theluddite

I think that's a very weird interpretation of that, but fair enough :)

Just because a postcapitalist world should have a battery for every house does not make batteries in and of themselves solarpunk. The story surrounding the battery, in this case, the branding, is actually precisely what matters, because solarpunk is explicitly about speculative futures. It's a genre of science fiction that creates an optimistic and green aesthetic to aid in imagining a postcapitalist world. Posting a link to a currently existing consumer grade technology with consumerist branding is, by definition, not solarpunk.

"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." You're posting the automobile. Science fiction is about the social context of the technology as much if not more than about the technology itself.

Again, I'm not saying that personal batteries are bad, or have no part in a postcapitalist future.

That's kind of a weird critique, because it's actually consistent with the book. He spends a lot of time talking about how wildly different every person's interpretation of the event is, and that's kind of the problem. It's part of why these movements are illegible to power. He's very clear that this is his interpretation, based on his own contacts, experience, and extensive research, but that it's not going to be the same as everyone else's.

Same is true with the moniker. Whether or not the people on the ground felt that way about it or not, that story, fabricated without input from those on the ground, is what ended up creating meaning out of the movement, at least insomuch as power is concerned. That's like the core thesis of the book: The problem with that wave of protests was not being able to assert their own meaning over their actions. The meaning was created for them by people like western media, and they weren't able to organize their own narrative, choose their own representatives, etc.

edit to add: IIRC, he even specifically discusses how the different people in the core group of Brazilian organizers disagree on what happened.

Oh hey I wrote that lol.

Not all protests for Gaza were meant to gain engagement, many were organized to cause direct economic disruption to those that profit from the war, that is a goal.

I actually totally agree with you. I should've been more careful in the text to distinguish between those two very different kinds of actions. I actually really, really like things that disrupt those that profit, but those are not nearly as common as going to the local park or whatever. I might throw in a footnote to clarify.

This kind of consumerist green-tech is not solarpunk. Solarpunk is about imagining a postcapitalist future, when human needs are met not just within ecological constraints, but as part of a healthy ecosystem, and technology exists to aid us in doing that. It's about envisioning a radically changed world. Tools like these are the exact opposite end of green-tech: They're specifically designed to fit neatly into our life as it exists today. The ad copy is super clear about that. The promotional materials even have an SUV.

To be clear, I'm not taking a stance on whether they're bad or good, but I am saying that they're not solarpunk.

"The workplace isn't for politics" says company that exerts coercive political power to expel its (ex-)workers for disagreeing.

Your comment perfectly encapsulates one of the central contradictions in modern journalism. You explain the style guide, and the need to communicate information in a consistent way, but then explain that the style guide is itself guided by business interests, not by some search for truth, clarity, or meaning.

I've been a long time reader of FAIR.org and i highly recommend them to anyone in this thread who can tell that something is up with journalism but has never done a dive into what exactly it is. Modern journalism has a very clear ideology (in the sorta zizek sense, not claiming that the journalists do it nefariously). Once you learn to see it, it's everywhere

That's why I say that antisolutions are context-dependent. This is being presented as the solution to plastic, not as a clean-up plan after we have banned plastic, or even while we ban plastic. The former is an antisolution, while the latter could be a responsible project. Antisolutions are dangerous because they deflate the political will necessary to actually solve the problem, not because the technology is problematic in and of itself.

You're always invited, and always fun to run into you on the other side of the fediverse from my perspective (I could never find a satisfactory way of using both lemmy and Mastodon on a single account that worked for me).

That's such a great suggestion! I haven't read it but will now, and I'll get back to you when I do.

Okay here's some wide-ranging suggestions, mostly focused on theories of change, as requested. A lot of it is authors whose views I don't necessarily endorse, but I find their contributions meaningful all the same, if that makes sense.

