As far as permaculture being isolated in non-socialist/Marxist countries, that’s a bogus argument. We know of one nation, a tiny island (Cuba) that uses permaculture WITH a mix of other forms of farming. It is not the predominate form in Cuba, it is integral. So, let’s not exaggerate the situation. I think permaculture is great. I think it has much to offer, much which will be needed by all. There are African villiages (not particularly socialist in any doctrinaire way) that use permaculture.

Cuba is an island nation that met up with an artificially induced peak oil situation. Those are facts. I don’t want to get into chicken and egg stuff like was it the nature of the Cuban people that allowed socialism, or the other way around? But that’s the road your argument takes this.

The situation in Cuba as discussed in that fine film you mentioned (The Power of Community) make NO mention of Marx or socialism. It was a profound and necessary transformation, one the Cuban people wanted to share with its neighbors (including the hegemonic power to the North).

As I’ve said elsewhere, I find the spirit of the Cuban people refreshing. I There is little doubt that permaculture is a major divergent from capitalistic mega-farms. It is not based in Marxism, though it does favor cooperation over competition.

Australian-developed permaculture farming principles aim at restoring this balance. Within capitalist Australia, permaculture remains a fringe movement. But in socialist Cuba, [permaculture] has become mainstream. Viewers of the inspiring film The Power of Community can see with their own eyes the depth of meaning that Marx attached to “healing the metabolic rift”. It is a physical healing of the land, combined with a spiritual rejuvenation of human society.

The fact is without Marxism, permaculture will remain small, localized, isolated and for people “rich enough” to drop out which means essentially fringe and elitist. Permaculture will not be and cannot be deployed for the masses without a profit motive unless Capitalism is stamped out. Therefore permaculture will only become viable on a world-wide scale when there is a revolution by the proletariat for the proletariat and new ideas are giving a chance for the benefit of society rather than for the few who profit or via the exploitation of the masses as well as nature.

I will say this: Cuba is a small island nation. By shedding the colonialism of the mid-twentieth century symbolized by the Batista dictatorship and US hegemony, it was positioned to best use the tools of permaculture. But Cuba needed to go through profound changes, and did so out of dire necessity. This is not due to Marx or Marxism or Dialectics.

On the contrary, Marxism ALLOWED Cuba TO TRY ALTERNATIVES. This once again reflects Max’s desire to DISPARGE Marxism in favor of whatever ideology he chooses to promote. That is the why Max misses the point of Marxism and the article that was written by Barry Healy for the New Left Review aligning permaculture with Marxism.

The two ideas are not at odd as Shields attempts to argue. In fact he has presented no references to support his premises with when you think about is very anti-Marxist because Marxism is grounded in reasoned, supported, rational, logical and scientific argumentation which is the heart of dialectics.

I will say this: Cuba is a small island nation. By shedding the colonialism of the mid-twentieth century symbolized by the Batista dictatorship and US hegemony, it was positioned to best use the tools of permaculture. But Cuba needed to go through profound changes, and did so out of dire necessity. This is not due to Marx or Marxism or Dialectics.

While it could be inferred that permaculture is an alternative (reaction?) to capitalism in Australia, I think it is clear that it is a reaction to global hyper-growth in general.

What exists as the dominate economic system is pure speculation and monopolization of the commons (nature) by a few.

This is a pathology. We know it is not socialism or communism. Experiments in communism have not survived on large scales, in fact in most respects they are utter failures as economies and human quality of life. Scale is very important. Small entreprenurial communities with workers’ coops and community businesses are neither capitalism nor communism.

Permaculture is a re-connection of human existence with nature; a complete jettison of the trajectory of thousands of years of empire which culminated in the recent forms of US Capitalism or Soviet Communism.

To, dig through, as academics will, the writings of Marx and Engles, to uncover a connection with ecology, dialectics, materialism is simply an attempt to make Marx relevent. As an academic exercise, fine, but let’s not get lost in these exercises which create distractions from the work at hand. (The rightness or wrongness of Marx is not the real issue.)

