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+ | ====== Solarpunk as Anarchist Infrapolitics ====== | ||
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+ | Social transformation never happens through economic or legal changes alone. Those changes are always accompanied by alterations in the more informally transformative spheres of culture and ideology, shaping the nuts and bolts of how people think and act. Anarchists have always acknowledged this. Indeed, if there’s one thing anarchists are known for among the general public, it’s having a leg in several artistic, musical, and philosophical subcultures. This goes way back. Kropotkin and Goldman weren’t just exquisite theorists of class struggle and anarchisation, | ||
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+ | However, I’ve noticed a tragic tendency as of late (i.e. the last couple of decades) to view anarchist activity in the cultural and ideological fronts as separate and apart from activity on the political and economic fronts. At worst, I’ve seen some involved in the latter dismiss most of those involved in the former as “apolitical” or as mere “lifestylists”, | ||
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+ | To be fair, such Libcom types aren’t wrong when they claim that so much of cultural anarchism is rife with people who have no commitment to social struggle or system change, viewing anarchy as a mere means of personal rebellion and self-expression. That’s always been a problem. The bohemians, the hippies, the punks, and the techies have thus far given us lots of nice artworks, though they’ve failed to deliver the dissolution of the state and worker self-management of the economy. | ||
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+ | But given that the prophesied proletarian revolution of the workerist anarchists is a good century or more overdue, one could say the achievements of cultural anarchism and class struggle anarchism – when considered as separate entities – are about equal. They’ve delivered many small and cumulative victories as part of larger movements (e.g. in arts, education, civil liberties, and workers’ campaigns), but the long-term ideal of social anarchy remains as far off beyond the horizon as ever. | ||
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+ | One of the main sources of this relative distrust between those involved in cultural-ideological struggle and those involved in political-economic struggle – and perhaps the absence of more significant gains we might get from better cooperation between the two fronts – lies, I believe, in the lack of an adequate means of conceptualising how they interrelate. On this issue, and despite the dismissals of much cultural-ideological activity as apolitical, I’d like to propose that both forms of activity are political, but political in different ways. One is // | ||
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+ | By infrapolitics, | ||
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+ | By megapolitics, | ||
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+ | Infrapolitics should always be of interest to anarchist activism because it’s in infrapolitical spaces that the seeds of practical (megapolitival) change are sewed within the social imaginary. We can cultivate the values of individual autonomy, voluntary cooperation, | ||
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+ | Which brings me to what I’d like highlight as one of the most promising potential infrapolitical spaces social anarchists would be wise to explore and become active in: a subculture called solarpunk. | ||
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+ | Born in the early 2010s online, and picking up momentum around the middle of the decade, it’s a form of ecological futurism which has found expression in science-fiction, | ||
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+ | Cyberpunk imagines a future gone wrong, taking as its premise the evolution of current society and technology down a dark path, full of pollution, corporate domination, and killer robots. Steampunk imagines a past gone right, taking as its premise the evolution of Victorian society and technology down a bright path, full of adventure, anti-imperialism, | ||
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+ | Looking at our contemporary circumstances, | ||
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+ | Solarpunk imagines a future gone right, taking as its premise the evolution of society and technology down a bright path, full of green tech, nonhierarchical cultures, and gorgeous art nouveau architecture (that last one is subjective, but I thought I’d throw it in there). Automation of toil is widespread, 3D-printing and micro-manufacturing replaces alienating mass production, and labour as a practice is artisan-ised, | ||
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+ | Solarpunk is futurist, but it’s a futurism of a rooted and practical kind. It founds its visions of alternative life-verses on technologies, | ||
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+ | As of right now, solarpunk is a pretty small scene. For the most part, interest in it is confined to a small few Facebook groups, Tumblr and WordPress blogs, Pinterest folders, and a handful of tech hobbyists. In arts and fiction, it’s had a smattering of comics and short story collections, | ||
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+ | What should make it of interest to anarchists is how similar the underlying values of solarpunk are to those of social anarchism, in particular to the post-scarcity anarchism of Murray Bookchin: decentralism, | ||
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+ | So while it’s small at the moment, both anarchists and solarpunks could have much to gain from collaborating and from getting immersed in each other’s worlds. For anarchists, solarpunk could become a fecund playground for elaborating upon libertarian ideas and practices through the mediums of aesthetics and fiction. For solarpunks, the visions of free and ecological societies glimpsed at through its eco-utopias and experiments in eco-technology can act as a gateway to Kropotkinian theories of how to remake the culture, economy, and polity on freer and ecological lines. | ||
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+ | Social anarchism of course is no stranger to the worlds of arts and (sub)culture. Though for the most part this has been in the form of individual anarchists using a given medium or work to explore anarchistic ideas at the level of personal liberation. What’s rarer is using culture as a whole to grow libertarian consciousness on a mass scale. That is what we need to try to do more of in the future, and that’s what solarpunk may have the potential to catalyse. | ||
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+ | We need artworks which instil a consciously anti-authoritarian way of looking at the world, and a libertarian ethos of autonomy, mutual aid, and ecological interrelationism. Solarpunk is one of the best available cultural hotbeds for generating artworks of those kinds. Its unique format of eco-speculation gives artists the freedom to imagine wild and alternative ways of ordering the world, but with enough of a connection to the nitty-gritty reality of the conditions we now exist in to draw a practical trajectory from what we’re stuck with now to what we want to create. To quote social anarchist aesthetic theorist Jesse Cohn, it draws out “the ideal from within the real”, actualising what’s already there in potential. | ||
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+ | There’s no way to tell how long solarpunk will remain popular, or if it’ll ever take off and become more than a small group of eco-geeks online. But given its obvious richness as a site for anarchist infrapolitics, | ||
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