Hiatus? What Hiatus?

Yeah, so … as you may have noticed, this blog, after a few posts in the spring and summer of 2015, has been pretty much dead ever since.

I won’t go into the numerous reasons why this has been the case – many of which are personal and have no wish to disclose – but I will promise that it’s coming back, and should have a more-or-less consistent flow of new content from here on. I’ll try to post something new each Monday morning (Ireland time), with extra posts if I’m able to fit them in, and perhaps a week skipped if I’ve got something else going on.

My sincerest apologies to the many people who discovered this site, either through the associated Facebook page or through the essay What is Solarpunk?, and never got more material to follow up on. I can’t make up for lost time, but I’ll try to do my best, going forward, to give you content which reflects the promise you may (I hope!) have seen in those first few essays and articles I wrote in a flurry of optimism. We live in much darker times now, and we need the radical hopefulness reflected in solarpunk all the more than when I first started writing about it.

The first “real” post in over a year-and-a-half will be published next Monday, and will be a review of Timothy Morton’s promising eco-philosophy book Humankind. Although I’ve got another brief article on political terminology planned which I may post sometime this week.

After that, expect essays talking about solarpunk and market economics, solarpunk fiction, ecological philosophy, theories of technology, aesthetics, social anarchist politics, and reviews of other people’s work coming in January and early spring.

In the meantime, to present you with something more than just an apology and a preview, here’s something posted earlier today on the Solarpunk Anarchist Facebook page: a minimal program and a maximal program for what I think social anarchists and other anti-rulerists ought to devote themselves to accomplishing in the next year, and going forward in general.

Long story short: We need less of the politics of insurrection and more of the politics of creation. Less focus on destroying the world we’re stuck with now, and more focus on building the world we want to live in, prefiguring it in the present.

MINIMAL PROGRAM

• Unconditional basic income to replace the welfare state

• Free healthcare, public transport, and university

• The creation of a hell of a lot more cooperatives

• Municipalisation (not nationalisation!) of public utilities

• Introduction of worker self-management in public enterprises

• Introduction of participatory budgeting programs in neighbourhoods

• Devolution of local government power to popular assemblies in communities

• Elimination of all laws prohibiting consensual drug use and sexwork

• Phased abolition of intellectual property laws (free the digital commons)

• Gradual abolition of all border controls and restrictions on the free movement of people

• Transition to community-owned green energy utilities and internet

• Increased protections for nonhuman animals and the natural environment

• Greater focus on social anarchist media and public outreach: better websites, bigger social media presence, more polished educational web videos on YouTube

• Creation of art and cultural works which emphasise the problems with social hierarchy, the benefits of freedom and equality and cooperation, and which amplify the voices of the most disempowered and marginalised.

MAXIMAL PROGRAM

• Replacement of the state with voluntary confederations of free municipalities (municipalism)

• Replacement of private and state enterprises with self-managed cooperatives (commons economy)

• Fostering a socio-cultural environment which emphasises individual autonomy, consent, unity-in-diversity, and the free egalitarian distribution of power (interrelationism).

We can’t keep defensively reacting to what the capitalist state system throws at us, or preaching pure negation and destruction of the status-quo.

We need to offer and build a positive alternative, growing sympathy and support for social anarchy as a viable alternative to rulerist society.

Have a wonderful and fecund 2018! ✌️☀️💚