I believe our cities should belong to us. They should be cooperative, co-creative, ecological, and egalitarian spaces, by and for the people. We have so much untapped urban potential just waiting to be explored. Join me as we determine how to build a solarpunk city.
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Thanks to @lilbilliam for voicing the skit!
JOIN THE DISCORD FOR THE SOLARPUNK ART COLLAB: https://discord.gg/Xg7CXZbQHp
The list of artists used is in the outro.
Introduction – 0:00
The Rise of Urbanisation – 3:52
City Planning – 10:01
The Right to the City – 15:48
SKIT – 19:35
Solarpunk City Planning – 21:19
Anarchist Urban Struggles – 31:11
Conclusion – 36:19
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Music: @ForeignManInAForeignLand Sun (prod. salmon the ghost) https://soundcloud.com/salmontheghost
outro music: Cedar Womb by joe zempel YouTube: / @joezempel
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3vVDn…
Sources & Resources: The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow
Seeing Like A State by James C Scott Colin Ward
Housing: an Anarchist Approach Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
Social Ecology and the Right to the City by various
The Limits of the City by Murray Bookchin
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1 Comment
How do you create non-hierarchical structures and self-management? Where do you start? How do you get everyone to adopt such things? Why is it called a Solarpunk city? Why not just a participatory planned city. A non-hierarchical city? A self-managed city? And when there is such a thing as Parecon, that clearly states, claims, spells out, prescribes and talks of such things that can be done within the economic sphere, not in vague terms, but necessarily clear ones, why is it not even mentioned. Why is it ignored, not known of, spoken of, linked to, as a concrete utopian vision that would aid in Solarpunkness. Why must I start again, listening to a short historical synopsis of the world, critiques of capitalism, be told of old books that have been read and quoted from, of old historical thinkers, blah, blah, blah, only to be asked to believe in, advocate for something that in many ways has been around for at least thirty years, like participatory planning, in a vision called Parecon. An example of human inventiveness and creativity on the scale of any great past thinker. An extension of anarchism. A repair of Marxist class analysis. A solidarity economy that points to needed specifics in the vagueness of anarchist visions, degrowth visions, social ecology and much else.
Ignored, ignored, ignored in favour of poetic YouTubing. The simplicity folk ignore it. Solarpunks ignore it. Marxists ignore it. Anarchists ignore it. Columbia University ignores it. Ignore, ignore, ignore. Yet I am asked to get on board with all these other things that actually give me, well, not much. As if to confirm my love of nature, my love of humanity, my compassion, my care, by jumping on by supporting and advocating for all this stuff that’s not new at all, in essence, and that’s ignores the very thing it needs. Clear institutional economic structure.
I do not need quotes from old intellectuals who wax lyrically about rights, rights to the city and then go home. I don’t need quotes from old intellectuals waxing lyrical about how rights to the city can’t come from the state or capitalism. It’s all a waste of space. It’s just people letting listeners know, readers, whoever, that the person delivering the message is well read. But the quotes are nothing but air to me now.
Where are the quotes by this author, speaker, YouTuber, from an economic vision that has been around for thirty years and deals directly with participatory planning, consumers and producers as a self-managed participatory decision-making collective, offers up a completely different way to account for social benefits and costs and how people access the social pie, how the social pie is decided and how class and hierarchy can be directly dealt with? They’re nowhere to be seen. Nowhere to be heard.
There is no Left. There is just a landscape of inhabitants who have no clue how to put their already knowing heads together and collate, mould, shape, already existing ideas into a visionary and transitioning spectrum with clear strategy to get to the goal. It’s always just in the head, an imagining with a few tiny real examples thrown in that capitalists can easily deal with. It’s always hovering above the ground, never landing with real transitioning strategy, delivered in poetic ways, with somber, gentle yet somewhat hopeful voices, well-mannered, and to a tiny number of people. As if pleading and as if those who disagree or don’t immediately jump on board are somehow just not caring enough.
David Harvey gets quotes, but where’s his vision? Other than vague calls for a better world I’ve read him write in the past, or even explicit calls for a new economic vision, which I have heard him make, I hear nothing. I’ve read Graeber’s new book twice. Love it, but it has nothing to do with vision or what needs to be done. He was as vague and non-committal re vision as the next person. Chomsky too, is wrong about Parecon. Wrong about the need for specific institutional outlines. And claims of our ignorance or our uncertainty about human relations under new visionary structure that prohibit him from getting behind things like Parecon fully, are nonsensical in my opinion. Unfounded. Unhelpful. Anything instituted singly or in a trial and error fashion, trying things out as we go, is no different in this regard as anything one finds within Parecon, whether Parecon is instituted in one foul swoop or bit by bit, singly, using, yes, you guess it, trial and error. The ideas, in the sense of being propositions of value, within Parecon, are no different to any one finds elsewhere that others seem so enamoured of. But the truth is, most of those ideas, those most seem enamoured if, are not new or revolutionary or radical. They’re friggin’ obvious. Been around for centuries. And they’re good ones too. I have no disagreement with most of them. It’s just they fall well short of what’s needed on a p.ZNet with 8 billion inhabitants. Parecon embraces what most choose to ignore. And those who ignore Parecon, yet know of it, do so using dodgy often bogus reasoning.
