From the Men of Property the Order Came

This week another part of the protection of the vulnerable is stripped away, as the government changes a clause in existing legislation to make squatting a criminal rather than a civil offence. The effect of this is to enable the wealthy to demand that the police undertake to remove squatters from their second or third homes at public expense, rather than them having to undertake civil action at their own risk. Squash, the squatters' support campaign have estimated the cost of squatting at £790m, money we will pay to defend the property interests of the wealthy.

In spite of its urban and somewhat risqué image, squatting is a noble and ancient tradition. Originally it meant squatting on land, laying claim to the right to provide for your own subsistence, to which the building of accommodation was secondary. Much as the members of Brazil's MST do today, our ancestors challenged the feudal land system by occupying farmland and providing for their needs. It was the shift of the economy towards a labour market and industrial production that changed the focus of squatting towards merely the need for a home.

The BBC quotes Housing Minister Grant Shapps as saying 'No longer will there be so-called 'squatters rights'. Instead, from next week, we're tipping the scales of justice back in favour of the homeowner and making the law crystal clear: entering a property with the intention of squatting will be a criminal offence.' This is a typical example of the divide-and-conquer tactics of the Tories, who ignore the fact that many of those who are homeless are in work, but are paid too poorly to afford the profiteering level of rents in many of our most expensive cities, and especially in London.

The answer to the homelessness crisis is for government to intervene in what should never have been a housing market. As a society we consider that education and health are too important for the vagaries of the market to control their allocation and their price - why not with housing too? And Tory ideologues should read their history and recognise the tradition of squatting as much more akin to the empowered economic response at the individual level that they so vehemently espouse than they might feel comfortable with.
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Work, Land and Provisioning

When systems of industrial production burst onto the British landscape in the 18th century they represented a break with a timeless pattern of social and economic life: it is this fundamental change in the relationship between people, their land and their systems of provisioning that has led to this process being termed a 'revolution'. In the 250 years since the advent of industrialism this system has spread geographically and across the productive sectors. It has brought extraordinary technological innovation paralleled by unimaginable improvements in lifestyle and longevity. While the yields of this system have been apparent and immediate, the costs have been more diffuse and have taken longer to express themselves.

In the book I am writing about the Bioregional Economy I am considering how the relationships between employer and employed, and between labourers and the resources they work with, changed as agricultural production gave way to industrial production. The complex social networks that typified production in rural communities that had changed little since feudal times were replaced by market exchanges.

In redefining an economy compatible with sustainability we need to reconsider the creation and distribution of goods and services within a market system but taking the achievement of sustainability to be the most important guiding principle. However, it is important to question whether this market system is the most conducive to achieving sustainability, or perhaps at all compatible with a sustainable future.

The achievement of an equal and sustainable society raises questions relating to 'provisioning', and economy that enables people to meet their needs directly, without feeling constrained by the strait-jacket of the market ideology. This may be considered to be a utopian project, but I would rather concur with Polanyi in his suggestion that it is in fact the ideology of the free marketeer that is utopian, in fact not merely utopian but dangerously so:

'the origins of the cataclysm [the Second World War] lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system. Such a thesis seems to invest that system with almost mythical faculties; it implies no less than that the balance of power, the gold standard, and the liberal state, these fundamentals of the civilization of the nineteenth century were, in the last resort, shaped in one common matrix, the self-regulating market.' (Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 31)

While the precise forms of the institutions has changed since Polanyi wrote his masterpiece in 1944, his central point remains: that they all collaborated in the underpinning of a unified system with the market economy at its heart. Like Polanyi, I would challenge this totalitarian approach to economic life.
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