Utopia Governance and the Commons: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 439

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Utopia Governance and the Commons Preface to the Third Edition

The main content of this book has been previously published, along with a series of memoirs, with the title Three Miles of Rice Pudding. (The origin of this phrase will become apparent in Chapter 2.) In Utopia, Governance and the Commons, I have stripped out a lot of the personal stories and focused on the more academic content. I hope, nonetheless, that the work will remain accessible. In this third edition I have simplified the text and added a few new thoughts and observations.

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Utopia Governance and the Commons 12

Utopia Governance and the Commons 1. Introduction

‘The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.’

Edwin Schlossberg

‘Aut tace, aut loquere meliora silentio.’ (Do not speak unless you can improve upon the silence.) Variously attributed

Do we dream of a utopia? Utopias and dystopias are with us right now but I think we often do not acknowledge them. Our society is focused on good living and hopes for the future, perhaps as never before. At the same time though, the understanding and practice of a commons has greatly diminished — to such an extent that when I mention ‘the commons’ most people think I am referring to the House of 13

Utopia Governance and the Commons Commons of the UK parliament. We will learn instead, in the course of this book, that a revival and extension of what we mean by a commons is central to how societies may, in turn, be revived and how they might fare the future.

So utopia and the commons are problematic and our politics too is on very shaky ground. We yearn for a happy life and many enjoy an abundance of good living — at least in the West.

But our sharing of the Earth’s resources, our societies and our politics — these seem to be in disarray. We have utopias and dystopias.

There is certainly a lot out there in books and blogs and Youtube clips. Hopes of green or high-tech futures. Fears of climate hells. Post-capitalist future economics. How do we make sense of all this? The planet-saving, eco-warrior works may leave us with a guilt complex. The technological,

futurist

books

seem

overly

optimistic

and

dismissive

of

the

world’s

problems. The political books can be very obscure and often yearn for the overthrow of the monster of capitalism. They assure us that once the beast is slain, all will be well — but what might replace the beast can seem fanciful or unrealistic.

I’ve worked my way through many such writings. I’ve also interviewed a number of folks

— of all political stripes — in the hope of incorporating their ideas. There are thankfully some exceptional people and exceptional works that have helped out. And even in the most obscure and difficult texts explored in my research, there was much to be gleaned. My first reason for writing then, is to collect up all 14

Utopia Governance and the Commons the useful stuff that others have said and to try to present this coherently. Dipping into the utopian visions of ecological futures, high-tech futures and political change, I’m aiming to give a big picture that I hope will be food for thought for the ordinary person who may not have picked up a book on politics before.

But, whilst many books are excellent, and many conversations have been inspiring, there remain questions and concerns that do not seem to be fully addressed. That is my further reason for writing. It is to tackle those further questions, and try to give some simple and accessible explanations, from a layperson’s point of view.

All authors of political writing, of course, are seeking to deliver a message that sums up their view of how the world may be made better. I don’t feel that many deliver a balanced message. They are: Too eco. Too catastrophic.

Too intent on wanting to overthrow capitalism.

Too fixated on devising rules that will get people behaving in ways that fit in with their brand of utopia. Or, just too complicated. Or a combination of some or all of these. So my further aim is to get some balance, and provide a story that does not seem overwhelming or polarised or excessively radical. That way, I hope, the ordinary person may feel they could participate in some way, without having to become a revolutionary.

Let me make a start then, by summarising the concerns that have led me to write and the questions that these concerns have raised, and which I hope to address in this work.

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Utopia Governance and the Commons Three Concerns

There are three main concerns I’m looking to address. The first concern is the one that is raised by Rutger Bregman in his Utopia for Realists. The concern is, what has happened to our visions of utopia? We seem to have become a bit jaded, a bit cynical, a bit worldly-wise, such that dreams of paradise on Earth, or even good governance, appear to be hopelessly naïve.

Where is the vision? Where is the hope for joy and pleasure? Is life now reduced to just a scrabble to hang onto a job, get a house and a car, enjoy a few holidays and then retire on a reasonable pension? What about everyone else, who maybe cannot afford such things? Can the rich only prosper at the expense of the poor?

The second concern follows on from the first.

Why is our view for a good life so premised on wealth and consumption? To address this, we might ask, how is it that we determine what makes for a ‘good life’ today? The answer we are offered by politicians is all about economic growth. If the economy is growing — or so we are assured — then there are better prospects for jobs, for higher salaries, and for all that follows from this. Growth, we are told, makes it easier to find a job, and then our salary gives us some spending power to satisfy our basic needs.

Perhaps after all that, we will have a bit of money left over; our ‘disposable income’. (The name says it all.) Only then are we really into the realm of pleasure. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a simple concept, but not such an obvious measure of success when looked at more closely. The worrying thing is that GDP

seems several steps removed from what might 16

Utopia Governance and the Commons actually make us happy. Why don’t we start instead with pleasure and celebration? And what

about

imagination,

creativity,

relationships, community, humour? There is no mention of these in the ‘good life’ promised to us by growing GDP. The ‘good life’ seems to just be premised on financial wealth and material possessions. But many people will challenge the idea that this is what is most important to them in life. So something is amiss.

The third concern is about trust in people. The big question for me is this. If we ever achieved a world in which everyone has a say in how things are run, would we make sensible choices?

Are most people okay — sensible and able to make reasonable decisions, given sufficient information? Are most people compassionate?

Or are people reactive, making emotional responses without much thought, suspicious of others, suspicious of change, self-seeking, prejudiced, hostile to those who might seek more balanced and informed decision-making?

This is not necessarily a question about any particular class or demographic of people.

People of all types might make bad choices — at least, that is my worry. Besides, who am I to set myself up to judge what is a good choice or a bad choice? I am naming my fear, but I don’t have an easy answer to the issue of trust. But I believe that the search for answers about how the world might be a better place is also a search for trust in others, in relationship and in community.

Why these particular concerns? Well, it strikes 17

Utopia Governance and the Commons me that we are short on vision, or shy of vision, as a society. Any visions we might have are mostly not coming to us through politics. Those offered to us by literature, film and television tend to be of the dystopian kind. Ideas about what might make for a good life are certainly out there, but media, politics and institutions are not really addressing these ideas in a coherent and wise manner. Also, in the background of the book, the climate emergency looms large. It affects all of the three concerns above. In particular, it is a contention of the book that the way we seek pleasure is a critical question to ask when trying to address the changing climate. And finally, because of the problems the world faces, good governance is an essential question. A divided and polarised politics means that we face considerable obstacles, in many countries, to finding better government and therefore solving our problems.

Good governance is very much based on trust.

Six Questions

The purpose of the book then is to answer the concerns raised above and along the way, to investigate what others have suggested and then arrive at a story that better fits with the world and the way we want to live. I’m approaching this by looking at current stories of how the world works and where it may be heading. I consider these to be utopian stories, even although the proponents of the various alternatives probably would not wish to be called utopian. Along the way, we’ll be looking at the meaning of the commons, and how this fits, or does not fit, with the alternative narratives. And we’ll also need to get into some 18

Utopia Governance and the Commons politics. So the journey ahead is a journey into governance

systems,

community

and

economics. All of that is a lead up to asking about what we really want from our lives and from society and what will make for a better world. The journey is also one about nature, place, compassion and pleasure. I’ll be taking these topics back to basics so as to get a handle on them. To do all this, I’m asking six main questions.

The six questions are: Who decides? What do we own? What should we share? What should we make — or not make? How should we trade?

Finally, and most important: How should we live? We will be referring back to the questions throughout

the

work,

as

the

discussion

progresses.

The first of these questions, of course, is the question of governance. To get the broadest possible view of politics I’m going right back to asking whether or not we should have a government at all, and then we explore the various forms of governance on offer. We look, in particular, at two varieties of governance system — Sociocracy and Participatory Politics, or Parapolity.

What we own and what we share are questions that the commons addresses especially well.

We will look at the meaning of the commons and we will look at sharing in more detail in the chapter on compassion.

Questions of work, labour, production and trade are addressed in the chapter on economics, but have a bearing on several other chapters in the 19

Utopia Governance and the Commons work. In relation to labour, production and trade, I also discuss a further aspect of governance, called Participatory Economics — or Parecon.

Finally, and a key feature of this work, is the question of where the pleasure lies in our lives, in our communities and in our societies. In the concerns above, I’ve suggested that we are led along a path of assuming that pleasure only follows once we have solved the basic questions of governance and economics. I’d suggest instead that, at the very least, the two work hand-in-hand. And maybe sometimes we are neglecting where our real pleasures lie and it would help us all to think this through. Utopias are all about pleasure, so pleasure must be central to our discussions.

Four Applications

If we are to make pleasure our starting point and utopia our goal then we also need to look at reasons that we might be hopeful in setting out on this journey. Pleasure, people, places, creatures, nature, compassion, things to love —

these, I suggest, should be our motivations. A hope for the future is essential. And we cannot leave all this to political leaders, or an intellectual elite or to activists. Each of us, I believe, no matter how humble our place in life, can play a part in making a better world for ourselves and for others.

So once those six basic questions are covered, we will turn to look at how solutions might be applied to four particular areas of concern —

nature, place, compassion and pleasure. In the 20

Utopia Governance and the Commons process, we will be devising an alternative story of utopia. Along the way we will touch on such issues as freedom, equality and justice. But these ideals are abstract and notoriously difficult to pin down. Utopias, by contrast, offer us the potential of concrete solutions. There is always a play-off between these two — the abstract, and the concrete — and we will see this contrast turn up many times as the work progresses.

So, those are my concerns and questions, and it’s these that have prompted me to try to write something to find answers. We will be looking at the idea of utopia first, and then getting to grips with ownership and the commons. Then it will be time to sort through the political views that might help us to administer owning and

‘commoning’ successfully. I hope that the reader will stay with me through the journey, explore the ideas proposed by the modern-day utopian stories and all with the hope of formulating a new story at the conclusion of our discussions.

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Utopia Governance and the Commons 22

Utopia Governance and the Commons 2. Utopias

‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.

Progress is the realisation of Utopias.’

Oscar Wilde

‘It’s not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.’

Bertrand Russell — Political Ideas

‘Creating a utopian paradise, a new Garden of Eden, is our only hope.’

William H Koetke — The Final Empire 23

Utopia Governance and the Commons

‘Yet Utopia as a form is not the representation of radical alternatives; it is rather the imperative to imagine.’

Frederick Jameson — Archaeologies of the Future

What better place to start our investigations than with all the things that we consider to be pleasurable in life? When it comes to utopia, it’s all about pleasure. Many utopias look at what we ultimately want and the details about how such societies or worlds are sustained are mere technicalities. But there are also much more pragmatic ideas for making a better world. We will be looking at both types of utopia. To use some terms that will become more apparent as this book progresses: Utopia is the vision. The outworking of utopia — making it pragmatic —

is the mission. And within this mission there are numerous aims required to bring about the detailed functioning of the better world that is being proposed.

Utopias and Ideals

The word utopia, as I’ve suggested in the Introduction, can often be used in a derisory way and the term is frequently scorned in modern societies. For instance, it’s been said that the first aim of all utopias is to eliminate real people! So the criticism is often that utopias are idealistic. We need to take a look at this claim.

Ideals are abstract concepts, like freedom, equality and justice, and it is true that some utopias are very much about these things. On 24

Utopia Governance and the Commons that basis we would have to agree — utopias can be idealistic. Russell Jacoby, however, contrasts ‘iconoclastic’ utopias (that’s the idealistic type) with what he calls ‘blueprint’

utopias. Blueprint utopias are much more concrete in describing what a better world might be like. The blueprint, concrete types of utopias are the pragmatic visions.

But, in truth, we need a bit of both. So we keep an eye on ideals in this book, but also try to dig into the pragmatics. French philosopher Raceour told us that utopias are the challenge to ideals. Ideals can become too static and fossilised without the bold practical visions of utopia. Starhawk reminds us:

‘We need more than psychology, more than spirituality and community: We need an economics, an agriculture, a politics of liberation, capable of healing the dismembered world and restoring the Earth to life. Most of all, we need to make a leap of the imagination that can let us envision how the world could be.

Then we need to consider, step by step, in great detail, how to bring our vision about.’

Starhawk — Truth or Dare

Origins of Utopia

Beyond that simple sorting of the idealistic and the pragmatic, there is a mass of literature, both fiction and non-fiction, which looks at utopias of every kind. It is hardly possible to give even the briefest of summaries to the subject here.

Instead I am looking to try to tease out some essential thoughts that will be our guide through 25

Utopia Governance and the Commons the rest of the book.

In this chapter we will consider utopias that look backwards

for

inspiration

—

sometimes

described as Golden Age utopias. We’ll also consider utopias that look forward to a future Golden Age. All of this is with the aim of seeing that there are utopian stories already playing out in our contemporary cultures. It’s these stories that will then be our main focus, as we examine their pros and cons, and how their ideas may be adopted, adapted or rejected as we seek to forge a new story.

The work from which the word utopia is derived is the tale of the mythical island of Utopia, by Thomas More. Although many utopian ideas have been around for much longer, it is More’s work that really started things off in the modern era. More seemed to be punning two Greek words — Outopia — meaning no place, and Eutopia — meaning a good and beautiful place.

This sets up an ambiguity that has been essential to the notion of utopia ever since: It suggests that it is both an abstract vision and a practical, realisable reality — so again that contrast of the idealistic and the concrete that we have discussed above. Patrick Geddes ( Our Social Inheritance) took up that theme in his work. Geddes never lost sight of the need for a broad vision, whilst being deeply involved in the practicalities of trying to bring the vision to life.

Referring to Thomas More’s Utopia, Andrew Keen ( How to Fix the Future) says:

‘Today, on its five-hundredth anniversary, we are told that this idea of utopia is making a 26

Utopia Governance and the Commons

‘comeback’. But the truth is that More’s creation never truly went away. Utopia’s universal relevance is based on both its timelessness and its timeliness. And as we drift from an industrial toward a networked society, the big issues that More raises in his little book

— the intimate relationship between privacy and individual freedom, how society should provide for its citizens, the central role of work in a good society, the trust between ruler and ruled, and the duty of all individuals to contribute to improve society — remain as pertinent today as they have ever been.

‘….By

inventing

an

ideal

society,

More

demonstrated our ability to imagine a better world. And by presenting his vision of this community to his readers, he has invited them to address the real problems in their own societies.’

In the first part of More’s book, a traveller who has visited Utopia discusses some of the issues raised by its existence. (We could say this digs into

the

ideals

of

society,

by

carefully

contrasting the values of Utopia with the values of the current society.) When it comes to the story of Utopia itself, the vision is a pragmatic one. Utopia is a large island, with several cities more or less identical. A hinterland of farms surrounds each city and provides for its sustenance. For the most part, the inhabitants work as farmers. They live communally and have no personal possessions. There is a tiered system

of

governance,

from

the

local

neighbourhood, to city, to nation. Freedom of religion is encouraged and the utopians are ever curious about new knowledge. Strangely perhaps, a few sorts of dissent are strongly discouraged, such as questioning the political status quo and unauthorised travel. Whilst the 27

Utopia Governance and the Commons technology is inevitably of the Middle Ages, the sentiments expressed in this remarkable book are especially prescient.

More

himself

was

a

complex

character,

apparently very amiable in his personal life, but also quite ruthless in his working life, especially towards religious heresy. He was executed for treason — a charge he may well have been able to get out of. He even told a joke to his executioner when his head was about to be removed. So, some have speculated that Utopia was not an altogether serious work. Whatever the true motives behind it though, it’s fair to say that it became the model for all future utopian speculations. It is difficult to think of any later work that can now be held up without comparison to More.

Golden Age — Looking Back

Western culture, along with many other cultures, has its creation myth and closely related time of a ‘Golden Age’ of humanity. The first known mention of a Golden Age is in Hesiod’s Works and Days. In the Christian tradition perhaps the focus is more on the ‘Fall’

that follows closely behind the creation story.

The details of Christianity’s Golden Age can often be disregarded in the process.

The Golden Age of the Garden of Eden has some interesting features. Eden is set apart from whatever lay beyond (Wilderness? Chaos?).

This is not too surprising for a desert culture, where a harsh wilderness contrasts so vividly with the occasional oasis of lush vegetation.

(This idea did not start with the Hebrew or 28

Utopia Governance and the Commons Christian faiths of course, but has come down to us mainly through them.) That split, between a protected place and the dangers of a wilderness, has stayed with us down the centuries. It is only in very recent years that wilderness has started to be seen as something positive. The split persists though in our ongoing contrast of city and countryside. A lot of utopian thinking is city thinking, with nature the poor cousin. Evan Eisenberg ( The Ecology of Eden) examines this contrast through history as the mountain (nature) and the tower (city/civilisation). In this book, I keep the split going in a slightly different form, contrasting the tamed garden (where we produce things to be used in our lives) with the wild nature that lies beyond. So, whether the contrast is between city and countryside, or garden and wilderness, the splits that Eden laid out for us are not necessarily problematic.