Yep, that’s right, two people chose to do what most choose not to do while they wax lyrical and proselytise about what is needed and needs to be imagined. Two people have done this. Much like how language propagated thought the population. But it just needed one person to see the mutation propagate and passed on till it stuck and now we all have it…the language faculty. The human race didn’t need a “we” to come up with a collective mutation for language. Nup, it just needed one member to get it and pass it on. And questioning Parecon’s “blueprint” like qualities, or constantly questioning whether any one or all of its institutions are possible or feasible, is nothing but intellectual filibustering. You can do that for any new idea anyone has. The blueprint argument, the efficiency argument and the ignorance argument, are all a waste of time founded on bogus politiccal, economic and philosophical positions. Parecon, like EVERYTHING ELSE, is nothing but a bunch of worthy and valuable ideas. All in sync with anarchism, solidarity economics, degrowth, solarpunk, Rojava, Zapatistas, Marxism, social ecology, simplicity and socialism itself. In fact. Parecon for me is the very definition of socialism. And I am tired of having to rewire my brain every two seconds about supposed new things, listen patiently to some rerendition of old visionary ideas dressed up in different clothing whilst those advocating them quote all the usual suspects and ideas already out there, whilst totally ignoring a 30 year old vision designed to improve and enhance. To fill in what needs to be filled in and to deal with what needs to be dealt with and that is a important as anything Marx, or anyone else, every wrote, if not more so, and in fact would help deliver what this person seems to want.
And I think it’s only because the two authors of parecon don’t pander to the rhetoric and romantic proselytising going on around them within the left landscape. They’re old foggies. They are not part of and don’t play the left intellectual game. And because they aren’t exclusively anarchists, Marxists, solarpunks, degrowthers, simplicity folk, community economics folk, solidarity economics folk, or whoever else you can throw in there, that makes them nothing but outliers, with a tiny bunch of invisible advocates around the world here and there. And outliers usually get ignored.
This Solarpunker needs to be seriously schooled on Parecon. Maybe they are. If so, why ignore it?
Further to his James C Scott quote about the State…couldn’t care less about it frankly. Sounds smart. Deducing things from self evident first principles doesn’t sound bad in principle to me. An authoritarian structure doing it to impose rules on others is just not self-management. Derr. Such a state is synonymous with the very aspect of coordinatorism that Parecon tries to deal with explicitly.
Techne coupled or mix with Métis (don’t know how to spell it) street smarts, or whatever it is, so what. It’s participatory decisionmaking, and just saying the above doesn’t make it clear how to do it. The next four steps he mentions are obvious and commonsense. Nothing more. But they apply to everything. But the last one is really interesting. Plan on human inventiveness. Hah! Well, Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert have exhibited just that, yet this person mentions absolutely nothing about it, there are no links to Parecon or any Parecon books have been read or sourced.
Why? Why does this person NOT MENTION PARECON? Yet talks of participatory planning and self-management and non-hierarchical structures? Why do they not know of it? It should be in the reading and links. Anybody who mentions Particpatory planning and does not mention a three decade old vision that is basically founded on such a thing has not been schooled properly (maybe a bit harsh) and it highlights a weakness about vision within the left landscape that needs rectifying.
However, I am beginning to feel to a certain extent that perhaps the whole Parecon things is totally unnecessary. I’m theconecwuthba problem. If this person has mentioned Parecon in other videos where he goes into more detail about things, as he alludes to here, then ok, I’m a fool or spoke too soon, or went off too soon, but it still doesn’t account for the invisibility of any Parecon books in the source reading section or links. But somehow I doubt it. So maybe Parecon is the waste of time. Perhaps all these other things being done at the Next System Project, Commons Transition, Democracy Collaborative, Simplicity Institute, by degrowthers, solarpunks and transition networks, at Rojava and in the Chiapas, is all we need and all of them, without exception, ignore or are silent on Parecon, even if they use the terms self-management or participatory planning. Never mention it. It’s unnecessary according to them all. So maybe it’s a red herring. Not that important. So maybe I should just shut my cake hole about Parecon and just leave change to the young vibrant folk more in touch with things now, like all those hip folk of the sixties, with more life ahead of them and who still contain some hope. Because I’m really just full of dread.
But when asked what I see, hear and smell when I think of a Solarpunk city, I see, hear and smell nothing. That’s the truth. Nothing. Because there is absolutely nothing concrete in this description that gives me any way to construct any vision in my head. If I do, it’s nothing but a guess, a dream. A romantic one at that. A poetic one. Or like a nonsensical Dylan song that just has the appearance of death. No simplicity vision or degrowth vision has done it either. Not even pictures or descriptions of the Zapatistas or Rojava have done it, nor community economics, nor land or housing trusts have done it. Why? Because they all exist within a capitalist market economy, are common human endeavours, all good, no doubt, but that can all easily be accommodated by capitalism.
But Parecon did do it and does do it. It struck me upon first discovery. It had impact beyond the romantic and poetic imaginings, and often merely fictive visions of others. It put the idea of change firmly on the ground, practicably. Because it gave me recourse to actual concrete institutional economic structure beyond anything existing now. Grounding and a chance for real socialism. A real explication of the maxim from each to each. That’s what real vision is.