RetroFedHow would a Solarpunk society handle law enforcement and military?
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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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A self-ruling community is not a lawless place, you don’t need to be under government control to set up a police. An example where that is the case is Cherán, where until the 2011 uprising cartels had cut down 60,000 acres under the cover of bribed politicians and a corrupt police. In 2017 Cherán may have had the lowest homicide rate in the entire country of Mexico.
i think we’d draw wisdom from pre-colonial societies who responded to community members violating consensual paradigms of existing with community based corrections. the challenge i have is that on the Eurasian continent something went awry and when the most extreme punishment in this paradigm, exile, was assigned enough, eventually the exiled created their own domination societies that would go on to eliminate the societies that had exiled them (examples include the Kievan Rus’, the Romans, and the Huns). part of a realistic thought process towards solarpunk means asking ourselves how we prevent domination societies from re-arising
That’s not a thing.
The way I see things, law enforcement and military are there to serve and protect those who are higher up in social hierarchies, as well as their wealth, even tho we are fed the story that they work for us, common people. In reality, they are a top-down structure, full of corruption, racism, sexism etc, and I really don’t feel safe around them.
So in order to answer your question, I would need to reframe it. It could be something like: how do people and areas can be protected, from other people or groups of people who are bad actors, within a society that does not have hierarchical structures (meaning that is organized in a horizontal way)?
For me, the answer is not a sweeping rigid model that will be applied everywhere, all the time. People from different places see things differently, so local solutions need to be applied. Cultures worldwide have dealt with these things. So, one solution would be to look into their examples and find ideas that would fit our community’s needs, and take it from there.
(If the questions was about the justice system, I would suggest to look into restorative justice, as well as transformative justice)
AE Marling has written Missing Mermaid which is a detective story set in a Solarpunk city. (You don’t need to read the first book, which is also a detective story set in a Solarpunk city) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/221365244-missing-mermaid
Wait there’s a first book? I liked mermaid, have to check if there’s a predecessor
Yes, it’s called Murder at the Tool Library
Thx!
Solarpunk is an anarchist philosophy. There wouldn’t be law enforcement.
The assumption that law enforcement is a necessity is a shortsighted one. I’m not the best at explaining it but I can provide a link to reading about the concept.
https://www.mpd150.com/faq/
I think there’s a difference between law enforcement and police, though the word “enforcement” does stick in my craw a little. I don’t know if it’s what the OP was getting at, but there does need to be some way to ensure that people don’t abuse others even in an anarchist society.
That could be community intervention in the moment and social services in the long term, with cessation of community support as a last resort for people who simply will not cooperate with the community.
Of course, there would be a lot less crime in a supportive society, but it wouldn’t disappear entirely.
The law part sucks too.
The law is impartial, which is to say it does not care for the wishes of the victim. The law is blind, meaning anyone who finds a loophole is in the clear. The law asks whether people are guilty or innocent, meaning complex situations have to be assigned a binary label.
You’ll want some way to protect people who are in danger from others, whether that’s warning them of others’ selfishness or violent mutual aid. But you don’t need a rigid law for that. Situations can get messy and benefit from things being cleared up, but that’s closer to investigative journalism than to courtrooms referencing obscure clauses written by lawmakers who never conceived of this situation.
Laws were made by centralized states to enforce the wishes of the central authority on its behalf. They are shaped like authority, not justice.
I was interested so I started reading the link. From what I understand their main point is that crime is committed when someone is unable to meet their needs and that the best way to prevent crime is to adress those needs by social programs. But what if ones need is sexual frustration and they want to commit rape? I’m guessing we are not talking about giving out government mandated GFs here. Every need can’t be met especially if someone happens to simply be a sadist who specifically enjoys the feeling of causing harm. How are you gonna prevent these kinds of crimes with social programs? Mental health resources only work as far as the people who need them actually want to partake in them.
