alyaza birze ΘΔ

Where the state in the early twentieth century appeared weak because of its lack of control of the metropolis (to which fascists responded by marching through the cities), the state in the early twenty-first century appears weak because it apparently does not control its borders (the actual massive accretion of border technologies notwithstanding). This is why migration politics, although not a major part of the state’s total activities, is so important for far-right movements which contest the power of the state[...]
—Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right

as immigration politics continue to spiral and the Trump administration begins to gear up for "large-scale" immigration raids in major US cities, it seems prudent to begin outlining something i call the "sundown agenda". in short, the sundown agenda is the overarching effort to de facto recriminalize being a visible minority. this effort largely models itself after the sundown town (and an oft-associated, infamous exhortation: 'Nigger, don't let the sun set on your head'), hence my name for it

like many portions of the contemporary right, this agenda takes an amorphous form that is both disorganized and centralized at the same time. the broader belief that certain kinds of people should neither be seen nor heard is centrally accepted across most of the right—in many respects it informs what the right does and why—but how this should be accomplished is scattershot. this is fortunate in many ways (a consensus on this subject can be intensely damaging: see the push against trans people for instance) but unfortunate in others (it is hard to fully grasp the scope of the problem, and in many cases fighting this agenda is fighting only one head).

illustrating the latter point, consider the apparent ICE raids against Diné (Navajo) citizens and the recent Trump administration argument for ending birthright citizenship that seemingly rest upon overturning American citizenship for natives too. it would be understandable to see these as completely unrelated events—but from my perspective, they both belie a fundamental axiom of the right-wing that groups like Native Americans are "apart from" the United States and can only become American through total assimilation. it is this system of beliefs that allows one to argue “The United States’ connection with the children of illegal aliens and temporary visitors is weaker than its connection with members of Indian tribes. If the latter link is insufficient for birthright citizenship, the former certainly is.” without shame; and it is that system which sees unlawful detention of Diné by ICE (forcing them to prove their citizenship and place in this country they were forced to join, rather than forcing ICE to demonstrate they are in some way undocumented immigrants) as acceptable.

state-level contributions to the sundown agenda

the apparent raids in Arizona and arguments by the Trump administration for banning birthright citizenship are obviously big problems; but just as alarming for many people are state-level contributions to this agenda. this post was actually inspired by one: Wyoming, which i have already detailed for its fossil fascists, is likely to pass a bill (HB 116) "invalidat[ing] driver licenses issued to unauthorized immigrants by other states" in the coming days. although dubiously constitutional and apparently ambiguous on legal penalties, what is not unambiguous is the bill making it de facto illegal for undocumented immigrants to drive alone in Wyoming (whether they are residents of the state or merely driving through). per the reporting of WyoFile:

Law enforcement chiefs interviewed by WyoFile said they weren’t entirely certain if undocumented immigrants driving with such licenses would be detained. In many cases, they said, offenders would be issued a ticket then — if someone else could take the wheel — travel on. But if not, they may end up stranded or, if there are other criminal charges, even jailed. “If you don’t have a driver’s license you can’t drive,” said Col. Tim Cameron, who directs the Wyoming Highway Patrol. “They would need an alternative method of transportation or another driver.”

even more concerning are other measures that Wyoming could potentially take up. HB 133, another bill introduced by a Wyoming Freedom Caucus member, would completely ban sanctuary policies (there are none in Wyoming) and defund polities which attempt to pass them. but it would also "charge government officials who don’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities with a felony"—an incredibly punitive and almost certainly unconstitutional measure designed to silence elected officials with sympathies to undocumented immigrants. Wyoming is not the only state considering such a bill either: in Tennessee, where sanctuary policies are already banned, a new sweeping anti-immigration bill threatens to criminalize even voting for a sanctuary policy. under this bill, doing so would "become a Class E Felony and grounds for removal from office."

obviously, the harm of bills which make it illegal to vote the "wrong" way are immense, and they are yet another step toward democratic backsliding whether they pass or not. i will reiterate that they are also almost certainly unconstitutional—it seems inconceivable to me that any court could ever legitimize making it illegal to vote a certain way when you serve on a democratically elected body, at least not without precipitating a disastrous constitutional crisis. but the right is willing to test the legal system on this subject.

there are also the bills intended to stoke fear, and which you might call an unusual form of stochastic terrorism. in Mississippi, an immigrant bounty bill (modeled after a similar one in Missouri) has been making news; although likely unworkable for at least a dozen reasons and unlikely to be taken up, the bill certainly makes it feel like criminalization (even potentially at the hands of a private actor) could happen anywhere.

what you can do about it

all of this is fightable—most of it should be legally inactionable, and will presumably be challenged on that basis. but it's important to get organized and be organized against this reaction; on the legislative, legal, and labor side there should be proactive efforts to ensure that undocumented immigrants are shielded through sanctuary policies, and consistent resistance against any policies that would jeopardize this status. undocumented immigrants should be made aware of their rights in advance (see Arise Chicago's toolkit for immigrant workers and Immigrant Legal Resource Center: Red Cards as just two resources) and given resources to lean on if they are detained (NNIRR's hotlines for example). if you can, you should join a broad organization like DSA or volunteer your skillset to an organization which will have it. in short: there's a lot you can do right now, but you must be the person who chooses to do it.

