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.
. Tweet

Squatting North and South

The Brazilian landless peasansts movement MST ( Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) is well known for its advocacy of land reform to enable people to establish sustainable livelihoods through their own labour, rather than having to engage in exploitative labour-markets and unsustainable economies. I'm glad to see that they now have a website, telling the history of their movement and inspiring similar change in other societies.

In the urban context of Brazil the MST have now been joined by the MTST, the movement of roofless workers (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto). As they say on their website:

Nosso objetivo é combater a máquina de produção de miséria nos centros urbanos, formar militantes e acumular forças no sentido de construir uma nova sociedade. A ocupação de terra, trabalho de organização popular, é a principal forma de ação do movimento. Quando ocupamos um latifúndio urbano ocioso, provamos que não é natural nascer, viver e morrer pobre e oprimido. Não aceitamos a espoliação que muitos chamam de sina.

'Our goal is to combat the production machine of poverty in urban centres, to train militants and gain strength in order to build a new society. The occupation of land by people's organisation is the primary mode of action of the movement. When we occupy idle urban land we prove that is not natural to be born, to live and to die poor and oppressed. We do not accept the dispossession that many call fate.'

As well as their direct action in the form of land occupation, these people of the shanty towns, whose daily life is a struggle against violence and dispossession, communicate their social and political message through a theatre of the oppressed.

I've raised the question recently of why we don't think of the people who live in our deprived communities as 'landless poor'. Since our 'great transformation' to a capitalist economy took place so long ago we accept that without a job you are worthless, whereas in the countries of the South people's first demand is for land so that they can grow their own food, gather fuel, make furniture and so on, rather than having to enter into an unequal contract with an employer.

This demand does not arise often enough in the post-industrialised economies of the West, however the demand for land for housing does. It finds its latest expression in the campaigning group Squash, which is lobbying against government plans to illegalise squatting. This legislation, clearly designed to serve the interests of the land-owning, property-owning class who the Conservatives have always served, will cost £790m. according to research carried out by Squash. More importantly it will deprive the homeless and the landless with the thin vestiges of the right to indepedence that our legal system still respects.
. Tweet

A Reverse Transformation?

Polanyi's work is valuable in denying the priority placed on the market in most economic theory. His account of how we arrived at the situation where most of our needs are met by the market is worth consideration. Polanyi identifies three stages in the 'subjection of the surface of the planet to the needs of an industrial society. The first stage was the commericalization of the soil, mobilizing the feudal revenue of the land. The second was the forcing up of the production of food and organic raw materials to serve the needs of a rapidly growing industrial population on a national scale. The third was the extension of such a system of surplus production to overseas and colonial territories. With this last step land and its produce were finally fitted into the scheme of a self-regulating world market.' (p. 188)

Given that the market system needs to be re-evaluated in an era when our most pressing task as a human community is to ensure the sustainability of our society, we might raise questions about all three of these process of transition. It is taken for granted by most contemporary economists that land can operate like any other resource, that the process of the commodification of land—its bundling into parcels over which ownership rights can be asserted—and of its sale in a market is unproblematic, but recent developments towards land reform across the world, based in the indigenous view of land as having its own rights, argues against this.

Polanyi's second stage of the transition to a market economy he calls the 'forcing up' of production of food and organic raw materials' in response to the movement of the population from the land and its rapid expansion in the industrial cities. What he has in mind here, I think, is the loss of balance between people and their land, which is a nexus of interacting pressures and conflicts rather than a simple cause-and-effect process. This reopens the generally accepted view that economic growth increased population and then put pressure on resources.

While some environmentalists have traditionally taken what can be judged to be a neo-Malthusian stance on the population question, the more nuanced response to the debate is to recognise that the shift to the market broke the connection between people, their need for resources and the land they inhabited. In a peasant community, each new birth represents a mouth that needs feeding from a limited land resource; in contrast, in an economy where livelihoods are based around the labour-market, each birth represents a potential labourer whose time can be sold. Evidence of the extent of child labour in Victorian cities or in the megalopolises of the global South today is greeted with horror, and yet it is a rational response to an economic system where people have no right to land and need their children to guarantee their subsistence.

Polanyi's third point is linked to the second, since once the industrialised country's population were engaged in producing goods for trade rather than for their own subsistence, their basic needs for food and the raw materials to make clothing, had to be met from the work and land of others, and in the colonial era and subsequently this has meant through using the over-priced land and labour of countries of the global South. Extending Polanyi's insight into the present globalised economy we can see the system of the global trade system as a means of enabling the rich Western economies to rent land in the poorer countries, and exchange which cannot be fair while the former's currencies dominate the system of global trade.

Polanyi's central point is that the role of the market as the central and controlling mechanism in economic life is a modern and short-lived one: 'Though the institution of the market was fairly common since the later Stone Age, its role was no more than incidental to economic life.' (Polanyi, 1944: 45). To move towards a provisioning based economy we need to reverse the three stages Polanyi identifies as forming the transition to a market economy. In other words we need policies to:

Decommercialise the soil - perhaps a Land Value Tax is a first step here;
Return to sufficiency via the strengthening of self-reliant local economies;
Limits on global trade rather than hyper-globlisation.
. Tweet

Celtic Land Values

I am grateful to The Land magazine for keeping tabs on the development of land use policy in Wales. In spite of the recent consultation over access to the countryside in England, there is little serious linkage between land ownerhship, sustainability, and food security in the English shires. By constrast, what is happening in the newly devolved territories of Scotland and Wales may be the beginnings of a revolution.

Perhaps because the history of exclusion from the land is still kept fresh in Scotland, the emphasis there was on taking control of land for local people and on the need for a land reform. Such demands are commonplace across the world but are less commonly heard in developed and industrialised societies, where people appear to find it hard to imagine any alternative to wage slavery. Unlike in England, these are not marginal ideas from cash-strapped campaigners, but significant planks of the policy platform of the governing party.

The Scottish Green Party is creating a buzz with an attempt to put onto the agenda the question of how to share fairly the proceeds from rent of the land: its survey of the potential for a Land Value Tax in Scotland is a useful model for England and Wales to follow. The proposals suggest a simple switch from the regime of business rates and council tax to a system of taxing the land itself. This would make 75% of Scots better off and achieve some wealth redistribution, but the data needed to make a more thorough assessment of how land is owned and used - and who gains the benefit - is still beyond the pocket of a political party like the Greens.

In Wales, meanwhile, the focus is on using planning policy to encourge sustainable lifestyles, and to replace the prejudice against low-impact lifestylers by offering them real legal support in developed sustainable livelihoods from the local land. With its technical guidance note TAN6, published back in the summer, Wales has followed the lead of Pembrokeshire County Council in supporting the right to build in the countryside of those who make their livelihood locally and in a sustainable way.

The policy is called Planning for Sustainable Rural Communities but includes the revolutionary section on One Planet Development, as well as support for self-build, the development of rural micro-business, and exceptions to uniform development bans to support such sustainable rural livelihoods.

As Simon Fairlie concludes, 'TAN 6 is a welcome departure from English planning policy guidance for the countryside.'
. Tweet