Australia's Permaculture Populists Download pdf from here
Australia’s Permaculture Populists – their social analysis
Terry Leahy
18th March 2022
Sage: Congratulations, you’ve completed your PDC with flying colours. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a little house on the prairie. To withstand the ravages of a dying civilisation. To last an enternity.
Student: I accept the mission.
Sage: You have chosen wisely my son. You are the pure of heart.
The Muddypaw Chronicles.
As a lot of permaculture people are now aware, a part of the permaculture movement in Australia has developed a perspective that aligns them with the populist pandemic movement. Some of these permaculture people attended ‘freedom’ rallies organized by this movement and carried a permaculture banner. They attended to show their resistance to lockdowns, mandates and the anti-Covid vaccines. I do not have a comprehensive knowledge of the views of all who are participating in this network. I am going to concentrate on blogposts and videos that are available online. As many of these views are also widespread in the ‘freedom’ movement, I will quote from these sources without referencing the authors. From what I can see on Facebook, these views are also current in permaculture in the United States and in other countries. This populist position is a minority view in the permaculture movement. Some influential leaders in the movement have disagreed with this position. Others have remained silent, treating these issues as not core permaculture business.
Other writings consider why governments have been using lockdowns and mandates, whether lockdowns are effective, the risks from current vaccines and the like. I will not re-state those arguments here. Instead, I will look at the social analysis that informs the populist position. I will break down their analysis into a set of related points and give my own take.
This dispute should not be a reason to abandon permaculture, a social movement embracing a diversity of viewpoints. As will become obvious, I disagree with a lot of this populist position. Nevertheless, I respect the fact that people in permaculture are responding to current events, making an analysis of the context for permaculture strategies. This populist work extends previous writings in permaculture, such as the book Future Scenarios. It develops an analysis of the pandemic in the context of energy descent. Most permaculture people would expect just this kind of work from people in the movement. The participation of this network at the freedom rallies is consistent with this analysis. It makes ethical sense when framed by that analysis. Personally, I oppose it. But that is no reason to accuse these people of intentionally acting against permaculture ethics.
Deep state
A blogpost defending participation in the freedom rallies makes this analogy. The freedom rallies are not that different to protests against the second Gulf War. In those very large protests (more than 200,000 people in Melbourne) demonstrators had the support of a majority of the Australian population — as shown in opinion polls at the time. Despite that, the protests were unsuccessful. The Australian government committed troops to the war. ‘What the protest showed is that when the ‘system’/’deep state’ is really set on a course of action, a huge majority of the population being against it makes no difference.’ By analogy, the freedom rallies are also large protests that are up against the power of ‘deep state’. Just as in the case of the Iraq war, the mainstream pandemic response of governments overcomes all opposition — as it draws on the power of ‘deep state’.
Comments
The concept of ‘deep state’ is a rhetorical device. The term ‘deep state’ does not imply any particular interests or social groups. It is whoever is the hidden hand behind whatever policy the state ends up by enacting. The concept is typically used when the actions of the state seem to be irrational or to go against the likely interests of a majority. Deep state are the puppet masters behind whatever actually happens.
This leads to what philosophers describe as a verifiability problem. ‘Deep state’ is a label that can be applied to any situation and can never be wrong. Anything that happens is in fact happening because of the string-pulling puppet masters behind the curtain. Accordingly, nothing that could happen can refute the idea that deep state is behind those particular developments. We can never know who Deep State is or what their motives and interests may be — because Deep State is always the hidden actor. Deep State is not identified with any specific group with interests and motivations. Their only motivation is power. Whatever happens they must be behind it because, by definition, deep state is the most powerful actor in any situation.
An alternative analysis of the failure of the mass movement to stop the war in Iraq would look at the specific interests that might have swayed governments to ignore public opinion. For example. The war was to protect US interests in oil and reflected the interests of oil companies. Also, that of the capitalist class, taken as a whole, hoping to maintain cheap energy supplies. The war was due to mistaken intelligence about WMDs. The war was pursued to back up US commitment to Israel. The war was engineered by the military to get more government funding. It was intended to pump prime the American economy. It is hard to work out which of these social forces were most important. We could know more if we had more knowledge of conversations between the government and other players. To an extent all that we can say is that one of more of these interests must have been behind a stupid decision. None of this suggests a deep state acting above and beyond the interests we are already familiar with.
In relation to democratic governance, the decision to go to war is certainly constitutional in democracies. Governments are not obliged to follow majority opinion as discovered in polling. A minority of the population taking to the streets does not have the constitutional authority to veto such a decision. The governments that joined the second Gulf war despite majority opposition risked being voted out at the next election. As happened in Australia to end our participation in the Vietnam war. They gambled that the electorate would come to approve the war — as ‘our boys’ became involved in it. A gamble that paid off for them and was a disaster for the Middle East. In fact, most Australians support the actions of governments in response to the pandemic. They have continued to vote for parties responsible for the mainstream approach. The analogy is misplaced to that extent.
Power in modern societies – a balance of forces
An alternative to the ‘deep state’ analysis of the structure of power in modern societies is as follows. The capitalist class is dominant, and their basic interest is to increase their privately owned capital. While the dominated classes resist the control of capital, they also have interests as employees that see them in alliance with capitalism. They want to maintain the good health of their part of the capitalist economy. They can end up seeing their own interests as being the same as those of the capitalists. While capitalist interests dominate the state they are not in complete and uncontested control in the rich countries. The state also sediments and maintains compromises coming out of previous activism. Obvious examples are things like national parks, health and safety regulations, public schooling, a free press, Medicare. Of course, all these developments can be seen in retrospect as measures that support a healthy capitalist economy. But partly, this is because a healthy capitalist economy has come to be defined in relation to these compromises. Go to any global south country to see what the absence of these measures means. Representative democracy is part of this package.
This moderation of capitalism is much weaker in the global south and in middle income countries. Without going into detail, suffice it to say that in many of these countries trade unions are suppressed, wages are low, opposition parties are hamstrung. Authoritarian policing suppresses oppositional media.
While capitalists have a general interest in maintaining the health of a capitalist economy, they also have particular interest — in opposition to each other. They are far from unified over measures that may serve some business interests while undermining others.