welcome to 2025. i came down with a rather nasty sinus infection approximately a month ago, which derailed what had previously been plans to talk about a large number of subjects. instead, to start the year you'll get to hear me talk about being painfully ill in a way that precluded serious work on anything and which generally ruins your month. don't worry, we'll eventually get back to some of the stuff i intended to talk about last month on this blog.

don't get sick: or, how it feels to be sick for literally an entire month

i don't generally get sick in the way most people seem to—my pandemic sickness of "choice" was getting the flu randomly. i have never knowingly had COVID, and the closest thing to sickness i usually experience is seasonal allergies. unfortunately, i also seem to develop sinus infections rather easily—and after dodging serious illness for the duration of the year, being stricken by an infection finally happened to me at the beginning of this month.

if you've never had a sinus infection: i do not recommend getting one. after a day of stuffy nose and sleeping weirdly, i woke up one morning at approximately 4am to feelings of being unable to breathe; i had approximately ten seconds between this and standing over our bathroom sink, painfully coughing up what is best described as a mixture of brown-red bile with the consistency of non-fresh caramel. if this sounds deeply unpleasant: yes, it is. it does not get better from here.

the subsequent six or seven days were spent in what i can only call a stupor; approximately 23 hours of these days were spent in various states of lucidity and (hard to catch) sleep. to not choke in my sleep or drown in a frankly unimaginable amount of mucus, i was obliged to sit upright at basically all times (not so bad) and sleep upright (horrible). this completely ruined my sleep schedule, which i am still recovering from. eating was non-pleasurable, but more importantly something i barely did at all—i think on at least two of the days in question i just drank water and juice and the bulk of my calories were from cough drops. at one point i coughed in a way that hurt so badly i thought i might have broken a rib or damaged a lung. this did not happen, luckily, but it's not ideal to feel that way.

the weeks to follow have been better: a number of hot showers and copious coughing has cleared up the worst of it, and for the past while i've been coughing up white stuff. unfortunately, i have been unable to cough up the remainder. as a result i have what feels in essence like a throat infection (even though it's not one), and protracted bouts of coughing can still be quite painful and lead to a sort of vomiting. this is not ideal, and i would also not recommend this.

what i'm reading (1/50)

i started this year off by finishing the fascinating book Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 (Katja Hoyer); if you're looking for a good account of East Germany's existence and what life was like for many people there this is a book to pick up. the relationship between the country and the Soviet Union is a particularly curious facet: i came away from this one feeling like much of the "blame" for the country's demise can be given to the Soviets. despite Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker taking strongly after the Soviet line, the Soviets were frequently distant or outright cold to the East German state. even from the beginning, the Soviets seem to have been dubiously interested in a partitioned Germany and were eager to push for reunification; when this became impossible, the Soviets consistently held East Germany to the standards of a disposable client state. regardless of its own desires or needs, the expectation was that East Germany would consistently and unquestioningly follow Soviet policy. thus, even the reform-minded Gorbachev was apparently oppositional to Honecker's efforts to establish a less antagonistic relationship with West Germany—at least without the Soviets being in charge of it.

the distance in relations was perhaps exemplified most heavily by economics between the two countries; Hoyer notes a particular moment in 1981 where relations essentially broke down after the Soviet Union refused to guarantee oil supplies to East Germany, which had by then become extremely dependent on the Soviet supply:

[Erich] Honecker found [Leonid] Brezhnev’s inability to engage with his concerns extremely frustrating. Brezhnev mechanically recited his brief: the Soviet Union needed to look after its own economic affairs for the foreseeable future and the GDR would no longer be able to rely on Soviet credit. Worse still, he could not guarantee that the supply of oil would remain stable. This was a huge blow to Honecker. His country had banked on the annual delivery of 19 million tonnes of oil contractually agreed with the Soviet Union.

[...]Energy consumption in the GDR had also begun to lean on imports from Soviet Russia. In 1960, coal still accounted for 97 per cent of domestic energy use; by 1980, oil had taken over 17.3 per cent and gas 9.1 per cent.3 As oil is five times as effective as brown coal in terms of energy production, the economy was shifting towards the deliveries from the Soviet Union while investment in domestic brown coal had begun to slump. The oil crises of the 1970s had made this an increasingly expensive undertaking – by 1980, the GDR was paying the equivalent of $15 a barrel of crude oil compared to $2–$3 in 19724 – and as a result local brown coal once again had to be sourced in higher quantities. Nonetheless, crude oil from the Soviet Union could still be turned into hard cash in the GDR’s refineries. Their oil-based products were sold to many non-socialist countries on the world market, including West Germany. So successful was this that, among the non-producing nations, East Germany had become one of the biggest exporters of fossil fuels. By the time Honecker received the worrying news from Brezhnev under the palm trees of Crimea, oil-based products accounted for 28 per cent of its exports to non-socialist states.

