The World Turned Upside Down

Greens are renowned for the penchant for catastrophising and the temptation to behave like a prophet of doom grows daily, as we are assailed by dire news on the state of our economy and our ecology. We feel justified in claiming that a system has reached its end and in demanding a new paradigm. But where are we to look for our models for a fundamental change, not just in a few aspects of our lives but in the whole way we perceive and interact with the world and each other?

I have received inspiration recently from the ideas and activities of the men and women who lived their lives during one of our country's most bloody and turbulent times: the English Civil War. Specifically I am thinking about rerunning a series of debates held in what was then the small village of Putney in 1647 amongst members of The New Model Army who had defeated the King's forces and now demanded the right to decide on the new world they would live in.

Their demands were widespread and radical. Army leader Thomas Rainsborough argued a case for radical equality of rights and property. His famous statement 'for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he’ was a key step on our road to democratic rights divorced from property, a case made more boldly by 'honest John' Lilburne, the pamphleteer whose words were so incendiary that he spent most of his life in gaol. These were 'the Levellers' who rejected the society based on privilege and inequality they had been born into.

These radical thinkers were clever enough to foresee that without a redistribution of resources political rights would ultimately be eroded. Hence the call for land redistribution so that it could become, in Gerard Winstanely's words 'a common Treasury'. Like today's radicals many out their words into practice, organising communes that followed the early Christian communes and gave models to later communities of the 1960s. Like many Greens today they had a spiritual onmection to the land, as demonstrated by Winstanley's comment that 'True religion and undefiled is to make restitution of the earth'.

For an intriguing and enjoyable introduction to those times you could try watching the Channel 4 drama series The Devil's Whore. This was sadly missold at the time as a lusty costume drama romp. In fact it is a skilfully written introduction to a time when nothing was unthinkable, viewed through the eyes of an imaginary Everywoman. If you believe we need to turn our world upside down, then learning from our courageous ancestors who demanded the right to live in freedom and equality may be a good place to start.
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Back to the Land

I have been away from my blog for a while because of tidying up a typescript for my new book called The Bioregional Economy: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. As I've been writing it I have leaned more and more on Polanyi who, it seems to me, is the economist for our times.

Polanyi has an uncanny knack of being able to take a long historical perspective. This is rare amongst commentators and policy-makers, but particularly rare amongst economists. It is well known that the discipline of economics defined economic history as outside its purview some decades ago. Not knowing your own history means you cannot learn from your own mistakes, which is an important explanation for why we have found ourselves in the Great Depression II: Revenge of the Austericons.

Polanyi famously describes the 'great transformation' from a stable, sustainable economy, based on social relationships and connected to the land, to a capitalist market economy, where people are turned into the 'fictitious commodity' of labour and decisions are made by those who control capital, without any need to take account of their social consequences. One of the questions I raise in my book is how we might reverse this transformation and find our way back to the land and back to wholesome social relationships.

It appears that part of this transformation may already be happening as a result of the crisis of capital. On the Guardian economics Live Eurozone Blog (11.11am), Helena Smith reports that

'Greece is undergoing a mass internal migration as a result of the economic crisis that has engulfed the nation since December 2009. After years of being spurned for the bright lights of big cities, rural areas are making a comeback as unprecedented numbers of unemployed young Greeks move en masse to the countryside encouraged by government stipends to cultivate tracts of land that have been left untended for years. A survey conducted at the behest of the Agricultural Development Ministry by the polling firm Kapa Research found that more than 1.5 million Greeks were considering relocating to rural areas with one in five already having made the move. Around 75 % were under the age of 44 – the group worst hit by joblessness in a nation where more are now out of work than employed.'

The state has launched a €60bn programme of subsidies on plots of land, a scheme which is attracting graduates who have despaired of finding white-collar jobs in the cities. In Thessaloniki trained agronomists have put their knowledge into practice and are renting land from the university to grow rice and cotton. You can find a short video of their experiences on Youtube.