The sense people have that there is a ‘deep state’ is partly because varied capitalist interests do pull strings and bribe politicians with election donations. To add to these lobbying pressures, the rich can take their money to countries with less government interference — if they are dissatisfied with a government decision. Politicians will take this into account, though they will rarely admit it directly. All of this contributes to the sense that there are hidden actors behind government decisions. In other words, there are hidden actors, but they are the obvious suspects — various sections of the capitalist class pursuing their economic interests. There is often a mismatch between what voters want and what is possible in a capitalist economy. For example, voters want economic growth and full employment, but also a safe environment for the future. They want effective social services, health care and education while also wanting lower taxes. They want cheap consumer goods and the protection of local manufacturing.
Because of factors like this, politicians lie and make promises they cannot keep. For example, they will promise to restore local manufacturing, but have no intention of doing that — because they also realize that high tariffs would mean high prices for consumer goods, capital flight, a recession, unemployment, and election losses. No wonder people think there is some mysterious entity behind these political betrayals.
The following section is in three parts. These are the three key premises of the populist analysis.
(A) The virus is manufactured
The virus comes out of a collaboration between elements of the US government and the Chinese government. They constructed an artificial virus in a lab in Wuhan. The true story of the origins of Covid is that it is ‘a human engineered virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology by scientists working on behalf of the vaccine industry and funded by America’s NIH.’ This is a repeated claim in posts from permaculture populists and aligns their views with those of the populist pandemic movement. The wording often suggests a top-level coordination between elements of a global deep state in these two countries — ‘collaboration between the US and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’.
Comment
It is certainly true that scientists from the US, partly funded by the NIH (a US government research organisation), were collaborating in research on viruses with Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute for Virology. It is certainly a possibility that a leak from the lab in Wuhan started the epidemic. The lab was indeed working on corona viruses. Whether they were engineering new viruses that could infect humans is debated. Mainstream scientific opinion is that it was more likely that the virus arose in wild animals and was transmitted to people through the Huanan market at Wuhan.
My bet is on that theory. A recent article in Science discusses the early cases of Covid-19 in Chinese hospitals. Hospitals in Wuhan notified these early cases before the theory of the Huanan market origin might have biased findings. Two thirds of these cases are people with direct or close indirect contacts at the market. As the author of this study observes, it is no surprise that one third of the cases were people not connected to the market. The virus is very transmissible. It could have very readily travelled from people working at the markets, through third parties, to people with no connection to the market. The preponderance of cases connected to the market is what suggests an origin there. Live raccoon dogs were on sale in the market before the outbreak. These are wild animals that are infected by coronaviruses, including the earlier SARS virus. The house locations of these early patients are clustered around the market and not around the lab, which is some distance away. The map of all these house sites, the market and lab, is very convincing.
Looking at a permaculture populist video on this topic, I do not find the arguments convincing. For example, 27 scientists collaborated on a paper for Lancet that argued that the virus had an animal origin. Later it turned out that one of these authors received funding to collaborate with the lab in Wuhan. This author had not declared a conflict of interest. So, the other 26 collaborating on this paper were all lying too? Another clip shows a map of China with bats located in the south of China, not in the vicinity of Wuhan. Since the animal in the market is more likely to have been a raccoon dog, this is an irrelevant demonstration, although it makes good television.
(B) It was released intentionally to serve the purposes of the deep state
Deep state agents released their manufactured virus to further their control of the world. Permaculture populists have made this claim in conversation, but it is generally absent from public posts. An exception is this wry description of the pandemic ‘whether you call it a pandemic or a “plandemic”’. The term ‘plandemic’ is a common shorthand in the populist movement generally. This shadow premise links the other two main premises. (A) The virus was manufactured in a lab. It was the product of a cooperation between the US and Chinese governments. (C) The pandemic has allowed deep state to try out methods of control suitable for a command economy, the first step in implementing ‘brown tech’ (see below). How much more plausible is this scenario if you also believe (B) that deep state was behind the engineering and release of the virus?
Comment
Deep State is an abstract actor that is seen as responsible for whatever happens. But in fact, events on the global stage are the result of interactions between many actors, whose interests and motives are fairly obvious. What is puzzling is the following question. Which powerful interests could lie behind the intentional release of a pandemic on this scale? To begin with, China and the USA (as nations and as governments) are clearly in competition. It seems strange to think of them cooperating secretly to stage something so momentous. Surely both would be petrified that the other party would rat them out; if nothing else.
If the capitalist class is an actor that has some role in deep state, this theory makes no sense whatsoever. The pandemic has been an economic nightmare for most capitalist businesses. Consumers are not shopping, even when lockdowns are not in place. Workers are locked down, or infected or staying at home to avoid infection. Mandates are a headache of extra paperwork for firms. Social distancing rules are killing the entertainment industry. Supply lines are in trouble. Governments are adding to their debt. Hospitals are overcrowded, interfering with the labour market. There have been some winners, the pharmaceutical industry, some digital communication businesses. But really, can you believe this small section of the capitalist class has got the reigns of deep state? That they are secretly telling the US and Chinese government to engineer and release a virus? That these governments are doing what they are told, knowing that this pandemic is going to undermine the business of every other part of the capitalist class?
I will argue in the next section that the politics of the rich countries are dominated by a variety of key actors, including the various sections of the capitalist class and the population at large. In that analysis, it is possible to imagine that at some time in the future, a ‘brown tech’ command corporatist economy will replace current capitalism, and representative democracy. The theory that deep state is now engineering a pandemic and the response, is a kind of time shifting. The ruling elites that will be in power in a ‘brown tech’ economy are manipulating global politics right here right now. But these ruling elites do not yet exist and do not yet dominate politics. If they ever will.
But maybe I need to think bigger. Perhaps the capitalist class is no longer in control, and it is deep state that pulls the strings. Global politics controlled by a deep state that does not care what happens to the capitalist class. Maybe they are lizard aliens, whose motives are hard to read. They have engineered the pandemic now — to allow them to try out a command economy that they may need in the future. Why would they bother to do this? According to the deep state theory, they are already in control of everything that happens, from invading Iraq to Brexit. How could they be sure that the virus they released would only kill one percent of the population — not ninety percent? How could they be sure that a vaccine would be invented — to alleviate the chaos? Who can tell, the motives of a bunch of lizard aliens are indeed imponderable?