Rather they keep us mindful of the ways in which we treat our cities, our agriculture, and the wilderness. And it has to be said that without Christianity’s images of Eden and the New Jerusalem, there may not even have been the idea of utopia.

Another feature of Eden is the implication that nature, at least within the garden, was not premised on death and rebirth, predator and prey, but instead could endure forever.

The past Golden Age can become a fixed and unchanging

perfection.

Darren

Anderson

( Imaginary Cities) warns us:

‘…the appeal of lost mythical cities requires a curious retrogressive nostalgia; the seductive deceptive idea that there was a golden age that 29

Utopia Governance and the Commons requires resurrecting (often the purveyor’s youth or their time-misted view of it). The problem with the past is that we are still living in its wake yet it is unreachable. We survey it with the torment of Tantalus; it is there just out of reach. Times which never really existed are elevated, as gilded eras of impossibly exacting perfection, often to justify fundamentalisms in the present. Even conservatives are Utopian!’

The legacy of Eden then is partly that we look upon nature and think she could be improved.

Rather than embracing nature’s ways, we directly or indirectly fight against her. What Eden seemed to promise stayed with us, with our dreams of taming the wild and conquering death. The story of the Fall added to this, suggesting that nature herself is ‘fallen’ and imperfect.

A further split, implicit in the story, is the difference between nature and society. This was often used in colonial times as a justification for exploitation and indeed extermination of foreign peoples. To describe a culture as ‘in a state of nature’ was already to do violence to it, by removing it from the normal circle of social conventions and moral principles. The people of such a society could then the more easily be treated as if they were a natural resource rather than a valid society in their own right. (See, in particular, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.) The Fall for humans is a difficult idea. After all, knowledge of good and evil does not seem such a bad thing. Was ignorance really bliss?

Implicit in the Eden story is that the state of innocence cannot be regained, so the Christian 30

Utopia Governance and the Commons tradition has a problem with trying to re-create Eden. Paradise cannot be regained, or at least paradise is delayed. Nonetheless, a lot of Western thinking has been about trying to regain something that has been lost — so this ambiguity continues to play out. In more secular times, we are more easily able to adopt a Golden Age myth without concerns over any heresy regarding a Fall. There is no longer such a problem with re-creating Eden, perhaps minus the innocence.

Other cultures that look back to a Golden Age have, in contrast to the Christian tradition, a somewhat easier time. In China, for instance, rebuilding a past Golden Age is seen as a distinct possibility. Meanwhile, some Western authors set aside the idea of a Fall. They want to dispel the notion that we are a ‘fallen’

humanity, somehow violent and evil in our basic nature. They wish to believe there was a time when human culture was as we might like it to be again. In a sense then, they are promoting a Golden Age myth as a means for modelling the future. If there was an age of a ‘noble savage’

— or we can demonstrate that a nobility is still present in current indigenous, ‘organic’ (to use Murray Bookchin’s term) peoples today — then there is hope for all of us, according to these authors

and

others

like

them.

Most

fundamentally, it means that human nature does not need to be changed. Instead, suitably arranging the basic living conditions and political circumstances of a society would be enough to realise a peaceful and harmonious culture.

Possible? Riane Eisler’s exploration of Minoan civilisation is perhaps the closest we get to an historical Golden Age, explored in her book The 31

Utopia Governance and the Commons Chalice and The Blade. But, apart from the fact that some authors may be projecting their own ideas back into people who we have no real hope of understanding, we cannot in any case go back. The Golden Age and the noble savage, if they ever existed at all, cannot be a model for the future. Even if we were to believe that human nature, of itself, is fundamentally good, we still have the massive and pervasive influence of culture that seems to go against this. Of course this is partly about the issue of trust I mentioned in the Introduction. I think the answer — at least in terms of looking at history — is that we have evolved culturally not so much as good or bad individuals, but as groups. Whatever disagreements there may be about what people in the past or today’s indigenous peoples may be like, there is general acknowledgement that we are very kind and protective of each other when we recognise a group identity. Any utopian vision, to prove effective, needs to recognise this. Utopias are primarily social constructs.

So, at best some very mixed messages are brought to us by Eden, and we will see these recurring as we look at alternative versions of utopias below. One thing potentially positive from the biblical account though, is the idea of stewardship. If nothing else, we might take this on board as an affirming message for today’s world.

The medieval myth of Cockaigne is in a way a provocative forerunner of re-creating Eden.

Eden of course, would lie to the East of Europe, whilst Cockaigne is set in the West. In Cockaigne, food is abundant, with birds and fish 32

Utopia Governance and the Commons seemingly all too willing to be cooked. (So there is meat, in contrast to Eden’s veggie diet.) There is even edible architecture. It is always Spring in Cockaigne. There is a fountain of youth and Cockaigners earn money whilst sleeping. Strangely, there are cheeky nuns, who seem intent on baring themselves for the delight of the Cockaigners. Understandably, people of the middle-ages would be obsessed with food. What is most interesting about Cockaigne is its deliberate flouting of established order. All utopias need to have that sense of challenge and defiance in them to be vital and relevant. Most strange about Cockaigne was that it could only be reached by eating through three miles of rice pudding. This is not so bizarre as it might first appear. Ancient versions of paradise were often thought to be contained within a womb, or to be walled in by something, often an organic substance of some sort.

Perhaps the message was that Cockaigne could at least be reached, whilst we are forever barred from entering Eden. Cockaigne, for all its subversive cheek, perhaps recognised that our dreams are hard-won. We must struggle through our rice pudding before we can reap the rewards of our efforts.

Like Cockaigne, many other utopias seem to lie to the West of Europe. The city of Ys — allegedly in Brittany, France — lay to the West. From Ys came the myth of Atlantis and the name for Paris — Par Ys — like Ys. Atlantis itself also lay to the West. The first of many accounts of Atlantis came from Solon and from Dionysius of Miletus. Plato also described Atlantis. ‘The Island of the Blessed’ (from Lucian) is a story similar to Atlantis, except that its inhabitants 33

Utopia Governance and the Commons are bodiless, ethereal beings. They dwell in a city of gold with emerald walls. The Celts, meanwhile, had the story of Avalon, or, ‘Apple Island’, also in the Atlantic. There are stories of a land called ‘Bresal’ dating from the fifth century, and from which, perhaps, Brazil takes its name. The ‘Fortunate Isles’ are described as early as 1100, and may be a reference to the Canary Islands. A map of 1367 refers to the

‘Fantastic Islands’.

Golden Age — Looking Forward

When

Christianity

looks

forward

to

the

consummation of history — its future Golden Age — then the vision is a city. The new Jerusalem is literally made of gold. That split between the human world and nature would then be more or less absolute. Getting there entails the destruction of the current world, or our physical death. The suggestion is that all that is good transcends us and is set in a future that we cannot bring about by our own efforts.

All of these ideas resonate so much with our current Western culture and with consumer capitalism. What is so strange is that it is a vision of a completely sterile world, and yet even in this we are set about re-creating it. A place without dirt, or flaws, or contradictions, or diversity, utterly known and therefore never surprising. Today’s ‘smart city’, is such a vision, as we will see. A Golden Age looking forward is arguable the defining myth of our times.

Two further, and useful, distinctions in utopian stories can be made here. One is the contrast between what we might call ‘static’ and

‘dynamic’ utopias. Cockaigne, for instance, was 34

Utopia Governance and the Commons very much a static utopia. All of its features are sustained essentially by magic. If anyone were to question how things actually worked, that would introduce an element of contingency to the story — and crucially perhaps it is a contingency based on the potential failings of humanity. (For Cockaigne, maybe it is only to ask how things are maintained. But for other utopias, the problems of governance are tackled head-on. So, such systems we would have to call dynamic. More’s utopia sits just at the threshold of the two types. The island of Utopia is isolated and restricted enough to maintain a fairly static society. But nonetheless, the dynamic questions of governance still intrude.) The final distinction I’d like to draw out is the degree of connection or disconnection between people in various utopias. This is perhaps most obvious in utopian and dystopian novels. It has to be said that many visions of future golden ages are distinctly lacking in human connection, despite

their

promises

of

material

and

technological wonders. The stand-out exception is Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time.

We might conclude that utopias allow for elements of both looking back and looking forward

and

perhaps

both

could

be

accommodated, or synthesised in some way to create a modern vision. Murray Bookchin said:

‘From

a

“backward-looking”

utopianism,

commonly based on the image of a bountiful nature and unfettered consumption arises a

“forward-looking” utopianism based on the image of a bountiful economy and unfettered production. Between these two extremes, religions and anarchic movements develop a 35

Utopia Governance and the Commons more balanced, although equally generous, vision of utopia that combines sharing with self-discipline, freedom with co-ordination, and joy with responsibility.’

Murray Bookchin — The Ecology of Freedom Three Utopias

As I’ve alluded to above, I am suggesting that we are, right now, living in three particular utopian worlds. To explore this, I am going to describe them as three specific ‘flavours’ of utopia. The first is Privatopia — a name taken from the title of a book by Evan McKenzie.

Privatopia is the name I’m giving to our current Western consumer society, and to its neo-liberal political and economic systems. Cornucopia, the second utopian flavour, is a follow-on from Privatopia and is the mostly technological and very positive future that is often promised by today’s society. Ecotopia is our third flavour.

The name Ecotopia is taken from the title of a novel by Ernst Callenbach. It covers a broad range of ideas, from high-tech futures to a romanticised return to a more rural past.

Sometimes Ecotopia can also be an apocalyptic vision.

The explanations and implications of these three flavours of utopia will hopefully become clear as we progress. Indeed, by studying visions, we will be able to explore all the issues that we need to cover by way of understanding society as it is now, and the directions it may be heading whilst offering various promises of a good life. These utopias are, to a greater or lesser extent, dystopias, but they clear the way 36

Utopia Governance and the Commons for a synthesis of everything that is good and serve as an introduction to what I want to propose in this book. We look at each of them in turn below.

Privatopia

Arguably, at least in the wealthier nations of the world, a lot of the promised abundance of a Golden Age has been delivered by the joint efforts of technology and capitalism. We have food of all kinds, in all seasons, from anywhere in the world. We are clothed and housed in relative comfort. Health care is good and improving. Life expectancy is improving.

Politically, societies are relatively stable and there is at least a semblance of democracy through representative government. Wars are less frequent. Violent crime is for the most part reducing.

Freedom

and

tolerance

are

increasingly prevalent. Equality of all kinds is at least recognised as a reasonable goal, even as we may struggle to realise it in reality.

Capitalism is often set up as the enemy, but in terms of material prosperity, it has delivered.

We will look in more detail at the problems later, but for now, let’s look at what kind of utopia capitalism and technology have created. I’m calling it ‘Privatopia’, and I hope the reasons for the choice of name will become clearer as we progress. The more we gain, the more defensive we are of our property. The more services are monetised, the less reliant we are on friends and neighbours. All that we need in life can be bought, and we can achieve this simply through work that often has no relation to our own neighbourhood. Life then is 37

Utopia Governance and the Commons increasingly driven towards being private, isolated and atomised. Even entertainment, once

something

shared

with

a

whole

community, has shrunk down through radio and cinema to television, video games and now all of this is delivered to individuals through mobile phones and earbuds. Privatopia is perhaps a middle-class phenomenon — the more wealth the more there seems to be a desire to be separate from community and society. But that is not to say that poorer people would not aspire to the same exclusivity, given half a chance. If we are happy like this, who needs the outside world? But in fact, we desperately do need the outside world, in a variety of ways, and the outside world desperately needs us. Despite its successes, capitalism fails to make proper use of the talents of individuals and communities.

Something is very wrong with Privatopia.

Privatopia is about a mindset of who we are as individuals as well as how things stand with the surrounding culture. Privatopia aims at personal happiness, but this happiness carries a price in stress, bad relationships and an impoverished natural world. Consumption is an addiction that adds to our stress. This is not just about capitalism. If capitalism were to collapse or be overthrown, there may well still be a Privatopia.

Even the style of modern houses is beginning to reflect the mindset of Privatopia. In years gone by, ‘public rooms’ faced towards the street.

Today, the main living space is often towards the rear of the house, looking out onto a private garden. Windows to the street are getting smaller and the front yard is reserved for vehicles. By implication, we only engage with 38

Utopia Governance and the Commons our surrounding communities when we are climbing into our cars to go somewhere else.

When we are at home we are absorbed just by our own private space. As economic crises proliferate and climate change begins to bite, then the desire to shut out the surrounding world only seems to grow. The more money an individual or family own, the more pronounced this exclusivity becomes. Darren Anderson says:

‘As conditions decline, the need to become physically detached increases through private security, gated communities, tinted windows.

This process of islanding finds its most blatant form in tax havens. For all their parasitism, these are nevertheless utopias, however selective or morally questionable.’

Darren Anderson — Imaginary Cities When we buy a house today we just look at the physical thing — the building — and we have little opportunity to meet the community we will be living with, until we’ve moved in (and it’s too late). We are buying a house, not a home, we are buying a thing, not a context, a relationship, an ecology. The material dominates over the social relationship.

Meanwhile,

Richard

Sennet

stresses

the

independence and autonomy of Privatopia:

‘Modern family life and, even more, modern business practice, has extended the idea of self-containment: dependency on others is taken as a sign of weakness, a failure of character; in raising children or at work, our institutions seek to promote autonomy and 39

Utopia Governance and the Commons self-sufficiency; the autonomous individual appears free. But looked at from the perspective of a different culture, a person who prides him- or her-self on not asking for help appears a deeply damaged human being; fear of social embeddedness dominates his or her life.’

Richard Sennet — Together

The vision of Privatopia, if it could be said to have a vision, is to suck what we can out of life without much thought to the consequences.

Privatopia is so insidious because it is more or less the dominant mindset of the developed world today. So it feels ‘normal’ — it is not recognised as an ideology. I have to confess my own Privatopia leanings — I am equally culpable. Privatopia is ultimately a vision that is paranoid and narcissistic. Behind our gates and picket fences, there is something of a siege mentality. Our hard-won wealth is always vulnerable. The obsession with property and boundaries is a clear symptom, and so too is the addiction to materialism. Privatopia wears a false smile whilst stress and depression hit record levels. Privatopia also ignores the looming disaster of economies ‘growing’ only because of debt and it ignores the ecological crisis that is unfolding across the planet.

Privatopia, in turn, is pointing towards and changing into a promised technological utopia —

the future Golden Age of Cornucopia.

Cornucopia

Cornucopians are people who believe that 40

Utopia Governance and the Commons advances in technology will allow all of us to live in abundance. Also, within this, there is often a belief that either environmental problems will be solved directly, or we will easily adapt to a natural world that has been greatly changed by climate upheavals (rising sea levels, warmer temperatures, etc.). Technology is indeed advancing at an accelerating pace. Wi-fi technology, which seems innocent enough, is part of this. But it’s a lot less benign than it might appear. The infrastructure for wi-fi will soon overtake aviation in terms of its impact on Carbon Dioxide emissions. If this seems remarkable, even with five billion mobile phones in the world, well, part of the reason is called the ‘internet of things’. This refers to objects that are connected by wi-fi. At the time of writing, around 20 billion such connections exist. By 2050, the number could be into the trillions. Such a prospect could make wi-fi the largest contributor to greenhouse gases, ahead of transport, ahead of energy, ahead of agriculture. This is happening right under our noses, as part of the natural progression of Privatopia into Cornucopia. I recognise that a Cornucopia can seem very appealing — after all, it means we can just live our lives and let technology deal with all the problems. But there are tricky issues that the Cornucopians seem to gloss over — the problems their high-tech world could bring about, the impacts on nature they choose often to ignore, the question of how an economy can be sustained when most work is automated, and the issue of whether society can psychologically cope with so much leisure.

As we’ve seen, utopias, including our modern Privatopia and future Cornucopia, are often 41

Utopia Governance and the Commons premised on abundance. Having to work for a living is an evil that many utopias hope to abolish. Many utopias try to deal with this matter of greatly increased leisure time and how we might spend our leisure. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, by contrast, saw an importance to work and limits to abundance. (Whilst Proudhon spoke of ‘pauperism’ and contrasted this with

‘poverty’, a more modern reading might contrast destitution with voluntary simplicity.) The more pragmatic utopias (including More’s original) recognise the importance of work and the dangers of excess. Proudhon lived before the dangers of climate change and ecological collapse were recognised, but his observations to some extent anticipated the issues. Our third utopia — Ecotopia — takes up these concerns as its key premise.

