this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
33 points (85.1% liked)
Solarpunk
5467 readers
50 users here now
The space to discuss Solarpunk itself and Solarpunk related stuff that doesn't fit elsewhere.
Join our chat: Movim or XMPP client.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
(maybe I'll make a separate comment about currency, but I feel I need to get on the soap box for a moment here)
This might be controversial so hear me out. I don't we should assume capitalism is destroyed. But more importantly I think the reason is absolutely critical to the success of solarpunk.
We like to pretend "direct democracy good, other systems bad", but almost all forms of governance; dictatorships, oligarchies, capitalism, republic democracies, communism, direct democracies, and socialism have their own applications. We use them all over the place; militaries almost always function as a mostly-dictatorship with some distributed autonomy. Courtrooms function as an ad-hoc oligarchy. Companies, Unions, Churches, and Cities have thousands of different governance models, from Gabe Newell leading Valve with one of the most flat companies ever, to Steve Jobs being effectively a dictator.
Yes, Solarpunk is a rejection. But it's a rejection of the dystopian outcome.
We give the middle finger equally to Xi Jinping, Ben Shapiro, and Joseph Stalin and any other spokesperson who prescribes one medication for all problems while ignoring the dystopia flourishing around them! All of them were/are so infatuated by style of governance that they forgot the original mission.
That's where we can be different. Solarpunk doesn't have "a prescription". All of us have extremely different views, backgrounds, ideas, and values. The only commonality is "we want a society worth living in".
I strongly feel the Solarpunk ideology is:
We should angrily reject the current prescription (and in the US that means rejecting our pay-politicans-to-win, fake-freedom, megacorp dominated capitalism)
But.
We should not get so angry as to forget; the difference between medicine and poison is the dosage & situation.
Okay, I'll get off my soap box now.
It looks like you are conflating market economy and capitalism. These are two different concepts, and the first one predates the second by a few millenia.
So in the end the question was about capitalism but you argued in favor of market economy.
After reading my whole comment again and checking some more definitions I kinda see your point, so I tried to edit it a bit to be more inline with actual capitalism.
And to your credit, there actually aren't nearly as many vibrant game worlds that actually include private ownership of the means of production, so I completely removed that section.
This is a little long-winded, but I think a shorter summary might be this: we should look for ways to set goals, then draw from the largest possible toolkit to meet those goals, and avoid assigning assumptions that a given tool is universally good or universally bad.
I would agree with that. I'll add that I have criticisms of capitalism, but I feel like I need to go out of my way to explain to people that they're not some blanket rejection of the concept whole-cloth. They're based on its utility for the set of conditions we're in. I'm fully willing to acknowledge the circumstances in which capitalism is effective. It's just that those circumstances don't match our present situation well.
You are on to something here I think. Any larger activity envolving humans need to be organized in some way, and I have always liked the idea of a temporary and/or skill-based leadership - where a project is organized by someone who understands the single steps to desired outcome best. Adding to that using organization structures where they are of good use is a similar approach.
I think politically solarpunk is mostly anarchism. Consider to post this thoughts on c/anarchism for a better reply than this mine.