(C) Responses by governments are a first step in creating a brown tech command economy
The response to the pandemic is being used by the deep state as a dress rehearsal for a command economy. In permaculture populist writing, this kind of polity may also be called ‘corporatist’ or ‘brown tech’. The term ‘brown tech’ draws on the well-known permaculture book, Future Scenarios.
In this scenario strong, even aggressive, national policies and actions prevail to address both the threats and the opportunities from energy peak and climate change. The political system could be characterized as corporatist or fascist (which Mussolini described as a merger of state and corporate power).
A ‘brown tech’ future implies an alliance between government and big corporations. These elements fuse to enforce an authoritarian state control of the population. What we are facing is a ‘centralized command economy’ — like either fascism or the Soviet Union. A command economy implies that a large part of the economy is either directly owned by government or closely controlled by government dictates.
This authoritarian control supervises the allocation of scarce resources. Resources are funnelled to mitigate climate impacts and to pay for the extraction of the last remaining fossil fuels. The aim is to get the most out of lower grade fossil fuels and uranium. Droughts reduce food production. The wealth of corporations increases ‘even as depletion reduces the flow of resources’.
This is a Hunger Games polity. A ruling elite maintains the affluence of current capitalism for the few. They reduce the rest of us to the status of serfs. They use the high-tech remnants of fossil fuel industrialism to manage a totalitarian digitalised control system.
In more recent blogposts and videos from permaculture populists, this future scenario is deployed to understand the pandemic response now. Brown tech is the ‘already emergent scenario’. It may turn out that ‘this is the start of a more permanent hard fascist command state’. What we are seeing is that the pandemic is being used to suspend ‘normal activity, personal rights and governance processes’. Accordingly, the ‘pandemic is an opportunity to implement some of the structures and processes needed to create what some fear is a global new world order’. It is ‘alarming’ that many in the left do not see that what is happening is ‘the system learning how to do that, how to have that hard response’.
Permaculture populists share this analysis of the pandemic response with the rest of the populist movement. Ash Jackson was an enthusiastic participant in Melbourne’s freedom movement. She made a recent exit from the movement. If she had been asked in 2021 where she thought she might be in 2022, she would have said ‘in a concentration camp for the unvaccinated or engaged in an insurrection after a communist takeover’. The permaculture populists use the term ‘command economy’ instead of ‘communist’, but the meaning is the same.
This argument treats the operations of the deep state as implementing the interests of a set of dominant corporations, acting under state supervision. Government defends the entrenched interests of these state and corporate elites. The goal is the gradual impoverishment of the population at large. The authoritarianism of the state is necessary to effect this transition. In this context the authoritarian measures associated with the pandemic are this system learning how to have this ‘hard response’. They are trying out the systems of control and surveillance that will be necessary to maintain power in a future of growing ecological and economic crisis.
Comments
Looking at the ‘brown-tech’, ‘corporatist/command economy’ scenario as a long-term vision, I do not find it totally implausible. I certainly rate it as one possible future. Indeed, both Russia and China already fit this scenario up to a point. A key difference from the ‘brown tech’ scenario is that in both cases, governments promise and deliver increasing affluence to the majority. They depend on that to be politically viable. What makes these countries like the ‘brown tech’ scenario is that large corporations are subordinate to the state rather than being independent actors. Corporations do not depend on market success to get economic power. They rely on government patronage. They are crushed if they are a political threat. Another similarity is that there is no effective representative democracy and no press freedom.
Another aspect of this scenario that strikes me as plausible is the idea that the state in the rich countries is growing the power and wealth of big corporations — at the expense of the middle-income earners, the working class, and the underclass. Globalisation has allowed the capitalist class to move manufacturing to the global south, with cheap labour and authoritarian governments. Undermining the power of the organized working class. Yet this is far from the brown tech scenario envisaged in Future Scenarios — with food riots and starvation in the rich countries. The incomes of the working class have stagnated, rather than plummeted. There has also been a growth of the consumer middle class in parts of the global south.
In terms of historical comparisons, ‘brown tech’ would be a kind of mercantilism. Like the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe. Kings and feudal lords dominated governments. They only permitted some selected firms to operate, authorizing ‘monopolies’ in return for political support. As in Future Scenarios, I can see ‘brown tech’ corporatist command polities as a response to climate change that we may well see in the next half century. The aim of these brown tech governments would be to deal with the energy peak and climate crisis by reducing the purchasing power of ordinary people and maintaining the affluence of the ruling elites.
Brown tech as ‘emergent’ in current events
Despite the above, I do not see the ‘brown tech’ scenario as ‘emergent’ in the rich countries today. We do not need this vision to understand government responses to the pandemic in the rich countries.
The capitalist class in the rich countries does not actually want a ‘command economy’. They do not want government intervening economically to favour players who are malleable to the will of a political elite. Companies certainly vie for government contracts and lobby for a favourable regulatory climate and labour market conditions. Every individual capitalist would like governments to put them first. But in the end, they do not want a system in which government command rules the economy, possibly at their expense. Ultimately, the capitalist class influence politics through their control of the economy – everybody needs a job. It is unnecessary to subordinate the economy to government command.
In both Russia and China, where ‘brown tech’ is an apt label, governments have had to step in very strongly to control capitalist firms and implement crony capitalism. The state favours its cronies and targets their rivals — confiscating their assets. The state may go further, gaoling disloyal capitalists on trumped up charges. Sometimes these renegades escape to other countries. In high profile Chinese cases, the targeted capitalists have just vanished. It is for reasons like this that the capitalist class in the rich countries is keen to avoid a similar set of developments.
What we also must acknowledge is that the state in the rich countries does not operate simply as an executive of the capitalist class, of the ‘system’. The state also consolidates and implements the victories of working people over centuries. There are many cases where the state actively works to prevent the worst impacts of capitalism. This is most obvious in cases where there is a welfare state, free medical care, public schooling and so on. But it is also apparent even in such mundane examples as food labelling and the vote.