Ecotopia

Ecotopia — the name made famous by the utopian novels of Ernest Callenbach — envisions a world that achieves full ‘sustainability’, for people and for nature. Ecotopians can often see this as coming about through some sort of revolution, such as the collapse, or deliberate overthrow, of capitalism. Or it may be that it is ecological collapse itself that brings about a new world order, as a result of extreme climate change. Some Ecotopians seem to positively relish the prospect — essentially they may be better designated ‘survivalists’. But be careful what you wish for. A sudden collapse of capitalism, or a large-scale natural disaster, is not the start of a newer happier world — it’s a zombie apocalypse. The timescale for transition to a sustainable world is therefore critical.

42

Utopia Governance and the Commons

‘Sustainable’ is a difficult word to define and has been much misused of late. Chiefly, it is the continued endurance of nature that is important, as human society relies, in turn, on nature for its sustainability over time. Without an apocalyptic narrative — a disaster story for the future — Ecotopians are faced with the challenge of trying to get us all to radically change our lifestyles by choice. It is a tall order, but arguably this would be a more pragmatic vision than simply saying that capitalism is about to collapse — or to try to speed its demise.

Ecotopians

though,

with

some

notable

exceptions, can be a bit lacking in proposals for political, economic and social change that might go along with the lifestyle changes they seek.

The vision for Ecotopia is for a world that could endure in perpetuity with a reasonable standard of living for its human inhabitants and abundant and sustained life for all other creatures on the planet. The positive message of stewardship is something that the Golden Age of Eden contributes to Ecotopia. Ecotopia tends to look more to the past than to the future for its inspiration, so Ecotopians are often ‘retro’ in their outlook, with close communities and ‘gift economies’ (or at least more direct means of exchanging

goods)

compared

to

today’s

societies.

So

Ecotopia

often

romanticises

primitive

technology and has an aversion to high-tech.

Ecotopia is often a rural vision, with human habitats reduced (somehow) to villages and great emphasis on farming methods such as organic

farming,

Permaculture,

and

43

Utopia Governance and the Commons Regenerative agriculture, along with sustaining nature through re-forestation and re-wilding.

More people, therefore, would be returning to the land — the reverse process from the last 150 years of industrialisation — and the Ecotopians may well endorse Proudhon’s views on the value of work and of thrift, mentioned above. Some technology is embraced by the Ecotopians, especially, of course, various means of supplying renewable energy. And oddly, computer and mobile phone technology doesn’t seem to be a problem for the Ecotopians. (I’ve highlighted the impact that the wi-fi network has on the planet in the previous section.) It almost feels like the Middle Ages with laptops.

The ‘hipster’ character captures this technical ambivalence especially well.

There are some unashamedly high-tech versions of Ecotopia however. In particular, Stewart Brand ( Whole Earth Discipline) sees an urban rather than a rural future and fully welcomes the contribution of technology towards a sustainable future. See also, David Owen’s, Green Metropolis.

Ecotopians must in some way deal with the convergence of high-tech and low-tech that the future is likely to require. I feel that a problem with Ecotopia is that it adopts the nervous calculation of targets and strategies — aping consumer capitalism. ‘Net zero carbon’ and ‘350

parts per million’ are abstract targets, that make no sense to a great many of us. They are, in effect, a ‘cost-benefit analysis’ of the future.

Remember Einstein’s famous quote: ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’ A problem with 44

Utopia Governance and the Commons the Ecotopians is that they try too hard to appear normal, whilst the future world that they rightly consider necessary is, in fact, a radical departure from our current lifestyles. I think they would be better to recognise their difference (recognise their inner hippy, we might say) and genuinely embrace the changes that are proposed. But for all its faults, Ecotopia recognises the urgent need for change — a feature mostly lacking in Privatopia and Cornucopia.

We could summarise our three utopian stories by saying that Cornucopia romanticises the future, Privatopia romanticises the present and Ecotopia, to a large extent, romanticises the past. We will be exploring different aspects of the three stories as the work progresses, and see how each may contribute. For an excellent exploration of the different aspects of utopia, see Gregory Claeys’, Utopia — The History of an Idea. Also, Krishan Kumar’s Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times gives excellent reviews of some of the best-known utopian and dystopian novels. Frank E. Manuel and Fritizie P. Manuel’s Utopian Thought in the Western World provides excellent historic detail.

Where to from Here?

Modern governments often try to defeat the concept of utopia. Perhaps they feel that if too much is promised then citizens’ hopes and expectations will be raised. What I’ve suggested in this chapter is that despite the cynicism of politics, utopias are very much with us. We have stumbled into a Privatopia, accepting it as just the way the world is. And we are in danger 45

Utopia Governance and the Commons of stumbling into a Cornucopia, with its fanciful aims of a fix-all without consequences. Are utopias ‘pie-in-the-sky’, as they are sometimes accused of being? What would that mean? It would mean having a dream of a better world that has little or no hope of fulfilment. In the meantime, we must muddle on with our unsatisfactory ‘real world’. By contrast, as we’ve explored earlier, there are more pragmatic utopias and a pragmatic utopia would tell a different story.

A viable utopia needs to be built as a conscious alternative to a vision that offers no hope of fulfilment. It needs to be a utopia that is being built in the here and now and that has everyone on board from the start. To achieve this we need to step back and consider the questions raised in the Introduction — questions about owning, sharing, making and trading, and about the type of lives we ultimately would like to live.

These questions will lead us on to consider the commons,

governance,

peace-making,

community and compassion. Let’s not however lose sight of some of those wilder and more sensuous visions of utopia that are often proposed. That drive for pleasure is telling us something about human needs and aspirations.

We will need to keep pleasure always in our minds as we seek to explore a new story.

How is it that we achieve utopia? Three main choices have been proposed — Revolution, Anarchism or Reform. The three options slide into each other to an extent; a mild revolution is reform, whilst the personal autonomy that is valued in most societies has elements of Anarchism.

46

Utopia Governance and the Commons Advocates of revolution need to keep in mind how complex the modern world is. We are heavily reliant on infrastructure — internet, wi-fi, telephone, railways, roads. We are equally reliant on institutions — schools, banks, the police, the judiciary, fire-brigade, hospitals, prisons, as well as the offices of government itself. Interrupting any of these, even for a few hours, would bring chaos to a modern society.

So I say again, be careful what you wish for.

The more extreme forms of Ecotopia are on the edge of revolution in a sense, as they often believe in the imminent collapse of capitalism.

(See, for instance, Charles Eisenstein and David Fleming.)

Anarchism can have a revolutionary flavour, but it offers a broad range of scenarios. Whilst a revolution

might

suggest

a

change

in

government,

anarchism

challenges

the

institution of government itself. As I’ve suggested above, there are hints of anarchism in most societies, not least today in the neo-liberal stated desire to be free of government regulation and to allow free reign of the market economy — which we will be looking at more closely in a later chapter.

Change of any kind could be sudden or could be a slower transition. Reform suggests a gradual transformation from the existing situation.

Depending on the nature of our utopia, this may be a possibility. Indeed, as I’ve suggested above, we are already creating and recreating Privatopia, at least for some of us, within the existing culture and within a capitalist economy in

(for

the

most

part)

representative

47

Utopia Governance and the Commons democracies.

We

may

be

sliding

into

Cornucopia, the natural extension of Privatopia.

So reform of a sort is happening, even although we may not be consciously pursuing it.

Whether we look for revolution or reform, or even if we advocate anarchism, our societies still somehow need ways to organise themselves. If there is a problem now, it is a problem of the state rather than a problem with politics. The state is the institution — big government, top-down authority. Politics, by contrast, is the way we organise ourselves — and this can be very local and personal as well as national and international. We are quick to condemn politics, but this is to confuse state power with the need for co-operation. From politics we have the word ‘polity’ and we will take a closer look at this in Chapter 5.

Some Inspiration

To fuel our imaginations, I want to finish up this chapter with a few visions of future worlds. The reader may be inspired or appalled by what follows. But hopefully, either way, this will be food for thought. So here goes:

‘I have a dream of an astonishing plurality of cultures for the year 2050 — all in which friendships, networks, organisations, learning, storytelling and the arts flourish, in ways specific to their place and geography. City centres are highly walkable and bikable with millions of meeting places for chats and fun.

The buildings are designed with care for the location, have passive ventilation with better air and uplifting day lighting. There is flirting, gossip, philosophical cafes, street theatre, 48

Utopia Governance and the Commons peaceful protest marches, farmers markets and rock concerts a plenty. The cars hum quietly around and do not spread toxic compounds from combustion engines, except for the occasional retro shows where noisy Formula 1-type events draw the petro-nostalgic with great beer and barbecue. Markets and trade are vibrant, and treated more as conversations of value than as efficient mechanisms of price equilibrium. The food is short-travelled, healthy, highly varied, and incredibly tasty and we will happily pay its full cost. The jobs are green

and

stimulate

well-being

through

personal mastery and acknowledgement for work well done. A liveable minimum wage makes the freedom of social mobility more than a cliché. There is greenery everywhere in sight, on the streets and buildings, so sparrows and hawks have re-colonised the inner-city rooftops.’

Per Espen Stoknes — What we think about when we try not to think about Global Warming

‘Let’s imagine a world where both light-hearted play and purposeful work, not drudgery, are the order of the day for all human beings — a world where our reality overflows with material abundance and where everyone can focus on maximising their potential instead of on scrounging for money. My greatest hope is that one day each human being — every one of us — will be able to participate in a society that is inherently just and that also considers well-being for future generations. To achieve this, we have to work together in appreciation of our differences and on behalf of common humanity.

When enough of us work together for the common

good,

then,

to

paraphrase

Buckminster Fuller, we will one day create a world that works for everyone.

49

Utopia Governance and the Commons Martin Adams — Land

‘…my

generation

will

live

in

a

world

unimaginably more beautiful than the one we were born into. And it will be a world that is palpably improving year by year. We will reforest the Greek isles, denuded over two thousand years ago. We will restore the Sahara Desert to the rich grassland it once was. Prisons will no longer exist, and violence will be a rarity. Work will be about, “How may I best use my gifts?” instead of, “How can I make a living?” Crossing a national border will be an experience of being welcomed, not examined. Mines and quarries will barely exist, as we will reuse the vast accumulation of materials from the industrial age. We will live in dwellings that are extensions of ourselves, eat food grown by people who know us, and use articles that are the best that people in the full flow of their talents could make them. We will live in a richness of intimacy and community that hardly exists today, that we know, because of a longing in the heart, must exist. And most of the time, the loudest noises we hear will be the sounds of nature and the laughter of children.’

Charles Eisenstein — Sacred Economics

‘My utopia would probably include three levels of society, rather like medieval days, with knights, clerics and peasants. The warriors would be the aristocrats, and it would be their job to sit around doing nothing except creating and tending beautiful gardens, having parties and festivals in their big houses and acting as patrons of the arts, and being hospitable, giving away beer and food…. The clerics would be the writers, poets, artists and so on. They 50

Utopia Governance and the Commons would live like peasants, freely and self-sufficiently. And the peasants would be the craftsmen, the stonemasons, shoemakers, woodworkers,

ceramic-makers,

potters,

blacksmiths. All three classes would be involved in the creation of music and architecture.

The

money-spenders,

the

thinkers and the craftsmen.’

Tom Hodgkinson — How to be Free

My own vision for utopia takes up similar themes. Conversation is the most prized resource in my utopia. People feel that their voices will be heard, so they are much more willing to participate in local democracy, centred around a new understanding of the commons.

Scotland (my home nation) has been largely reforested and people seek out the forests, beaches, lochs and rivers for quiet retreats into nature. The spread of forest across Scotland is not an isolated phenomenon — natural habitats, from mangrove swamps to coral reefs and wetlands, are protected and expanding across the globe. Many of these places are seen as sacred and religions have morphed into ceremonies for Earth-centred worship. Farms are smaller, but farming is more intense. There is a lot of space given back to hedgerows, ponds and small copses of trees. Organic farming has largely replaced industrialised farming and the new farms serve a mainly vegetarian and vegan population.

There are a lot of parks and other small pockets of nature within towns and also numerous allotments and market gardens. With an intensely managed use of land, even the largest 51

Utopia Governance and the Commons of cities can more or less feed itself.

Greenhouses provide for many foodstuffs that would formerly have had to be imported into the UK.

Technology has greatly advanced. There are colonies on Mars and on one of Jupiter’s moons.

Probes have been sent to some nearby stars, to explore possible Earth-like planets. Even so, back on Earth, technology is discreet. People prefer things to be hand-crafted and traditional, if at all possible.

Towns and cities are more compact, with layouts returning to a more traditional style of streets and squares. The suburbs are largely gone —

replaced by more compact development and surrounded by farms and with nature. The private car is also gone, and with this many roads have been narrowed or removed. People generally walk or cycle, or use trains and buses.

People woke up to the needs of the planet —

perhaps a little too late — but in time to avoid total

disaster.

Genetic

engineering

has

developed sufficiently to allow many extinct species to be resurrected from their saved DNA.

Carbon emissions are steadily reducing, but even so, it will be several decades before global warming and sea-level rise stops. In the meantime, many major towns and cities are being rebuilt on higher ground.

In Summary

Murray Bookchin told us:

‘Rarely has it been so crucial to stir the imagination into radical new alternatives to 52

Utopia Governance and the Commons every aspect of daily life. Now, when imagination itself is becoming atrophied or is being absorbed by the mass media, the concreteness of utopian thinking may well be its most rejuvenating tonic. Whether as drama, novel, science fiction, poetry, or an evocation of tradition, experience and fantasy must return in all their fullness to stimulate as well as to suggest.’

Murray Bookchin — The Ecology of Freedom The ideas of a Golden Age looking back or looking forward have inspired visions of a better world. There are utopias about consumption, abundance, indulgence, sensuousness, and

indeed decadence. There are utopias that are more grounded and look at the pragmatics of a good society. But a pragmatic utopia still has to acknowledge this drive to

pleasure

that

underlies society. Pleasure always needs to be kept in mind. The delights of the more sensual utopias are sending a message that the joy we need to find in our lives is not to be ignored.

I have suggested that today’s modern society has three flavours of utopia — Privatopia, Cornucopia and Ecotopia. These visions have their good points, especially Ecotopia. However, I feel that any one flavour on its own cannot fully address the problems the world faces and offer us an inspiring vision and practical solutions. Hence, the need to dig some more and explore all aspects of the visions in greater depth.

So to make a start, we will step back a little and take a close look at ownership, the commons, governance and community — building blocks 53

Utopia Governance and the Commons that will help to address a couple of those questions from the Introduction: What do we own? What should we share?

54

Utopia Governance and the Commons 3. The Question of Ownership

‘The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, “this is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society..’

Jean-Jacques Rousseau — The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality

In modern societies, there are three main ways in which wealth is created without work. The first is that identified by political theories on the left — ‘capitalists’, meaning business owners —

make money by taking profit from the labour of their workers. The second is to make money by renting out land or property. The property generates wealth perhaps with little or no effort on the part of the owner. (Just the development of infrastructure and other properties around a 55

Utopia Governance and the Commons particular piece of land, for instance, will result in an increased value of the land, without the owner doing anything.) The third way to acquire wealth without work is through money itself, for instance by making loans and then charging interest. All three forms are sometimes known as ‘economic rent’, even where no actual renting is involved. ‘Rent-seeking’, it is often argued, is the ultimate cause of economic disparities, and any changes that might be proposed to society must in some way have an impact on rent-seeking in order to be relevant. (Or, we could say, it is wealth disparity that is the cause of rent-seeking — it cuts both ways.) But this might mean changing the minds of the rent-seekers. A tall order.

I should add here that the definition I am using of economic rent is not agreed on by everyone.

Some economists have added other forms of rent-seeking to the traditional definitions given above, such as money raised through patents and copyright laws. This might be seen as muddying the waters, but on the other hand, it may point to the way things are moving in the societies of the developed world. We’ll be taking a look at some of this in later chapters, but for now I’m sticking with just the three types of economic rent given above. In this chapter, what is meant by the ownership of land and property is the main concern, and in exploring this, we will be in a good position to move forward into looking at the commons and ideas about sharing. Our explorations around ownership, and then sharing and the commons in the next chapter, will have a bearing on the various governance systems that we will be looking at later, in Chapter 5. Further chapters 56

Utopia Governance and the Commons will then build on this groundwork, to show how the various commons and economies relate, and how we might choose to look at things in different ways as we seek a new story for the future.

The themes taken up in this chapter might seem at first to be a bit unrelated. I am introducing several subjects that we will pick up later in the work. They do however have a narrative running through them. The main themes here are — the meaning of capital, the means of production, ownership itself (more precisely, how our ownership is increasingly geared towards commodities rather than utilities) and the economic rents from land, labour and finance. Finance, in turn, then grows in importance.

