this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
89 points (91.6% liked)
chapotraphouse
13934 readers
592 users here now
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Art is fascist when I assume it doesn't depict humans
Goofy because Solarpunk (while idealist as @Chapo_is_Red@hexbear.net points out) is more interested in human involvement and labor than any other "-punk" aesthetic.
Solar-punk feels like of like an inversion of socialist realism to me. Socialist realism celebrates the worker as creator with muscles straining, tools in hand, actively building the world. Labor is heroic, collective, and visibly transformative. The aesthetic screams: WE made this. On the other hand, solar-punk envisions society after the work is done with comfortable citizens enjoying green tech built by unseen hands. The aesthetic whispers: Look what grew while no one was laboring.
So all art featuring architecture that doesn't have it actively being built or features someone holding a hammer in the foreground is fascist?
Is this fascist?
Hard to say; it is very silly-looking though. It's like someone threw a couple shapes together, traced random lines between them, and called it a design.
It does have green roofs and open parkland and integrates terrain. On the left side, the sidewalk traces the contour, and that's the most solarpunk part of the image. But if it doesn't have deep principles of sustainability, it's more futurism/cyberpunk than solarpunk.
It is an actual train station that is currently being renovated in China. Which is kind of my point, we have the kind of stuff being derided as idealistic actually being made in China, with the kind of images promoting it that are being derided for being fascist. Is the topic at hand here that some people who promote solarpunk that are fascists and that we then work backwards from that to see the same in the art, or is it that solarpunk is inherently fascist aesthetically speaking (which I assumed the post was about)?
What is the substantial difference between this render and a solarpunk render of a forest city? (Or the renders of forest cities being built or sponsored by China)
That makes sense, I stand corrected. I still think it's silly to not have the cylinders any higher, and to have them looking like they're haphazardly laying on top of the terrain, instead of anchored inside it.
Also, the grass lawn monoculture is bad
I think I explained myself clearly above.
So is that a yes or a no? If we were to assume that no aesthetics exist other than solarpunk and socialist realism your argument would be sound, but as it is now you defined pretty much everything that isn't socialist realism as fascism.
We're not talking about art of the sake of art here. We're talking about a political ideology and the art associated with promoting its values. The issue I have is that solar-punk sells a vision of a comfortable society while ignoring the labour that underpins it. In my view, the recognition of the central role of labour in society has to be part of any genuinely socialist aesthetic.
quoting for posterity
Wow, all the images of Shibam have no people in them. Yemen is cancelled for being fascist.
Maybe if we inserted some Western consumerism and planned obsolescence, they could be perpetually engaged in construction work like we are in the West.
All you have to do to not be fascist is build things that are not made to last, so you always have a need for more glorious labor that replaces what has already been built. Easy.
20-hour work week? 10-hour work week? But then where are all the workers going to be appearing? This economic projection of a reduction of socially necessary labor input, to maintain an objectively decent quality of life for a stable number of people, is fascist.
And FALGSC must be the most fascist thing there is. Everybody has the cool cosmonaut avatars and the banner images of people flying through space alongside rockets, but no one has a banner image of people working in the factories to make the space suits and the rockets, or mining the metals for them.
'oh but he has a hammer and sickle symbol in his fist'
If I slap some ivy on a brick wall in a hammer and sickle shape, would that make you happy? But I still wouldn't call that solarpunk to much of a coherent extent, though. Certainly, the aesthetic does blend with others, but solarpunk distinguishes itself coherently from cyberpunk and futurism to the degree that it incorporates human-scale, appropriate technology, and living systems. Putting a couple trees on the outside of the Burj Dubai is a strawman.
The only way it's not fascist is if *checks notes* you constantly have a massive number of labor hours being invested into something.
Bravo, you really put a lot of effort into that straw man.
Speak for yourself, with this entire post.
No investigation into key tenets or even correlates, just vibes and Twitter bait.
Sure yeah that's it.
You are the one coming out with a topic stating that the art doesn't show the workers building it and is therefore fascist by default. Virtually no art other than socialist realism features the builder, and even most soviet architectural art doesn't feature any people to any significant extent. It is the same kind of tea leaf reading that you get when westerners call Stalinist or Chinese architecture totalitarian and evil by imagining the people who were enslaved to build it.
I wonder since the majority of the real world muscle behind the actual movement with forest cities and expanded solar power automation is currently in China. Like, another topic you just posted completely fits with the whole aestetic, but I assume it wasn't meant to be seen as terrible news.
I think I was pretty clear in what I said above. Feel free to actually address that.
I did. You have blankly refused to answer any of my questions though, and instead decided to change the subject to the ideology that some proponents have so further interaction seems pointless.
I love how you're upset that you didn't get the answer you were very obviously fishing for. Given that you don't care for what I actually have to say, you're right that further interaction is pointless.
All I'm getting out of this discourse is Solarpunk art needs more twinks or bears (pick yer poison) in dirty overalls installing solar panels and geodesic domes
yup that's the way to fix it :)
What, so you're saying:
That being said, it's a huge stretch to compare it to social fascism. While it is political in nature, I feel its merits lie more as a literary and artistic counterbalance to dystopian worldbuilding in the west
Honestly, taking it as its worst, an aesthetic artistic movement is based on aesthetic, and frankly I don't see a lot of harm in that, at all, but it's not good if one is stuck on it, as an end-all
I think its role is similar to that of religion, albeit more benign
The problem is that solar-punk is entirely compatible with social fascism. It sells a vision of a comfortable society that sweeps labour that underpins its functioning under the rug. This is largely how the west functions already. We outsource labour to the global south where it's brutally exploited, but then peddle the whole Nodric "socialism" where the exploiters live in comfort.
The recognition of the role of labour in society has to be part of any genuinely socialist aesthetic.
Do you actually have a conception of Soviet & socialist art outside of the Western propagandistic portrayal of it? Now, I'm not an art historian or anything myself, but I'm pretty sure it was not in fact a Japanese bara manga about big sweaty workers with their hulking muscles swinging hammers around. The Soviet Union was a big country, with many separate republics and ethnicities (hence the name!), and I'm sure a variety of styles and artistic movements.
The Soviets were also pretty big on resorts with spa-style facilities, so portraying workers as only ever working wouldn't have even necessarily been the ideological line, especially after the Stakhanovites went out of fashion. And a bunch of socialist realist paintings aren't of workers at all, they're just Stalin or other important figures standing around looking cool
Having grown up in USSR, I'm pretty sure that I do in fact have a conception of what Soviet art looks like. Obviously socialist art encompasses more than simply glorification of labour. The point I'm making is that labour is an essential part of socialist art. The critique of solar-punk as an ideological and political project isn't regarding what it depicts but rather what it omits.