solarpunk memes

This is interesting to bring up because I'm coming from about as opposite a point of view as I can. Capitalism contains in itself the seeds of its own destruction which is as clear today as it was in the nineteenth century. It inevitably trends toward the centralization of power and the most any government has ever been able to do about that is slow it down or reverse it temporarily. For the last few decades the global nature of capital has made it a supernational force which is above regulation, even determining who is allowed into government at all throughout much of the world. Either Capitalism will end when the winners close the door behind them and some kind of neo-feudalism on a world scale will happen or the infrastructure supporting Capitalism will collapse prior to that point. Capitalist Realism is absurd unless one has been conditioned to assume it as self-evidently the best possible system which can exist and actively dismiss any criticism of any kind of economy at all.

I have not read the referenced book, so I'll address the general idea I got from the wikipedia summary. It is absolutely true that there have been models for settled society which were vastly superior in terms of average quality of life than anything based on European Feudalism, including Capitalism. There are clear examples from history and existing today (The Zapatista movement is a favorite of mine). The issue is that these cultures don't exist in a vacuum and can only exist for as long as they don't have to contend with an amount of violence which threatens to supersede their sovereignty, and collecting the volence to wield themselves undermines the pro-social nature of their own society. The power of global capital has been wielded with impunity for the last few centuries directly undermining many of the pro-social societies. Many of these societies collapsed not because they failed their people but because they failed to defend them. If they had changed fundamentally to repel violence, they would have lost their society in doing so anyway. In 2024 technology and the centralization of wealth to a few places on the planet has made it possible for a few people to run a global empire, and everyone on earth must deal with this reality in some way. Either they conform to it or resist it, but they must deal with it. I don't like the nature of the system that we live in but as long as it is possible to inflict the will of power using violence and there are people around who are willing to believe that people wielding power like this are legitimate, we will continue to have this problem.

I'm not even arguing that this scale of violence is natural. Like agriculture itself, it developed gradually by complete accident. For most of human history the level of violence one needed to prepare for was vastly different in different parts of the world, allowing for many of these societies to flourish without worry. In 2024 everyone is vulnerable to capital. After capitalism, we could have a socialist system we developed intentionally which hopefully covers all the important variables this time but most likely our intentions will meet with millions to billions of people testing the new system in all kinds of ways the designers could never have predicted. We could also simply have warlordism, as there would still be plenty game theory types feeling obligated to take everything they can get before they get overrun by not growing fast enough from the myriad others thinking exactly the same thing. My preferred end to history is a series of autonomous communities run democratically with no violence whatsoever, but we have a lot of development to do as a species before we can settle into that.