Your examples for a positive life are a relief for me to read, thank you for this <3

Anti-nuclear activist and system theorist Joanna Macey has written with Chris Johnstone about what they call “Active Hope.” I recommend the book and the Work That Reconnects, if you are interested. Best summarized by the question “What do I hope for and how can I be active in moving that way?”

Any interest in returning to this conversation? I’m involved in abolitionist organizing in Arkansas, USA, but after recently reading The State and Revolution, I’ve gotten kinda shaken about this very question posed by @[email protected]. I will write a bit below about some of the important take-aways from this text, but in the case of tl;dr I guess what I’m especially interested in is this conversation that Robin D.G. Kelly encourages. Could you drop some links to where Kelly says this, whether that’s in these comments or in their own posts? Looking forward to it :) -Clairexo

In The State and Revolution, the key points about policing are made by way of Engels and Marx, quoting from The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State:

But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state."

The modern state has two distinguishing features: dividing its subjects according to territory, and establishing a public power. Regarding the latter:

The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force. This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the split into classes… This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile [clan] society knew nothing…" “It [the public power] grows stronger, however, in proportion as class antagonisms within the state become more acute, and as adjacent states become larger and more populous. We have only to look at our present-day Europe, where class struggle and rivalry in conquest have tuned up the public power to such a pitch that it threatens to swallow the whole of society and even the state."

As @[email protected] noted, prisons aren’t unique to capitalist societies; they are necessary to any authoritarian system. An authoritarian system requires prisons and policing in order to manage political dissent. A capitalist system, to whatever degree it’s clearly authoritative, requires prisons and policing in order to maintain some form of equilibrium amid the inherent antagonism between classes. Since I’ve just recently begun studying Marxism, I’m partial to the argument that capitalism’s end comes through a workers’ revolution, and that the revolutionaries will require systems of force such as an army in order to engage in self-defense lest the bourgeoisie regain power. I’m open-minded about this, I just haven’t yet had any conversations with people who are both serious about PIC abolition and informed in the basic theories of political economy underlying Marxism.

thank u so much for your thoughts here :)

Lazare isn’t fully aligned with [Andreas Malm, author of How To Blow Up a Pipeline], who has advocated an “ecological Leninism” of top-down state intervention in the economy.

Anybody have a good sense of what “ecological Leninism” is? This several-word description of “top-down state intervention in the economy” isn’t particularly descriptive, and doesn’t really speak to what is Leninist about Malm’s views in contrast to Lazare’s

Now, via Councilwoman Linda Lee’s cynical and vague Intro 772, the real estate lobby’s coming for a third: an exemption from the law’s provisions for condo and co-op building owners. LL97 targets large buildings. Make no mistake: Residential buildings don’t just stop polluting because people are living there instead of companies.

I’m stumped by this one. Does the real estate lobby have much investment in co-ops and condos? Especially co-ops! I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding here, or if I’m noting something true here that this third example provided is less a matter of bowing to the pressure of the real estate lobby and more about easing the collateral effects that the legislation had on smaller (both far less resourced and far less impactful) entities

I really appreciate reading this, terry_jerry. I work rn at a small architect firm in midwest US, I’m an engineer by training and just happen to be at an architect firm to help them with office management and admin work. They do mostly small-scale residential stuff, and I see this attitude of “at the end of the day it all comes down to who’s paying” so prevalently here too.

How do you go about educating and pushing the system from the bottom in your professional role? I get stumped when my coworkers here just throw up their hands and undersell the influence that they can have on shaping the client’s final say. Sure, some clients come to the firm just because they need a licensed architect to check the boxes and get their project built, but many others are coming to the firm because they respect the architects’ perspective and big-picture vision. The architects that I work with though haven’t had any role-models to show how to push for more sustainable details, or even a shifted paradigm, when in conversation with a client’s unconscious preferences for design approaches that are environmentally-ambivalent. Any suggestions from personal experience here, or even just what you can imagine in a hypothetical interaction with a client?

My (solarpunky) hope is just that all of us step into the power that we really DO have. Architects, however local or global their recognition, are in the perfect position to be shifting the paradigm of what clients and the broader population can even imagine - that’s the power of solarpunk and any speculative genre!

Not all decommodified / cooperatively owned housing needs to be the sort of social housing that tend to come to mind when thinking of a “housing co-op.”

Check out the work that the Beverly Vermont Community Land Trust is doing in Los Angeles: https://laecovillage.org/community-land-trust/. The “eco village” operates in this more crunchy, housing co-op sort of way, but then there are also lots of tenants and home-owners alike who live on the land owned by the land trust, without owning their homes in the standard sense.

Heads up, when I read “base building” my first interpretation is the the political organizing term. I appreciate now knowing that it’s got meanings in completely different contexts too! Best luck in finding good community for discussion here on slrpnk :)