I am less optimistic for large nations like China, US, Russia in trying to grapple with the issues of population (central, btw to permaculture) and the attraction to economies of scale which leds to mega-farms, and WalMarts. All this will need to change. Bio-regions, local democracies and economies will need to replace them. I think there needs to be much greater community-based and owned businesses, and local cooperatives, and public “owernership” of natural monopolies. The basics of classical economics will need to re-emerge within the context of steady-state. If you can only translate this by reading Marx, so be it, but I think it is an unnecessary obsticle to clear, straight on understanding.

Point, don’t really care about leftism. It’s a prisim that keeps solutions at bay while fighting old, irrelevent battles.

Making the economics of sustainability a Marxist paradigm is like WalMart going “green” (slight hyperbole).

Look, if we’re going to wed everything to Marx, why not Jesus?

Jesus would have LOVED permaculture and probably, you’ll find ‘references” to that effect…though they didn’t call it “permaculture” waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy back then. [irony]

The point, Deadbeat, is still the same: Permaculture is NOT Marxist. It may not be “anti-Marxist”, but it is quite certain that Bill Mollison was not reading Marx when he came at this problem.

Now is it capitalism? NO. (When you have a hammer, DB, everything begins to look like a nail.) It is both simplistic and dogmatic to tie Marx to permaculture no matter whose article you reference.

As far as references, I’ve supplied many. One article does not a case make.

I will say this, a sustainable world will require a major shift from forms of competition and hyper-individualism to community and collective. In that sense both Jesus and Marx were right. I don’t think Marx would have been as keen about permaculture and the life-style it purports. First, permaculture is NOT about a linear cultural evolution which required stages of capitalism to achieve.

Permaculture is about limits to growth. It is a systems view of feedback loops and balance. Marx was NOT anti-capitalism so much as seeing the necessity to move passed it to the next “stage”. The very spirit of permaculture is not that we are simply in a pre-determined stage, but that we are in an unsustainable growth pattern that will end – either through the efforts of movement and planning (transition) or because natural forces will pull the plug (collapse).

Well Max then you need to argue with the article’s author Barry Healy, the Aussie who wrote the article for New Left Review.

You say the following…
The use of small farm, community gardens, permaculture and sustainable organic growing is NOT Marxist.

According to the author he states …

Marx didn’t use the word “ecology” — it was coined in 1866 — but metabolism . He argued that capitalist accumulation shatters basic processes of ecological sustainability “by destroying the circumstances surrounding [natural] metabolism”. Marx called this “metabolic rift”. So, he said, what is needed is the “systematic restoration [of natural metabolism] as a regulating law of social reproduction”.

and …

Australian-developed permaculture farming principles aim at restoring this balance. Within capitalist Australia, permaculture remains a fringe movement. But in socialist Cuba, it has become mainstream. Viewers of the inspiring film The Power of Community can see with their own eyes the depth of meaning that Marx attached to “healing the metabolic rift”. It is a physical healing of the land, combined with a spiritual rejuvenation of human society.

and …

The SSV reported that instead of artificial fertilisers, Cuban farmers use micro-organisms that enrich the soil, earthworms, compost, animal and green manure, and the integration of grazing livestock.

But cheap food isn’t always good food: often it isn’t really food at all. In Marx’s day, cheap workers’ bread contained stone dust, chalk, pearl ashes, soap and other such choice items. In Capital, Marx quoted testimony to the 1855 parliamentary inquiry into food adulteration that, because of contamination, “the poor men who lived on two pounds of bread a day did not take in one fourth of that amount of nutrition”.

What I find interesting Max is how you seem to try to position yourself as being above ideology while at the same time promote your own ideology.

The problem is Max you haven’t shown where these idea contradicts Marxist Socialism. I’m still waiting for you to present your evidence to the contrary. All you ever do is just make an argument and you provide no supporting evidence.

