I mean, let’s be honest: People do crimes even when they have no material need to do so, so you will always need some form of law enforcement, how should a solarpunk society handle this?
The same is true for a military: As long as there is no world peace or some magical way to shut the outside world out, and as long as other societies exist somewhere nearby (and in today’s world this means somewhere on the same planet), a society needs the means to defend itself… what would this look like?
It would be like an earthship community, or an amish community. It relies on a legitimate government outside of it to provide actual protection from outside lawlessness. A solar punk commune couldnt exist in a wartorn country, it would become a refuge for those seeking shelter and nourishment. Imo a better thought experiment would be how can we build passive structures on lines of communication outside of cities that can provide potable water or shade from the sun. “Johhny Appleseed” John Chapman style of how can we help provide for everyone instead of how can we build a gated community to keep the barbarians out.
It relies on a legitimate government outside of it to provide actual protection from outside lawlessness.
An solarpunk society would decentralize power as much as possible in-line with Anarchist principles. Anarchist Catalonia (which had over 3.5 million participants) demonstrated that a decentralized society is entirely viable, and how it functioned was documented quite well (such as in this book). We also have a modern example of how Rojava (a somewhat decentralized society in Syria of 4.6 million people) does community defense.
War is the highest level of compeition for humans. No anacharchist society could ever survive being in competition with a legitimate nation state with mordern weapons. I have been to Kurdistan in Northern Iraq, the Kurds have their own legitimate government and are their own quasi nation state. I don’t think comparing the horrors of the Syrian civil war (which had ungodly amounts of money and influence dumped into it from world powers), and the pinterest topic of solarpunk is fair at all. These two concepts are so incredibley far removed from each other, and the people there are just as reliant on fossil fuels and taking advantage of the environment as anyone else. It comes off as a luxury of wine drinking socialists to even compare the two. I never thought of “solarpunk” as the next logical step after overthrowing literal jihadist warlords with weapons from the russians and americans.
No anacharchist society could ever survive being in competition with a legitimate nation state with mordern weapons.
An anarchist society would need manufacturing capability to create weapons that would be effective against the enemies they faced (much like Ukraine’s local drone construction is essential to their survival). That was an issue in the Spanish Civil war, especially as no outside countries were willing to help logistically except for the USSR, which had strings attached, and was mostly diverted to the Marxist army.
These two concepts are so incredibley far removed from each other
I don’t believe they are. Rojava modeled its society on Democratic Confederalism as laid out by Abdullah Öcalan. Abdullah himself was heavily inspired was inspired by the works of Murray Bookchin, who advocated for a form of Eco-Anarchism, which Solarpunk itself is partly based upon.
I am not saying that Rojava is a solarpunk society, it is not, it’s also not considered properly Anarchist by most Anarchists, but it is currently an existing society that at least is attempting to decentralize societal power in a meaningful way (to varying degrees of success), similar to the Zapatistas.
A lot of colonial American power structures fit the intent of what you’re describing. For law enforcement, the local government would usually designate someone to be the head of law enforcement for day to day activities and there would be a communal drawing of manpower from the local community if the need arose. For the military, you had local militias which had elected officers and would vote on strategic actions if time permitted.
You’re likely going to see a lot of people here completely reject these forms of local communal government because communal doesn’t mean equal. For instance, the enforcement of slavery was a communal action in the South; free whites gladly assisted in the capture of escaped slaves.
I reject the idea that law enforcement is always necessary. Laws are frequently unjust and anti-solarpunk. I don’t care about people breaking laws if the laws don’t serve the people. But let’s say all the laws are just - I also reject the idea that we need a bunch of power-hungry assholes with weapons and legal immunity to “enforce” them.
Here’s the thing - we rely on the police to do a broad range of tasks and, at least in the US, we hand them a gun to do all of those tasks. The traffic lights are down? Take your gun and go stand in the intersection. Parking tickets? You’ll need your gun for that. Homeless people on the streets? Don’t forget your gun. House broken into? Here’s a gun, try not to shoot the wrong person.
The simple answer is that we should have a different team of (trained, specialized) people for each of those scenarios. Police don’t receive training in each of those areas which means they are frequently in danger and frequently relying on violence or the threat of violence to get things done. It’s not fair to the officers and its not fair to the people they “serve.” I want to see a team who handles traffic, a team to respond to homeless people (though hopefully we’ll be on our way to finally providing housing for all), a separate team for crimes like burglary and theft, etc etc.