This leads me to question how much these experiences might be shared in the UK, if our Depression continues. Greece has only been a member of the EU for 40 years and was previously an agricultural society, so the link to the land is still strong. In the UK for many the experience of living from the land was lost 100 years ago or more.
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The Church of St. George

A week before the election - and how long ago that seems now - I was happy to accept an invitation to make a presentation to the IU Conference on land issues. The International Union for Land Value Taxation is an interesting organisation with a long pedigree that campaigns under the slogan 'Why is so much wealth in the hands of so few'. Its primary motivation at present is to propagate the policy of land value taxation.

In spite of its obvious appeals in terms of justice and practicality - after all, land cannot be hidden or sent overseas as a means of evading tax, as most other assets can - the taxation of land has not received much attention in recent years. This is partly, I think, because those who argue for it often come from the opposite ends of the left-right spectrum.

On the left end we have people who, following Gerard Winstanley and the Diggers, argue that land is a common wealth and that value extracted from it in tax should be shared between all the citizens of that commonwealth, or nation. On the right end we have those who argue that the absence of a cost for land stifles its efficient exploitation, leading to over-strict planning laws and the like. If people had to pay to own land, they would be sure to get the maximum financial return from it.

Henry George, the radical journalist of some 150 years ago who created a global grassroots campaign for land taxation, seems to have had sympathies with both of these arguments, but that was before the planetary limit was an observable concern. Since the recognition of the limits to growth we would need to work a land tax in conjunction with the planning system to prevent over-exploitation.

I was not received with universal approval at the conference, largely because I had made a speedy attempt to calculate how much a land tax might actually yield in the UK today, and what proportion of the overall tax tax this appeared to be. My assumptions were clearly questionable, but I felt it pointless to discuss theory without having some handle of what the fiscal implications for the UK might be. Although I presented my figures with a lavish quantity of caveats, they were attacked (subsequently) for being treacherous.

However, explanations offered to me as to why I was wrong were theoretical. George argued that a land value tax could be a 'single tax' since all other sources of taxation would ultimately have to be derived from land as the source of all wealth. As a green economist this argument appeals, but it cannot be theoretically upheld today for a couple of reasons.

First, the value that is generated by companies today is not linked to any particular parcel of land and does not derive from it. Most is created from thin air by financial institutions. Second, our consumer lifestyle relies on renting - at extremely cheap prices - productive land in many other countries around the world, to produce our food and the raw products for our clothes and consumer goods. If we truly lived from the value of our own territory we could never sustain the levels of living we now consider our right.

While this undermines the theoretical argument for land value taxation, it also suggests that land value tax might be able to play a crucial role in recreating the link between the value that land can produce and the financially based size of a national economy. It is the breaking of this link that is driving environmental destruction. Limiting the money system and introducing a tax on land values could offer policies to restore it. Tweet

Suits Meet Scythers

My latest issue of The Land has arrived and is filled as usual with excellent things. Perhaps the most encouraging is the serious attempt to find out who owns our most valuable resource - the land itself.

The threatened privatisation of The Land Registry has spurred the Public and Commercial Services union into action and an interesting relationship between land-rights campaigners and anti-privatisation campaigners seems to be developing. The first evidence is a report presenting An Alternative Vision of the Land Registry.

The report in itself is fairly unoriginal - a rehearsal of arguments about the disaster that is New Public Management - but what is interesting, and rather impressive, is that way that the PCS has identified a way of keeping their members' jobs by massively increasing their workload.

The first step to introducing a Land Value Tax would have to be a cadastral survey - a massive data-gathering exercise to establish who actually owns the rolling acres we all feel to be our national heritage. The fact that this information needs to be discovered is what brings the land campaigners - who want redistribution - and the land registry civil servants - who want jobs - together.

Simon Fairlie, bless him, is leaving nothing to chance and his cynical view of politics is likely to be proved right. In typical DIY mode, Chapter 7 are launching their own 'Map Your Local Landowner' award, with prizes of £400 for 'the best cadastral maps to show how landownership is distributed within any given county, district, town, village or parish.' If they receive enough entries they'll be able to piece the map together themselves in the Flaxdrayton Potato Store. If you feel inspired you can contact them on: chapter7@tlio.org.uk Tweet