despite these difficulties (and the 1981 situation bringing the state perilously close to immediate economic collapse, which was averted only through prompt new trade relations with Bavaria, of all places), East Germany was able to consistently deliver a high standard of living. Hoyer notes that by the end of the 1970s:

Rents were so heavily subsidized that GDR citizens did not have to worry about affordability once they had found a suitable flat. From 1971, the rates paid were means-tested, allowing working class families with children privileged access. A four-person household in West Germany spent around 21 per cent of their net income on rental costs while a similar household in the East only needed 4.4 per cent. While this focus on newly built housing meant that older buildings were left to decay in town centres up and down the country, which made for very unsightly impressions on foreign observers, the prefab blocks came with central heating, insulation, bathrooms and plenty of space. Honecker was also able to oversee rapid progress in supplying the population with consumer goods. By 1975, more than a quarter of households had a car, compared to only 15 per cent in 1970, and the figure would rise to 38 per cent by the end of the decade. By 1980, almost every household had a fridge, a TV and a washing machine.

East Germany also had a remarkable amount of gender parity; from 1981 onwards, more than 90% of women were employed and the country had the highest rate of female employment in the world. half of all university students were women, a remarkable accomplishment given the pre-Cold War state of higher education. for the most part—and although their representation lagged within the Socialist Unity Party itself relative to the rest of East German society—women were financially autonomous and politically independent, and their concerns were well represented in politics. women were even integrating into the military by the late 1980s—something that was constitutionally illegal in West Germany (and led to virtually all of these women becoming unemployed after reunification). in many respects it is remarkable the state was so stable given its inability to be self-sufficient and its troubled relationship with the Soviets. i'll definitely have more to say about this in subsequent blog posts, especially since i have other books about East Germany to eventually read.

brief introduction

two days ago i wrote an off-hand blog update about my problems with solarpunk. i wrote this in a matter of a few hours, but i think my premises are pretty straightforward and defensible. however: these are not my only problems with solarpunk—in fact, i elided many of the more complicated issues that undercut solarpunk for me. i will now elaborate in some detail on these issues.

what does it mean to be solarpunk?

let's start from the ground floor here: i don't know what it means to be solarpunk. i don't think most solarpunks know either. or, i suppose i should say they might have an answer to the question "what does it mean to be solarpunk?", but i doubt that i would find it satisfactory.

whenever i engage in solarpunk spaces, i find it a consistent struggle to actually see myself—an impoverished Black nonbinary person—reflected there. this is true of the aesthetic, genre, and movement, and there are some obvious sources of this disillusion. as i previously observed, solarpunk's growth as an aesthetic and a genre is intimately tied to Tumblr; but that platform is comprised of "mostly white, mostly sheltered middle-school misfits and fandom teenagers who have since grown up." so solarpunk has inherited its demographics, and thus people i cannot relate to whatsoever. this would make it rather hard to be a solarpunk.

but it's not just an interpersonal feeling of disillusion that i have here—that would be something i could just work through. what i find is a fundamental disagreement with solarpunks invoking diversity and decolonialism. in solarpunk texts these are often considered integral to defining the term and what it stands for at all. solarpunks, then, implicitly frame themselves as advocates of diversity and their aesthetic, genre, and movement as one with an essentially decolonial character. i simply don't believe this is accurate. i consider it false from first principles: solarpunk is, again, very white, not particularly diverse, and hardly free of colonial prejudices; i also consider it false in actual practice: as we'll go over at length, solarpunk seems much the opposite—something that reifies a white, Western, and colonial line of thinking and leaves little room for anything else.

solarpunk as an extractive analogy

in function, i would argue solarpunk actually has something of a low-stakes extractivist relationship with diversity and decolonialism: it takes many of its most interesting building styles, technologies, cultural practices, and more from non-Western cultures. but then it fails to actually process them, their purpose, their place, and their context. if anything it decontextualizes these things—it fails to give them, and the peoples who made them, proper deference or due. thus they are cherrypicked without much deeper consideration and then laundered back into culture under the label "solarpunk," a Western curation of how the world ought to be run and what is acceptable or not.

jugaad, swadeshi, and refugee

take for example the assertion that "solarpunk draws on [...] Ghandi’s [sic] ideal of swadeshi and subsequent Salt March, and countless other traditions of innovative dissent." already a strong prescription is made here by posing Gandhi, poster child of nonviolent resistance and someone whose form of resistance is acceptable to nearly everyone, as the ideal. intentionally or not, forcible or violent resistance is foreclosed—a position hard to stomach given the nature of the climate crisis and the salient critiques of nonviolent tactics by people such as Peter Gelderloos. and what necessitates invoking Gandhi's "ideal of swadeshi" by Western solarpunks? even most other educated Westerners probably have no sense of what this movement was, or what its occurrence means practically for themselves today. certainly i don't. the swadeshi movement was strongly informed by the particular circumstances of colonial-era India, and particularly resistance to the first partition of Bengal. it seems quite out of place in any foundational solarpunk document.