Here’s a resource for you (and others) to check out, they explain things much more succinctly than me: https://defundthepolice.org/alternatives-to-police-services/
As for a military - I will be completely honest, I haven’t educated myself as much on alternatives to that, but I do question your assumption that we will always need to defend ourselves. It assumes that people will always be attacking us.
Solarpunk and its Anarchist ideals are a pretty direct threat to virtually every other societal system. Fascists, Capitalists, and Authoritarians all either see it as an enemy to starve out, or even directly attack in an attempt to prevent its spread, as was seen during the Russian Revolution with Mahkno’s Black Army, and the Spanish Civil War.
As long as there are still state governments with military might at their disposal, a Solarpunk society is likely going to need to be able to defend itself against them. The Anarchists of Spain organized their voluntary militias from the bottom up, where the soldiers themselves would elect someone to lead the group (but with the ability to immediately recall them outside of battle if they didn’t perform their duties to the satisfaction of the soldiers who elected them), and those elected leaders would then elect a commander to help organize them more effectively, with the same recall rules applied. It seemed to work out quite well for them.
However, there may be a point in time where the advantages of the alternative solarpunk system are too apparent to ignore, which could spark mass-civil disobediance or even revolution in those other countries causing their governments and capitalist economies to collapse, hopefully then leading to them joining in with their own solarpunk movements. Were that to eventually happen the world over, the need for militias to exists would likely dwindle.
AE Marling has written Missing Mermaid which is a detective story set in a Solarpunk city. (You don’t need to read the first book, which is also a detective story set in a Solarpunk city) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/221365244-missing-mermaid
Wait there’s a first book? I liked mermaid, have to check if there’s a predecessor
Yes, it’s called Murder at the Tool Library
Thx!
A self-ruling community is not a lawless place, you don’t need to be under government control to set up a police. An example where that is the case is Cherán, where until the 2011 uprising cartels had cut down 60,000 acres under the cover of bribed politicians and a corrupt police. In 2017 Cherán may have had the lowest homicide rate in the entire country of Mexico.
i think we’d draw wisdom from pre-colonial societies who responded to community members violating consensual paradigms of existing with community based corrections. the challenge i have is that on the Eurasian continent something went awry and when the most extreme punishment in this paradigm, exile, was assigned enough, eventually the exiled created their own domination societies that would go on to eliminate the societies that had exiled them (examples include the Kievan Rus’, the Romans, and the Huns). part of a realistic thought process towards solarpunk means asking ourselves how we prevent domination societies from re-arising
the challenge i have is that on the Eurasian continent something went awry and when the most extreme punishment in this paradigm, exile, was assigned enough, eventually the exiled created their own domination societies
That’s not a thing.
The way I see things, law enforcement and military are there to serve and protect those who are higher up in social hierarchies, as well as their wealth, even tho we are fed the story that they work for us, common people. In reality, they are a top-down structure, full of corruption, racism, sexism etc, and I really don’t feel safe around them.
So in order to answer your question, I would need to reframe it. It could be something like: how do people and areas can be protected, from other people or groups of people who are bad actors, within a society that does not have hierarchical structures, meaning that is organized in a horizontal way?
For me, the answer is not a sweeping rigid model that will be applied everywhere, all the time. People from different places see things differently, so local solutions need to be applied. Cultures worldwide have dealt with things. For example, one solution would be to look into their examples and find ideas that would fit for our community’s needs, and take it from there.
(If the questions was about the justice system, I would suggest to look into restorative justice, as well as transformative justice)
Solarpunk is an anarchist philosophy. There wouldn’t be law enforcement.
The assumption that law enforcement is a necessity is a shortsighted one. I’m not the best at explaining it but I can provide a link to reading about the concept.
In reality, the difference between objective law enforcement based on rule of law and anarchy in a small community is demonstrated by lynch mobs. It’s lovely to think that people don’t need someone like a local law enforcement officer, but someone with legal authority to counter mob mentality is for the benefit of the accused. Mobs don’t care about evidence or the law or circumstances. Localized collective violence is the term.
I’ve seen this a couple times around Africa. Zambia’s “flying coffin” is an ideomotor effect where sometime gets killed because “the body points to who killed them.”
Plenty of examples. Women accused of witchcraft. Lynchings. Necklacing. If you search for the word mob and “burned alive” you’ll find examples from every continent of localized collective violence.
Intentional communities aren’t immune from this.
In fact, I had an in-law that had to leave an intentional community they lived in for decades because no one was willing to address a member that was sexually abusing children. The collective violence was being unwilling to act.
