Solarpunk Dawn

Created Sunday 10 May 2026

The revolution itself was not a grand guerrilla war to write epic sagas on. Guerrilla fighting was a part of it--there was a warfare component, but it wasn't like the comparable to the propoganda movies (of either side) of yesteryear's socialist revolutions.

A series of world economic shocks wracked the global economy in the 2040s and 2050s. The "developing" nation of Clovus was hit hard by the ensuing breakdown of global trade and resource conflict. Overfishing, clearcutting for lumber, and coal mining had been choking the land and sea near the island. The corrupt government and powerful-but-narrow corporations demanded "austerity", "discipline", and other such nonsense without ever admiting what they had done or accepting a paycut themselves. They would not reduce rents or subsidies they favored and it made costs within the system unbearable despite material availability. It was more important to maintain property rights than it was to house the people... yet the state and it's sanctioned corporations were ill prepared. It didn't so much as collapse as it did contract visibly. The state was never particularly strong or omnipresent. It was very effective at protecting itself, embezzling, and facilitating consistent value extraction, but not much more. The military and intelligence services were poorly funded and deployed in favor of the police. Clovian police were at the time were huge in number, highly indoctrinated, militarized, trained, and ruthless. Private military companies were also used prolifically. These PMCs were particularly awful as "security" around legacy colonial extraction propety.

Starting a revolution with flash mobs?

The war didn't start with a brazen battle or daring raid/assassination. A wave protests over protecting immigrants (in a nation historically built by immigrants) and general frustration over the direction and conditions of the country escalataed into a militant general strike with blockades, sabotage, and even a few arsons...
One warm summer day in 2042 saw a "No Kings, No Masters" mega-protest humourously saw flashmobs shutdown critical infrastructure in 73 places with meme dances and other "shenanigans". This was brutally repressed, and the president declared martial law "to protect GDP". 3 days later on what would come to be called Insurrection Day, millions of activists and pissed off people took the streets and fields. Months of hardcore civillian disobedience ensued, and they were most cetrainly not cutesy shenanigans on TikTok. Enforcers responsed with beatings, shootings, public executions, disappearnces, mass arrests without trial, and anything else The System(TM) could muster. Seemingly endless videos of it all livestreamed and broadcasted everywhere. There was no denying what was going on.

The ruling classes = corrupt beureacrats + comprador capitalists + police. Their strategy was...efficient. They knew they had no real moral legitimacy amongst the populace. They knew it was over for them as soon as anything else could gain power. Leverage, force, and a modicum of outside support was all they had. They heavily concentrated control on the most valuable places: roads, ports, central rail arteries, mines, factories, and premium plantations. Everything else was to be partitioned, sabotaged, disrupted, and decapitated until such a time that they could be brought to heel or at least safely ignored. It worked quite well, initially.

The solarpunk's military arm had a lot of seeds planted already. ELF like ecological sabotage cells, an active civil disobediance front, a people already used to communal support and autonomous action, and many other gifts planted over many generations. They did well with these gifts, but they were not without flaw or error. They too commited atrocities. They had many failures. They're not heros, they were unusualy ethical and disciplined trauma survivors.

The revolution spanned 12 years and was rather unlike their revolution for colonial independece almost a hundred years earlier, which was much more conventional. This was not a conventional war. It was closer to a particularly intense tit-for-tat campaign of mutual terror, ambush, bombings, sabotage, and so on. It was ugly and unglamourous for the most part.

The solarpunk military arm started off in a manner that is perhaps stereotypical of insurrectionary anarchists and good-ol-boy "militias"... Because that's where most of the early fighters came from. The initial Solarpunk Dawn fighters were very often militant anarchists and/or isolated rural resistance groups desperately grasping at straws. Such fighters predictably had some pros and cons. Very diffuse. Very innovative tactically. Often very brave and also very stupid. High energy, low discipline, high unpredictability, nearly nonexistant training, extremely high adaptability, almost no cohesion. This was very successful at kicking things off in a seemingly hopeless period. It was not successful at bringing about liberation. the wild energy helped more than it harmed, but it did harm. High casualty rates. Poor intelligence. Poor community connections. Poor communications and nonexistant logistics. Over-reliance on flashy attacks of little substance. Lack of accountability when things went wrong--which was frequent. Don't get it twisted, this stage was successful and it was largely supported by the population, but problems piled up fast. There had to be a better way of doing things.

Why so serious, solarpunk man?

The first 4 years of chaotic insurrection paved the way for the rise of a centralized revolutionary army under the command of the Clovian Socialist Partisans (also sometimes referred too as the Clovian Communist Party). It was initally quite promising. Discipline, unity, chain of command, clear leadership, standardization, and all that. There were some pretty immediate and impressive gains as a dedicated organization formed, drawing inspiration from Mao style parties and national liberation armies like the IRA and FLN. It had a number of successes. Establishment of training pipelines and communication standards. Contact with organizations outside Clovus. Better intelligence and more consistent relations.