Unlike you Max , a reference is provided that argues permaculture being in in line with Marxism. The two are not at odd with each other which has been your argument. You have yet to site a reference with argues your case. I would like to see you site a reference whereby permaculture or any other holistic approaches to agriculture is at odds with Marxism.

What is clear is that Venezuela and Cuba would not have made any changes had the people not fought to change their government and make the economy serve the needs of her people. That is the essence of Marxism — seizing power and using that power to end exploitation and to serve the needs of the people. That is the only way any real ecological advocacy will proceed and succeed on a mass or world-wide scale. Power must be seized and exploitation ended.

I appreciate what you’re saying. Let me give you an example of what I’m trying to say. First, I think Venezuela with Chavez has made important changes, deep, democratic, in just about every aspect of policy in that nation.

I think what happened in Cuba post-Special Period is exempliary in every way. In fact, Cuba is truly a model in many respects for developed as well as developing areas of the world.

That said, rhetoric aside, what they have done is not Marxist. I’m sorry. It is adaptive, with a deeper understanding of the environment.

The use of small farm, community gardens, permaculture and sustainable organic growing is NOT Marxist.

Just because we’ve drawn this historical line around anything or one that stands up to the US as a Marxist nation, perhaps one that espouses Marxism variants vis a vis the cold war, does not mean they are truly practicing Marxists. I don’t think there are any practicing [Adam] Smith Capitalists for that matter.

I will hark back to points I’ve made before the concentration of wealth is not capitalism. The greatest concentration of wealth comes from unearned income – what the wealthy 1% do. That happens when land and resouces are buried in capital which is the neoclassical paradigm.

Now to the issue of ownership. I don’t think Marx holds a patent on wrestling with the ethical and moral dilemmas of concentration of wealth. I’ve repeatedly offered on DV Henry George as an alternative. George is neither a capitalist in the sense we use that term today, nor a socialist. He did not set out to create a so called “third way”. He looked at the problem of progress and poverty and from there through a combination of methods reached profound conclusions that WORK when used. I have site case after case of how it worked.

There is a Georgist school in Venezuela. Chavez by nationalizing (again that’s not a Marxist idea) resources, he is in effect employing the notion that George espoused. In Cuba, for instance, land is given for farming, if it is used for any other purposes it goes back to the state. That is perfectly within the practices of a Georgist.

Marx did deal with land, but that was years after he had read George. George had yet to read Marx when he wrote Progress and Poverty.

I will not argue the details of what Marx thought of George. George was praised the world over, and I don’t know what George eventually thought about Marx. But for me that’s gossip and irrelevent.

I’m not saying that either Cuba or Venezuela have consciously employed Georgist land distribution. I don’t know, but I would be surprised with the economists (and Chavez) are not very familiar with Progress and Poverty. George provides a means to capture land/wealth and distribute it without a violent revolution.

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That said, Cuba used permaculture and other organic farming methods to transition out of the Special Period (Peak Oil). And it worked!! But it is hardly meant to be a Marxist adaptation. In fact, small independent farms were intoduced as well as cooperatives…again hardly Marxist.

Hundreds of African villages are using permaculture, community urban farms in New York City, Australia, England, and on and on.

It is an alternative life style to the consumer-based hypergrowth economics of the West.

Here is an article on permaculture that ties very neatly with Marxism. Ironically the article is written by another Barry (Healy) for the New Left Review.

But with these capabilities has been the great environmental price.

You may want to check out permaculture in terms of a transitional form of farming, building and living.

Basically, I think the downfall of humanity started with agriculture. Industrialization – including industrialized agriculture – followed in the footsteps of agriculture.

I think you are missing the essence of my point. The problem is not simply industrialization. The problem is the extreme difficulty of the human species to function within limits. Deforestation is a phenomenon not entirely unique to the human species but it is only the human species that so devastes the planet. Humans require an immense amount of resources, even those in tropical areas who consume a fraction of Northern tribes. That consumption produces waste and pollution unlike no other form of “wild” flora or fauna.