That’s just plain false. You have a very limited perspective on this topic, it seems.
Read Graeber’s works such as “Dawn of Everything”, “Debt: the First 5000 Years”, and/or “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology” and learn the history of humanity. Society works perfectly fine with hierarchy and the state.
Literally all of human history is littered with examples of localized collective violence. Its a fairly well-studied topic.
Your meme paste is hopeful, sure. But you seem to speak from an obvious lack of experience of small community living. It takes a lot of work to keep a community going. Many intentional communities fail once a cluster of leaders age out of leadership.
I’m just asking you to accept that reality is real, messy, and complex. None of this should be shocking unless you’re just fantasizing about this.
Police riot. Trump and ICE are the institutionalization of the lynch mob. If government disappears, everything will not be just fine. People can be unreliable. The police and government are made of people. Governments fail, societies collapse. Solarpunk is a movement to adapt communities so that when government fails again, the harm can be mitigated.
The lynch mobs you’re referring to didn’t happen in spite of government, but with tacit approval of government at some level of administration. The people doing the lynching knew that they wouldn’t be held accountable, and that they would be protected by the government from retaliation. They aren’t examples of anarchy, they aren’t typical of small communities.
Lynch mobs typically are the result of unwritten laws being tacitly enforced by government.
Small communities do have problems, so we should continue the collective discussion of how to best resolve those problems in ways that preserve justice. Bringing in the FBI to deal with the racist police who were leading lynch mobs only worked until the federal level was recaptured by a more virulent strain of white supremacy. ‘Strange Fruit’ didn’t end because the FBI suddenly discovered injustice. It was a result of a long running grassroots community conversation about the problem until progress on alternative solutions showed enough success to became threatening to the supremacy of the federal government.
Reality is real, messy, and complex, and doesn’t get simpler by abdicating responsibility for that messy complexity to a class of people with even less accountability than ourselves. Communities fail, and often people with the imagination to think of creative alternative solutions and are doing the hard work of community building are the reason that they don’t. Assuming we don’t live in real, vibrant, complex worlds only telegraphs the simplicity of your own worldview.
I was interested so I started reading the link. From what I understand their main point is that crime is committed when someone is unable to meet their needs and that the best way to prevent crime is to adress those needs by social programs. But what if ones need is sexual frustration and they want to commit rape? I’m guessing we are not talking about giving out government mandated GFs here. Every need can’t be met especially if someone happens to simply be a sadist who specifically enjoys the feeling of causing harm. How are you gonna prevent these kinds of crimes with social programs? Mental health resources only work as far as the people who need them actually want to partake in them.
You might find this documentary interesting: Hollow Water | 2000 | 48 min
Most cases the reason for rape is less about urges, and more about power (with a dash of opportunity). There’s also societal predispositions baked into the way that people are raised. If your parents, friends, neighbours, media, etc, all treat rape as a horrid thing that nobody would do, it doesn’t even pop into people’s heads. And even if someone does it, they get shunned, though in the general the way solarpunk societies are presented also include community support, so both the perpetrator and the victim would get support. For the perpetrator, I’d assume there’d be an involved process of the why - what’s making them feel powerless, or making them think hurting others is okay, or whatever. They might need counselling, rescue from an abusive situation of their own, medication, or whatever not. It’s incredibly rare to have people who genuinely cannot help themselves, in which case they’d need additional support just like anyone else who has troubles that affect themselves and those around them. There’s sadists who are sadistic due to their own trauma, there’s those that are such due to mental health issues, and there’s very few who are like that due to the way they were born. In the last case, it could be a combined “enforced” support, as well as general community perception of “ah, that’s sadistic George, be careful around him and don’t be alone with him, otherwise he bakes a mean cottage pie” kinda stuff, if that makes sense?
TW: rape mention
::: spoiler This is my thought as well. I know it’s not palatable to think about - we don’t want to extend empathy to rapists, of course we don’t. But we can’t say that some people deserve help and others don’t. I’ve thought about this a lot for my own moral values, and yeah, if we have someone who is unable to stop themselves from raping (whether by some kind of psychological issue or because they simply don’t want to), then I want to extend community support to them just like anyone else.
That might look like having them in some kind of supportive housing situation (NOT a prison) where they can be supervised, or allowing them to go out and have a job if they’re showing signs of working hard against the urges with a caretaker present to, well, stop them from raping. Medication that lowers the libido would be necessary. So would counseling.
I don’t like the idea of helping someone who happily rapes any chance they get, but I will not ever play God and decide who gets human rights and who doesn’t.