Capital starts off as an accumulation of wealth.

Once we had settled into agrarian societies, the surplus we created became important. We gathered into small cities and the division of labour added to the importance of capital but also led us into questions of who controls labour.

We may have worked largely for ourselves, but exchange became more important (because of specialisation) hence the rise of the ‘commodity’

(goods produced for exchange) over ‘utility’.

And it is this rise in commodity that in turn fuelled a consumer mindset — hence the predominance and attraction of ownership. So this condensed history shows us the link between all the themes of this chapter, and we will see how commodities — or, commodification

— feature heavily in our further discussions, along with the issues around economic rent.

57

Utopia Governance and the Commons We could simply describe this as a class issue —

with

the

ruling

class,

monarchies,

then

landowners and capitalists — ruling over the poorer commoners — serfs and the working class. For a while the division was clear —

between the rent-seekers and those who had no resources from which to extract rent. But now it is sometimes said that these class divisions are no longer so clear cut. We have all become

‘rentiers’ — entrepreneurs, to put a positive spin on it. Or, more realistically, we are the

‘precariat’ of a ‘gig economy’ — struggling to survive by renting out whatever assets we have at our disposal.

The Meaning of Capital

From the explanation above, we can see the importance

of

capital

in

framing

our

understanding of ownership. So before we set about looking at ownership, we need to make a small diversion into understanding the word

‘capital’ and some basics on the way our economies function. (As with all matters relating to economics, it has to be said that almost every statement that can be made is likely to be contested by some economist or another. I have chosen to take a few key works as the basis of my descriptions. In one sense, it is not overly important if definitions are contested. I am not setting out a new theory of economics,

just

trying

to

glean

enough

understanding to give context to the ideas about utopia and a new story, which is the main aim of the book.)

We need to reach an understanding of capital by some key ideas central to our economy — ‘land’, 58

Utopia Governance and the Commons

‘labour’, ‘wealth’ and a few others. The word

‘land’ is used in economics to mean more than just the ground on which, for instance, a house may sit. Land has traditionally meant air, water, and other material resources, as well as just ground. It might also include tides and sunshine, soil and photosynthesis. To try to avoid any confusion in this book, I am using the term ‘material resources’ for all the things that nature affords us. Within this, land takes on its more limited and more typical meaning of just ground.

When people labour with these material resources, we produce material wealth, which is then either consumed or used to aid us with further production — and hence it is described as capital. The first meaning of capital then is, that part of production that is retained, either for later consumption, or for re-use.

Capital can also be the ‘means of production’, that is, the machinery and tools contained in a factory, for instance, and indeed the factory building itself. (This is described as ‘constant capital’, as opposed to labour, which is ‘variable capital’.) All of this is the result of the past use of labour and material resources. We also produce the infrastructure that allows for future goods and services to be manufactured. In recent years, the word capital has expanded in meaning somewhat beyond the strict definition above, and we will look at this in more detail in later chapters.

(We might add, at this point, that in a modern economy it is energy and the price of energy that is the real driving force of an economy.

59

Utopia Governance and the Commons Labour is becoming less and less important.

See Kate Raworth’s Donut Economics.) Adam

Smith

( The

Wealth

of

Nations)

summarises the meaning of wealth and capital:

‘His

whole

stock

[wealth],

therefore

is

distinguished into two parts. That part which, he expects, is to afford his revenue is called his capital. The other is that which affords his immediate consumption.’ In order to clarify the more traditional use of the word capital here, I am describing the production process as creating material capital. The basic components of material capital are illustrated in the figure below, and I’ve added the other elements of classical economics that are understood to constitute the production process — Land and Labour — to show how these fit in.

Figure 3.1

One point to note especially in this diagram, is labour. There is no capital without labour, and we will see later that this golden rule applies to even the more abstract definitions of capital that are with us today. Another point, as we have been exploring above, is the difference between capital and wealth, and also ‘land’. The meanings of these terms have slipped over the years — with more and more things that are, 60

Utopia Governance and the Commons strictly speaking, ‘land’ carried into the term capital. Henry George ( Progress and Poverty) long ago said: ‘The term land embodies […] all natural materials, forces and opportunities, and, therefore, nothing that is freely supplied by nature can be properly classified as capital.’

George continues: ‘Capital is not a necessary factor of production. Labor exerted upon land can produce wealth without the aid of capital.’

Elsewhere, George provides a description of wealth and the three factors in production, illustrated above.

We sometimes hear the word capital used to also just mean money. Money in modern societies has taken on a life of its own, and, unfortunately, we can no longer ignore the term

‘financial capital’, which will be explored in Chapter 8. Money, in its right place, lubricates the world of trade and flows modestly between the inputs to goods and services and the takings from consumption. (See Figure 8.1 in Chapter 8.) Money, out of control, gets us into big problems, because as was said above, all capital, of whatever kind, ultimately relies on someone’s labour. The more abstract the financial economy becomes then the further it is removed from labour (see Figure 8.2 in Chapter 8), but labour must still be there at some point.

Money made just from money works only for the few — someone’s labour must ultimately pay.

The diagram above is a starting point for our descriptions of the commons, and the various

‘capitals’ and ‘economies’ that follow on throughout the book. It is worth keeping this diagram in mind as we move forward, to see how the various things that are now described 61

Utopia Governance and the Commons as ‘commons’, ‘capitals’ etc. relate back — or, sometimes, do not relate back — to the basic model.

For many, capitalism is the enemy. However, I ask the reader to stand back from the theories for a moment and consider how much we are all embedded in the system. Even for simple things like buying food, or having a mortgage it is almost impossible to escape from the capitalist system. To try to sweep all this away and long for the ‘collapse’ of capitalism, or for its overthrow, is a dangerous vision. Reports that capitalism

is

dead

have

been

greatly

exaggerated. Capitalism will adapt to the future and very likely survive. Claiming that capitalism is the cause of all our woes is more or less a conspiracy theory. Like all conspiracy theories, it is too simplistic and absolves the believer from having to think too deeply or try to work out real solutions.

There is always commodification. Those who wish to see the end of capitalism because of its appropriation and commodification are being disingenuous — they (and I) only have the liberty to criticise capitalism because we ourselves participate in its commodification.

The ‘gift economy’ is just the opposite end of the

‘commodity spectrum’ — it must still commodify up to a point, but it tries to see value outside of commodity. We can, at best, just strike a balance between commodity and gift. So, very strong and realistic alternatives have to be brought by those who wish to see a radical change. Revolution is not an option — it is just not going to happen. Society is too complex, and disruption of any kind to the institutions and 62

Utopia Governance and the Commons infrastructure of a modern society is likely to result in chaos.

But if the economy works then does it matter if we call it capitalism or not? If everyone’s needs are met, the planet is protected and people are satisfied with their work, then what is the use of economic growth? Some economists think capitalism will lead to equality, but many (see, in particular, Thomas Picketty — Capitalism in the 20th Century) accept that it leads to greater disparities in wealth. Another criticism of capitalism — at least, in its current form — is that it creates useless commodities because it requires consumption, above all else, to maintain growth. Some look to modifying capitalism, to a greater or lesser extent, in order to try to address its shortcomings, without overthrowing the system and starting over.

Ludwig

von

Mies

saw

capitalism

as

a

meritocracy. Jealousy, he thought, leads people to question the system, because the system of capitalism exposes their true ‘wealth’ — that is, their true talents or lack of talents.

We can ask, at what point does capitalism begin? One view is that capitalism began when wage labour was introduced, such that workers were no longer fending for themselves, but had to sell their labour to another in order to provide for their sustenance. Another view is that capitalism began when goods were no longer produced solely for their ‘use-value’ but also, or instead, for their ‘exchange value’ — so becoming ‘commodities’. Yet another view is that it is the tendency for the rate of profit to fall (identified by Adam Smith and David 63

Utopia Governance and the Commons Ricardo, as well as by Karl Marx) that keeps capitalism going (a view that is now mostly discredited). Perhaps the most important reason that capitalism continues is related to debt. True capitalism, it is argued, began where there is borrowing and therefore debt. Even money brought into existence by governments is as a loan, and therefore a debt. Meanwhile, money created as private loans also means that growth is necessary to keep up with the creation of new money. Also, note that this does not, for the most part, go to new production, but is often for the purchase of land and buildings. This tends to inflate the price of land and property.

(See Rethinking the Economics of Land and Property by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd and Laurie MacFarlane.) For several decades now the ‘growth’ is in the financial sector — but this must inevitably be based on the eventual (hypothetical)

repayment

via

goods

and

services, ie. through the real world economy. If the debt fell due now, there is no way it could ever be met. Debt means that more has to be produced in order to service the debt as well as just maintaining a living. It is especially compound interest that is the reason the economy is forced to grow. Even if the population was stable and there was no desire to improve living standards, then arguably debt still forces growth.

What if there was no debt? The jury’s out as to whether a system not based on debt would still be a capitalist system. The number crunching is still the same and the economic theories can remain unchanged, but borrowing would stop.

Small businesses may well be fine with such a situation, free of any debt worries and 64

Utopia Governance and the Commons repayments, they can just work with what they have and get by. But a lot of production now is so large-scale that no business could save its way to a point where they could make the kind of

investments

needed

for

complex

manufacture. So a growth-free economy may be possible, but a debt-free economy is more of a challenge. The best we might hope for is to rein in the ridiculous levels of debt we have at the moment and to stop creating money through debt.

We can ask then, is all this inevitable? Should we not just get rid of growth or debt, or both? I suggest that there could still be economic growth

without

destroying

our

natural

commons, or using them up at any increased rate. Or we could have a stable economy with no growth. John Maynard Keynes ( The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money) seems to have thought that this would be possible. It would seem to require that profit be abandoned, and as such, some would consider that a zero-growth economy would not be true capitalism, as the premise of capitalism is that it must grow. But perhaps that’s just an argument over semantics. A zero-growth economy could be a stable economy, whether we call it capitalism or not. But there is an odd reason for inflation to exist and therefore for growth to contnue. Production levels vary and if there were no inflation then it would sometimes be necessary to cut wages in order for producers to balance the books. This, clearly, would be very unpopular. So a little inflation allows for small variations in wage levels to be hidden amongst the steady rise in prices.

65

Utopia Governance and the Commons Paul Collier ( The Future of Capitalism) identifies three core problems with capitalism — the thriving metropolis with a hinterland of dead and dying smaller towns and cities; the disparity between a well-educated elite and the rest of society who are left behind and the collapse of social responsibility. Inequality then, is one of the entrenched problems of capitalism. The growth of consumerism, identified above, has in turn contributed to the collapse of social responsibility Collier identifies. This last point is critical if we are to see the social commons as a means of healing the problems inherent in capitalism.

From gift economies to communism, the solutions offered are extreme. I cannot prove that a more moderate change is sufficient to solve the problems of capitalism without collapsing the economy. But take this simple example. Imagine a crop in a field. The harvest is plentiful — or would be — but there is no-one to bring in the harvest. Not that there are no people, just that there is no-one willing to do the harvesting for the money offered. Clearly, everything is well — there are people to do the work of harvesting and if they harvested they could eat. But, otherwise, things are not well

— ‘the system’ cannot allow the harvesting to take place. This example calls into question the notion that life is somehow ‘impossible’ without some kind of economic system. The ‘scarcity’

created by the situation I’ve described is a false scarcity. (Economists would actually refer to this as ‘economic scarcity’!) Actually there is very often an abundance of resources and an abundance of labour to create society’s wealth.

The world could survive and thrive without 66

Utopia Governance and the Commons capitalism in its current form.

Capitalism must convert our natural commons into commodities in order to continue. Not only that, but, so the theory goes, capitalism must continue to grow, so the speed with which the natural commons is used up is ever-increasing as a result. Some authors suggest that a sustainable life is impossible under capitalism, but that without capitalism, life as we know it is equally impossible. With all these issues, many conclude that for better or worse we are stuck with capitalism.

Owning the Means of Production

Owning the means of production is the basis of one of the types of wealth without work mentioned at the beginning of the chapter —

earning money from the labour of others.

Wealthy capitalists own the tools and the factories where things are made, so this inevitably leaves the rest of us in the compromised position of selling our labour, as this is the only thing we have to offer in the process of society reproducing itself. Traditional left-wing politics has looked to ‘the proletariat’

(that’s us workers) seizing the means of production and therefore allowing a more equitable distribution of the wealth raised through manufacture. Sometimes this process is seen as merely an exchange of goods and wealth, rather than being about the relations between those involved in the manufacturing processes themselves. Karl Marx ( Capital), and subsequent Marxists, thought it was the class relations, in particular, that are key. Remember the critical importance of labour, mentioned 67

Utopia Governance and the Commons above. It is the social relation that needs to be healed — the relations of workers with one another, with their customers and with their

‘bosses’, or whoever it is that is managing the business. Otherwise, this argument is just a reversal of the power game — with the working class taking what is currently with the rich. A more balanced approach might be to ask that everyone gets a fair share of what we produce as a society. And we might go further — the question is not who owns the means of production, but what we do with that ownership

— what we make and who we serve. Do we honour others in our communities with our work? Rather than destroy businesses and overturn ownership, can those who own companies see the benefit of sharing their gains with their workforce, such that the ‘profit’ is only such as is needed to sustain the business, and is not a ‘rentier’ gain by the owner? I’d suggest that the economic rent derived from the labour of others is not an inevitable consequence of the capitalist system. It could be changed without the whole system being overturned.

Why do we want to Own?

Why is it that we are so keen on owning stuff?

Some books on economics tell us that society is based on scarcity. (Since they regard us as creatures of unlimited wants, it’s perhaps not surprising that they see scarcity everywhere!

Aristotle ( The Politics) told us: ‘It is the nature of desire to be infinite, and most people live for the satisfaction of desire.’) For most of human history, for most people, scarcity was the norm

— at least in terms of material possessions. Is it true today? Yes and no. Sometimes a scarce 68

Utopia Governance and the Commons resource is exploited and sold back to us — or something is made to seem scarce so that its price can be increased. But from the perspective of this book, we might say that today our world of Privatopia is based on abundance

(with

the

promise

of

more

abundance

as

Privatopia

evolves

into

Cornucopia). There is the promise, guarantee even, that anything that we could ever want is out there to be bought, or could be made for us.

Advertising, meanwhile, creates a psychological need to consume. If there is scarcity, then it is mainly scarcity of money. The scarcity of money leads therefore to a ‘scarcity’ of stuff. The actual abundance of stuff, combined with the scarcity of money is a lethal combination. It makes us cling tightly to our possessions, as they are often hard-won.

There are also ‘positional goods’, such as a house in the countryside — where there can only be a few houses, by definition, before it ceases to be ‘countryside’. Or a positional good may be a product that can only be made by skilled craft-workers, and is therefore scarce. It is the scarcity of these things that make them positional, and hence gives rise to status. So the status conferred by particular goods is another reason for owning. This is where scarcity has a bearing on our desire for ownership and consumption. It is this type of scarcity derived from positional goods that makes things symbols of our status. We are, in turn, very keen to protect what we own, and rightly see some things to be ‘irreplaceable’.

A further reason for owning is that ownership helps to define who we are. This might be by 69

Utopia Governance and the Commons way of positional goods, as described above, but it can more generally just be by our consumer choices, for things that are not necessarily scarce. For better or worse, our choice of clothes,

houses,

cars,

furniture,

gadgets,

jewellery and all the rest, give us a sense of identity and sends out signals to others about what we are like as people, or at least, how we would like to be perceived.

Economists also recognise things such as time spent with family and friends as not being

‘positional’ and to be essentially outside the economy. In this book, anything that is considered ‘outside the economy’ is especially interesting! In later chapters we will see how there are wholly different economies at work in society ‘under the radar’ so to speak, and how important it is to bring these into the light when we are trying to devise a new story for our future.

Some utopias, including Thomas More’s original, suggest that ownership is wrong. But ownership is so wrapped up in our identity it is difficult to see the world in any other way. It might be concluded that this is a cultural thing. The surrounding culture, especially via advertising, persuades us that owning is good and important. Faced with the excess of stuff presented to us by consumer capitalism, our survival instinct goes into overdrive and leads us to store up goods which are really just there for the taking (or for the buying). The message implicit in this claim is that humans are not naturally selfish. We are just led along by a system that has become out of kilter. We are the victims rather than the perpetrators of 70

Utopia Governance and the Commons excess. Those who take such a view are suggesting that if the system were to change then people would no longer have occasion to act in a seemingly selfish manner. There is not something inherently bad about us, they are saying. Given the right circumstances and we will behave less selfishly. The opposing idea is that actually we are selfish, and it is selfishness that has built the system of consumer capitalism and selfishness that sustains us. So we come down to what will be a familiar topic throughout this book — is it people who must change, or is it the system? Various aspects of this question will crop up throughout the chapters that follow.