The transistion was timely and was able to absorb uneemployed veterans and defectors in pretty large numbers as the state pursued increasingly aggressive "cost cutting" measures. A significant portion of defectors found a more welcoming home with the CSP and related syndicates. This trend exploded when an enterprising and semi-official cartel--the "Dark Enlightenment Society"--implemented a radical restructuring of the remaining power structures. The "spineless and insubordinate" intelligence and military services were abolished entirely for their internal resistance to the ruling classes and refusal to engage in "domestic law enforcement". This sends roughly 1/3 of the now defunct services to the police, 1/3 into unemployment, and 1/3 to the rebels. Other significant government services are cut in simillar ways or hit even harder. Forestry, oceanography, climate/weather, disaster response, general civil service, and anything else perceived to fetter the ruling classes or be "stealth socialism".

Most of you will probably see this is an idiotic and disastrous decision that would only be made by moustache twirling capitalist villain stereotypes... And most of you would be correct. However, it was logical from their POV because they were embattled and in command in terms of hard power, but had basically no soft power left. Global capitalism was ending and everyone who wasn't delusional knew it at this point in world history. They had consumed too many natural resources, started too many wars, and screwed too many people. It physically couldn't last. The DES solution was pretty clear once you stripped away all their propoganda and rhetoric: take everything they can, lock themselves into hardened neofeudal fortresses, say any lie that's conveninet, and destabilize all the rest so no one can challenge them. Doesn't matter that the poors are fucked. Sound familiar?

Unemployment, strife, and basic societal functions slowly drove off a series of cliffs. The civil war reached a bloody and personal stalemate despite or perhaps because of massive gains by the now rather experienced solarpunk revolutionaries under the CSP... But there was no shortage of new problems.

Basic goods shortages, skyrocketing unemployment, evictions, unusually bas natural disasters, sanitization breakdowns, escalating reprisal warfare... It was not a good time.

The centralized army and hierchal revolutionary party was trying, but they too had many (predictable) problems. For one, unlike the "pure" insurrectioanries: the CSP was legible to the enemy. It was suddenly possible for the police to infiltrate, target, capture, decapitate, and generally fight at scale now. It could gather a lot of resources, but it was reliant on extraction which menas they had to break strikes and collect rent through various sources. It could command disciplined formations, but was easily timed and therefore disrupted and baited frequently. It was able to halt civillian deaths from poorly planned shootouts and bombings, but killed more civillians in aggregate from overzealous punishments, purges, and massed fire. Additionally, some of the internal frictions within the CSP and with "aligned" (re:subordinated) groups broke out into fighting in both literal and figurative senses. Still, the CSP had momentum until a series of very costly setbacks in year 9 of the rebellion forced the solarpunks to rethink their situation.

The end--an hourglass. Grains falling like sand.

Starting in year 10 the centralized army-party construct self-abolished and voluntarily held themselves accountable for both excesses and failures. Those confirmed guilty of warcrimes, being informers, abuses, and other major crimes yet unrepentant about it were executed or exiled. Those that were court-martialed but repentant were not punished--they were told to make it right. Easier said than done.

That said a vast majority of the former CSP members helped develop the new form of Clovian Solarpunk resistance. This is the beginning of what we now recognize as the Clovian Services and National Clovian Soviets/Syndicates/etc. The new form did away with rigid chains of command, and chose to focus on drilling a handful of simple "principles of action and organization" into everyone's head. These principles had to be shared to the bone lest they never see an end to this ridiculous war. They had to find a way to be highly organized without being an organization in the traditional bureaucratic sense.

The Services appear

Now, a lot of this section will be a repeat of The Services document... But it's worth including here to see how they formed.

Over the course of a patchwork of strategic soviet (council) meetings occuring from years 9-11 of the revolution the Services came to a consesus on what they believed to be the most effective structure and standard operating procedures. Participation in basic civil defense and public intelligence functions is mandatory for basically everyone. Being in harms way, doing shit work, and doing these functions full time is purely volunteer--service members can quit anytime. All service members take the same oath. Each service member has a personal rank tied to the specific service they volunteer for. These personal ranks should be a marker of time served and expertise and do not grant inherent command authority. The details of personal promotion are branch and specialty specific.

Orders are not tied to rank or position because orders are just something you yell because you think something needs to happen. Any service member can order other service members regardless of rank or position. Whether or not that order is considered binding is based on several factors. The most important factor is simple: need. Is that thing a recruit just yelled out needed? In an example like "Get me more ammo! Pigs are coming up the hill!" the order is probably binding even to a grizzled major with more years of service than that kid has being alive. An order that's unlikely to be considered binding would be "Hold my beer you insolent little welp. I'm going to show you how we did it in the E-city smoke pit!" because... whatever follows that sentence almost certainly does not need to be done... Situationally important factors in whether an order is binding include: expertise, situational awareness, leadership structure, unit practices, how much sense the order makes, and so on.