Most cases the reason for rape is less about urges, and more about power (with a dash of opportunity). There’s also societal predispositions baked into the way that people are raised. If your parents, friends, neighbours, media, etc, all treat rape as a horrid thing that nobody would do, it doesn’t even pop into people’s heads. And even if someone does it, they get shunned, though in the general the way solarpunk societies are presented also include community support, so both the perpetrator and the victim would get support. For the perpetrator, I’d assume there’d be an involved process of the why - what’s making them feel powerless, or making them think hurting others is okay, or whatever. They might need counselling, rescue from an abusive situation of their own, medication, or whatever not. It’s incredibly rare to have people who genuinely cannot help themselves, in which case they’d need additional support just like anyone else who has troubles that affect themselves and those around them. There’s sadists who are sadistic due to their own trauma, there’s those that are such due to mental health issues, and there’s very few who are like that due to the way they were born. In the last case, it could be a combined “enforced” support, as well as general community perception of “ah, that’s sadistic George, be careful around him and don’t be alone with him, otherwise he bakes a mean cottage pie” kinda stuff, if that makes sense?
You might find this documentary interesting: Hollow Water | 2000 | 48 min
In reality, the difference between objective law enforcement based on rule of law and anarchy in a small community is demonstrated by lynch mobs. It’s lovely to think that people don’t need someone like a local law enforcement officer, but someone with legal authority to counter mob mentality is for the benefit of the accused. Mobs don’t care about evidence or the law or circumstances. Localized collective violence is the term.
I’ve seen this a couple times around Africa. Zambia’s “flying coffin” is an ideomotor effect where sometime gets killed because “the body points to who killed them.”
Plenty of examples. Women accused of witchcraft. Lynchings. Necklacing. If you search for the word mob and “burned alive” you’ll find examples from every continent of localized collective violence.
Intentional communities aren’t immune from this.
In fact, I had an in-law that had to leave an intentional community they lived in for decades because no one was willing to address a member that was sexually abusing children. The collective violence was being unwilling to act.
That’s just plain false. You have a very limited perspective on this topic, it seems.
Read Graeber’s works such as “Dawn of Everything”, “Debt: the First 5000 Years”, and/or “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology” and learn the history of humanity. Society works perfectly fine with hierarchy and the state.
Literally all of human history is littered with examples of localized collective violence. Its a fairly well-studied topic.
Your meme paste is hopeful, sure. But you seem to speak from an obvious lack of experience of small community living. It takes a lot of work to keep a community going. Many intentional communities fail once a cluster of leaders age out of leadership.
I’m just asking you to accept that reality is real, messy, and complex. None of this should be shocking unless you’re just fantasizing about this.
Police riot. Trump and ICE are the institutionalization of the lynch mob. If government disappears, everything will not be just fine. People can be unreliable. The police and government are made of people. Governments fail, societies collapse. Solarpunk is a movement to adapt communities so that when government fails again, the harm can be mitigated.
The lynch mobs you’re referring to didn’t happen in spite of government, but with tacit approval of government at some level of administration. The people doing the lynching knew that they wouldn’t be held accountable, and that they would be protected by the government from retaliation. They aren’t examples of anarchy, they aren’t typical of small communities.
Lynch mobs typically are the result of unwritten laws being tacitly enforced by government.
Small communities do have problems, so we should continue the collective discussion of how to best resolve those problems in ways that preserve justice. Bringing in the FBI to deal with the racist police who were leading lynch mobs only worked until the federal level was recaptured by a more virulent strain of white supremacy. ‘Strange Fruit’ didn’t end because the FBI suddenly discovered injustice. It was a result of a long running grassroots community conversation about the problem until progress on alternative solutions showed enough success to become threatening to the supremacy of the federal government.
Reality is real, messy, and complex, and doesn’t get simpler by abdicating responsibility for that messy complexity to a class of people with even less accountability than ourselves. Communities fail, and often people with the imagination to think of creative alternative solutions and are doing the hard work of community building are the reason that they don’t. Assuming we don’t live in real, vibrant, complex worlds only telegraphs the simplicity of your own worldview.
I reject the idea that law enforcement is always necessary. Laws are frequently unjust and anti-solarpunk. I don’t care about people breaking laws if the laws don’t serve the people. But let’s say all the laws are just - I also reject the idea that we need a bunch of power-hungry assholes with weapons and legal immunity to “enforce” them.