where it's possible to extract meaning from an invocation of this sort, we still find that solarpunk fails to grapple with what that invocation actually implies. continuing the example, the swadeshi demand was not a blank slate—it comes bearing its own context and prescriptions. Gandhi's unrealized "ideal of swadeshi" was intimately tied to a notion of absolute, decentralized self-governance (Swaraj) by the Indian traditional village. the best analogy to this in the West is perhaps Hutterite or Amish communities, which have long utilized community-based economics and self-governance as Gandhi might have envisioned—and which also tend to be strongly hierarchical and oppressive because of their social beliefs. needless to say the invocation loses its luster when thought of this way.

meanwhile when we strip it to its bare essence, the swadeshi demand for "communal economies removed from ruling ideology, and serving as the basis of a new, moral system" becomes one with plenty of Western analogues that better serve its purpose in a solarpunk context. from Peter Kropotkin to Murray Bookchin, there is a long history of Western theory on this subject. non-white Western theorists have also taken up the subject and built on it throughout history. Jessica Gordon Nembhard's Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice documents the long history of Black cooperative structures in America, many of which were built on similar principles to the swadeshi central demand; more contemporarily, Huey P. Newton's intercommunalism served as the basis of the Black Panther Party's "survival" programs.

we find this trouble too with invoking "Jugaad-style innovation from the developing world"—another turn of phrase from the same foundational solarpunk work. solarpunk's consideration of jugaad is purely an aesthetic one since the basic principles of jugaad are almost universal (Wikipedia gives them as "innovative fixes or a simple workarounds, solutions that bend the rules, or resources that can be used in such a way" - in effect, the Indian subcontinent just happens to have a broad word for this). but jugaad's ramshackle "aesthetic" is explicitly a byproduct of systemic failings—of underdevelopment and inequal access to resources—that solarpunk presumably seeks to address in the first place. in other words: "jugaad-style innovation" only happens because of a capitalist economy in which many are necessarily deprived. i feel comfortable asserting a better world would not have jugaad aesthetics. so what is the purpose of its inclusion versus, say, appropriate technology? why does solarpunk not foundationally rest on a publication like Low Tech Magazine?

i think that there is a consistent tendency, in solarpunk, to gaze toward the developing world as a gigantic involuntary laboratory for solarpunk ideas. (non-white people generally—particularly indigenous peoples in the West—are also subjects of this gaze.) this is weird. but it would probably be fine if that gaze were processed, engaged with critically and in a nuanced fashion, and its impact on solarpunk acknowledged. for the most part, though, this is not the case. much of the current basis on which solarpunk is built strikes me as—unintentionally or otherwise—culturally appropriative and orientalist. to adapt a turn of phrase from Edward Said, solarpunk bleaches away "troublesome interpositions" of context. the invocation of the swadeshi movement and aestheticization of jugaad are just two examples of it doing so. but there's no shortage of erasure of indigenous peoples; overlooking genuine extractivism needed for solar panels and wind turbines; Eurocentrism; or fetishization of Western norms, values, and morals in solarpunk spaces either. and sometimes solarpunks explicitly make prescriptions that cut to the heart of this problem: one early treatise on the politics of solarpunk proposes earnestly that "If we are going to create solarpunk cities/societies from scratch, refugee camps may very well be the foundation we build on." perhaps if one were to actually live in a refugee camp, they might not be so quick to prescribe this state of living as acceptable for others to live in. but most Westerners—and especially most white Westerners—will never have such an experience. and most solarpunks are white Westerners. so it goes.

diversity and decolonialism for who?

solarpunk at the end of the world

in an article on Storming the Ivory Tower entitled "You've Got To Throw Your Zombies On The Gears!" there are two observations that seem worth examining. the first of these is actually a rather simple statement, which is:

Solarpunk[—]in the projected context of resurgent fossil plagues, mass refugee status for the entire equatorial region, sunken cities, famine, and, perhaps, extinction[—]seems woefully unprepared, delusional.

indeed, i think this observation begs the question for the prevailing, depolicitized solarpunk² that cares more about aesthetic than action: how solarpunk can you be when your world is ending? even achieving 1.5°C—now virtually impossible without either geoengineering or inventing the deus ex machina of carbon capture—will be bleak for many. on our current trajectory (closer to 2.5-3.5°C), much of that Global South will become unsuitable for decent human living, or perhaps habitation at all. Gaia Vince suggests there would be "[a] wide equatorial belt of high humidity [that] will cause intolerable heat stress across most of tropical Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas, rendering vast areas uninhabitable for much of the year." Paul Behrens speculates that "Increasingly, we [will] begin to dread the onset of summer, anticipating what the season will bring: how many wildfires, heatwaves, hurricanes, etc., and how large they will be. We will adapt by bolstering infrastructure… but the changes will outpace us. Higher temperatures will render people incapable of working; they are already increasing suicide rates." David Wallace-Wells fatalistically notes "Already, as many as 1 billion are at risk for heat stress worldwide, and a third of the world’s population is subject to deadly heat waves at least twenty days each year; by 2100, that third will grow to half, even if we manage to pull up short of two degrees. If we don’t, the number could climb to three-quarters." and these are just some of the effects to come.