The inclination to colonize and destroy great swaths of the planet pre-dates capitalism. But without a doubt, it is industrialization which expontentially expanded the exploitation of the earth.

But this is true in “Communist” China and the Soviet Union. It was true in Cuba before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This is not purely a Socialist/Capitalist phenomenon. And so the problem cannot be solved by simply ridding the planet of capitalism (a feat which will probably not happen).

A localized steady state economy is workable, has been workable and can provide the orientation of transformation.

Marxism doesn’t exist. I think Venezuela is doing some very postitive things as has Cuba in recent years. And there are other places as well, but to say that they represent Marxism (not saying you are) would be very wrong. There is capitalism throughout all of these nations. My arguments is not “anti-Marx”, I think he made some very important observations and provided useful analysis.

What humans have is the ability to reason, observe, analyize and make course currection. The problem arises when the system is so overpowering so as to make correction nearly impossible.

I don’t think that is a ‘capitalist’ issue. The issue of monopolies and privitization of the commons (Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons) requires public domain/government to function for the good of the commons not of private interests. I don’t think it is capitalism that creates the corruption we see with our public officials when they cozy up to big money. It is not in the interest of “capitalism” to undermine democracy. On the other hand, capitalism as we know it has led us to a dead end, a treachorous dead end.

Me and Tony Soprano come around and a breaka your legs!

As for not paying attention to current events, I can totally relate to that. It’s only been in recent months, and primarily here, that I’ve re-engaged in my interests in such things. I have to say, I prefer it the other way for a variety of reasons.

From the French you’ve sparingly used in past conversations, maybe an island in the Caribbean, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, etc? I guess it depends most on the degree of interest you have to see the world outside of the Empire, which provokes an overall change in one’s perspective… as you might expect. There’s a whole world outside those borders, and while capitalism is homogeneously the platform for daily life, the cultural aspects could induce an unknown sense of creativity to write in your foreign language based on your societal observations, or something else considered to be worthwhile.

As for local, resource-based economies, it could easily be considered Utopian and would require an overall, collective leap upwards in consciousness — I’m not certain as to the likeliness of that occurring — along with which comes a different lifestyle. Although if it were to happen, the human objective would be to treat humanity humanely, taking comfort in knowing that your neighbors’ needs are met, that the Earth is being treated with respect, and so forth. But as Max has countlessly pointed out, that may take a huge population drop to actually implement it successfully and sustainably. It something that may seem like a crap shoot to many, but in the realm of all possibilities, what’s not possible?

It would be more beneficial to habitually project what we want, instead of focusing on what we abhor. I pay much less attention to all the chaos and disharmony going on in the world than I used to, in fact, I used to become physically and emotionally sickened from giving it so much attention daily. Removing myself from the good ole US of A has precipitated a shift in attention. For myself, expatriating was the smartest decision I made after the longest preparations of my life. Would that be your case? You won’t ever know unless you try it…and when life’s all over, you won’t regret the things in life that you did, so much as the things you didn’t do.

Always open to discourse on the subject with you, Tree.

Best to you.

Ramsefall, where to move to? I have ignored a nagging feeling to get my passport for a while now and I’m not sure there’s anywhere better to live. Suggestions?
How would you see local resource based economies working? This strikes me as extremely limiting and a situation ripe for wars as people who do not have a particular resource attack those who do…which is pretty much how things are anyway.

Max, Barry and Ramsefall, I don’t always agree with your comments but I truly appreciate the intelligence and rationale that goes into them.

Right now the mainstream thinking all over the world is capitalism, and communism and socialism are still in diapers and alternative unpolitically correct ideologies. Another thing is that socialism has to suceed at least in a couple of countries like in Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba their populations have to accept it, love it, and be happy with socialism, so that other countries populations demand socialism in their own country.

Like oppressed americans here in USA, have to realize how socialism is increasing the living standards of venezuelans, and connect the dots, of how socialism would increase the living standars of the american population. Because we all know that capitalism is making americans poorer (at least this stage of capitalism which is neoliberalism)

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