Ownership of Land

This book takes the stance that any utopia worth the name is very much place-based. As such, questions of land and property ownership are especially important. Land, like many forms of material resource, is a finite resource and therefore ownership of land has its limits. We have to recognise limits to what can be owned, used, and indeed used up, by humans so that nature has space to endure and to thrive. Under capitalism however, land is almost invariably treated like a financial asset or just another form of capital and as if it were fully ‘fungible’

(convertible) to other types of resources.

Being an owner of land inevitably means being a

‘rentier’ — even if the owner does not literally rent out the land to someone else. Ownership of land leads to one of the ways of accumulating wealth without work. So this is our second definition of economic rent that we introduced at the head of the chapter. Because land — as 71

Utopia Governance and the Commons distinct from some other material resources — is inevitably finite, it is especially susceptible to this accumulation of wealth — it embodies the scarcity on which economics is so often premised. Land, in a sense, is the ultimate

‘positional good’, and the ultimate monopoly.

Winston Churchill said of land: ‘Land monopoly is not the only monopoly, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies — it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly.’ (Speech to the House of Commons, 4th May 1909.)

If things are so bad, then why have we allowed the monopoly of land to continue? Well, those who own land have sought to perpetuate their advantage and meanwhile the ordinary citizen’s lack of any real say in politics means we have little choice but to accept the status quo.

Owning land, therefore, is different from other types of owning. As we move from personal property (such as clothes, furniture and gadgets) towards ownership of land, then I suggest that we are moving from personal ownership towards a shared responsibility.

Being a custodian of land is an important distinction from merely owning or using it. Land is a natural commons — as we will explore in the next chapter — and should therefore be treated differently from other types of resource.

I am not necessarily suggesting that land should not have any owners at all, just that what is meant by ownership needs to be looked at closely and perhaps re-considered. I suggest that stewardship or custodianship are the key elements here and define what ‘ownership’

might mean.

72

Utopia Governance and the Commons

‘Usufruct’ means the right to enjoy and benefit from property held in common, provided that the property is not damaged or destroyed in the process. It goes back to the religious idea of stewardship. In a letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson says:

‘…the earth belongs in usufruct to the living…

No man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeeded him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the usufruct of lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead and not the living.’

A phrase beloved of socialists comes from anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon. It is usually translated as, ‘property is theft’, but the context suggests that Proudhon had rather the idea of wealth without work in mind when he said this.

It is the economic rent derived from ownership that constitutes the theft. By contrast, elsewhere, Proudhon comes out strongly in favour of individual ownership. (See, for instance, his General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century.) In a similar manner, Wendell Berry is looking especially at land when he writes about the nature of ownership. He suggests that caring for what we own is especially important, and this is all the more the case if that ownership is about a resource that will be used by others.

And again, Henry George:

‘But who made the earth that any man may 73

Utopia Governance and the Commons claim such ownership of it, or any part of it, or the right to give, sell or bequeath it? Since the earth was not made by us, but is only a temporary dwelling place on which one generation of men follow another; since we find ourselves here, are manifestly here with equal permission of the Creator, it is manifest that no one can have any exclusive right of ownership in land and that rights of all men to land must be equal and inalienable. There must be exclusive right of possession of land in order to reap the products of his labor. But his right of possession must be limited by the equal right of all, and should therefore be conditioned upon the payment to the community of an equivalent for any special valuable privilege thus accorded him.’

Henry George — Progress and Poverty Along similar lines, here’s Thomas Paine:

‘And

it

is

impossible

to

separate

the

improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which the improvement is made, the idea of landed property arose from the

inseparable

connection;

but

it

is

nevertheless true, that it is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property…. Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community a ground-rent (for I know no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds.’

Thomas Paine — Agrarian Justice

John Locke, in turn, suggested that what a person, ‘removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joyned to it something that is 74

Utopia Governance and the Commons his own, and thereby makes it his property.’

Jean-Jacques Rousseau ( The Social Contract) sought to put some restraints on how land is owned:

‘In general, the following conditions are required in order to justify the right of first occupancy of any given piece of land. First, the land must as yet be uninhabited; secondly, no more must be occupied than needed for subsistence; and in the third place, possession must be taken not by empty ceremonies, but by work and cultivation, the only mark of ownership which ought, in default of juridical title, to be respected by others.’

These restraints on the ownership of land have come to be known as the ‘Lockean proviso’.

(Locke may, in turn, have derived his ideas from Joseph Pufendorf — see, for instance, The Noble Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature and The Moral Person of the State. And Pufendorf, in turn, may have derived his ideas from Grotius.)

Both Proudhon and George are making a distinction between property and possession.

Property takes on the attributes of something owned

outright

—

with

no

necessary

responsibilities of stewardship and custodianship that are discussed above. Possession, however, is ownership with social responsibility. The quotes from Paine and Locke are introducing a further point to the question of ownership of land,

and

that

is

the

argument

about

‘improvement’. It is again tempting to interpret this — as is so often done — as just a direct argument for ownership, pure and simple, and 75

Utopia Governance and the Commons indeed an argument for the ‘property’ kind of ownership discussed above. But it’s clear, from Paine at least, that he is suggesting possession, and the resultant responsibilities that this entails. Improvement does not therefore necessarily lead to inalienable rights on the owner, and this is a point we will be looking at again in the next chapter.

In The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto presents the very simple argument that security of land and property makes an enormous difference to developing nations. Property rights took sometimes hundreds of years to emerge in the developed nations. Somehow these nations are so used to the idea of owning land and property that they often completely overlook the problems that lack of secure tenure causes in developing nations. Ownership, therefore, is not something to be automatically challenged.

Secure

tenure

—

hopefully

with

the

understanding

that

this

implies

care,

responsibility

and

custodianship

—

is

enormously important. (We can also note that forced re-distribution of land has been practised, arguably

quite

successfully,

by

capitalist,

democratic nations as well as by communism, as explored by Andro Linklater in Owning the Earth.)

We can conclude that the wealth without work issue, concerning this form of economic rent, is more about the inappropriate exploitation of land and property than about ownership direct.

Money and Usury

Trade, of course, existed long before there was 76

Utopia Governance and the Commons money. The ‘coincidence of wants’ allows bartering to take place, such that if you happen to have something I need, and vice versa, we can make an exchange that benefits us both.

Money was initially a useful intermediary for this process. Money’s first definition then is as a means of exchange. It is a veil, so to speak, for what we are really doing when we buy and sell things. A purchase is just an exchange, usually of our work, for something that we really want or need, like food or holidays. ‘Owning’ money is pointless by itself, since money is only the intermediary

for

goods.

Money’s

further

definition is as a way of defining value, a shorthand for what we consider useful, or scarce or desirable in its own right. In the meantime, what is used as money — that is, currency —

has changed from something that held value in itself (‘commodity money’) to something that represented that value (‘representative money’) to just an abstract concept that no longer links directly to physical things (‘fiat money’).

Borrowing money came along as another intermediate step for when there was too much money, or too little, for an exchange of goods to take place directly. Banks give some guarantee of the legitimacy of currency and they also allow the saver and the borrower to ‘find’ each other.

A modest charge for this service (and for creating the currency, the ‘seigniorage’) is arguably justified, but an excess charge is usually termed as ‘usury’. Aristotle ( The Politics) for instance, said: ‘The trade of the petty usurer is hated the most with reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process that currency was meant to serve.’ Usury, in turn, leads us to our 77

Utopia Governance and the Commons third type of wealth without work — money from money itself.

As we’ve seen, there are many discussions about when capitalism, as a system, really got going. One suggestion is that it was when money was first lent at interest that capitalism truly began. It’s the interest payable on loans, the argument goes, that keeps the capitalist system in business, as more and more resources go towards paying off the ever-increasing indebtedness. Again we can ask, would it still be capitalism if there were no debts? I think it’s less important to decide on how capitalism began, and more important to address that question of whether debt is its inevitable consequence. We will be taking that question up later in the book.

When we deposit money with a bank, invest in an insurance policy or a pension scheme, or buy shares in a company, we are in a way participating in the process of accumulating money without work, or, more accurately, money via the labour of others, since everything eventually leads back to someone’s labour. The banks even have a habit of describing their services as ‘products’, as if they wish to suggest that what they have to offer us is something material and tangible. But what they offer is, on the contrary, increasingly abstract. Lending money with interest has escalated over the centuries into all types of financial transactions.

As with the other forms of economic rent, there is no clear-cut division for what is reasonable and what is exploitation here. I hope we’ve seen that ‘ownership’, has a bit of flexibility. I hope we’ve seen too, that making money from 78

Utopia Governance and the Commons another’s labour — owning the means of production — hides a deeper concern over the social relations involved in our economies.

There might be some flexibility with money as well. Borrowing and selling stock in a company are arguably beneficial to society, but when financial transactions such as hedge funds and derivatives

proliferate,

the

situation

is

increasingly complex.

What do the Utopias have to say

about Ownership?

Privatopia loves ownership, and it is arguably progressing towards a ‘rentier’ society, where not just the rich and powerful are the owners extracting economic rent, everyone will be in on the act. The virtual monopoly created by land ownership is not acknowledged, but heavily subsidised and supported as a good and obvious thing to be doing. This can only continue with Cornucopia, and Chapter 13, A Wider Commons, explores possible futures of ownership under this vision. It is only Ecotopia that challenges the notion of ownership. Increasingly, this challenge refers to the commons — both in land, and in the other material resources that we use

— and use up — as a society. So the commons, and the question of what should we share, is where we now turn.

79

Utopia Governance and the Commons 80

Utopia Governance and the Commons 4. Defining the Commons

‘If commoning has any meaning it must be the production of ourselves as a common subject.’

Sylvia Federici — Re-enchanting the World —

Feminism and the Politics of the Commons A Commons Exists for us Now

A commons means different things to different people. In this chapter I am mostly taking it to have the political meaning of shared land and property and shared resources, but we will be looking at wider definitions as well, as the discussion of the book continues.

In much of the developing world a commons is still the norm rather than the odd aberration that it has come to be in developed nations. I’m suggesting though that for the developed world 81

Utopia Governance and the Commons a commons still exists, but in less recognisable forms. For instance, we accept that most roads are publicly owned, there are public buildings, city squares and pavements. Arguably this is public space rather than commons, but it is still a ‘commonised’ resource. Up to a point, wealth is shared by taxation; in the UK we are not forced to pay directly for public services such as education and health care, so the costs of these facilities are commonised.

So, if we were to be more aware of the commons, we’d see that it does not have to be re-invented where there has previously been nothing remotely considered a commons. It is more a question of shifting the boundaries —

literally and metaphorically — as to what is described as commons and what is not. In the light of these thoughts, this chapter asks: What should we share? Are there changes to the way a commons is defined in society that would make us all happier and also protect nature and maintain her and us in ecological stability?

The Tragedy of the Commons

Anyone who has heard the term commons at all is likely to immediately think of the so-called

‘Tragedy of the Commons’. In its modern form, the name comes from an essay by Garrett Hardin, although there are echoes of a similar story in Rousseau. Traditionally, a commons was land available for ordinary people to do such things as graze cattle, collect firewood, forage and plant crops. Over time however, pressure from wealthy landowners resulted in

‘enclosures’, whereby the commoners, starting in England, were increasingly shut out from the 82

Utopia Governance and the Commons land that had previously provided for their sustenance. Hardin, in his essay, takes up the traditional view of the commons and asks us to imagine individuals with cattle that they wish to graze on a particular piece of common land.

Each such person, in their own self-interest, would be motivated to increase the number of cattle they graze so as to maximise the benefit derived from the land in the short-term.

However, if everyone acts this way, then the land will be over-grazed and everyone will lose out. Hence, the tragedy. Hardin was not simply referring us back to something that might have happened in the past. His essay was really suggesting that we are doing the same thing on a much grander scale in today’s world. Whilst, in the developed world at least, there is little or no common land remaining, nonetheless there are ‘commons’ of fossil fuels, forests, clean water, fish, minerals and ores. In the interests of short-term gain, we burn our way through these and risk our long-term tragedy. (Critics of the Tragedy of the Commons theory point out that societies with common land for grazing or crops never have individuals acting in their own self-interest — there is always a community.

But this, whilst true, rather misses the point of Hardin’s argument. The developed world is essentially a world of private interests — a Privatopia — so the Tragedy of the Commons is a very real possibility, indeed an increasing reality.)

In a book, Filters Against Folly, Hardin goes on to explain a bit more about dealing with the potential tragedy identified in his commons essay. Here, he makes the crucial distinction between a managed and an unmanaged 83

Utopia Governance and the Commons commons. Hardin asks, Who benefits? Who pays? He suggests three alternatives —

privatise, commonise or socialise. To privatise is to accrue the benefits of what we are doing, and to take responsibility for any losses. (This would be something like a business, acting responsibly, cleaning up any pollution, recycling, avoiding contributing to climate change and not using up resources that cannot be replaced.) To commonise, in Hardin’s terms, is essentially the Tragedy of the Commons scenario. Individuals or businesses privatise profits — so keep them to themselves, and thereby benefit in the short-term — but commonise losses. So, everyone pays for clearing up pollution, adapting to climate change, etc. This is a ‘commons’ of sorts, but it is a blind commons that is forced on us because of the selfishness and irresponsibility of others. To socialise, by contrast, is a

‘managed commons’. The gains and losses are shared out in a conscious and purposeful way.

We can see echoes of the same mindset in Adam Smith’s notion that if everyone is working blindly towards their own self-interest this creates — by way of an ‘invisible hand’ — a better society. But this idea is also the very idea that leads to the Tragedy of the Commons.

The important thing to grasp here is that a managed commons offers us the best hope of avoiding disaster in the future and a managed commons relies on community and good governance. So, it’s not that there is no commons right now. It’s that there is a commons of the worst possible kind. All the profit is extracted by a few. All the mess and waste is a shared cost borne by everyone. In 84

Utopia Governance and the Commons summary, we are privatising profits and commonising losses when we could be sharing profits and privatising loss. (Some might have preferred if Hardin had exchanged what he meant by socialise and commonise in his explanations, but hopefully his meaning is still clear. It is a managed commons that Hardin is promoting. In fact, later in life, Hardin reflected that it might have been better for him to have called

his

essay,

‘The

Tragedy

of

the

Unmanaged Commons’.) We might add here, as is often said, that there is no commons without community; indeed no commons without a suitable economic model to regulate it. Authors Maria Mies and Veronika Benholdt-Thomsen (The Subsistence Perspective) say:

‘In our view, we cannot simply say, “no commons without community”, we must also say, “no commons without economy”, in the sense of oikonomia, ie. the production of human beings within the social and natural household. Hence, reinventing the commons is linked to the reinvention of the communal and the commons-based economy.’

Natural Commons as Resource

and Wild Nature

As we’ve seen above, the usual conception of the commons is about land that provides shared grazing for animals or shared space for growing food. And then we hear about ‘enclosures’, where the land becomes private property. Land is taken by those with power and then rented back to those who once used it for free. The idea of enclosure vividly describes the process whereby features of the world that were once 85

Utopia Governance and the Commons wild and free have become commodified.

It is nature that provides the resources of the commons, and it is clearly nature still that provides the resources, even after enclosures have been devised by humans. We did not make a change to this by enclosing land, but we shifted attention from our reliance on nature over to an emphasis on production, rent and profit. The link back to nature became obscured

— and this process has only become worse. I am using the term ‘natural commons’ for what nature provides for us — that is — the natural resources we need in order to survive. There are natural resources that can be replaced or replenished, whist other resources that, so far as the Earth is concerned, will be used up forever.

It should be pointed out though, that common land can be owned by someone, either an individual or the government, yet still remain a commons. As the last chapter tried to show, defining

the

commons

is

therefore

not

necessarily about ownership. The key thing is how the land is cared for and how a ‘managed commons’ is achieved.

The whole world has been at least indirectly affected by human activity. Chemicals in the air and water and changes to the atmosphere are all-pervasive and likely to increase in the foreseeable future. Even so, places that are as much untouched by humanity as possible are, I believe, critically important. The term I’m using in this work for such places is ‘wild nature’.

Those places where, as yet, the human footprint is light, need to be preserved and protected at 86

Utopia Governance and the Commons all costs. Wild nature belongs as much to the other fauna and flora with which we share this world as it belongs to us. Wild nature is where the privileges all belong to the animals, birds, insects, trees and plants that live there, instead of to us humans. If we go to such places at all, it is only to visit, or perhaps there are indigenous people living there, so close to nature that their footprint is exceptionally light.

Wild nature, then, is not a ‘common wealth’ in the sense of offering us resources for food, energy, minerals or whatever. Its value is not even by way of absorbing Carbon Dioxide and regulating rainfall and its run-off and in preserving and making soil. Its real value is just for itself, and for its beauty and its nourishment to the human soul. Chapter 9 — Nature —

considers

these

matters

in

more

detail.

