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Utopia,

Governance

and the

Commons

THIRD EDITION

Tom Wallace

Utopia Governance and the Commons

Other books by Tom Wallace:

Conatus

Twenty-One Levels of Self-Deception

Three Miles of Rice Pudding

A Little Book about Climate Change

Wild Body Wild Nature

Tales from a Distant Shore

Dreamtree

Another Pudding is Possible

Stories of Place

Truth HQ

 Artwork By Tom Wallace 2025

Posting as ‘abtw777’ across various platforms

Utopia Governance and the Commons

To my father, Thomas Lawson Wallace.

Utopia Governance and the Commons

Table of Contents

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION 11

1. INTRODUCTION 13

Three Concerns ............................................................16 Six Questions ...............................................................18 Four Applications.........................................................20

2. UTOPIAS 23

Utopias and Ideals ........................................................24 Origins of Utopia..........................................................25 Golden Age — Looking Back......................................28 Golden Age — Looking Forward.................................34 Three Utopias...............................................................36 Privatopia .....................................................................37 Cornucopia ...................................................................40 Ecotopia .......................................................................42 Where to from Here?....................................................45 Some Inspiration ..........................................................48 In Summary ..................................................................52

3. THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP 55

The Meaning of Capital................................................58 Owning the Means of Production.................................67 Why do we want to Own? ............................................68 Ownership of Land.......................................................71 Money and Usury .........................................................76 What do the Utopias have to say about Ownership? ....79

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4. DEFINING THE COMMONS 81

A Commons Exists for us Now ................................... 81 The Tragedy of the Commons ..................................... 82 Natural Commons as Resource and Wild Nature ........ 85 The Commons, Wealth and Capital............................. 88 Widening the Commons .............................................. 93 The Creative Commons ............................................... 97 Commons and Cultural Heritage ................................. 99 The Prospects for Common Good Laws.................... 101 Proposals for the Commons....................................... 102 Recognising the Commons invites a new Politics ..... 105

5. POLITY 107

State versus Stateless ................................................. 109 Individualism............................................................. 112 Collectivism............................................................... 113 Communism............................................................... 118 The Purpose of Government...................................... 124 Types of Government ................................................ 127 Federations and Assemblies ...................................... 134 What do the Utopias make of the Governance Options?139 Conclusion................................................................. 142

6. COMMUNITY ON A SMALL SCALE 145

The Issue of Scale...................................................... 147 Starting with Ourselves.............................................. 148 Personal Change leading to Vision............................ 150 New Missions are formed by Working Together....... 151 Power and Hierarchy ................................................. 153 Equality in Groups..................................................... 159 Community and Bureaucracy .................................... 162 Sociocracy ................................................................. 164 Local Democracy....................................................... 168

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Community and Business ...........................................170 From Small to Large ..................................................172

7. COMMUNITY ON A LARGE SCALE 173

Parapolity ...................................................................174 Parapolity — Scaling up from Neighbourhood to Nation178 People’s Parliaments and Citizens’ Assemblies .........183 Parecon.......................................................................185 The Adoption of Parapolity and Parecon ...................188

8. THE ECONOMICS OF THE COMMONS 193

The Economic Base of Society?.................................194 The True Base of Society...........................................196 What we Neglect — Wild Nature and the Emotional Economy ....................................................................200 Value ..........................................................................204 Value and Money — The Financial Economy ...........207 What Should we Own?...............................................211 What Should we Share? Equality and the Welfare Net213 What Should we Make? How Should we Trade? ......217 Money making Money ...............................................220 Neo-liberalism............................................................223 The Gift Economy......................................................224 The Importance of Corporations ................................230 Proposals ....................................................................232 How Do the Utopias View the Social Commons?......239 Summary ....................................................................240

9. NATURE 247

Natural Commons and Wild Nature ...........................248 Connection and Inspiration from Nature ....................249 Our Own Wild Nature ................................................253

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Nature and Value....................................................... 255 Nature as part of the ‘Moral Community’ ................. 257 Re-Wilding ................................................................ 259 Living on Wild Land ................................................. 260 Seeking out the Wild ................................................. 262

10. PLACE 265

The Mystery and Joy of Place ................................... 271 Competing Interests in Place ..................................... 272 The Importance of Beauty ......................................... 273 Taking Back Control of our Places............................ 276 Places ‘Planned’ by People ....................................... 278 Communities Shape Place ......................................... 279 Taking back the Commons ........................................ 282 Business and Place .................................................... 284 The Nightmare of Cars .............................................. 285 Slow Cities ................................................................ 287

11. A COMMONS OF COMPASSION 289

Sympathy, Empathy, Compassion ............................. 290 Why Compassion?..................................................... 292 Compassion for Self .................................................. 293 Compassion for Others .............................................. 295 Government and Compassion.................................... 297 Business and Compassion ......................................... 300 Wider Circles of Compassion.................................... 302

12. A COMMONS OF PLEASURE 307

Joy, Pleasure and Happiness...................................... 307 Grades of Pleasure? ................................................... 309 Abundance — What do the Utopias make of Pleasure?312 Different Pleasures .................................................... 314

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Pleasure and Nature....................................................317 Pleasure and Place......................................................319 Pleasure and Compassion...........................................322 Pleasure and Work .....................................................323 Pleasure and Business ................................................327 Carnival......................................................................328 Pleasure and Soul .......................................................330 Beauty, Slowness, Silence and Peace.........................331

13. A WIDER COMMONS 335

Education ...................................................................336 Science and Technology.............................................338 Why Privatopia will not Work ...................................338 Can the Future be a Cornucopia? ...............................342 Is Ecotopia Enough? ..................................................346

14. WHAT WE MIGHT DECIDE, IF WE COULD DECIDE 351

Who Decides? ............................................................352 What do we Own? What should we Share?...............356 What Should We Make? How Should We Trade? ....360 How Should We Live? ...............................................361

15. A NEW STORY 365

From Facts to Story ....................................................368 The Voice of Dissent..................................................372 Daydreaming ..............................................................372 Education Without Character .....................................373 Name your Pleasures ..................................................374 Name your Fears ........................................................377 The Current Story.......................................................377 A Story of Isolation or a Story of Trust? ....................381

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The New Story........................................................... 385 The Demise of the Current Story? ............................. 391 Prospects for the New Story ...................................... 393

16. CONCLUSION 395

Where is the Vision? ................................................. 396 The Good Life ........................................................... 397 Three Utopias ............................................................ 398 Six Questions............................................................. 399 The New Story........................................................... 404 Trust .......................................................................... 408

17. GLOSSARY 411

18. BIBLIOGRAPHY 433

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 439

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.

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

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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 fair in 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

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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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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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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

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‘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

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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

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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

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‘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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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‘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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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,

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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.

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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

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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 re-forested 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

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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

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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

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

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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

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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

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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.

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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’,

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‘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.

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Labour is becoming less and less important. See Kate Raworth’s Doughnut 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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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‘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

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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

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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.)

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