foundational solarpunk writings propose "infrastructure as a form of resistance" and assert ingenuity and local resilience as core values of solarpunk. but even in the Global North our built infrastructure assumes a world colder than the one we live in today—it literally is not equipped for the current amount of climate change, much less further heating. what happens when we actually reach 1.5°C or 2.5°C? absent radical politics, what is the solarpunk prescription to our current situation, in which climate isotherms shift nearly every year and whole ecosystems are forced to follow? Tad DeLay notes in Future of Denial that "A given temperature line, an isotherm, moves poleward at a rate of sixty kilometers per decade. Species dependent upon specific bands of temperatures will move at a similar speed if they are to survive." humans too will be a part of that great migration—hundreds of millions are expected to become climate refugees in the decades to come.

if in the Global North "infrastructure as a form of resistance" is problematic, in the Global South (where infrastructure is poor to nonexistent in the first place) it totally collapses. so too do hopes of ingenuity and resilience that rely on, among other assumptions, the premise that outside activities will remain non-lethal. but this is already being tested at an alarming rate by current wet-bulb temperatures (which become lethal at lower-than-first-thought thresholds) and current dry but protracted heat. the worst of these will both be experienced by the Global South—that is, if rising sea levels, flooding, famine, disease, and other worries don't get there first.

it is here that some solarpunks will probably exercise an escape clause i've avoided to this point: solarpunk is utopian. it's not meant to politically grapple with the here and now, at least in the ways i'm talking about; rather, it exists to be a sort of collective speculative fiction. this is why it is depoliticized. but i find this problematic as an out: it cedes that solarpunk can't really be a movement, and many solarpunks clearly disagree with that notion. beyond the aforementioned "infrastructure as a form of resistance" quote, one of the landmark early works outlining solarpunk invokes "local free association and global networks" as a model of political organization, and asserts "solarpunk can create connected pockets of vibrancy and resistance amidst a larger world of decline and oppression." clearly there is a desire among solarpunks for some sort of solarpunk movement. but if we are to nullify the out and say solarpunk should be a movement, then what good would its current depoliticized form be? without a radical change in our economic, political, and social systems solarpunk's utopian vision will be for a privileged few, if any.

we know this because the underlying arithmetic of climate change is simple, even if its outcomes are complex. we know the future in some places is uninhabitable, and these future uninhabitable places are disproportionately in the Global South. no amount of invoking "local free association and global networks" who build "infrastructure as a form of resistance" and try to be locally resilient will overcome this. you cannot resist wet-bulb temperatures above a certain threshold, nor build a community on an island that is beneath the waves. both will happen in the near future to people living today—the end of some worlds is now inevitable. in this respect depoliticized solarpunk again takes something of an appropriative and extractive form: Westerners are likely to reap the diversity of the world and the new-found benefits of applying technologies once confined to the Global South, while the Global South is depopulated by the climatological arson of the Global North.

and far from any sort of decolonial arrangement, i find it alarmingly likely the "best" outcome for a depoliticized solarpunk movement would be neocolonial: a world in which the developing world becomes completely reliant on the developed world to continue existing at all. Kwame Nkrumah's vision of countries whose "economic system and thus its political policy" are directed by outside actors would in this case become extremely literal—countries might remain intact only through an outside actor ensuring said country is habitable, with habitation technologies only the outside actor can manufacture. certainly this is not inconceivable of countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where there exist considerable natural resource deposits and a profit to be made on continued resource exploitation. (but what of other countries where few such profits are forthcoming?)

the rage and pain problem

this provides a useful turn to the second point i find substantial "You've Got To Throw Your Zombies On The Gears!", which is:

Solarpunk as it stands feels a lot like "green technology"--a series of tweaks that make for good branding and style but don't rock the boat too much. Where is Solarpunk's militant side? Where is the rage and pain? Where is the accusatory question: "Who killed the world?"

as we have just recounted: parts of the world will end—in a meaningful sense—in the lifetime of most people reading this. there are real people and real corporations who are actively killing the Earth right now, and who causally have the blood of dozens of species, thousands of ecosystems, and millions of people on their hands. Eunice Foote discovered the mechanism for climate change in 1856 and the arithmetic of future warming was deduced by Svante Arrhenius as early as the 1890s. the American Petroleum Institute warned in 1965 that "[...]by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in the climate beyond local or even national efforts." Exxon research in 1979 found that "the present trend of fossil fuel consumption will cause dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050." they knew. everyone responsible for the climate crisis knew what would happen. yet in its depoliticized state, solarpunk has more to prescribe about aesthetics than its very reason for existing: the greatest crime one person has ever committed to another.

i'm not saying that vengeance against those who have brought us here is necessary—it is not, and killing oil executives would not be useful praxis even if i think you could justify it morally. but where is the rage and pain in solarpunk—and why are hope and optimism treated by solarpunks as mutually exclusive of these? even non-killing forms of physical praxis against entities responsible for the climate crisis—destruction of natural gas and oil infrastructure, sabotage of cars and trucks, monkeywrenching and tree-spiking, or permanent blockading like the Unistʼotʼen Camp—are ones solarpunks seem loathe to acknowledge. far more frequent in my experience are guerrilla gardening, community gardening, little free pantries or libraries, Food Not Bombs tabling, and the like. i don't mean to speak ill of this variety of praxis or anything, but its unique valorization is another place where the notion of "Gandhi as ideal" i mentioned earlier rears its head for the worse. solarpunk has essentially tethered itself to a Gandhi-like path of pacifism and nonviolent resistance (including nonviolence against property)—but, for their value in the toolkit of politics, in what sense are either of these punk or countercultural? they're arguably the dominant mode of political resistance today.