Representative democracy and capitalism
The response of governments to the pandemic in the rich countries reflects a balance of forces. Both the capitalist class and ordinary voters have had a hand in the way things have played out. The lockdowns protected people from the worst possible impact of the virus and saved the hospital systems from overloading. This was in the interests of ordinary people, and also in the interests of the capitalist class. An unchecked pandemic was not a recipe for a flourishing economy. This ‘authoritarianism’ was supported by the electorate. The governments funded and supported the vaccine rollout. The vaccines have been extremely effective and relatively cheap in saving lives — and saving the hospitals from overload. It is no surprise that governments funded vaccines, and most people chose to get vaccinated. The science behind all this was available from multiple sources and stacked up. No mystery that mainstream media promoted it. The mandates were understandable in the Delta pandemic period because unvaccinated people were much more likely to have the virus and pass it on to others. Keeping these people out of public space was a measure supported by most. Likewise masking and social distancing. More recently with Omicron, the vaccines are still good at reducing the severity of illness and saving lives, but not so good at protecting people from infection. The earlier rationale for the mandates is less compelling. Yet the primary motive of governments in the mandates was to ensure that most people were vaccinated, and that the hospital system was saved from overload. This motive is still relevant in the Omicron period. The mandates certainly worked to achieve vaccination coverage. For example, in Australia the proportion of people intending to get vaccinated climbed from sixty per cent to more than ninety per cent.
At present, the interest of the ruling classes is to get business going again by promoting vaccines — so that people are out and about, shopping and going to work. It is not to maintain a shadow lockdown with a frightened populace kept at home under state surveillance. Mass vaccination is also the interest of the vast majority. In fact, in the context of Covid, it is the only thing that could allow a flourishing public sphere and civil society. Australians by and large recognize this, get vaccinated and continue to vote for the politicians who have initiated the lockdowns and mandates.
The fact that this is not a deep state command economy project is revealed by the variation in responses globally. Governments have responded quite differently to the pandemic. In large part in response to the urging of their voters. The USA, most of Europe, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand. Even different states within the same country have responded differently. Countries where a corporatist or state socialist economy already exists have also responded in different ways. Putin’s Russia has had a very laissez faire approach while China has been eliminationist. None of this fits the view that governments have been playing a tune composed by a global deep state. Collaborating to try out a command economy. What is this global deep state and what does it want?
Of course, this is not the whole story. There are many ways in which the response was insufficient. But those failings also suggest a balance of forces with capitalist interests dominant. The success of neoliberalism in the rich countries has damaged the hospital system. Much of the system is privatized and does not work well. It is underfunded. Free health care is patchy. It was difficult for neoliberal governments to step in and nationalize parts of the health industry. Private firms were not always effective. There were shortages of PPE and vaccines. Private nursing homes were understaffed. There was no option to completely ban international travel without damaging capitalist interests. Sections of the capitalist class were all too ready to believe that we needed to get back to business as usual. This impatience was hard to resist for neoliberal conservative politicians. Workers in industries most affected by lockdowns formed the nucleus of a populist resistance, fomented by the far right. What the capitalist class feared most was that people might get used to government funded unemployment benefits closer to a living wage. So, payments were inadequate for those thrown out of work – contributing to the demand for quick solutions. Consequently, the dominant solution in the rich countries was ‘balanced containment’. Lockdowns were temporary measures, ineffectively mild and implemented in response to catastrophic overloading in the hospital system.
The ‘brown tech’ vision could well describe the future in the rich countries. The mistake is using this forecast to understand the current response. Government response to the pandemic is an understandable reaction to the virus. It makes good epidemiological sense. Much of the public and large sections of the capitalist class support it. From the perspective of the public, it seems like the best option to prevent premature death, relieve the pressure on the hospital system and to restore employment and social life. From the perspective of the capitalist class, it seems like the best option to get people back to work, save the hospital system and restore the economy. That there are some sections of the capitalist class that are doing well out of the government response is hardly a big surprise. Big corporations can readily twist the arm of governments to get special favours. Big pharma has undoubtedly done well — but that does not mean that they released the virus intentionally. Likewise digital communication companies — but that does not mean that they engineered the lockdowns.
The mainstream narrative of the pandemic is a con
Blogposts and videos from permaculture populists characterise the mainstream narrative of the pandemic as a lie. For example, ‘almost all the narrative is a fabrication’. It is ‘a massive propaganda push coordinated from the top.’ We have ‘become available for manipulation’. This has been achieved through ‘strong censorship of broadcast media and novel efforts to censor social media’.
Backing up this broad analysis are more specific rebuttals:
• The virus is real but not as dangerous as lockdowns and other ‘draconian measures’
• The response will cause more deaths than the virus has so far
• The virus mostly kills old, disabled, and obese people
• The vaccines for Covid entail more risk than all previous vaccines, with extreme consequences that are now beginning to show up
• The vaccines themselves are creating more dangerous versions of the virus
• There are low cost and low risk treatments that are being suppressed
• These are already being used successfully in some countries of the global south
• We should build up natural immunity rather than mandating vaccines
• Quarantines prolong the pandemic
Permaculture populists share these talking points with other parts of the pandemic populist movement. They draw on these sources for clips for their videos and cite them in footnotes.
Comments
I have given an analysis of the pandemic response in the rich countries in the previous section. This explanation relies on mainstream scientific sources for an understanding of the epidemiology. To take the pandemic populist way of looking at things, if all this mainstream epidemiology is a ‘con’, then we may well wonder why governments have responded as they have. The obvious explanations seem less plausible. Government responses are very mysterious if the pandemic is no real threat, the vaccines don’t work and there are cheap cures that have been suppressed. In that case, we may well surmise, government motives are not what they seem. There must be a shadow cabal running things, with motives that can only be inferred.
If you believe the mainstream narrative of the pandemic is a fabrication, you may well wonder why people have been so easily hoodwinked. The answer is obvious. Deep state has engineered a massive propaganda campaign, convincing people to believe a lot of lies. So, the control of deep state is a double whammy — preparation for a brown tech command economy in two ways. First an engineered propaganda campaign. Then authoritarian measures to round up the recalcitrant minority.
