that puts the ratio between north / south countries at 9:1, see https://globalinequality.org/responsibility-for-climate-breakdown/ for further references.
- Because good degrowth is indistinguishable from socialist five-year plans, and bad degrowth is indistinguishable from austerity. I don't like Saitō, but from what I've read so far from Hickel, his work is worthwhile.
- Mostly because degrowth can mean everything from "maybe we don't need so many funkopops and ads" to "the peasants should learn to subsist on grass", so it is not by itself meaning anything.

solar punk is real but not how its creators envisage it

Why is a huge PV field in the Sahara, with all the distribution infrastructure and maintenance costs this requires, better than its equivalent capacity in a thousand distributed solar parks in the vicinity of the cities that use that electricity?
A roof full of solar panels can give one person all the electricity they need, as long as they don't need ostentatious individualized transportation and meal preparation powered by the grid.
- ostentatious... meal preparation powered by the grid.
🔥

I think solarpunk while it looks nice is idealistic and does not have a much intellectual depth to it. For example its art pieces do not convey any information about the social relations which makes it very hard to imagine how we can have conditions remotely close to what is being depicted because the works feel more like science fantasy than anything. But equating it with fascist futurism is hasty. I can't explain why because I know nothing about fascist futurism tendencies. But I don't think just because solarpunk skip labour and jumps straight to its fruits makes it fascist. It just makes it a bit silly.

You can't prescribe an aesthetic to a future that doesn't exist. The aesthetic of our future will be determined alongside building it, not isolated from the work.

Oh we're talking about something for video games aren't we?

for video games aren't we?
i think it's mostly 2D art not games stuff
- There are a ton of "solarpunk" games, too

This is a really interesting point. But the fascist art is always historic "better times" shit, depicting an old world in a utopian way (without people in it). It's never the future.

This isn't true. Even aside from Italian futurism, there is also art of places like "Germania," the proposed super-city that some Nazis dreamed of making the capitol of the conquered world.
Counterpoint: Italian futurism. Though I don't think drawing a futuristic city with lots of trees is fascist, I think it's pining for more green spaces. Or for built environments to be aesthetically more pleasant than a sea of asphalt.
- Italian futurism preceded fascism, though but only by a few years and was co-opted and later marginalized. Mussolini was kind of riding Futurism's coattails and then vice versa as fascism developed more. An interesting example though.
Futurism and ecomodernism were/are both pretty associated with the furthest right.

I'm a fan of the YouTuber "andrewism", who regularly makes videos on an anarchist solar punk society. I don't think he supports solar punk just as an aesthetic, but believes it's legitimately part of what an ideal and egalitarian society would look like, alongside other concepts he's discussed like library economies.

I don't think solar punk is idealist either. Idealism doesn't just mean it's still just a concept, or that people want to use it as a goal. Solar punk is materialist because it describes a society that reproduces the values that sustain it, like land stewardship and collectivism. It describes a super structure with communal control of resources, which then does the whole self reinforcement with the base (which, admittedly, solarpunk also describes). It's not just the aesthetic.

I've enjoyed his solarpunk stuff because he does give a much more pro-social and conscious tilt to it, as opposed to the tendencies within the solarpunk trend that myself and others have been criticizing here. Not a fan of his sectarianism, though.

And here I thought the low population bit was supposed to be because technology and decentralization allows humanity to spread out and higher standards of living and education being the birth rate down 🤔 I guess either way we're making a lot of assumptions about a hypothetical commercial like future aesthetics....

the only thing we have now that i think would impact birth rates in a high-tech socialist future is low infant mortality.
pretty much everything else that pressures people to have kids or not have kids is rooted in patriarchal religion and the capitalist hellscape. Who knows what people would do without losing career prospects to raise children, without god telling them to be fruitful and multiply, without despairing climate change, and without the imposition of the nuclear family? hell maybe the population would even go up more.