and even supposing my assertion was not true, it's still hard to be more punk than literally facing prosecution for anti-corporate direct action. many people engaging in physical praxis experience this. it was barely 20 years ago that the United States government enacted a "Green Scare" in an effort to crack down specifically on practitioners of sabotage and monkeywrenching. people in the Earth First! and Animal Liberation Front movements have already seen very real prison time for mere property damage against polluting industries and tree-spiking in forests intended for clear-cutting. and the possibility of prison, or worse, has not ceased to be true for environmentalists in the time since the Scare. last year police brutally executed Tortuguita, an environmental activist involved in the Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest movement. 23 other Stop Cop City activists face domestic terrorism charges for their alleged involvement in the movement's blockades and direct actions, and another 60+ face racketeering or money laundering charges because they supposedly supported the movement materially. the pattern of repression makes it clear what those in political power fear from activists, and right now it's direct action.

perhaps not coincidentally, there is striking difference in the tactics often used by colonized or oppressed peoples and the tactics valorized by solarpunks. beyond Stop Cop City recent examples are easy to find. Stop Line 3 land defenders "put up barricades and dug trenches across roads" to halt the pipeline; it was reported they "slashed tires, cut hoses, [put] rocks and dirt in engines, forced entry into offices and destroyed electrical wiring in equipment." and in Wetʼsuwetʼen territory protesters have for years seized equipment, dug trenches and built blockades, disabled Coastal GasLink infrastructure, and continually blockaded roads and the Coastal GasLink pipeline. there were solidarity blockades of rail lines by Mi'gmaq and Mohawk First Nations throughout 2020, slowed only by COVID-19. in one instance in 2022, 20 masked attackers armed with axes caused significant damage to a Coastal GasLink pipeline work camp by "seizing large company machines and using them to destroy the site."

history likewise gives many examples of self-defense and violent resistance from the colonized and oppressed. the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973—one of the pinnacles of the American Indian Movement and its efforts to mainstream the colonial failings of the United States government—was certainly not nonviolent. it literally involved the seizure of a reservation town, and during the 71-day occupation three people were killed. the Black Panthers—both before and after their turn toward intercommunalism—made a point of openly embracing self-defense and defensive violence against oppression; in several cases (such as that of Bobby James Hutton) they forewent even this principle and shot first. and even the Civil Rights Movement had a degree of heterogeneity with respect to nonviolence: Akinyele Omowale Umoja's book We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement observes the continual creation of Black self-defense and paramilitary forces in the Jim Crow South. these were ubiquitous enough that even the non-violent SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) were sometimes influenced by them. CORE's Louisiana chapter explicitly adopted armed self-defense and organization as a principle in 1963; and both CORE and SNCC had many members who supported the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and its contemporaries. this despite RAM advocating for "armed struggle as the primary means by which Black liberation would come about" and its desire "to build a Black liberation army to wage guerilla warfare in the United States".

all this to say: i find the near total absence of physical praxis and violence from solarpunk to be bizarre—and once again reflective of solarpunk's depoliticization and mostly white and Western demographics. many of the movements and moments i would consider punk have explicitly used one or both of those things—particularly the movements and moments of non-white peoples, who have often needed a component of violence to enact any sort of change at all. if i were to summarize my position by way of books, i would assert that Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline or Aric McBay's Full Spectrum Resistance ought to have equal or greater a place in solarpunk than Food Not Bombs' Hungry for Peace. that they don't is a statement of priorities. and that's not a dunk on Hungry for Peace (which is a very good manual that i recommend)—it's an objection to the bounds of acceptable activism that seem to exist form many solarpunks. but i suppose it would be rather easy to be a pacifist—to take refuge in nonviolent protest—when you're not colonized or oppressed, and when your world will not end in the lifetime that you read this.

a better world is possible (but not through solarpunk)

i will reiterate my belief that if you're a "solarpunk" for political reasons you should read Bookchin and Öcalan, and learn from the Zapatistas and Kurds. social ecology is, to me, what solarpunk ought to be (but won't)—and under its wings are at least two schools of thought. you might adhere to a classical Bookchinite communalism/libertarian municipalism, or take after Öcalan and his democratic democratic confederalism. i think both are defensible, and both Bookchin and Öcalan are some of the most forward-thinking theorists of our time. you would be doing yourself and those around you a favor by trying to make their prescriptions reality.