Here’s the thing - we rely on the police to do a broad range of tasks and, at least in the US, we hand them a gun to do all of those tasks. The traffic lights are down? Take your gun and go stand in the intersection. Parking tickets? You’ll need your gun for that. Homeless people on the streets? Don’t forget your gun. House broken into? Here’s a gun, try not to shoot the wrong person.
The simple answer is that we should have a different team of (trained, specialized) people for each of those scenarios. Police don’t receive training in each of those areas which means they are frequently in danger and frequently relying on violence or the threat of violence to get things done. It’s not fair to the officers and its not fair to the people they “serve.” I want to see a team who handles traffic, a team to respond to homeless people (though hopefully we’ll be on our way to finally providing housing for all), a separate team for crimes like burglary and theft, etc etc.
Here’s a resource for you (and others) to check out, they explain things much more succinctly than me: https://defundthepolice.org/alternatives-to-police-services/
As for a military - I will be completely honest, I haven’t educated myself as much on alternatives to that, but I do question your assumption that we will always need to defend ourselves. It assumes that people will always be attacking us.
Solarpunk and its Anarchist ideals are a pretty direct threat to virtually every other societal system. Fascists, Capitalists, and Authoritarians all either see it as an enemy to starve out, or even directly attack in an attempt to prevent its spread, as was seen during the Russian Revolution with Makhno’s Black Army, and the Spanish Civil War.
As long as there are still state governments with military might at their disposal, a Solarpunk society is likely going to need to be able to defend itself against them. The Anarchists of Spain organized their voluntary militias from the bottom up, where the soldiers themselves would elect someone to lead the group (but with the ability to immediately recall them outside of battle if they didn’t perform their duties to the satisfaction of the soldiers who elected them), and those elected leaders would then elect a commander to help organize them more effectively, with the same recall rules applied. It seemed to work out quite well for them.
However, there may be a point in time where the advantages of the alternative solarpunk system are too apparent to ignore, which could spark mass-civil disobediance or even revolution in those other countries causing their governments and capitalist economies to collapse, hopefully then leading to them joining in with their own solarpunk movements. Were that to eventually happen the world over, the need for militias to exists would likely dwindle.
A lot of colonial American power structures fit the intent of what you’re describing. For law enforcement, the local government would usually designate someone to be the head of law enforcement for day to day activities and there would be a communal drawing of manpower from the local community if the need arose. For the military, you had local militias which had elected officers and would vote on strategic actions if time permitted.
You’re likely going to see a lot of people here completely reject these forms of local communal government because communal doesn’t mean equal. For instance, the enforcement of slavery was a communal action in the South; free whites gladly assisted in the capture of escaped slaves.
A while back I started a discussion on the anarchist community looking for some similar discussion - some of the answers there might be useful:
https://slrpnk.net/post/35979981
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
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.
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)
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).
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.
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.
Cyberpunk is an anarchist critique. That’s what the corpo part is.
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.
It’s an anarchist critique of those exact things i.e. critiquing them from an anarchist perspective.
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.
There’s always a set of assumptions implied by these types of questions that people tend to miss when answering them. We have to start by talking about those before we talk about anything else. The first is the implicit connection between morality and criminality. Slavery was legal. The Holocaust was legal. The current ethnic cleansing in the US, and the genocide in Gaza are both legal.
The state exists to maintain a specific order, a specific acceptable direction of violence. This is non-consentual hierarchy isn’t just bad for the people being oppressed, it changes the oppressor. Arguments against slavery mostly centered the violence carried out against people, but some talked about the ways in which enacting violence also destroyed the person committing the violence.
The whole Epstein thing isn’t some weird artifact of the current time. It’s how power works. The dynamic of powerful men sexually abusing children goes back to Rome, at least. Sexual violence and power is intimately connected, and it extends from the locus of power in the king/president/dictator/elite class through society as patriarchy, racist violence, etc. Illegitimate hierarchy, in and of itself, infects the whole society manifesting as “crimes” and “things that really should be crimes but are never actually prosecuted.”
This happens to also be connected to the military question (which I’ll come back to in a bit) by the concept of “sovereignty.” There can be no such thing as a system that can both create and modify rules and constraints itself with those rules, formally speaking. That’s basically what Kurt Gödel proved. So every “constitution” that “protects rights” is fundamentally snake oil, at best.