The argument that the mainstream narrative is a con has been answered in many mainstream sources which are readily available. Each of these specific talking points have been addressed comprehensively. So, I will not repeat those discussions. What I would add is this. If we think the mainstream narrative on Covid is a ‘con’, we end up with a view of current global politics that is very counter-intuitive. We must believe that deep state is secretly in control of institutions as varied as government health departments (in all the rich countries), organisations like the AMA representing medical professionals, government bureaucracies adding up deaths, nursing staff and doctors certifying the causes of death, refereed publications in medical journals such as Lancet, and news organisations as diverse as The Guardian, the New York Times, the ABC, the BBC, Al Jazeera and Channel 9. These puppets are all implementing a massive propaganda push organized by deep state. With a few shining exceptions, all these people are lying and faking the data that they are releasing to the public. Really?
Let us look at a case where governments did lie, and got away with it, at least to begin with. Prior to the second Gulf War, some governments informed the public that Saddam Hussein was constructing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Ultimately, this was revealed to be a fabrication. The intelligence authorities in the UK had believed stories made up by one Iraqi whistle blower. Well, two things about this. One is that this lie was very shortly revealed as a fabrication and denounced in the mainstream media. Showing that it is not particularly easy to maintain a deceit of this magnitude. The second thing is that the intelligence info behind this deceit was all down to a single source, taken up by the UK government and promoted from that point. There were no corroborating sources.
The pandemic is the total opposite of that scenario. For example, the evidence of fatality from Covid is coming from a great variety of countries with very different governments and political constituencies. The reports of huge number of medicos, separately determining causes of death, are collated to create these statistics. The sceptical stance of the permaculture populists implies that deep state has suborned these independent medical professionals and somehow compelled them to lie. Then there are the excess death figures that compare deaths before the pandemic with those after. These excess death rates are also very hard to fake. They back up the statistics on causes of death coming from medical staff in hospitals. You can decide to say that 900,000 deaths in the USA and 650,000 in Russia is not a huge problem and good luck to you. But it is implausible to claim this never happened.
Some environmentalists may be drawn into alliance with the deep state
Environmentalists may contribute to a ‘brown tech’ future by supporting authoritarian measures. For example, by banning cars. A command economy linking corporate interests to nanny state controls on citizens. There is a worrying alliance between ‘plans promoted by the World Economic Forum for a Global Reset that will require a command economy to respond to the climate emergency’ and a left whose ‘increasing alignment in support of authoritarian and corporatist solutions to the climate emergency leaves them more and more as serving “the system”’. We can only hope that this ‘does not continue far enough to create some version of Mao’s Red Guards driving some ideological transformation of society from above in response to the ever-worsening Limits to Growth crisis’. There is an element of the environment movement ‘who say, yes, the emergency is really big and serious, therefore we give up our freedom, we give up our autonomy and we police the population who are reluctant to, initially, get out of their cars, or do whatever is needed.’ It is true that these problems are immense but ‘resorting to yes, a centralized command economy, isn’t the solution’.
Comments
There are two issues here. One is what kind of technologies we might use to prevent global warming and other likely catastrophes. The other is whether it is advisable or necessary to use authoritarian measures to implement the necessary changes.
Ecological modernism and the environment movement
Looking at the first issue, ‘ecological modernism’ is becoming popular in mainstream media and political thinking. We can continue to grow capitalist economies while replacing the energy services of fossil fuels. Government money will kick start a transition. Most of this money will go to big corporations producing these new technologies. For example, electric cars, wind power farms, storage batteries, solar panels, green hydrogen, carbon sequestration, third generation nuclear plants, smart grids, high speed rail.
For the most part, people in permaculture do not believe in any of these proposed grand solutions. They could never work at a scale big enough to enable continued growth. Money spent on such projects can often end up with huge white elephants. I agree with this degrowth critique.
It is certainly true that some parts of the environment movement are moving in this ecomodernist direction. You might argue that promoting this vision is the way to go even if ecomodernism can never work. Firstly, because this is what the punters want to believe. We might motivate them to support government measures to start a transition, even if we do not end up where they expect. The second applies the same logic to the capitalist class. Get them to think that targets for reducing emissions are achievable in an expansionist growth economy. Get them committed to measures that may end up with quite different outcomes. Personally, I doubt whether people trust governments and environmentalists enough to welcome this proposal. An open call for sacrifice now, for the sake of the future, may well be received as a more honest approach. But it is hard to say.
Authoritarian environmentalism?
The second issue is whether environmentalists should be supporting strong state action to deal with environmental problems. Permaculture populists mention regulations to get people out of their cars. With the strong support of environmentalists many governments around the world have made commitments to phase out cars that run on fossil fuels. Permaculture people would be very doubtful that you could achieve this by replacing every car on the road with an electric vehicle. The minerals used in batteries would run out long before you managed this replacement. Let us look at a likely scenario. As the minerals used in electric cars started to become scarce, the price of the vehicles would go up. They are already a lot more expensive than petrol cars. At the same time, an environmentalist government would want to phase out petrol vehicles. The most likely way would to be to ban new petrol cars very soon from now. Many who expect to own a car would be priced out of the market through this ‘authoritarian’ measure.
Of course, this is just the beginning. The steady state economy favoured by many in permaculture depends on cap-and-trade systems, or taxes, being used to cut back resource use. It depends on cost incentives that will ensure all minerals are recycled. The effect would be an increase in the price of consumer goods. Many would see this as authoritarian overreach by the state. The winding back of the fossil fuel industry would deprive people of work, even if other jobs were available in renewables. It has been clear that many in the working class see such changes as an attack on their living standards.
I am ambivalent about this issue and will explain why.
Unlike the permaculture populists, I do not see a ‘climate emergency’ policy as implying an undemocratic dictatorship. It could very well take place within the representative democracies typical of the rich countries today. Sections of the capitalist class would be severely disadvantaged by a set of measures that the capitalist class, taken as a whole, would regard as necessary to forestall environmental collapse. The population, as a whole, would take a similar view. Parties would respond by implementing measures that would be seen as necessary, even though some would resist them.
Market competition means that individual firms are motivated to ‘externalize’ environmental damage to maximize profits. The workers in those firms by and large support their companies — they want to keep their jobs. Tough regulations or strong financial incentives seem like the only ways to counteract these tendencies. In a capitalist economy, it is wildly utopian to think a cultural shift accompanied by voluntary changes are all that is needed to make the energy transition happen, as permaculture populists suggest. There is nothing new in this situation. We hardly notice that we are using ‘authoritarian’ police enforcement to prevent wildlife and plant poaching, waste dumping, and timber cutting in a national park. Popular support and cultural change can go part of the way — and is in any case essential to get electoral support. But in a market economy it is never sufficient.
