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How would a Solarpunk society handle law enforcement and military? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/solarpunk@slrpnk.net
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I mean, let's be honest: People do crimes even when they have no material need to do so, so you will always need some form of law enforcement, how should a solarpunk society handle this?

The same is true for a military: As long as there is no world peace or some magical way to shut the outside world out, and as long as other societies exist somewhere nearby (and in today's world this means somewhere on the same planet), a society needs the means to defend itself... what would this look like?

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[–] 3 points 3 months ago (10 children)

I would say it depends how we ended up at solarpunk society in canon like there could totally be an iron grip authoritarian version haha if you take a look at what chinas doing think progress at all costs where you march to your engineered future regardless of the human cost

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago* (9 children)

    China definitely isn't solarpunk. The -punk suffix is included in the name for a reason. As Doc_Cranckenstein said, it's an anarchist philosophy.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    I mostly agree with you, that China is not exactly solarpunk, that solarpunk leans towards anarchism and that the -punk suffix has anarchists connotations, but is it really mandatory that something with the -punk suffix is anarchist or anti-authoritarian ? By comparison, steampunk and cyberpunk are pretty much not anarchists to me (we could debate for cyberpunk, but the corpo part disqualifies it imo)

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    I think steampunk and most other aesthetic styles with -punk suffixes are better counterexamples, but cyberpunk is definitely punk. It depicts a dystopian future as a warning and rebels against it. The bad guys are always the tech megacorp inc. and so on. Then this core message went over peoples heads and you get all the aesthetic styles without actual punk in them. Solarpunk has a very strong social aspect to it (the punk and the anarchism) to differentiate it from greenwashing realestate development visualizations (building but with plants on it).

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Yes, i agree with you and @queermunist@lemmy.ml that the message of cyberpunk is anarchist, but my point was that the society it describes is not.

    I guess it should be the societies it describes, cuz there definitely are different ways of organizing described in cyberpunk worlds, and some of them are anarchist or close to it. But since the most recurrent and prevalent system i know is the corpo one, i knowingly narrow it down to this one.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    Cyberpunk depicts a dystopia that assumes capitalism essentially 'won', but how punks at the bottom of society can still resist it and use the system's technology that enabled so much oppression and exploitation against itself.

    Solarpunk instead depicts a utopia where capitalism lost to the punks, and how society would be organized from that anti-authoritarian eco-anarchist perspective.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Cyberpunk is an anarchist critique. That's what the corpo part is.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (3 children)

    Not really tho. It's a critique of capitalism, corporations and consumerism. It's just that anarchism critiques the same thing from what I understand, but they aren't rigidly connected.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    It's an anarchist critique of those exact things i.e. critiquing them from an anarchist perspective.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    What makes the critique anarchist over communist or socialist? Maybe I'm missing something but I see cyberpunk as being against corporate run city-states. Being for small communes doesn't seem to be a requirement.

    I don't even think solar punk needs to be anarchist. You could have a small communist solar punk state for example. Granted, the links to anarchism are much stronger though.

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