American biologist E. O. Wilson has the idea of

‘half Earth’ — leaving (or, giving back) half the Earth to nature and using only the remaining half for humans. (At the time of writing, humans take up over two thirds of available land area — in the 1960’s it was only around one third. There is currently an attempt to protect one third of the natural world by the year 2030.

Meanwhile, economist Partha Dasupta estimates that were we to invest in ‘natural capital’ the return on our investment would be 19% per annum.)

It might be argued that indigenous peoples, and even people who abandon ‘developed’ society and choose to live ‘off-grid’, are not necessarily going to draw the sharp distinction between

‘wild nature’ and ‘natural resources’ that I am suggesting here. It is a fair point, but for one thing, the numbers of such people are very 87

Utopia Governance and the Commons small, so their impact is minimal. For another thing, the belief systems of indigenous people (and even some off-gridders) will often mean they live in a careful balance with nature. Even though that balance may not be as I have defined it here, I think something similar is implicit. Indigenous people often have a relationship and reciprocity with nature that

‘developed’ societies have largely lost and which would be difficult to replicate.

The relationship of nature, place, the natural commons and wild nature are shown in the figure below.

Figure 4.1 Nature, Place, Natural Commons, Wild Nature

The Commons, Wealth and Capital

I have chosen to identify nature as partly a 88

Utopia Governance and the Commons resource and partly as wild nature in order to clarify what is going on when we look to her for our sustenance. The resource aspect of nature

— what I’m calling the natural commons — is what was traditionally just called ‘Land’ by economists, as we discussed in the previous chapter. I have separated this out from wild nature. Wild nature, as we’ve said above, belongs to the animals, the birds, the fish, the trees and the plants. We humans may find beauty and rest within wild nature, but not

‘resources’ in the traditional sense. Inevitably there is some cross-over. Old growth forests, for instance, sit on the borderline between what might be a resource and what might be preserved as wild nature. The important thing is to be conscious about what we are doing — to have a ‘managed commons’ of resources, in Hardin’s terms — rather than blindly and inadvertently destroying both wild nature and the natural commons. The first act of managing is to make clear this split between what is reasonable to be used and what needs to remain untouched.

Classical economics recognises that for wealth to be wealth, some kind of work needs to be done in order to render natural resources useable.

Some of this wealth is then consumed directly whilst some is retained as ‘capital’ for future use. We need then to introduce human work and labour in order to produce wealth and capital. All capital is wealth, but not all wealth is capital. This process was illustrated in Figure 3.1 in the last chapter. The figure below combines Figure 3.1 with Figure 4.1 to show how the two relate.

89

Utopia Governance and the Commons Figure 4.2 Natural Commons -> Resource +

Work/Labour = Wealth -> Capital +

Consumption

90

Utopia Governance and the Commons An important point to note here — which I will discuss again below — is that our material economy

with

its

capital,

wealth

and

consumption, is not somehow ‘outside’ nature.

Everything we do is within nature, even although many of the products of human endeavour — including our waste products and pollution

—

may

seem

‘un-natural’.

Environmentalists often balk at this conclusion, and perhaps the reason is that by calling everything ‘nature’ this might mean that those who exploit and/or destroy eco-systems then have an ‘excuse’ for their activities. But, in balance, I think describing everything as nature forces us to consider all of our activities as taking place within eco-systems, and this is a positive move. Some economists try to devise a similar pattern or process for the cultural economy as I have shown for the material economy.

91

Utopia Governance and the Commons Figure 4.3 The Cultural Economy, showing the mirror progression from ‘Resource’ to ‘Capital’

92

Utopia Governance and the Commons So both those two main economies, the material and the cultural, are shown as linear processes.

This is rather typical of our Western thought patterns, where things come from ‘nothing’ and are

ultimately

‘consumed’

or

destroyed.

Everything else in the diagram seems to be floating around these linear processes. We could say that the way we try to organise all our economies wants to force us into these same linear arrangements that we ascribe to the material and the cultural. This sets up an awkward tension in the figures. There will be more to say on this in Chapter 8.

The parallels between the material economy and the cultural might suggest that culture is an

‘industry’ and its functioning mirrors very much the behaviour of the material economy. This might not be a problem for many — indeed it might be a welcome reflection, in their view, that there is a natural order in the way human endeavours of all kinds function. However, for others, the commoning that we have spoken of with regard to natural resources above, takes on an even more important role when it comes to culture. As we will see below, there is a desire to group activities into new definitions of commons. These ideas can be grouped under the collective term creative commons, and require some further exploration.

Widening the Commons

As I’ve suggested earlier, the terms capital and commons have been expanded to include a variety of different things. Physical capital is sometimes used as an alternative term for the 93

Utopia Governance and the Commons material resources nature provides. Human capital describes our ability to do work, essential, of course, for us to reproduce society through new goods and services. Cultural capital may be a term used to describe the contribution of intelligence, imagination and creativity. Social capital is the value inherent in community that might be realised by way of voluntary

work,

informal

help

between

neighbours and so on (sometimes referred to as

‘horizontal’ relations, in contrast to more formal work, which is termed ‘vertical’). Financial capital — dealt with more fully in Chapter 8 —

recognises how integral money is to the flow of the economy, but also has a life of its own.

Perhaps this proliferation of different capitals is a source of confusion. However, authors are perhaps attempting to show that the wealth of a culture owes as much to abstract qualities, such as

compassion,

imagination

and

social

connections, as it does to physical resources. It might be that this suggests an attempt to quantify the less physical contributions and reduce them to number crunching. So the danger of the ‘capitals’ is that everything gets reduced to economics — or, elevated to economics — depending on your perspective.

Along with this, it brings the notions of commodity, scarcity, transactional relationships and cost-benefit analyses. Maybe there is some justification for this with natural and cultural capital, but less so with social capital. But I think the intent of those authors who expand the meaning of capital is to show the richness of human culture and how the economy is actually built off a foundation of social connections. This is the more positive motivation that I have followed here.

94

Utopia Governance and the Commons To summarise the further definitions of capital: Physical Capital — What I’ve called Natural Resources, or Material Wealth.

Human Capital — Value innate to people, including labour and work.

Cultural Capital — Intelligence, imagination and creativity.

Social Capital — The value in the connections between people — as described by Robert Putman ( Bowling Alone). See Chapter 8.

Financial Capital — Sometimes just used to refer to money, but better if it refers to the flow of money in the economy, as a support for the flow of physical resources, material wealth, consumption and material capital. See Chapter 8.

As with capital, there has also been a recent move to widen the meaning of commons, from the natural commons to the inclusion of human imagination and creativity. For the term natural commons itself — sometimes this is used to refer to all of nature. As discussed above however, I have suggested that we divide off part of nature as the commons part so as to recognise it is not all just a resource. But again, I don’t wish to quibble too much over definitions. The fact that many are describing nature in some way as a commons is to be greatly welcomed. The flexibility of all these terms — the commons and the capitals — is probably annoying to academics, but should remind us that all these things are fluid and waiting for us to resolve them into concrete 95

Utopia Governance and the Commons decisions — indeed, our missions and aims will evolve over time, and the definitions we are discussing here will also evolve — it is always a process and not a destination.

The definitions of the more abstract commons I am taking mostly from Charles Eisenstein ( Sacred Economics). Eisenstein identifies a cultural commons of intelligence, inventiveness and technical know-how, a spiritual commons of imagination and creativity and a social commons of compassion and sharing. To summarise the definitions of commons:

Natural Commons — Sometimes referring to all of nature, but preferably referring to that part of nature that humans need for our sustenance, so is used as a material resource.

Cultural Commons — Eisenstein refers to intellectual property and creative copyright here, but I prefer to use the term to refer to the actual wealth produced, as in invention, art,

music,

literature

and

celebration, rather than the copyrighting of these. (Perhaps we should also include trademarks, patents and trade secrets, to be concise.)

Spiritual Commons — Imagination and creativity.

Social Commons — Compassion, gifts and sharing.

96

Utopia Governance and the Commons The Creative Commons

The term ‘creative commons’ has started to be used to refer to intellectual property and artistic copyright, so it may safely be regarded as a collective term for the cultural and spiritual commons, following the definitions above —

hence, intelligence, creativity, imagination and technical know-how.

In the last chapter, we looked at ideas around the ownership of land and saw that one claim to ownership was on the basis of ‘improvement’.

The idea was that if someone spent time and effort clearing a piece of ground of rocks and undergrowth, for instance, and then planted crops, the effort alone was sufficient for the person to claim ownership. (See John Locke.) In Classical economics, a similar argument is made to arrive at a general definition of wealth. Effort must be put in for wealth to be created. (Figure 3.1.)

For imagination and creativity and their concomitant intellectual and creative copyright, we might take that same argument of improvement and apply it to the more abstract ideas of creativity and know-how. Minds need to be trained and the ideas of our imaginations take a lot of effort to bring to fruition as an invention, an artwork or a book. We might conclude therefore that the ‘improvement’

invested to bring something from an idea to an invention or a product mirrors the process of bringing natural resources into material wealth.

The wealth that is created is cultural wealth and the capital derived from this is cultural capital.

97

Utopia Governance and the Commons Alternatively — and this is what is often behind the proposal for a creative commons — there is sometimes the wish that all cultural wealth should be a gift. Indeed, the term ‘creative commons’ tends to conflate imagination and creativity with their output — the cultural wealth

— and downplays all the effort that goes into bringing the promptings of imagination to birth as actual inventions, artworks, music and so forth. It is an argument therefore against creative copyright and intellectual property rights. Personally, I have no quibble with those who

wish

to

offer

their

gifts

without

remuneration. But I feel that the parallels of material wealth and capital with creative wealth and capital are worth making. For artists engaged in social justice for instance, this is a critical issue, so we can appreciate the challenge they have in resolving such questions. They may wish to see the cultural commons as emblematic of a ‘gift economy’, an idea we will be exploring in Chapter 8.

The creative commons sits on the border between the material economy (where most things

are

commodified)

and

the

social

commons (where most things are gifts). In fact, culture is a way that the importance of the social commons can be brought to light. There is a further way to look at things, which might be helpful. The reader may recall that in the previous chapter we considered the difference between ‘property’ and ‘possession’ with regard to land. The first term regarded land simply as commodity. The second recognised a social responsibility that went along with ownership; a responsibility that is expressed well by the notions of stewardship and custodianship. The 98

Utopia Governance and the Commons debates over intellectual property rights and artistic copyright get very complex. The notion of stewardship may be a way that we can cut through these arguments to a sensible balance.

As with land ownership, it is not ownership itself that is the real problem, it is how that ownership relates us to society. Social relations feature as much in the cultural economy as in the material

— arguably more so. Could we find a way of rewarding the efforts of those who generate cultural wealth that also recognises the social aspect of what they produce? Could we have intellectual and artistic possession, rather than property — and what would this mean? The reader will appreciate, I’m sure, that a lot hinges on what we are like as people and how our societies function. I’m not going to explore this too much further here. However, I think one useful parallel can be drawn between the culture of today and how we treat the culture of the past.

Commons and Cultural Heritage

Some material production of past generations starts to be regarded as cultural wealth and of course artworks, literature and music endure beyond the lives of their creators. The cultural wealth feeds back to us as a resource, both in terms of artefacts and also physical places —

buildings and landscapes. We often see these as a shared inheritance. This is partly because their creators are no longer around to benefit from what they have produced and also because communities, and sometimes nations, rightly regard such things as part of their culture. In the UK, we have protection for historic buildings by awarding them listed status, whilst whole 99

Utopia Governance and the Commons areas of towns and cities may be protected in Conservation Areas. Landscapes, meanwhile, benefit from a variety of safeguards such as

‘Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty’, National Parks and ownership by the National Trust.

Sometimes when historic buildings are under threat in other countries, concerns are raised, indeed there are places that have World Heritage Status to protect them. Likewise, artefacts in museums and art galleries can be the subject of national and international interest when they are bought and sold or moved to new locations.

Historic artefacts, buildings and landscapes can often still be owned by someone and the owners may derive benefit from their ownership. Such owners are not the creators of their property, but they may well be its protectors and custodians. We see items that were once the products of human creativity moving gradually into a kind of common ownership. The more significant those things are considered to be, the wider the pool of people who regard them as somehow a shared inheritance. In this process any current owners seem to have an ever greater degree of trust and responsibility placed upon them for what they ‘possess’.

I hope the parallel with intellectual property and artist copyright is clear. As with cultural heritage, our contemporary cultural wealth could be treated with similar kinds of mutual agreements and shared responsibilities. Indeed, we can refer this right back to our material economy,

and

recognise

the

shared

responsibilities around the natural commons and wild nature.

100

Utopia Governance and the Commons The Prospects for Common Good

Laws

According to Montesquieu: ‘the state owes all citizens a secure subsistence, food, suitable clothes and a way of life that does not damage their health.’ ( The Spirit of the Laws). It is tempting to see our understanding of the commons as fixed, but a look back in history reminds us that laws around land, sea and air have gone through countless changes and there are thousands of variations across the world.

The commons is a process rather than a set of fixed laws and our governments are themselves processes. A process is open to change, so a change in our views of ownership and commons is a realistic possibility. I think climate change in particular has alerted us to the unfairness currently integral to the way the natural commons is exploited for the benefit of a few, whilst the rest of us pay for cleaning up the mess.

If the current systems aren’t working, then what system will work? In my own country of Scotland,

the

terms

‘common

land’

and

‘common goods’ (which includes buildings and sometimes furniture and other items) have a specific meaning. All 32 local authorities have a responsibility to keep records of common land and common goods and to hold a common good fund for any revenue that may be raised from their use, such as the rent of buildings. In fact, these laws are amongst the oldest in Scotland and some relatively recent proceedings have served to clarify the law with regard to the commons. England, likewise, had its ‘Charter of 101

Utopia Governance and the Commons the Forest’ that dates back to the Magna Carta, although it was eventually taken into other laws in a much-diluted form. Guy Standing tells us:

‘The Charter of the Forest [1217] asserted the rights of the common man to subsistence and to what were called estovars, the means of subsistence in the commons. In the thirteenth century, every church was required to read out the charter to congregations four times a year.

One remarkable feature inserted in the revised Magna Carta was the right granted to widows to “reasonable estovar of the commons”. Every widow had the right to a basic income, in the form of the right to take food, fuel and housing materials from the commons.’

Guy Standing — Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen. See also , Discourse on the Common Weal (1507).

Now that we are realising the importance of the atmosphere, the oceans and our reserves of fossil fuels, it would be very welcome to have the law recognise a global commons more explicitly and to set in place legislation that clearly defines what the commons means today and how use of the commons should be managed. (See especially, Guy Standing — The Plunder of the Commons.)

Proposals for the Commons

The above discussion leads us inevitably towards the rules and laws surrounding the management of our natural commons and the protection of wild nature. To be a ‘managed commons’ requires regulation, and this in turn requires governance. See, for instance, Elinor 102

Utopia Governance and the Commons Ostrom’s, The Governance of the Commons.

For better or worse, it is legislation that shapes our environments. We will be looking at governance in the next three chapters and fitting this together with our understanding of the commons. For now though, here are some ideas to get us underway.

From our discussions, the natural commons of land, sea and air, fossil fuels, fish stocks, minerals, soils and forests is a commons for which we are the custodians and caretakers. If we truly took that on board, then we would be a long way towards taking care of this planet on which we rely, as well as agreeing fair shares amongst ourselves. The authors quoted in the last chapter, especially Henry George and Thomas Paine, have already made one proposal

— a ‘ground rent’ payable to the community by land owners. More recent authors such as Adam Lent ( Land) have fleshed out how things might work in a modern society. The proposal is now generally known as a Land Value Tax.

Variations on this central idea also suggest that the tax may be reflective of the uses to which a particular piece of land is put. If local government were to be strengthened then communities will have a lot more say in how land is used. The social responsibility of land ownership can then be taken up more directly.

We might also see the actions of oil and mining companies brought under new legislation in terms of what they can take from the natural commons, as well as having accountability for the damage done to air, sea and climate. When a global commons is recognised, pollution and climate change take on a slightly different feel, 103

Utopia Governance and the Commons as it is brought home to us that we are all affected. The culprits owe all of us for the damage they have done as we all own the global commons. So, we might see the producers of fossil fuels paying recompense for their share of the damage, and this would be distributed to everyone. This ‘Fee and Dividend’ idea has already been proposed in the USA and other countries. Meanwhile, polluters that affect more local habitats may pay compensation directly to local residents. We might envisage Sovereign Wealth Funds, for income derived from the use of common resources, to be administered and shared out equitably to local residents. Such systems are already in place in Alaska and Norway, amongst a number of other nations.