• Erik Olin Wright's "How to be anticapitalist in the 21st century." It's short. It's easy to read, and makes a case against capitalism, for socialism, while sketching out a light revolutoinary theory. I actually don't like his theory of change, personally, but I do respectfully recognize his contribution to the discussion as a clear-writing and insightful scholar.
• Rosa Luxemburg's "Reform or Revolution and the Mass Strike." I like Luxemburg. A lot of Marxists have many critiques of her theory, but no one can doubt her revolutionary practice. She and Lenin were contemporaries, and had many, many, many disagreements about socialist revolutionary theory, often writing in response to each other. I find their disagreements to be productive.
• Lenin's "State and Revolution," or maybe "What is to be done?" Lenin is not, in my opinion, a particularly compelling writer, nor do I necessarily endorse his politics. Frankly, he comes across as kind of an asshole. Still, I think that the modern anglosphere could benefit greatly from reading him, especially re: your "peace sign" complaint. Lenin writes with urgency about the issues that face him and his revolution. He's completely fucking appalled at the state of the world, and to him, the injustice inherent to the status quo makes every single new day of it intolerable, so he is determined to do something about it now, not later. His clear goals, his urgency, and his complete commitment to an orthodox interpretation of Marxism are a wild combination of strenghs and dangers that come through very clearly in reading his work. In my opinion, Lenin is at his best when analyzing imperialism, though I'm suggesting things that have a theory of change right now.
• Huey Newton's "Essays from the Minister of Defense." Huey Netwon was a Black Panther. It's challenging stuff, in a lot of ways, but I thought it might interest you given your previous comment.
• Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia." When the fascists were taking over Spain, Orwell grabbed his gun and was determined to shoot them. The book is about his experience as part of the leftist resistance that was both fighting the fascists and running Catalonia.
• The work of Abdullah Öcalan, or anything else about the existing situation in Rojava. It's super interesting and complicated, and not much discussed in the anglosophere. It was also greatly influenced by the work of Murray Bookchin, who I have somewhat mixed feelings about.

I have a ton more but this comment is long and I have to work so I'll leave it there.

edit (can't help myself): I also want to recommend the work of the various socialists involved in The International during the lead up to the first world war, like Trotsky, who I do really like and is a very strong writer, but also Lenin (this is what I was talking about earlier re:imperialism) and many others. This history was a big part of my own journey to becoming a socialist. The International saw what they called the "imperialist war" coming. They knew how bad it was going to be, and they tried to organize all the socialist parties in Europe to be disloyal to their national governments in favor of international peace if/when it came. There's an alternative reality, much closer than many of us realize, where the parties that composed the international held firm to their commitment to oppose their national governments by any means, and WW1, one of the worst things that has ever happened, didn't happen, at least not as we know it. Instead, the international collapsed as the parties folded to their domestic pressures. The lyrics to l'internationale talk about this commitment (formatting with code because I don't understand how to make lemmy keep the newlines):

The kings make us drunk with their fumes,
Peace among ourselves, war to the tyrants!
Let the armies go on strike,
Guns in the air, and break ranks
If these cannibals insist
In making heroes of us,
Soon they will know our bullets
Are for our own generals

This is extremely based, and it was much more mainstream in the early 20th century than it is today. How much better would the world be had we kept this alive? Imagine if there were active major parties that prioritized loyalty to international peace before their own "national security" interests.

It’s all good that we say, let’s do this, but it’s how we get there. How do we topple the systems of inequality which prop up capitalism, because it’s not enough to say give up plastic and make a peace sign.

We learn and we organize. Speaking for myself, I started a worker cooperative and work in international human rights. I'm a member of many socialist organizations, some local and some international. I've joined more picket lines than I can count. I go to conferences, where I network with other socialists to start other projects and support each other. I've been part of local efforts against evictions, expanded police budgets, and so on, some of which actually won. It's not a mystery, but it is hard, and we have to keep showing up and doing it.

Also, if I may probe, I think that your dismissive comment ("it’s not enough to say give up plastic and make a peace sign"), which clearly implies that I'm not doing anything serious, is telling. I think that you're being defensive. Zizek (I think in "Sublime Object" but it could be in something else) notes that ideology, as he defines it, is something that we don't see in our day to day life, but being forced to see it is a painful process, and we often respond defensively to having it challenged. Your current worldview seems to take for granted that no one (at least, no one serious) is doing anything meaningful to change the status quo, or even has a plan for how to change it, but that's actually not true, so we end up in this strange situation where you think that saying the most superficial thing about the current state of the world is somehow explaining something to me.

If you're actually interested in that question that you asked, and not just using it rhetorically, I have approximately ten thousand reading suggestions for you. I've already mentioned Gramsci and Zizek, but they can be a bit esoteric. There are also very good and very practical theorists of revolutionary change, many of which were themselves practicing revolutionaries.