Sovereignty is the supreme power, that which is above the law, and it is a fundamental property of all states. “National Sovereignty” is simply a property without which a state cannot exist. There must be something above the law, and that thing tends to be the worst people. Legal systems and militaries exist to maintain that fact.
The criminal legal system is a system of violence. It does not prevent violence, or protect people. It maintains a specific type of violence and a specific direction of violence. Everything else it does is a cover. If you happen to know what a “clearance rate” is, then you know what a thin cover that is. If you understand recidivism rates, you start to realize that prisons are not simply unhelpful but that they actively harm society. They create “crime.” But why would a society use prisons if prisons create “crime"? Because prisons are tools of political violence. I’ll prove it.
Restorative justice is one of the myriad of systems that exists as an alternative to punitive criminal legal systems like those in the US. It is far more effective at reducing anti-social behavior, and has been widely studied. This works, it works well, even for violent crime. Some places even do use it for non-violent crime like petty vandalism. It’s cheaper than punitive measures and it works, why is it not being used now?
You know what else reduces “criminal” behavior? Free breakfast programs, free child care, lead abatement, the list goes on. All of these programs are cheaper than prison. In terms of return on investment, the criminal legal system is an absurd waste of money. It doesn’t fulfill it’s stated goal at all, and there are actually efficient and tested things that do. But what does this system do? Well, it maintains the political system by heaping so much trauma on vulnerable people that it’s hard to organize, and it kidnaps and isolates political organizers. The purpose of a system is what it does. The criminal legal system is a tool of political repression.
So then, what do you replace the cops with? If you got rid of cancer, what would you replace the cancer with? You don’t. You’re cured of cancer. The treatment, that is, building this society, is the process of systematically challenging these hierarchies and dismantling them. The foundation of a solarpunk society is built on systems that address the causes of anti-social behavior - that help people heal from abuse, that help people see their internal biases, that help people hold themselves and others accountable for their actions, that help people grow into the types of people who can live in a solarpunk society.
But what about defense? Now we’re back to talking about sovereignty. You can’t have sovereignty without hierarchy, and you can’t “conquer” a people without sovereignty. This is kind of the whole point (as I understand it, the book is still on my reading list) behind James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. In order for governments to conquer people, they have to first create a government to conquer. This has been the pattern for thousands of years. In Indonesia, the Dutch (VOC) systematically built governments among indigenous people and then turned those people against each other in order to control them. The England took 400 years to conquer the Irish because they had to force them to have a government first. Compare that to the Blitzkrieg taking over unwilling people in days by simply seizing the seat of power, or Russia taking over the US government without even declaring war.
Centralized governments are actually a vulnerability, not a strength. Decentralization actually gives you a pretty significant natural advantage. This advantage grows even more when you shift to irregular warfare. The US, with the most powerful military in the world, still has no good way to manage asymmetric warfare. And they never will. Because it’s actually impossible. Cybernetically speaking, a decentralized asymmetric actor has greater variety than a centralized one. Any entity that can leverage that advantage will always beat centralized power. That’s not even a new insight, Machiavelli even talked about this. Basically, if you want to rule a population that doesn’t want to be ruled you essentially have to commit genocide (thus the Russian approach to Crimea, the English approach to Northern Ireland, the Israeli approach to Palestine, and the American approach to Turtle Island).
Even then it’s simply a matter of time. Colonial societies are permanently at war with themselves. Entropy takes care of all empires, on a long enough time scale. And that’s kind of the reality of it. Hierarchy is a high energy system. It is always working against entropy. Given enough time, entropy always wins. Decentralization just takes less energy.
We are living through a brief period where agricultural abundance cascaded into fossil fuel abundance, during a relatively calm and stable climate. Hierarchy is ending that stability and abundance. I don’t expect hierarchical systems to be the biggest things to worry about, because I don’t think they can actually survive in the world they are creating.
But, they can create a lot of havoc before they collapse (like the Nazis did). So a solarpunk society should be able to use decentralized tactics to speed up that collapse as much as possible. That looks like drones and tunnels attacking oil infrastructure and other logistics.
