Quotes from this article:
Indeed, if there’s one thing anarchists are known for among the general public, it’s having a leg in several artistic, musical, and philosophical subcultures.
This is definitely true. It's also part of why we shape radically different spaces for so many things (even schools, when we're trying to break out of the state-mandated spheres).
One of the main sources of this relative distrust between those involved in cultural-ideological struggle and those involved in political-economic struggle – and perhaps the absence of more significant gains we might get from better cooperation between the two fronts – lies, I believe, in the lack of an adequate means of conceptualising how they interrelate.
I definitely agree with this, especially as anarchists in both camps need to recognise that they need each other. I often feel frustrated because I get trapped by one or the other, and I just want to work on things that do both. We need to be building the on-the-ground networks, and that doesn't happen when we're dismissing political-economic or cultural-ideological needs.
Automation of toil is widespread, 3D-printing and micro-manufacturing replaces alienating mass production, and labour as a practice is artisan-ised, emulating William Morris’s dream of work being made into play. It’s a world of decentralised and confederated eco-communities, using technology for human-centric and eco-centric ends rather than for accumulating power and profit – mending the metabolic rift between first nature (the natural world) and second nature (human culture) – and where social hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and disability are considered horror stories from the past “oil age”.
This is something that I love about solarpunk stories.
What’s rarer is using culture as a whole to grow libertarian consciousness on a mass scale. That is what we need to try to do more of in the future, and that’s what solarpunk may have the potential to catalyse.
I agree with this, and something like solarpunk would be more accessible to people currently teaching topics like literature and science (in traditionally organised schools). It would at least be something to provide to students as food-for-thought, which could promote people to engage in other similar texts (as a whole, not just written works) or creators.