of course you might charge that social ecology has many of these same problems i've talked about. in some respects this is a fair observation. Murray Bookchin—although an antifascist and antiracist Jew who spent much of his life opposing sources of oppression and dominion—obviously had his own blind spots. his opposition to racism, colonization, and settler colonialism was primarily expressed via polemics against others and not affirmatively throughout his work (to which it was also left secondary); his works, likewise, strongly center Europe in no small part because of his sectarian objections to the New Left and their centering of the Global South. most social ecologists that i am aware of are also white.

but Bookchin was far more unambiguously anti-racist, anti-colonization, anti-settler colonial, and appreciative of non-European traditions and the need to accommodate them and learn from them than he is usually given credit for. social ecologists, too, are aware of his (and social ecology's) deficiencies and have written at great length about them. take Blair Taylor's Social Ecology, Racism, Colonialism, and Identity: Assessing the Work of Murray Bookchin, an extensive piece in the social ecologist magazine Harbinger which summarizes Bookchin's visions and his drawbacks in this sphere. and social ecology is an actual movement doing actual things, not an aesthetic and genre trying to become a movement. even if on the whole social ecology might be demographically white, the most developed social ecologist projects are generally not. Cooperation Jackson is one such example in the United States—and one of its major figures, Kali Akuno, is intimately involved with the Institute for Social Ecology. and Öcalan's democratic confederalism, as noted previously, is essentially a wing of Bookchin's social ecology, libertarian municipalism, and communalism. the democratic confederalist experiment of the Kurdish people, in fact, is likely the largest ongoing nonstatist experiment in the world. it's also likely one of the most ecologically conscious in the world, and actively seeks to remedy many of the ecological legacies of consequences colonialism and imperialism in the region.

obviously, there are not solarpunk analogues to Rojava. there aren't even really analogues to Cooperation Jackson in the solarpunk space that i know of (although probably not for a lack of trying). i don't think this is intrinsically a failing of solarpunk—it's hard do these things. but it does mean that solarpunk's whiteness (and its dubious ability to actually be diverse and decolonial) is not even offset by what its adherents are doing in practice. it remains essentially an online phenomenon, and a heavily white and depoliticized one at that. this is not confidence inducing. even though i might be one of the few visibly non-white social ecologists, i can look to the inspirational work taking place in Jackson, Mississippi and know there is a place for Black social ecology. i can hear about Black facilitators putting the Symbiosis movement's efforts to build a confederal organization in North America on the right track. i can read Lêgerîn and the inspirational stories of peoples around the world who find hope in the Kurdish project, and hope one day to build it in their own communities and cultures. i can't do something like that with solarpunk, and i doubt i ever will be able to.

if solarpunk is to become a movement at all—or a movement that is actually diverse and decolonial—it will probably have to shed much of its current form; what i write about here will have to be overcome; and, fundamentally, it will have to politicize itself and accept it cannot be for everyone. i do not expect any of this to happen. i do have optimism that a better world is possible, and i hope it comes about one day (through socialist politics)—but i don't expect solarpunk to play any serious part in making that better world. and after reading this, i hope you understand why, and the problems that make me think this way.

notes

¹ for many, i would imagine they also afford variations on the same basic notion of escapism from a complex, degenerating world into something simpler and more harmonious.

² if you're wondering how a movement that so asserts and emphasizes politics could still be depoliticized as i claim here: words are cheap. it is easy to assert anti-capitalism, diversity, decolonialism, etcetera—actually doing these things is another story, and as you may be able to tell i am not sold solarpunk really does any of these things. certainly not with the consistency to justify labeling the aesthetic, genre, or movement that way.

i read this post from liberal pundit Noah Smith the other day—How will you save small midwestern towns without mass immigration?; i find it interesting now that i've finished Future of Denial. here are some miscellaneous thoughts on the two.

for the most part, a combination of social and economic liberalism seems to actually get people reasonably close to what i'd consider a correct take on immigration. but, as with many political differences that distinguish liberalism from leftism it's the remainder that presents a gigantic issue. this article is useful for illustrating some of that.

it's not all good

you might say the political distinction is best illustrated by the framing of the article in the first place: that revitalizing and maintaining the economic prospects of a desiccating region through immigrant labor is more-or-less always a good thing (for both the immigrant and to a lesser degree the place they're immigrating to). take for instance the glowing verbiage here:

If you’re a poor immigrant from a low-income country like Honduras, or Somalia, or Haiti, or Laos, or even the poorer parts of Mexico, the chance to live in a first-world country like America and work in a relatively clean, relatively safe factory for $14 an hour is the chance of a lifetime. You’ve really made it, if you can do that. So when a small-town factory owner who needs labor starts hiring workers from an immigrant group, they quickly tell all their friends and family, and the factory fills up with immigrant workers.

is this sentiment true in many cases? i'm sure, especially if your frame of reference is Somalia or Haiti or any other number of deeply fucked up countries in the world. it isn't for nothing that over a million people per year immigrate to the United States—in terms of political stability, wealth, opportunity, and cultural and economic hegemony this country has quite a lot to offer virtually any immigrant. but living a better, safer life obviously does not make you immune to exploitation (even in a liberal framework; certainly in a leftist one). the treatment of immigrant labor is often quite appalling in the United States (especially undocumented labor, which de facto allows for slave-like conditions) and deeply exploitative or unsafe relative to non-immigrant labor. and—while this can't inherently be solved by wage increases, benefits, and unionization—is it not an obviously troubling dynamic that vital industries like meatpacking and fruit production are heavily reliant on a flow of immigration to function?