Peter

Barnes

( Capitalism

3.0)

suggests

establishing regulative bodies independent of government, who would make decisions about a nation’s carbon budget, and so on. That way, the problem of governments fearing a backlash from unpopular policies on the use of fossil fuels would be partly overcome, as it would be the regulative body, and not the government, who would be imposing restrictions on the use of the commons. Barnes also suggests putting common good assets under the control of trusteeships, who would then rent the use of those assets back to private business (and, presumably, the government). In a sense, he is suggesting turning around the ‘rentier’ model of capitalism, to work in favour of the commons.

Such systems as sovereign wealth funds, fee and dividend, and the like, are often known collectively as ‘pre-distribution’ — in contrast to

‘re-distribution’. The Earth’s wealth is therefore 104

Utopia Governance and the Commons shared in advance, as it were, rather than waiting for a few people to appropriate it, become rich and then be taxed, so that everyone else will then benefit only indirectly, if at all, from the wealth that arguably belongs to us all. (It should be noted that the term pre-distribution is usually used by economists to refer to more mundane things such as minimum wage agreements, unions, good welfare benefits and easy bankruptcy laws. The extension of pre-distribution to include the benefits of a shared commons is stretching the meaning quite substantially!)

Recognising the Commons invites

a new Politics

From the discussions I’ve had with a broad range of people, it’s clear that a great many have never heard of the commons. ‘Commoner’

is a derisory term nowadays, but in truth we are all commoners, and if we saw this to mean participants in a vast commons of nature and culture then we might not think it so bad.

What’s more, that status of commoner should afford us rights. Those rights need to be taken out, dusted down and looked at anew, before our common heritage is squandered by those who don’t care. I get the impression that if folks were to learn of the Charter of the Forest, for instance, and all the rights and privileges that were afforded all citizens, by law, in earlier centuries, then they may view our current systems as somewhat paltry and unimaginative by comparison! As I’ve discussed above, it is legislation that is needed to make all this happen. So thinking about governance is our 105

Utopia Governance and the Commons next task — answering the question: Who Decides?

106

Utopia Governance and the Commons 5. Polity

‘If you can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.’

Attributed to Emma Goldman

‘A nation of sheeps will beget a government of wolves.’

Edward R. Murrow

‘Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.’

Plato — The Republic

It seems we are still a long way from those ideas around ownership, sharing and the commons that we have explored in the preceding chapters. Big business and the interests of the super-rich seem to take precedence over the voices of the poor and the 107

Utopia Governance and the Commons care of the planet. This is all dressed up as

‘progress’, as if we will all one day benefit, and the problems of climate change and pollution will miraculously be sorted out along the way.

So, the ‘principles’ we are presented with; maintaining economic growth, investing in new technology, even job security; are often smoke-screens for a far less palatable agenda.

Meanwhile, the poor suffer: Poorer nations suffer from the exploitation and the excesses of the wealthy nations. Poor people in rich nations suffer from the growing inequalities within their societies. And future generations are being made poor already, as they will have to pick up the bill for our negligence and irresponsibility.

Rousseau said:

’…when the state is close to ruin and subsists only through empty and deluded forms, when in each man’s heart the social bond is broken, when the crudest self-interest insolently adorns itself with sacred name of the public good, then the general will falls silent; the motives of all are kept secret, their votes are no more the votes of citizens than if the state never existed, and the decrees that are falsely passed, under the name of laws, have private interests as their only aim.’

Jean-Jacques Rousseau — The Social Contract In this chapter we’re looking at that basic question raised in the Introduction: Who Decides? I’ve called this chapter Polity because it seems to encompass all of the possible descriptions

that

might

be

deployed

to

answering that question. There is a more specific meaning to polity, which we will get to later. But for now, let’s make a start, by asking 108

Utopia Governance and the Commons why there might be a polity or a government at all.

State versus Stateless

Any summary of political alternatives cannot fail to mention Thomas Hobbes ( Leviathan) and his view that humanity, in its natural state, consists of a life that has: ‘No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continued fear of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. According to Hobbes, only by voluntarily submitting to an authority, such as a monarchy or a government, can people live together in relative peace and harmony. The suggestion is that what we sacrifice by way of freedom is more than compensated by the stability that is gained. It has to be said though, that for most people in most countries, we have never actually been given a choice about whether we take up this offer of government or not. Most monarchies and governments have taken power at some time in the past — often by violent means —

and

they

have

not

since

considered

it

appropriate to ask their citizens whether or not we really think it’s a good idea! Most governments therefore are not legitimate, and to say that they govern by consent or ‘have a mandate’ is dubious at best.

The counter-argument is that we need our freedom, and that we are sensible and wise enough to look after ourselves. A high level of good will and common sense amongst people is assumed, and this allows life to go on without much in the way of government or institutions.

But this raises the question — are we really 109

Utopia Governance and the Commons good and sensible enough for such freedom?

The question of whether or not we have sufficient knowledge, skill and co-operation to make society work without authority was posed long ago by Aristotle and he came down firmly on the side that says we cannot make it by ourselves. He said: ‘He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must either be a beast or a god.’ But there have always been plenty around who think otherwise, and their belief in freedom, independence, self-reliance, good will and common sense is often referred to as anarchism.

(The word is derived from the Greek anarkhia

— an = without + arkh(os) = ruler/authority.) It is difficult to take in much of the broad sweep of ideas that anarchism includes, especially in more recent times, but a small review will hopefully bring out some salient features that are important for our discussion.

Anarchism, as hinted at above, is very optimistic about people and especially at pains to promote the notion that all that is bad in society is due to culture gone wrong, rather than some intrinsic problem with human nature. By ourselves then, and in our basic nature, we are good — the anarchist would claim. It is government, especially any form of state bureaucracy (that almost inevitably will involve hierarchy) where things go wrong. Proudhon (the reader may remember him from, ‘property is theft’) regarded anarchy as the adult state of a society

— in other words, with anarchy we are grown-up enough to take responsibility for our actions. By contrast, he regarded hierarchy as primitive!

Anarchism’s way to organise society is to 110

Utopia Governance and the Commons maximise

freedom

(especially

individual

freedom) and to minimise bureaucracy and all else relating to government and state. Nicholas Walter’s pithy quote addresses this:

‘Many people say that government is necessary because some men cannot be trusted to look after themselves, but anarchists say that government is harmful because no man can be trusted to look after anyone else.’

Nicholas Walter — About Anarchism A further definition, from Alexander Berkman, again stresses freedom:

‘Anarchism teaches that we can live in a society where there is no compulsion of any kind. A life without compulsion naturally means liberty; it means freedom from being forced or coerced, a chance to lead the life that suits you best.’

Alexander Berkman — ABC of Anarchism And Proudhon gave us this delightful quote:

‘To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded, all by creatures that have neither the right nor wisdom nor virtue…. To be governed means that at every move, operation or transaction, one is noted, registered, entered into a census, taxed, stamped, authorised,

recommended,

admonished,

prevented, reformed, set right, corrected.

Government means to be subject to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolised, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; all in 111

Utopia Governance and the Commons the name of public utility and the general good.

Then at first signs of resistance or word of complaint, one is repressed, fined, despised, vexed, pursued, hustled, beaten up, garrotted, imprisoned, shot, machine gunned, judged, sentenced, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to cap it all, ridiculed, mocked, outraged and dishonoured. That is Government. That is its justice and morality!’

As with many of the subjects taken up in this book, there are many names and subtly different meanings that we could use to describe things. This is especially true of anarchism, which seems to have as many subsets as there are anarchist authors. To keep things simple, I’m trying to emphasise just two different categories of anarchism — those that stress the importance of the individual, as we’ve explored above — what I’m describing as individualist anarchism. And those that look at some kind of organisation and shared action in society. For this second category, I am adopting the term

‘collectivist’, although it is sometimes termed

‘communistic’. Whilst individualist anarchism stresses freedom, collectivism stresses equality.

We look at each of the two types of anarchism below.

Individualism

It is arguably the individualists who promote the freedom aspect of anarchism the most. As earlier quotes have suggested, freedom means

‘freedom

from’,

that

is,

freedom

from

government, laws, institutions and bureaucracy.

It also means ‘freedom to’ — freedom to choose one’s own way of living. Later chapters will 112

Utopia Governance and the Commons develop the ‘freedom to’ aspect as freedom to be the author of one’s own story. But, as far as anarchism goes, this ‘freedom to’ idea often refers to freedom to pursue business interests and to own property. So, the individualist is for freedom, therefore ownership. Individualists are very much into the ownership of property as a guarantor of security, whilst collectivists saw property more or less as an evil. Why would we want more collectivism? Collectivism might suggest

planned

economies

—

therefore

committees and bureaucracies — and therefore the suppression of freedom and the misery of endless meetings.

It might seem, at first strike, that a kind of individualist anarchism is very similar to today’s liberal and libertarian notions. We’ll see below, however, that those who promote individual freedom nevertheless have very strong ideas about how people should co-operate and above all promote the flourishing of everyone, not just themselves. The contrast with today’s neo-liberal societies (and the utopia I’ve named Privatopia) could not be greater.

Collectivism

Perhaps even before humans formed settled communities, there was a tendency for some people to do very much more work than others.

The success of one person might be down to hard work, or luck, or both. Meanwhile, failure might be the result of laziness, illness, bad luck or just old age. As such, some gathered large swathes of land for cultivating, whilst others ended up with little or nothing and became hired hands — or slaves — of the rich.

113

Utopia Governance and the Commons Andro Linklater ( Owning the Earth) explains that as a younger man he had joined several communities looking to share resources with each other in a fairer way than offered by the dominant culture of consumer capitalism.

Sooner or later they all came up against the problems that had been faced by the early settlers in America. Some people are weaker than others, or just plain lazy, so trying to give them an equal share of what the stronger, harder-working members of the community had toiled to produce just did not seem fair.

Because of this issue — sometimes referred to as the ‘free-rider problem’ — all societies have tried to find ways to achieve a fairer distribution of land, property and other goods to address the imbalance. Compassion leads us to wish to share with those who, through injury, bad luck or old age, do not have the means to work and provide for themselves. But fairness demands that we receive a just reward for our efforts and those who work hardest deserve a larger share.

Linklater traces how this story has been played out in different times and different places.

Whilst the ‘solutions’ have been very different, the reasons for trying are really as described above.

So the issue comes down to a balance between freedom and equality. Jean-Jacques Rousseau ( The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality) recognised two types of inequality — natural, because of physical differences — and moral, or political, because of the laws and conventions of society. We saw above how society tries to address the ‘natural inequality’ issue through 114

Utopia Governance and the Commons compassion for those who are less able. The

‘political inequality’ is the other aspect that society must address — the issue of fair shares.

If we are free then we have the opportunity to better ourselves any way we wish. If society does not restrict this freedom then we have what is known as ‘equality of opportunity’. For some, equality of opportunity is still not enough.

They might argue, for instance, that since we are all essentially owners of the land then we all have the right to the proceeds of land use. This approach is seen as favouring a different kind of equality — equality of outcome. ‘To each according to his needs’, is an especially ambiguous phrase — it is not obvious that we should all end up with the same levels of income and consumption. (Karl Marx’s famous quote, originally from the Critique of the Gotha Program, says, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ It may have been taken from Louis Blanc, but also may be based on a quote from Pierre Leroux: ‘From each according to his capacity; to each according to his work’. It dates back to Cicero:

‘ Suum quidque cusuque sit’. (‘To each one, that which belongs to him.’) And also, Saint-Simon:

‘To each according to his capacity, to each according to its results.’ And Charles Fourier: ‘To each according to his capital, his labour and his skill.’ But note the somewhat different meanings in all of these.) We might also note that the equality of outcome stance may be seen as unreasonable for other reasons than simply about what is a fair distribution. People are too diverse for fairness to be resolved by these simple equations. But if we favour distribution and fair shares, then at the very least we are saying that people should get what is owing to 115

Utopia Governance and the Commons them for the amount of effort they have put in.

This alternative kind of distribution is referred to as ‘proportionality’. ‘Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs’, as Terry Eagleton has it. Ronald Dworken ( Taking Rights Seriously) gave the example of putting two people on a diet of 3000 calories. One is an athlete who needs 5000 calories. The other is an elderly lady who requires only 2000. Both have been treated equally, but treated unfairly.

James Hillman also explores the diverse meaning of equality. He says:

‘We are equal because each brings a specific calling into the world. And we are unequal in every other respect – unfairly, unjustly, utterly unequal, except in the fact of each’s unique genius…

‘All are born free. It is the fact of calling that makes us equal, and the act of calling that demands we be free!’

James Hillman — The Soul’s Code

This balance of freedom and equality is one we will return to.

Matthew Crawford ( The Case for Working with your Hands) offers us yet another angle on this.

He says:

‘… consider the paradoxical truth that equality is an aristocratic ideal. It is the ideal of friendship — of those who stand apart from the collective and recognize one another as piers.

As professionals, or journeymen, perhaps. By contrast, the bourgeois principle is not equality 116

Utopia Governance and the Commons but

equivalence

—

a

positing

of

interchangeability that elides human differences of rank.’

(Crawford therefore, rather unexpectedly, seems to support aristocratic values to allow us to speak openly about difference.)

Deciding on fair shares raises the question of how

this

distribution

is

organised

and

administered and who decides what is fair. A community or a nation may have a ‘welfare net’

to distribute resources to those who need them.

The welfare net stresses the community aspect of society. As societies become more complex, the various resources that make up a welfare net, especially the massive investments made for

infrastructure

in

transport

and

telecommunications, likewise become more complex — we cannot simply take resources directly from production and hand them out to those in need. So the usual solution is to achieve the welfare net through taxation. Tax may be recovered from what people own, or it may be from the proceeds of their labour, or both.

But here we run up against the problems inherent in our various ‘rights’ of ownership.

The political question that arises is, when does a fair

distribution,

which

allows

for

life’s

unpredictable problems, become an imposition on our rights of ownership and the fruits of our labours? The enjoyment of our property and benefiting from the fruits of our labours are therefore rights that all political systems need to respect, along with trying to provide a welfare net for those who have fallen on hard times.

117

Utopia Governance and the Commons So, from our anarchist perspective, we can see how the two poles of individualist and collectivist try to balance the considerations we have looked at above.

The collectivist end of the anarchism spectrum, therefore, might be seen as favouring the distribution side of this equation. So, the drive towards equality of the collectivists seems to involve a curtailment of the freedom of the individualists. It is hard to see though, given the complexities of modern societies alluded to above, how this could be achieved without bureaucracies

and

therefore

something

approaching government.

Proudhon

is

sometimes

identified

as

an

individualist anarchist, but also referred to as a

‘mutualist’. He had a deep concern for equality.

In particular, he identified the three forms of economic rent we discussed in the previous chapter, (from ownership and rent, from the labour of others and from money itself) and saw these as an evil to be eradicated so as to benefit the ordinary worker.

Though they may see themselves as radically distinct, collectivist anarchism flows naturally into being more or less pure communism. So, in our brief summary of alternative polities, we will take a look at this next.

Communism

Communism is a system of government — or rather, no government — proposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. (See, in particular , The Communist Manifesto.) Whilst there are 118

Utopia Governance and the Commons similarities

between

collectivism

and

communism

there

are

also

differences.

Communism distributes all wealth by default.

Proudhon took up this problem of excessive sharing in What is Property?

He says:

‘Communism is oppression and slavery…

Communism is essentially opposed to the free exercise of our faculties, to our noblest desires our deepest feelings…

communism violates the sovereignty of the conscience of equality: the first by restricting spontaneity of mind and heart, and freedom of thought and action; the second, by placing labour and laziness, skill and stupidity, and even vice and virtue on an equality in point of comfort.’

Pierre Joseph Proudhon — What is Property?

Proudhon, then, was picking up on the point above, about the equality of outcome and whether this is truly fair, but also hinting at the further point referred to earlier, that this kind of distribution inevitably involves a structure to make it work — a state — in order to enforce the kind of equality that the communists seem to think could exist naturally.

Communism though, like anarchism, is a belief in no government. If people believe that a fair distribution of resources is required and that a bureaucracy needs to be put in place to achieve it, then this is socialism rather than anarchism or communism. So, whilst there may be

‘socialist’ states, if we are to be true to the original definition of communism then there cannot be communist states. The only ‘state’ in 119

Utopia Governance and the Commons communism is an intermediate stage, known as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ — which allows for the re-distribution of wealth and the eventual more or less equality of all citizens.

