what a weird take, i always pictured it as an anarchist wet dream.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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These kinds of comparisons to fascism remind me of the Frankfurt School and I gloss over them every time. Adorno said the way we close a car door is fascist, I presume because you have to slam it to force your will upon it. I actually read a tweet that succinctly explained the rise of pomo, starting from "Marx didn't take into account why people want fascism if socialism is inevitable" - though the tweet didn't mention the CIA funding that went into it too.
But that's a tangent. Regarding solarpunk itself it started as a literature movement and then a yoghurt commercial recalled to it, but not directly I think... or at least I don't know if the artists behind the ad were aware of solarpunk when they made it.
Then that got turned into an ideology, started on vibes.
The problem is not so much that it started on an ad but that there's just nothing behind it. You want flying squid robots to harvest your self-grown crops but where are the robots made? It lacks everything it needs beyond the surface to be an actual ideology and its adopters make it up as they go along based on the vibes of the yoghurt ad.
The main problem I see is that how things are created is left up to your imagination. It sells a vision of a comfortable society while ignoring the labour that underpins it. In my view, the recognition of the central role of labour in society has to be part of any genuinely socialist aesthetic.
yeah basically, that's a much more efficient way to put it lol
^This, well said.
thanks
This is idiotic and a perfect example of why social media needs to be destroyed
I struggle to believe these twitter weirdos exist, but unfortunately they do. I swear there's somebody crafting a post rn about how breakfast cereal is fascist.
I don't it's any more "idiotic" than average convos in RL. The problem of twitter with this kind of thing is that unless you are privy to argument #5325920525 that happened in the comments of a tweet that was related to another tweet that was related to another conversation some months ago, you may have no idea what people are getting worked up about in the first place. I say this as someone who used to use twitter and would regularly have moments where I was like, "What exactly are people arguing about and why?"
In context, it probably makes perfect sense why they went for "it's fascism", but if you don't have that context, it can look like somebody randomly calling things fascist. In this case, I'm fairly confident that what's going on is some in the online "left" (idk if it extends to RL at all) view solarpunk favorably as some kind of aspirational future thing (IIRC, maybe because of it's vaguely environmentalist themes?). And so there is pushback against it as having any sort of meaningful basis on which to aspire to. What people aspire to does matter and there may be some in the west especially who are so used to the normal of their country exploiting the global south that it doesn't register as odd to them, the lack of the working class's presence in the aesthetic.
A lot of us are products of bourgoisie cultures and we will likely enjoy the art that such a society produces. Future generations will hopefully produce and enjoy arts not constrained by such backward sensibilities though that doesn't mean we shouldn't try now.
It is like the flip side of the coin of self-identification amongst westerners; it is not revolutionary to incorrectly pigeon-hole yourself to the proleteriat if you don't actually belong to that class, it is better to identify the class you belong to and then engage in class betrayal. Otherwise it is just another form of idealism.
To take examples of very popular western pop culture: LOTR and Harry Potter. It's OK to like them, it doesn't make you any less a social scientist; just be conscious of your own limitations which extends to the things you enjoy - accept that you and the art you enjoy is flawed, and use that knowledge to help engage in revolutionary pragmatism (I used the above two as examples because of how racist they both are, LOTR arguably much more than HP).
Addendum - it obviously matters what parts of the above series you like; this is an ML space so I figured I could be a bit less precise with the language here. Both series are deeply problematic to say the least.
Thank you for articulating this point, comrade. I am certainly a part of the labor aristocracy myself and that white fragility has been very tough to overcome because no sensible person wants to think of themselves as an oppressor.
But finally I realized that no sensible person should want to be oppressed either. So how about I just do my part to bring down systems of oppression and use the privileges I have in the process to do so.
If Engels can do it, us western white folks can too.
I think liberalism has diminished our dialectical thinking; if one is a westerner labour aristocrat (a definition? One cares about property value) and not at the receiving end of the settler-colonial dynamic, no matter the colour - though we can't ignore ethnicity, then at the very least we are a cog in the racist machine against the Global South which we only have a chance of mitigating through organisation.
It doesn't, however, excuse the racism. By being real of what our place in the world is we are going to have a better chance of tackling this beast (though as one can tell from my comment history I am not very optimistic about us westerners. Like this is an ML forum and I see blinders all the time. To the point whenever someone says "what can I do" I feel like saying move to China, though this is not the correct take from a global revolutionary standpoint).
A famous example of attempting to do it right is Che Guevara - a Chilean labour aristocrat physician who decided to tackle the beast.I'm not saying that we all have that level of charisma and skillset but you know aim for the stars and you may at least land on the moon. Or as Zhou Enlai said to Khrushchev: we are both traitors to our class.
Well Zhou meant that as an insult Khrushchev because Khrushchev was born a Russian peasant while Zhou was born into the Mandarin Chinese class which had considerably more social privilege than other Chinese ethnicities.
But I agree nonetheless! One cannot engage in material analysis and revolutionary politics without first coming to grips with material reality. What’s very important is that we remember the circumstances of our birth do not diminish our value as human beings (that notion is fundamentally idealistic and liberal). But it does change what our role is in revolutionary organization.
Haha yes I included it because of the insult :) (ie it is both aspirational and critical of us westerners in this context)
I'm not like the biggest solarpunk guy. But...idk, it just feels mean to yell at people who like it. I like fantasy worlds and fantasy astectics. I understand that obviously there's plenty of problems in their origins, the messaging etc. And I get that a lot of people don't, but I would legitimately lose my mind if I was like "doesn't this medieval town look nice" and all my replies were "omg are you a literal feudalist?" I probably would also be less convinced as well if I was the type of person who needed to be convinced.
This is also why I'm not on Twitter and never will be, because goddamn I cannot take this type of incessant negativity (well also the nazis but I feel like I don't have to point that out)