Now let me argue the other side of this coin. While authoritarian measures are necessary in a capitalist economy, these measures are unlikely to be popular. Look at the Paris accords. It is all very well to make these grand promises. But to get the political will to implement these measures when the promises fall due is a different matter. Implementing the targets would restrict capitalist firms, chuck people out of jobs, reduce the spending power of private consumers, and regulate daily life to an extreme degree. A national park is one thing. But a whole economy transitioning to scrap fossil fuels, and end up on a much lower energy budget, is another matter. Capitalist firms can threaten capital flight. Or just abstain from investment — threatening unemployment and electoral wipe-out. They have endless ways of avoiding regulations to protect their assets. People resent controls over daily life. They have more than enough dictatorship in their workplace. Leisure and consumption are prized as havens of free choice.
So, we can see why environmentalists are attracted to ‘authoritarian’ solutions, and also why they are unlikely to get support for them. Most people cannot see an end to the market economy, the fundamental cause of our troubles. So, there are no easy answers. Environmentalists inevitably end up arguing for state initiatives and getting branded as dictators. Arguing for these state initiatives is not a totally futile tactic. Small victories are possible. But alongside this, I advocate system change as the only long-term solution.
Permaculture populists worry that environmentalist authoritarians will team up with deep state and engineer a command economy to stop climate change. This is a recent development in the thinking of permaculture people. In Future Scenarios, the ‘brown tech’ state tries to squeeze the last bit of wealth out of fossil fuels and nuclear power. It is hard to know why any deep state corporatist economy would want to implement a climate emergency policy. Where some version of a corporatist economy now exists, governments fail to deal with climate change. In Russia the state depends on the export of fossil fuels. In China climate policy is window dressing, big promises and small experiments. In both countries corporate interests do not favour strong action. These authoritarian governments are also worried about how people might react to anything that cut back on growth, incomes or employment.
The Red Guards had the support of the State, the armed forces, and the owners of the means of production. This is not the case for environmentalists who might aspire to this role now. Most people are deeply worried that environmentalists in government would strangle their free choice and destroy the economy. It has become close to impossible for Green Parties to take power and control climate change.
Permaculture should join the resistance to these developments
According to permaculture populists, the appropriate response for permaculture is to resist this top-down control and assist ordinary people in their defence of democratic freedoms. By joining these freedom rallies, permaculture people are bringing attention to ‘the suffering of fellow Australians being persecuted out of their jobs and society for upholding the right to bodily autonomy and raising their children by their values rather than those of corrupt national and global elites.’ The hope is that we may turn society around, exposing the stupidity and evil of the mainstream pandemic response.
Comments
Given their overall picture of the world and the pandemic it makes perfect good sense for the permaculture populists to be supporting the freedom rallies. According to them, this is the first major battle between corrupt elites and the people. The choice is stark. On the one hand a brown tech corporatist command economy that cannot deal with the environmental crisis. On the other hand, a permaculture utopia of rural decentralisation, degrowth and disengagement from the industrial system.
In contrast, my view is as follows. The vaccines worked, at least to massively reduce deaths and hospitalisations. The lockdowns were effective. If Australia had gone with the balanced containment strategy preferred in the UK, we would not have escaped some lockdowns, major self-imposed restrictions on social life and an economic downturn. But we would have ended up with about 50,000 deaths instead of 1,500. It was indeed awful that some people were deprived of paid work because of a decision not to get vaccinated. Nevertheless, the mandates were an inevitable government response to a crisis in the hospital system. To save health care when totally voluntary vaccination was insufficient. The mandates certainly got public support. During the first two years, the freedom to work and socialise was also the freedom to infect people and kill them. To my mind the policy context is a balance between difficult options. I am glad we struck the balance where we did. Accordingly, I will not be joining the freedom rallies.
This is not meant as a rubber stamp for everything that governments did. The failure to vaccinate the global south was a moral disaster and stupid from a health perspective. Nasty targeting of migrants and the underclass in the rich countries was appalling. We could have tweaked lockdown measures here in Australia to make life easier for people with young children. Governments should have taken over the production and supply of vaccines, PPE and RAT tests and made these available free of charge in the first months of the pandemic. There should have been more adequate income support.
The permaculture strategy is to build the alternative economy. Resistance to the mandates is a recruiting opportunity for this strategy.
The task for permaculture people is to build the alternative economy. To create and popularize an alternative solution to the brown tech future being advanced by the deep state. An interview with permaculture populists uploaded to a permaculture website declares. There are ‘huge opportunities to build the parallel economy.’ We need to use our resources to develop community sufficiency and become a ‘neo-peasantry’. The interviewees stress their own practice:
What our households have been doing is actually limiting, no, doing without, cars, being really dependent on walking for food and bicycles for food relations and energy relations really working towards that connection to that small, loved land that Wendell Berry talks about.
Blogposts explain this narrative at greater length. Permaculture can recruit people disadvantaged and disaffected by the authoritarian response to the pandemic. These people are potential allies in building an alternative economy. We should not hesitate to find allies with a diverse range of political viewpoints. ‘Politically, the outsiders are diverse, from hard right libertarian to tree hugging greenies and everything in between … the potential for these groups to come together in new forms of political organisation to reverse the changes of the last two years is enticing and one way or another these new alliances will be part of the political landscape.’ We should expect that this new alliance will ‘moderate extremes of racism and xenophobia’ in far-right participants.
Resistance to authoritarian solutions is driving people to escape the mainstream economy — ‘walking away from the system to rebuild household and community autonomy’. It seems likely that ‘whole industries will lose a significant part of their workforce as some substantial minority of the population withdraw their work, consumption and investment in the system rather than getting the vaccine.’ We need to reach out ‘to help those in need who have the capacity and motivation to increase their personal, household and community autonomy, resilience and connection to nature.’ We are bringing a positive message to ‘new audiences open to solutions’. Communities of those excluded from society will be pioneering an alternative economy of home birth, home education, home food production and alternative health.
