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[-] happybadger@hexbear.net 55 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] Awoo@hexbear.net 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[-] happybadger@hexbear.net 24 points 1 week ago

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.

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[-] Carl@hexbear.net 50 points 1 week ago
[-] SkingradGuard@hexbear.net 17 points 1 week ago
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[-] VibeCoder@hexbear.net 50 points 1 week ago

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

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[-] Tabitha@hexbear.net 49 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] Keld@hexbear.net 22 points 1 week ago

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

[-] Crucible@hexbear.net 48 points 1 week ago

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

[-] Andrzej3K@hexbear.net 44 points 1 week ago

[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

[-] jack@hexbear.net 41 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 22 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] Barabas@hexbear.net 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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?

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[-] Esoteir@hexbear.net 39 points 1 week ago

twitter users: is-this is this fascism?

[-] Barabas@hexbear.net 26 points 1 week ago

Shit, the Trots were right no-choice

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[-] sodium_nitride@hexbear.net 37 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] 30_to_50_Feral_PAWGs@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago

geordi-no Treatlerism treatler

geordi-yes Treatskyites pika-pickaxe

[-] Chana@hexbear.net 36 points 1 week ago

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?

[-] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 17 points 1 week ago

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.

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[-] 30_to_50_Feral_PAWGs@hexbear.net 35 points 1 week ago

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

[-] Esoteir@hexbear.net 37 points 1 week ago

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

[-] 30_to_50_Feral_PAWGs@hexbear.net 17 points 1 week ago

The "Duck season!" / "Rabbit season!" bit, but it's "Ecosocialism!" / "Ecofascism!" bugs-stalin

[-] Dessa@hexbear.net 34 points 1 week ago

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^

[-] Diva@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 week ago

I have nothing to add, but I liked Wall-E too!

[-] LaGG_3@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago

It stars a little movie nerd with a decaying body

^he's^ ^just^ ^like^ ^me^ ^fr^

[-] prole@hexbear.net 31 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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?

[-] Chapo_is_Red@hexbear.net 36 points 1 week ago

Imo, it's an aesthetic. Ideologically, the worst I can call it is idealist.

[-] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 23 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] Dessa@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago

I always saw it as cope. "Here is far in the future, after we've mostly destroyed the planet. Here is a small pocket where things have calmed down enough that people can settle back into something resembling a primitive state."

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[-] AstroStelar@hexbear.net 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

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[-] Tervell@hexbear.net 30 points 1 week ago

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

Zykunov P.A. - Industrial landscape

more

Ivan Tyukha - Soviet landscape 2

Ivan Tyukha - Ruined temple

Ivan Tyukha - On the Volga river

Ivan Tyukha - Autumn

Igor Rubinsky - Haystacks, 1952

Igor Rubinsky - Foggy morning, 1971

Charnetskaya N.K. - Tbilisi, 1953

this one's definitely focused on people, but I just found it and thought it was pretty cute - also the father's fit here is impeccable Ponomarev A.M. - From the city with gifts - 1969

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

[-] LangleyDominos@hexbear.net 30 points 1 week ago

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/

[-] robot_dog_with_gun@hexbear.net 29 points 1 week ago

somebody tell Andrewism he's fash

[-] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 29 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] imogen_underscore@hexbear.net 29 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

putting degrowth in the same category to be dismissed is not serious. this is not the 1980s.

[-] cosmosaucer@hexbear.net 22 points 1 week ago

whats wrong with degrowth? solely educational question if you feel like replying

[-] Collatz_problem@hexbear.net 26 points 1 week ago

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.

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[-] RaisedFistJoker@hexbear.net 27 points 1 week ago

solar punk is real but not how its creators envisage it

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[-] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 21 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] LangleyDominos@hexbear.net 18 points 1 week ago

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?

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[-] Awoo@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] enkifish@hexbear.net 19 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] TheLastHero@hexbear.net 19 points 1 week ago

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.

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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
89 points (91.6% liked)

chapotraphouse

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