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.

This is very silly.

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

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.

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.

twitter users: is this fascism?

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.

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?

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

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^

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?

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

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/

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.

solar punk is real but not how its creators envisage it

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?

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.