Permaculture can support these new allies in modelling a future permaculture economy: ‘the most creative deep adaptations to the Brown Tech world will be crafted at the geographic and conceptual fringes by younger risk takers coming together in new communities of hope’.
The scenario that is being painted through this relates to the description of the Brown Tech polity in Future Scenarios. In that Hunger Games scenario, there is an increasing ‘divide between the falling number of “haves” dependent on a job in “the system” and their relatively lawless, loose but perhaps communitarian “have-nots” living from the wastes of the “system” and the wilds of nature’. Because the energy and minerals resources are running out, deep state cannot control all the population. In the rural areas, permaculture people hold out and maintain a self-sufficient alternative lifestyle.
Comments
This is a version of permaculture close to survivalist prepper thinking. Permaculture populists imagine that the collapse of capitalist affluence is already upon us. For most of the rest of us, daily experience indicates the continued viability and robust good health of the capitalist economy, even in a pandemic. I doubt that the pandemic is going to increase the numbers of people willing to live a degrowth self-sufficiency lifestyle. People need to make an income in a market economy, they hope to live a ‘normal’ life, they consume to compensate for the pressures of working life. These pressures will continue to make a self-sufficiency lifestyle unlikely. As events have turned out, few people have deserted the paid economy in Australia. They have just got vaccinated and got on with it. The percentage of unemployed people has in fact fallen.
At the same time, I absolutely endorse the ‘early adopters’ strategy of permaculture populists (and others in permaculture) as a part of what permaculture is doing towards system change. It may be that some people will be recruited to permaculture in the way the permaculture populists suggest, going from a resistance to vaccines into an alternative lifestyle and self-sufficiency. Measures may be as local as growing food at home or participating in a community garden. At the same time, permaculture needs to continue with strategies that attempt to engage with the market economy through ethical business, community supported market agriculture, and international aid work. In other words, adapt to the context that now exists rather than imagining that most people can readily opt out. As permaculture people also realize, we have to make allies with other movements working towards system change.
New allies for permaculture?
It is in the spirit of this last phrase that permaculture populists welcome a new politics coming out of the freedom rallies — joining permaculture and other political currents. While they see this as ‘enticing’, I have more mixed feelings. Key organizers of these rallies are far right. Politicians from the far right are being promoted by these movements. In Australia, the UAP and Pauline Hanson, in Germany the AfD, in the USA, Trump Republicans. The far right hopes to leverage the pandemic movement to get into government. This would not be a good outcome for permaculture.
Looking at these movements from the perspective of the grass roots participants in the rallies, we can characterise them as ‘populist’. Populist movements see society as a conflict between the ‘pure people’ and ‘corrupt elites’. Permaculture posts on pandemic make this contrast when they talk about the people at the rallies, ‘families with young children; health and other essential service workers; Aussie battlers from the suburban heartland and regional hinterlands; migrants from different ethnicities; religions, Christians, Muslims and more’. This is the ‘pure’ people of populism. Elsewhere permaculture populists talk about the people responsible for the pandemic and response as ‘corrupt national and global elites’, both ‘evil’ and ‘stupid’.
The pandemic freedom movement is quite a bit different from the Nazi and fascist movements of a previous era. Unlike those earlier movements, the pandemic movement is genuinely anti-authoritarian. Participants are not ready and willing to subordinate themselves to a top-down dictatorship. Despite this, it could be easy for this pandemic movement, or something like it, to become the catalyst for a corporatist command economy, as I will explain.
A summary of the populist depiction of global society is this. There are two major groups, both composed of disconnected individuals pursuing the moral paths that are intrinsic to their nature. On the one hand there is a large bunch of ordinary people, the pure at heart, who seek freedom and are oppressed and exploited by elites. Then there are the elites, corrupt and evil to the core. The kind of people who would intentionally release a killing virus on the world. Their motives are basically to secure and increase their power, nothing more complicated than that.
The pitfalls of populism
For me, the populist picture of global politics is much too simple. The people who are dominant in society today (the capitalist class) and the people who are dominated (the rest of us) do what they do in the context of society as a ‘system’. An idea that permaculture people should not find unfamiliar. Capitalism is like a machine made up of interlocking parts. Or like a game, with different groups having different roles to play. While personal self-interest and personal motivations are important, they are only understandable if we look at how people fit into the system.
The populist picture of the ‘pure’ people has a few flaws. One is that the system in its complex economic arrangements pits various parts of the population against each other. They are rarely united against corrupt elites. Another is that ‘the people’ are to some extent complicit in the rule of capitalism. They are often working hand in glove with the ‘evil elites’ that populism attacks.
Likewise with the capitalist class. Members of this class are preoccupied with the bottom line. This is not simply evil greed, and a moral reform cannot make it go away. Those capitalists who do not compete successfully lose their capital and their position in the capitalist class. Capitalists are also split in terms of their interests. Different sectors within the capitalist class were affected differently by the pandemic. A more significant division exists around climate change. Some capitalist factions hope to benefit from an energy transition while others want to hang on to the old fossil fuel economy.
Failing to understand capitalism as a system, populists also misunderstand social change. If the people are purely and simply good and the current elites are simply evil, the solution is obvious. In the words of Donald Trump, the answer is to ‘drain the swamp’. Chuck out the corrupt elites. With these parasites removed, the people will just follow their nose to a bright and golden future. Realizing that capitalism is a system, we can see that this strategy cannot work. You need to make big changes in the structure of the system itself. Otherwise, you just end up with new people occupying these same old positions, operating according to the same interests as those who have been turfed out.
That is one thing. What is also possible is that a populist movement can be leveraged to bring about system change to something seriously worse. The populist grass roots resistance can bring to power a faction of the capitalist class who go on to destroy the capitalist economy and representative democracy — to serve their own minority interests within the capitalist class. They become the first members of a new kind of ruling elite that operates the corporatist gangster capitalism that permaculture populists call ‘brown tech’.
For example, it may be that the fossil fuel interests hope to come to power through a populist rebellion and through this to reverse initiatives to deal with climate change. This interpretation certainly fits with the politics of the Trump presidency in the United States. We can readily see Trump attempting to become a lifetime president. As a long-term dictator, he would have dominated the economy through deals made with gangster capitalists. On climate change, he would have favoured the fossil fuel capitalists as his most likely allies.