mass immigration, freedom of movement, carceral policy

there's a section in Noah Smith's article which is as follows:

Opinion about immigration in America depends very strongly on the type of immigrants being considered. For example, people really love high-skilled immigration. But at the same time, people really don’t like illegal immigration. But in between, there’s a whole category of immigration that doesn’t quite fit into either of those buckets: mass low-skilled legal immigration. This is when a large number of people come to an American town who aren’t entrepreneurs or engineers or doctors, but who came through perfectly legal channels.

and in the conclusion, he notes:

[...]if you’re upset about “floods” of low-skilled immigrants getting “dumped” on small towns in the American heartland, you should ask yourself: How else do you propose to revive those declining regions? Would you starve them of the only resource that they could possibly use to revitalize themselves?

i think these make for good jumping off points to exploring far more interesting aspects of mass immigration that deserve consideration and aren't just dumb right-wing canards or fearmongering. for example: immigration is for most intents and purposes a finite resource under the immigration law of most countries. there are a finite number of people, and the subset with the ability and desire to move elsewhere are even more finite. most immigration processes are also exceedingly laborious; and some are virtually impossible, especially for the "low-skill immigrant" category Smith identifies.

needless to say: i think that's bad! if we're serious about facilitating mass immigration and freedom of movement then i think it obviously follows in the short term that we must demilitarize existing borders; reform immigration systems to be much more permissive of who is allowed in and how quickly; and create analogues to the Schengen Area around the world. i'm sure Smith agrees with most of that, and that it'd make everything much easier for those considered "low-skill immigrants". we could revitalize a lot of economically deprived areas that way.

but i suspect where i'd lose him is full abolition of borders—i am opposed to them in principle and practice. in this specific context, that's because if we want to make the finite nature of immigration as unimpactful as possible, that will require minimal restrictions on global freedom of movement. borders are obviously and by far the largest impediment to this. but there are other reasons borders suck and shouldn't exist, and some of these are perhaps even ones that you've considered in passing before.

borders are necessarily carceral, even when in "kind" forms like the Schengen Area; they must define an in-group and an out-group, a "legal" and an "illegal", a "right" and a "wrong" way to move about. the construct of "illegal immigration" is in large part a product of borders (and the states which make them tangible). borders serve to define the in-group and the out-group, and they make it possible to describe someone as "illegal" through the application of a state's law. as Catherine Dauvergne puts it: “Illegal migration is a product of migration law. Without legal prohibition, there is no illegality.”

a byproduct of this is that a state's power to police its borders can extend far beyond its actual borders. Tad Delay and Harsha Walia combine to note, for instance, that:

Borders do not keep people out. What borders do is confer and revoke status. We tax goods at the border. Humans turn “illegal” at a border. [...] Concentration camps and border patrol raids draw attention, but power acts on migrants or refugees long before they reach a host nation. In her marvelously documented book Border and Rule, the immigrant rights activist Harsha Walia defined border externalization as webs of “interdiction, offshore detention, safe third country agreements, and outsourcing of border control to third countries.”

many of the people impacted worst by this—the ones who resort to being trafficked, or who brave journeys of thousands of miles over land just to attempt to declare asylum—are, of course, in the "low-skill immigrant" category. reforming the immigration system will only change so much for these people, especially as they become more frequent due to climate change, political instability, and worsening economic prospects in their home countries.

neocolonialism

of course there's an additional, interesting matter of complication: at least currently, the dynamics of immigration in the world seem quite neocolonial. the financial power—or prospective financial power—of developing nations is, in a sense, extracted through emigration. facilitated by the lack of opportunity in such countries, developing nations lose their highly-educated talent to other countries like the United States (and often these emigrants do not return). a brain drain follows, from which such countries often struggle to recover. economic prospects are worsened; political instability is made more likely; the country is perhaps obliged to take on foreign specialists (who may have their own agendas) to replace lost domestic talent, or perhaps forced to be subservient to outside financial interests to make up for this.

the root of this issue is the state these developing countries were left in by the colonial process. this is almost universal, actually. even comparatively well off developing countries like Nigeria—poised to be a major economy in the future due to its population growth and oil wealth—struggle with the historical plunder of colonialism¹ and the lack of colonial statebuilding. the Congos of the world have even less to look forward to in this respect. emigration is a very understandable impulse from countries like this; but simultaneously, and especially if it becomes easy even to the non-skilled worker, virtually guarantees Nkrumah's words become reality for these countries: "the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside." even the benefits of such emigration (remittances, for example) are easy to see as liabilities in the long term.

overall, this is an unfortunate dynamic that there don't seem to be easy answers for—in the short term, even good and humane immigration policy on the part of developed nations seems likely to make the dynamic worse.

¹ and ongoing economic neocolonialism too! that oil wealth has many strings attached by foreign corporations—check out how many joint-companies there are in the Nigerian petroleum industry.