In terms of “enforcement” in the cases of rape, I think we can safely get rid of cops and lean toward a team of mental health professionals who can employ things like supportive confinement and counseling etc.
spoiler:::
I think there’s a difference between law enforcement and police, though the word “enforcement” does stick in my craw a little. I don’t know if it’s what the OP was getting at, but there does need to be some way to ensure that people don’t abuse others even in an anarchist society.
That could be community intervention in the moment and social services in the long term, with cessation of community support as a last resort for people who simply will not cooperate with the community.
Of course, there would be a lot less crime in a supportive society, but it wouldn’t disappear entirely.
The law part sucks too.
The law is impartial, which is to say it does not care for the wishes of the victim. The law is blind, meaning anyone who finds a loophole is in the clear. The law asks whether people are guilty or innocent, meaning complex situations have to be assigned a binary label.
You’ll want some way to protect people who are in danger from others, whether that’s warning them of others’ selfishness or violent mutual aid. But you don’t need a rigid law for that. Situations can get messy and benefit from things being cleared up, but that’s closer to investigative journalism than to courtrooms referencing obscure clauses written by lawmakers who never conceived of this situation.
Laws were made by centralized states to enforce the wishes of the central authority on its behalf. They are shaped like authority, not justice.
Kind of like the wickerman, but with one of those fancy solar towers.
I would say it depends how we ended up at solarpunk society in canon like there could totally be an iron grip authoritarian version haha if you take a look at what chinas doing think progress at all costs where you march to your engineered future regardless of the human cost
China definitely isn’t solarpunk. The -punk suffix is included in the name for a reason. As Doc_Cranckenstein said, it’s an anarchist philosophy.
I mostly agree with you, that China is not exactly solarpunk, that solarpunk leans towards anarchism and that the -punk suffix has anarchists connotations, but is it really mandatory that something with the -punk suffix is anarchist or anti-authoritarian ? By comparison, steampunk and cyberpunk are pretty much not anarchists to me (we could debate for cyberpunk, but the corpo part disqualifies it imo)
Cyberpunk is an anarchist critique. That’s what the corpo part is.
Not really tho. It’s a critique of capitalism, corporations and consumerism. It’s just that anarchism critiques the same thing from what I understand, but they aren’t rigidly connected.
It’s an anarchist critique of those exact things i.e. critiquing them from an anarchist perspective.
What makes the critique anarchist over communist or socialist? Maybe I’m missing something but I see cyberpunk as being against corporate run city-states. Being for small communes doesn’t seem to be a requirement.
I don’t even think solar punk needs to be anarchist. You could have a small communist solar punk state for example. Granted, the links to anarchism are much stronger though.
Because they don’t believe in a state solution to capitalism, corporations and consumerism.
Solar punk without anarchism is just China.
I think steampunk and most other aesthetic styles with -punk suffixes are better counterexamples, but cyberpunk is definitely punk. It depicts a dystopian future as a warning and rebels against it. The bad guys are always the tech megacorp inc. and so on. Then this core message went over peoples heads and you get all the aesthetic styles without actual punk in them. Solarpunk has a very strong social aspect to it (the punk and the anarchism) to differentiate it from greenwashing realestate development visualizations (building but with plants on it).
Yes, i agree with you and @queermunist@lemmy.ml that the message of cyberpunk is anarchist, but my point was that the society it describes is not.
I guess it should be the societies it describes, cuz there definitely are different ways of organizing described in cyberpunk worlds, and some of them are anarchist or close to it. But since the most recurrent and prevalent system i know is the corpo one, i knowingly narrow it down to this one.
Cyberpunk depicts a dystopia that assumes capitalism essentially ‘won’, but how punks at the bottom of society can still resist it and use the system’s technology against itself.
Solarpunk instead depicts a future where capitalism lost to the punks, and how society would be organized from that anti-authoritarian eco-anarchist perspective.
Erm, the same, I guess, but powered by renewable energies? It depends on what you imagine will happen in this fictitious litterary genre. I don’t really understand the point of the question, actually. It would be whatever the authors decide it to be.
Sounds like you’re confused between solarpunk the literary genre and solarpunk the social movement. This comm is about the latter.
Oh, then, wouldn’t it be about (I’ve forgotten the english for it) a justice that uses therapy and social justice before it considers jail, except for truly twisted cases?
I need to read more about solarpunk as a social movement.
I think you man restorative justice? Yes, that sounds more fitting!
That’d just be solar, not solarpunk