The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ leads to a change in the ‘superstructure’ — in Karl Marx’s terms — meaning culture changes to accept, as a given, a more egalitarian society. This, in turn, leads to full communism, which can be defined as:

1. Distribution of wealth according to need, no longer according to labour performed.

2. No classes.

3. The state withers away.

4. Very high productivity, so there is plenty for all.

5. High socialist consciousness — people work without incentives.

6. More equality, but not absolute equality.

7. No money.

8. A communal economy.

9. The economy managed by a free and equal association of producers.

10. The differences between occupations disappear, so that there is no social distinction between town and country.

11. Each person does about as much physical as intellectual labour.

12. The system is … worldwide.

120

Utopia Governance and the Commons The countries that have come closest to establishing communism have had, arguably, very bad experiences. But no nation has really come that close to full communism.

Anarchism and communism were, and are, of course, identified as utopias — which some of their advocates accept and others fight to reject.

Communism hoped for those ‘oppressed’ by a powerful elite to

regain

the

‘means

of

production’ and therefore be able to take control of their own lives. Ironically, both Marx and, arguably the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, saw capitalism as a necessary intermediate stage for a better world. Whilst writing about capital and acknowledging the almost magical power by which all kinds of resources

are

mediated

through

money,

nonetheless Marx seems to have failed to appreciate the lure of money to almost everyone. In large societies, with few social bonds, selfishness becomes a growing problem.

Consumption is an addiction. Privatopia reigns.

Releasing serfs and peasants from domination only gave room for human nature (at least the more selfish part) to exert its tendency to profit from and exploit people. ‘…to each according to their need’ is open to a lot of hyperbole when it is our own needs that we are considering. The bourgeois

capitalist

is

a

caricature

that

communists,

and

Marxists

generally,

just

replace with an equally unlikely caricature of

‘the worker’. This presents us with too simplistic a picture — valorising one group over another is divisive and ignores the complexity of real people. As Proudhon seems to be alluding to in 121

Utopia Governance and the Commons the quote above, only a powerful bureaucracy was able to enforce the kind of equality that had been envisioned by communism, and in many ways this became no better than the previous exploitation by the rich elite — perhaps worse.

Communism aims at changing the system, and this will, in turn, change the social relations between people. But, as we explore elsewhere in this work, we could well ask whether change really can come about by changing the structure (capitalism and/or economics) first, such that the ‘superstructure’ — the social relations, the culture and the way people view the world —

will likewise change to accommodate the structural change. My conclusion is that people and culture need to change, and that structural change can only follow once this happens. (I have to add here that what has been explained above about base and superstructure is the usual interpretation of Marxism, and has filtered through to economics generally. Marx and Engels themselves were a good deal more ambivalent about what takes precedence — the culture or the economics.)

In passing, it’s worth mentioning here the

‘Rochdale principles’ of Robert Owen, which are often taken as the basis for socialism. (It is interesting to compare the very practical suggestions of Owen’s principles, and how these were enacted in his mill works in Scotland, with the

ideas

of

Charles

Fourier,

and

his

‘phalanesteries’, ideal communities, which he proposed and a few of which were actually built.) It’s also interesting to speculate as to why socialist ideas haven’t taken hold as strongly as might be expected. Take the 122

Utopia Governance and the Commons camaraderie between a group of workers, who just get things done without the need for formal meetings. Such a group usually exists within a larger hierarchy. The merry band of workers is only merry because they are showing ‘the management’ that they know better and can get on without management’s petty interference, thank you very much! But this authentic band of workers will rarely, if ever, stand on its own two feet. The workers don’t form companies, or co-operatives or even charities. They only seem to survive as a kind of semi-hostile, semi-friendly stand-off with their bosses. But why?

We are, it seems, just not schooled in a way that would let things be different. We are not natural socialists!

One contemporary activist and author who has brought valuable insights to these matters —

and, especially, the class issue — is Michael Albert. Albert points out that between workers and capitalists there is a third group, which he refers to as the co-ordinator class. Such professions as doctors, engineers, architects and lawyers tend to exercise a lot of control within society and their position, Albert argues, is privileged. Albert even suggests that a revolution, supposedly to benefit the working class (as in the initial stage of communism, to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, described above) would actually benefit the co-ordinator class. It is these people, he suggests, who would take up the administrative roles in the reformed society, giving them extra power, whilst the lot of the workers remains little changed. It may even have been the jealousy of the co-ordinator class for the ruling elite that has been the real source of revolution in the 123

Utopia Governance and the Commons past. The workers did not benefit — they just saw a change in their oppressors. Albert goes on to describe what he considers a just way of arranging work and paying an equitable wage for people’s contribution to society. A similar split into three layers of society occurs in many utopian novels, and indeed in the classic dystopian novel, 1984.

As mentioned above, whilst there may be

‘socialist’ states, there cannot be communist states, if we are to be true to the original definition of communism. Anarchism and communism, in all their forms, mean no government. We will return to anarchism again later in the chapter, but for now, let’s move on to look at the other side of things. If we were to accept the need for government, then what kind of government would we wish for?

The Purpose of Government

One of the benefits of looking at anarchism and communism is as a wake-up call. If we were to try to run our lives without government we would at once realise the responsibilities that would be on all of us for getting society to function. If, however, we agreed on the need for a government, it does not mean that we can then shirk all responsibility and just blame the politicians when things go wrong. We still need to take some responsibility for deciding on what kind of government best suits our needs.

John Stuart Mill identified:

124

Utopia Governance and the Commons

‘… one very simple principle as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control… That principle is… [T]hat the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will, is to prevent harm to others.’

John Stuart Mill — On Liberty

Thomas Jefferson said: ‘The care of life and happiness and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.’

It is difficult to think of any government disagreeing with Mill and Jefferson, but, of course, the aims they identified are very broad and general ones. Also, they tend to be focused on preventing things from going wrong, rather than actively making things better.

A more cynical view of government is that it is primarily for the protection of property — and, of course, this invariably means the protection of the rich over the poor. Government’s function of protecting private property comes originally from Cicero. Meanwhile Rousseau said:

‘Property is the true foundation of civil society.’

However, also in his Discourse on Inequality, he argues that property brings discord and conflict.

He agrees that government is established to protect the property rights of the rich over the poor. But this strategy, he told us, ‘irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, established for all time the law of property and inequality… and for the benefit of the few ambitious men, subjected the human race thenceforth to labour, servitude and misery.’ From this, and other criticisms, we 125

Utopia Governance and the Commons might say that government is the ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’, that is, the only power that can uphold its rules by force over its citizens.

Apart from preventing harm and protecting property, could we identify some further aims for government that provide more of a vision for a better world? Rousseau gave us a starting point:

‘One of the most important things for a government to do, therefore, is to prevent extreme inequality of wealth, not by depriving the rich of their possessions, but by denying everyone the means of accumulating them; and not by building poor-houses but by ensuring that the citizens do not become poor.’

The Social Contract

Rousseau’s quote takes us back to our discussion of the commons in the previous chapter. We could say that government’s chief purpose, other than preventing harm, is to manage the commons. We saw that, in a sense, governments already do this in an indirect way.

Could it be more direct and conscious, so that we really get to grips with how we might use natural resources and protect wild nature? It’s also important to see governemnt as upholding moral principles, such that citizens see that justice in all areas of life is the basis of political action and we can have some trust in the state that justice will be done! This principle, I’m sorry to say, seems seriously undermined by many nations with their threats of extreme force against other nations that might threaten them.

There may be a social contract between a state and its people, but so far as nation states go, 126

Utopia Governance and the Commons it’s still the law of the jungle!

So what about a world where the purpose of government is to realise the common good, rather than just to protect whatever goods we might be holding on to at the moment? What about a world that is premised on human flourishing, with an emphasis on compassion, equity, enhancement of the environment, a respect for nature and a sense of responsibility for our shared natural commons? Colin Tudge ( The

Great

Re-think)

suggests

‘convivial

societies

(with

personal

fulfilment)

in

a

flourishing biosphere’ should be our aim. If we agree that some kind of governance is a good thing, then can we find a way of getting a governance system that focuses on these kinds of aims?

Types of Government

What kind of government would deliver such solutions? How do we begin to sort out the various strands of political thought that are on offer?

We have to go back to the ancient Greeks, to Plato and Aristotle, to get our definitions. From them, we have: One ruler is a monarchy or dictatorship. Rule by a few is an aristocracy.

Rule by many is a constitution or a polity. The perversion of a monarchy is called a tyranny.

The perversion of an aristocracy is called an oligarchy. We are probably fine with these definitions, but then, for the ancient Greeks, the perversion of a constitutional government is, amazingly, a democracy. For instance, from Aristotle, the definitions are described like this: 127

Utopia Governance and the Commons

‘We have thus, as the three subdivisions of the

“right”

type,

kingship,

aristocracy

and

“constitutional government”, or “polity”: as the three subdivisions of the “wrong” type, tyranny, oligarchy and democracy.’

Aristotle — The Politics

The exact meaning of all these terms has evolved somewhat since the ancient Greeks, but it’s true that democracy still presents problems for some as a government system. American satirist HL. Mencken, for instance, said that to believe in democracy is to believe that,

‘collective wisdom will emerge from individual ignorance’. If, like many nations today, we consider democracy to be the ideal form of government, then we will have to dig deeper into the meanings of democracy, to unravel these issues.

Notwithstanding the ancient Greeks, most nations

today

take

pride

in

describing

themselves as democracies. They would normally

use

the

term

‘representative

democracy’. This phrase might imply a mixture of the governance forms outlined above: It is rule by the many — because we all decide who will represent us. At the same time though, it is rule by the few — those chosen to represent us.

The adoption of representative democracy —

often

following

the

British

format,

the

‘Westminster model’ — occurs, and persists, under the belief that having the correct system in place will result in the best decisions being made — a process known as ‘proceduralism’ —

the decisions proceed from the system. (The alternative

is

known

by

the

term

128

Utopia Governance and the Commons

‘instrumentalism’, where decisions are based on circumstances,

fitness

for

purpose

and

pragmatism. Instrumentalism is probably better described here as ‘consequentialism’ — where governments just respond to the consequences of their situation and of the decisions they make.)

Representative democracy suggests a kind of balance between the desire to get everyone’s opinion, but at the same time having some experts take on the actual business of governing. Our representatives, in theory, listen to their electorate, take a balanced view of what is required, then act on this in the interests of society, as best they can. Our suspicions though, are that this is not really what is happening. The suspicion is that under the guise of representative democracy, we have at least an aristocracy, who make decisions under their own light. And, if we are especially cynical of government, we might conclude that, in fact, we have an oligarchy, the perversion of rule by the few, acting in the interests of big business and others who can pay for their voice in politics. Arguably, it is the financial oligarchy who are the ruling class in our day — the 1%, as they have come to be known since the Occupy movement.

Rule by the few is therefore always fraught with this tension of just whose interests the few are promoting; their own, or the population at large.

Furthermore, the aristocracy needs to find a justification for their position of power, and this is usually by way of claiming a greater ability to make judgements. We describe this as a

‘meritocracy’, and those who benefit from it are 129

Utopia Governance and the Commons the first to claim that a meritocracy represents fairness. Those at the top may insist that their position is acquired through competence, but those at the bottom suspect that it is more by money and privilege that the few have acquired their power. A meritocracy based on presumed leadership and managerial skills is as fraught as suggesting that class distinctions should be the basis for deciding leadership. Darren Anderson says:

‘If you acquire enough money identities are accepted and sins forgiven. The only real crime is the absence of money. Due to the variety of ways wealth is accumulated, myths are required, not least the fabulous mirage of meritocracy. The more you own the more you are, and the more deserving of it you’ve been.

Those who have nothing are nothing and deserve nothing but contempt.’

Darren Anderson — Imaginary Cities (The term ‘meritocracy’ itself, comes from a 1958 novel by Michael Young — The Rise of the Meritocracy.)

Could we ever resolve this and perhaps set up intelligence as a genuine criterion for a meritocracy? (Plato’s wish for ‘philosopher kings’, which some take to have been ironic, is the desire for rule based on knowledge and intelligence. It is sometimes known as an

‘epistocracy’.) If we could get to a meritocracy that was genuinely fair, then would that be a good move? At first strike, it might look promising, but some would argue that an

‘equality of merit’ is, in fact, a deeply troubling notion. Whilst it suggests that it’s fair, it 130

Utopia Governance and the Commons implicitly says that there are people who simply are not good enough. If the reader were one of the ones left out as a result, then what crumb of comfort is the state going to offer, as it overlooks your voice, your opinion and your needs? It goes back to the issue of trust — are ordinary people bright enough? Even if it were concluded that they are not, should people be denied the right to decide their own future, based on some (rather difficult to apply) standard of intelligence?

So much then for representative democracy, which we have seen is really ‘rule by the few’.

What about rule by the many? Going back to the

Greek

definitions,

the

‘polity’

or

‘constitutional government’ that is taken to be the good form of rule by the many is not something that is too clearly defined. It seems in modern times that we have just taken representative

democracy

to

be

the

constitutional government that is being referred to. But for this to be true then things would need to be very different. There would need to be a true voice for all citizens. We return to this below, but for now we can ask why democracy is seen as being a corruption by the Greeks? To answer this, imagine for a moment that all decisions in the country were decided by a referendum (known as ‘direct democracy’). The problem immediately arises that — even if a great deal of information is provided about what is being asked — some people will not have the time or inclination to study the question fully, whilst others may make their choice for very dubious reasons. There is no accountability, or mechanism for ensuring that everyone makes responsible choices. (This, it seems, was the 131

Utopia Governance and the Commons chief concern of the ancient Greeks and also one of the problems that representative democracy seeks to address. They were also concerned that people with a particular talent for persuasive and charming speech might lure citizens into bad decisions.) Direct democracy also risks the ‘tyranny of the majority’, where a majority make a really bad or morally suspect decision (sometimes known as ‘ochlocracy’).

There is no way to correct for this possibility from

within

the

system.

Then

again,

representative democracy can suffer from its own version of a ‘tyranny of the majority’.

Elected leaders may collectively reach very bad decisions and there is no process in place to correct this until they next come round for re-election. It could be argued that, even with these concerns, such a system would be fair.

After all, a free vote is a free vote, and why should anyone set themselves up to say that anyone else has not made a ‘responsible’ choice, or has not considered the evidence put before them in a reasonable manner? There is an argument then that ‘direct democracy’ is, at least, a step up from our current system. But it still does not address the question of decision reached by an appropriate level of deliberation.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, made this distinction; that the people may choose on behalf of what is good for society, rather than what is good for themselves individually.

As mentioned above, we might also question the idea that democracy (or any form of political system) is ‘government by consent’. We have never been asked if we want to be governed, so choosing a candidate for a system already imposed on us does not constitute consent.

132

Utopia Governance and the Commons Likewise, not voting at all does not imply consent, in that, had a citizen preferred something different, they would have voted.

The ‘choices’ on offer (if there are any at all) may not be anything the citizen would want, so they are not consenting by refraining from voting.

Let’s assume that we did, at least, consent to the principle of government. The question of consent then moves to us citizens having some knowledge of the policies that governments may be seeking to put in place. We are being asked

— through voting, or some other means — to give an informed opinion of our choices. So, what about informed consent? We are not given the facts about decisions the government is trying to make, or given much of an opportunity to even comment on them. No doubt — at least, in theory — this information is available somewhere, and we could access it, given enough time and effort. But is this really enough to say that we are giving informed consent? It seems like too much of a stretch.

Could people then live free of government (since it is imposed on us without our consent)? No.

Our only choice would be to live in another country, under a different government that we also have not chosen. International law prevents us living in Antarctica — even if we wanted to. Perhaps there is scope, still, for indigenous peoples and people who choose to go

‘off-grid’. We will be exploring this in later chapters. Maybe, eventually there will be a chance to live on other planets without government. For the moment though, almost everyone in the world is forced to live under a 133

Utopia Governance and the Commons government they have not asked for.

Federations and Assemblies

From what has been described above, the impression may have been given that anarchism (and communism, in its idealised form) would have no organisational structures at all. But this is not the case. It is rather the hierarchies of power, the bureaucracies and the institutions that are the problem for those who would advocate no government. The main concern with these types of organisation is that they harden into systems that just continue with their own momentum, getting increasingly out of touch with the people they are intended to serve and often imposing rules and regulations for their own sake with scant regard to the impact all the bureaucracy has on the smooth-running of society. (See Proudhon’s quote above.) By contrast,

anarchism

generally

suggests

federations to make decisions at the local level.

Federations are much less formal arrangements of people, coming together to make the pragmatic decisions necessary for any given situation. Power, if you like, is ‘radically devolved’. For the larger decisions there are federations of federations that affect regions and nations. (See, for instance, Proudhon.) Peter Kropotkin takes up this idea in his definition of anarchism as:

‘…the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government — harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded 134

Utopia Governance and the Commons between

various

groups,

territorial

and

professional, freely constituted for the purposes of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilised being.’

Peter Kropotkin — Anarchy