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How would a Solarpunk society handle law enforcement and military? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 weeks ago by to c/solarpunk@slrpnk.net
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I mean, let's be honest: People do crimes even when they have no material need to do so, so you will always need some form of law enforcement, how should a solarpunk society handle this?

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

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[–] 1 point 4 weeks ago (1 child)

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.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 child)

    It relies on a legitimate government outside of it to provide actual protection from outside lawlessness.

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 weeks ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

    No anacharchist society could ever survive being in competition with a legitimate nation state with mordern weapons.

    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.

    These two concepts are so incredibley far removed from each other

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    Over the last day, while traveling without much internet access (but with Kiwix and tons of material on my laptop) i used the time to dive a bit deeper into the question i asked myself. I think now that with things like 3D printers (perhaps even more advanced versions that we have today), distributed construction and distributed but highly connected guerilla groups a conflict could be made somewhat winable / surviveable for a solarpunk society.

    I asked the question in the first place because i am currently dabbling a bit into writing and after first drafting some sort of detective story i am now more inclined to pivot to a bit of a "solarpunk society gets invaded by a conventional state" story...

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