In Australia, the party most likely to get a boost from the populist movement is the United Australia Party. Clive Palmer, a billionaire, is funding a set of ads for the party that parrot the anti-authoritarian message of the freedom rallies. The cost is $30 million, way beyond what the two mainstream parties are spending. His aim is to run his coal mining and coal export business without the inconvenience of political oversight. He hopes the populist movement will vote in UAP senators in numbers sufficient to twist the arm of any incumbent government.
This kind of analysis can be over stretched. In the end populism in the rich countries reflects real discontents with the current situation. The insecure labour market, housing prices, the impending environmental catastrophe, the end of manufacturing jobs. It is most likely to recruit men who blame women and woke ‘elites’ for their problems. Aspirants to power may be capitalists with a sectoral interest in upsetting the apple cart. But equally, they can just be disgruntled magnates from any part of the economy. Their real aim is to settle the economic game in their favour through a permanent takeover, a gangster corporate capitalism. The disillusion with capitalism that infects the whole population is also acute in the ruling class, leading some into a cynical detachment. A willingness to risk everything to overturn the rules of the game and take over.
Populism fails to understand current capitalism as a system. The populist world view imagines a pure and good populace ranged up against corrupt and evil elites. With these opposed groups behaving as their moral character implies – good on one side and bad on the other. Instead, people act within the framework of a system, a system in which the ordinary people and the elites both participate. A system that creates motives as part of its functioning. A system in which the ruling powers are constrained as much as anyone else. A system in which ordinary people cooperate as much as they resist. A system where the ‘battlers’ are often at odds with other battlers. And elites with elites.
People who want power find populists to be gullible allies. These aspiring elites portray themselves as at one with the ‘people’. They sweep into power backed by those who see them as the only hope. They take control of the state, promising to ‘drain the swamp’. The outcome is usually just more of the same. Look at Brexit for an example. Otherwise, as in Putin’s Russia, populist success inaugurates a change to a system that is even worse than the one it replaces.
To avoid this outcome, we must join populist rage to a much more realistic analysis of our problems. We also need a feasible and attractive alternative to capitalism.
The vaccine and mandate solution to pandemics is not viable in a low energy economy
Permaculture populists have a particular view of the problems with the Covid vaccines, a view that is related to the theory of energy descent. Without fossil fuels, they argue, we cannot continue a high-tech economy. The vaccines are premised on abundant fossil fuel energy. This is because the human capital, the specialized scientific knowledge required to create the vaccines is an ‘embodiment’ of fossil fuel energy. Going unvaccinated is a practical step we can take now. By doing this we can pioneer the simple and practical technologies that will be sustainable in the long run — as fossil fuels are depleted.
This analysis is behind the view that high tech science may well be a casualty of the ‘evolution bottleneck of climate chaos and energy descent’. The implication is that ‘salvaged and retrofitted versions of practical science crafted at the margins will serve humanity better than rigid faith in the priests of arcane specialised knowledge maintained by an empire of extraction and exploitation’. As with the views on the emergent scenario of brown tech, this critique of current vaccines for Covid fits with explanations of energy descent in Future Scenarios:
Human capital, in the form of mass education, the media, democracy, and other characteristics of industrial culture, has greatly expanded the apparent power of human rather than ecological factors in determining our future. While these new forms of wealth are clearly important, they are in reality ‘stores’ of high-quality embodied fossil-fuel energy.
Energy descent involves a reduction of economic activity, complexity and population in some way as fossil fuels are depleted. The increasing reliance on renewable resources of lower energy density will, over time, change the structure of society to reflect many of the basic design rules, if not details, of preindustrial societies.
Comments
As stated above, my view is that the lockdowns, the vaccines, and the mandates all make sense as public health measures. In that perspective the ethically compromised structures through which this solution was invented and promoted are a bit beside the point. Is it any surprise that big companies depending on fossil fuel energy are behind this solution? Yet I note that Cuba has dealt very effectively with the pandemic by inventing its own vaccines and vaccinating more than ninety per cent of the population — including children down to two years old. As my socialist friends often say, the solution is not to dump a public health measure that works, but to nationalize it. Within the context of the state and a market economy that is probably the best we can hope for.
But of course, the permaculture populist argument goes beyond these parameters. The point of being early adopters is to practice now the technologies that will be required in the future in a low energy economy. The claim is that this kind of high-tech medicine is only possible in an economy based in cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy.
It is worth saying that recent interviews with permaculture people do not find this viewpoint common. Most permaculture people accept the necessity for degrowth and the inevitability of energy descent. On the other hand, they envisage a limited use of electrical power and high tech to run services such as lighting, rail transport, digital information, communications, and medical interventions.
Howard Odum (1995; 2008), an American environmental theorist, has had considerable influence on the views of the vaccines coming from permaculture populists. Our technology is dependent on human capital, depending on mass education and centuries of accumulated knowledge. According to Odum, this in turn depends on fossil fuels – a concentrated repository of solar energy. We cannot have a high-tech information dense economy in a society based on renewables. Without the energy precursors of human capital, we will inevitably return to the simpler technologies of pre-industrial societies. Odum’s argument has some key flaws, but I will not go into this here. In any case, this is all very inconsistent with a practice that includes high tech video production, internet publishing and industrially produced bicycles.
Conclusions
To be honest, this long paper has been written from the point of view of permaculture. What can other permaculture people make of the views of permaculture populists? Is there an alternative way of looking at things that is consistent with a permaculture view of the world? I have used this present context as a convenient jumping off point to start talking about the global social context of permaculture strategies and the problems for environmentalists more generally. But of course, at the present time of writing, business as usual seems to be taking over, at least in Australia. Hospital admissions for Covid are way down and keep falling. Huge crowds attend the AFL match at the MCG, without masks. Trams and buses going to the venue are packed out. Lots of people are getting Covid and recovering after a few days, thanks to three vaccine doses. The news space is preoccupied with the war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, we are unfortunately all too likely to end up with another awful pandemic sooner or later. More to the point, the issues which are driving populism as a global phenomenon are not going away any time soon. It makes sense to be acknowledging these issues: recognizing the elements of truth in the populist narrative and developing an alternative account. A way of looking at the global political scene that does not entail the same long-term risks.