Organizationally, there are home units and emergent formations. Home units use a traditional division/fleet structure and are tasked with--at a minimum--administration, pay, training, logistics, and whatever else needs fixed categories. Home units are to share burdens and triumphs equally and not confuse station or rank with leadership. Where formal positions of extra responsibility such as battle commander, quartermaster, or unit administrator are needed, they are to be elected by the members of the specific home unit. If service members can't be trusted to elect their own leadership, they can't really be trusted with life or death decision making. Larger leadership structures should not follow the tradition of liberal electoralism or ruling class imposed hierarchy--both are clearly disastrous. A better way to do things is what a lot of radicals of old proposed. It's gone under different names like inverted hierarchy or worker democracy. To illustrate the idea with infantry: fire teams designate a lead -> fire team leads designate a squad lead -> squad leads designate a platoon lead -> ... all the way up to designating a field army soviet with specific duties and defined command authority.

Emergent formations are ad-hoc as needed formations that operate with whatever rules and structure (or lack thereof) that makes sense to deal with a certain situation or expected type of situation. You can have some fun with them but don't fetishize them. Do what's needed and go home. Actually practice the important ones!

On the ground, what all this meant for the rebellion is that self-disciplined and self-organized cells and cadres embed deeply in communities. These cells and cadres have their own identity and their own local topsight. These cells and cadres often have humourous little names like "The Muppet Babies", but the broader ecosystem has very clear rules. They rigorously employ defined protocols to network locally and make their own decisions. This keeps high opsec penetration cells safe in austere environments while making sure bigger swarm units actually freaking talk to each other. Everyone and every unit finds ways to participate in service councils that set standards for priorities, logistics, comms, sops, tradoc, training, and so on. These decisions are then binding upon everyone applicable--with the known caveat that units will have to adapt or ammend to some degree as conditions on the ground evolve. Thus the birth of the first official swarm army without a hiearchy or officer class.

Finishing a long terrible war

The revolution ultimately was not decided by bullets and bombs. It was people finding ways to live a better life that decided the revolution. The people and the island ended up being more central than the armed conflict. This swanky new swarm army and the armed struggle they inherited did matter, but they were more of an enabler than a core driver. The core driver was that the clovian people
adapted and refused to particpate in The System(TM) and instead build their own systems that still had a lot of issues... but at this point is it really that hard to imagine a better system than corrupt comprador capitalism brutally enforced by zealot police and greedy pinkertons?

There was still an intense netwar in the closing years of the revolution and the start of the solarpunk dawn. It wasn't pretty or nice. Plenty of ridiculous and horrible shit still happened, but steadily--people began to feel safe and maybe even empowered when the solarpunks had a strong foothold. The last round of escalation from the ruling classes in year 11 did make minor gains... at horrible cost to their forces and dwindling reserves. They kept trying to go on the offensive again, but the ROI (their words) got lower and lower each time from then on. The death of their order didn't come from a grand battle or raid or even a general strike. It degraded slowly over the years until the system couldn't enforce compliance. Revenue dwindled. Mercs deserted or mutinied. Outside help stopped. Their command structure frayed under this strain until it suddenly seemed to snap one week 11.5 years into the rebellion. Suddenly the remaining PMCs and police were isolated from each other, surrounded and often infiltrated by the very people they'd been stepping on for decades. No one to give them orders, no revenue source, and no one to bail them out. The last battles of the war were desperate and particularly bloody. Deserters surrendered individually in significant numbers, but a larger number of the reamaining and cornered oppressors lost it. Desperate hostage kidnappings, brutal last stands, crazy survivalism attempts--you'd think they were going through the apocolypse. It's a good thing Clovus never developed nukes, because one of these fools would have tried to use them. I guess they just couldn't stand the idea of having their status lowered to mere working class peons.

This spike in violence was handled grimly by the Solarpunks. They were tired, but committed to a protracted war at this point. They actually didn't believe they had finished the war for 3 months... but it was over. The System(TM) had cracked. The pieces had been mopped up or dissolved. It was disappointing and hollow. Now what?

The war is over, so said the speaker

With a ragged suit on, certainly to him no one's a pawn
To use to advance, man, all the peeps want to do is dance

Clovians are taught to not say "win" in this context. An old sentiment that became popular on Clovus during the solarpunk dawn was that only very craven people win wars. The best the rest of can do is hope to survive with only a few instances of shocking trauma.

Still, the whole island celebrated the 12th anniversary of Insurrection Day. They were free. Now they just had the arguably harder task of healing. It would take another 30 years (into the early 2080s). To get new systems up and running well enough to solve most issues in this broken and mistreated land.