Kind of like the wickerman, but with one of those fancy solar towers.
The more favorable implementations I have read about typically take the form of community patrol groups. Members of the group rotate in and out, and when something goes wrong they step in to de-escalate whatever situation is going on. For more serious problems, those boil down to a community wide decision on what to do with the perpetrators.
As for military, there’s a few paths. In real life, the most ideal but least likely would be a world wide revolution that sees the end of hierarchy applied globally. At that point there would be no need for any military.
Next most likely would probably be a more dedicated form of the community patrol groups, with various populations pitching in with what they can and where they can.
Third is a geographical separation that leads to no need for a military. The best example of this is Annares in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Annares and Urras are sister planets/moons. Annares is an anarchist utopia and Urras an archist nightmare. Theoretically any nation state on Urras could decide to wage war against Annares, but waging war against a different celestial body is much more difficult than a normal war, so in practice the threat of war is not very large, and therefore the need for military is absent.
Erm, the same, I guess, but powered by renewable energies? It depends on what you imagine will happen in this fictitious litterary genre. I don’t really understand the point of the question, actually. It would be whatever the authors decide it to be.
Sounds like you’re confused between solarpunk the literary genre and solarpunk the social movement. This comm is about the latter.
Oh, then, wouldn’t it be about (I’ve forgotten the english for it) a justice that uses therapy and social justice before it considers jail, except for truly twisted cases?
I need to read more about solarpunk as a social movement.
I think you man restorative justice? Yes, that sounds more fitting!
There’s link at the mo, at the very top of our front page. Here it is: ☀️ New to Solarpunk? Click here.
Thanks!
That’d just be solar, not solarpunk
It would be like an earthship community, or an amish community. It relies on a legitimate government outside of it to provide actual protection from outside lawlessness. A solar punk commune couldnt exist in a wartorn country, it would become a refuge for those seeking shelter and nourishment. Imo a better thought experiment would be how can we build passive structures on lines of communication outside of cities that can provide potable water or shade from the sun. “Johhny Appleseed” John Chapman style of how can we help provide for everyone instead of how can we build a gated community to keep the barbarians out.
A solarpunk society would decentralize power as much as possible in-line with Anarchist principles. Anarchist Catalonia (which had over 3.5 million participants) demonstrated that a decentralized society is entirely viable, and how it functioned was documented quite well (such as in this book). We also have a modern example of how Rojava (a somewhat decentralized society in Syria of 4.6 million people) does community defense.
War is the highest level of compeition for humans. No anacharchist society could ever survive being in competition with a legitimate nation state with mordern weapons. I have been to Kurdistan in Northern Iraq, the Kurds have their own legitimate government and are their own quasi nation state. I don’t think comparing the horrors of the Syrian civil war (which had ungodly amounts of money and influence dumped into it from world powers), and the pinterest topic of solarpunk is fair at all. These two concepts are so incredibley far removed from each other, and the people there are just as reliant on fossil fuels and taking advantage of the environment as anyone else. It comes off as a luxury of wine drinking socialists to even compare the two. I never thought of “solarpunk” as the next logical step after overthrowing literal jihadist warlords with weapons from the russians and americans.
An anarchist society would need manufacturing capability to create weapons that would be effective against the enemies they faced (much like Ukraine’s local drone construction is essential to their survival). That was an issue in the Spanish Civil war, especially as no outside countries were willing to help logistically except for the USSR, which had strings attached, and was mostly diverted to the Stalinist faction.
I don’t believe they are. Rojava modeled its society on Democratic Confederalism as laid out by Abdullah Öcalan. Abdullah himself was heavily inspired by the works of Murray Bookchin, who advocated for a form of Eco-Anarchism, which Solarpunk itself is partly based upon.
I am not saying that Rojava is a solarpunk society, it is not, it’s also not considered properly Anarchist by most Anarchists, but it is currently an existing society that at least is attempting to decentralize societal power in a meaningful way (to varying degrees of success), similar to the Zapatistas.
Also to be clear, my reference to Rojava in my previous comment about Community Defense related to how they had replaced law-enforcement, the primary subject of this thread.
Who ever is in the ingroup would gang up on who ever is in the outgroup. Similar to many communes.