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Posted on June 3, 2012 | 8 Comments
Here in Frome we were lucky enough to have an excellent programme of evening discussions recently entitled Generation Next. A common theme of the evenings I attended was the need to come up with something to replace the dysfunctional and unsustainable systems of power, finance and knowledge that currently hold us in their grip. And this was a ‘common’ theme literally inasmuch as several speakers referenced the idea of ‘global commons’ as a way of transcending these current difficulties. The term has a nice ring to it. It’s surely right to emphasise that we’re common denizens of just the one globe, who must all ultimately share its risks, responsibilities and opportunities. But, beyond that rather basic point, I have some misgivings about the concept of a global commons, particularly when I think about it from my perspective as a local grower. And no, it’s not just because I’m a private landowner. Or maybe it is, but not simply because I fear the expropriation of my humble plot. Let me try to explain…
The first point to make is that we need to think about what a ‘common’ means in practice. People often think of it as a place that nobody owns but everybody has a right to use. But actually this isn’t a common, it’s an open access regime. The classic example of an open access regime is a fishery in international waters, and it’s not a very promising model for an ethic of ecological care. In an open access regime it’s in everybody’s individual interest to grab as much as they can for themselves, and there is no collective check on them doing so. That in a nutshell is why cod are on the endangered species list, and we’re still eating them.
A true common, though, is not an open access regime, but a common property regime – that means that while nobody owns it individually, people’s individual usage rights are carefully allocated within the community. In enduring common property regimes, it’s usually very clear who is allowed and who isn’t allowed to exercise some precisely defined right (eg. summer grazing for so many cattle).
It’s easy to romanticise the process of allocating common rights as something benign and communal, but often it’s anything but. In medieval England, common rights were essentially a sop to the labouring classes accorded by the gentry, and rural life for those classes generally entailed a grim struggle to hang on to what scraps of property rights were available so as to avoid sinking into the category of servile labour. Deplorable though the enclosures that removed commoner’s rights may have been, what they were replacing was hardly benign.
The appeal of commons seems to me to owe more to the misgivings many people have about the usual alternative – private landownership – than anything especially benign about commons as such. Those misgivings about private property are usually twofold: the human conceit of ‘owning’ the earth, and the unfairness of access to land.
I think the first objection is quite easily overcome, because it’s based on a misconception. Ownership is not fundamentally a relation between a person and the thing they own, but between them and other people – it’s a usage right that the owner has in respect of the thing they own from which other people are excluded. But, particularly when it comes to land, those rights are limited – public footpaths, planning restrictions, sporting and mineral rights, environmental regulations and so on create other usage rights in which people other than the owner retain interests. We can argue about whether those rights should be extended further, but the basic principle that property is a non-exclusive, social relationship between people is clear enough. And anyone who thinks that ‘owning’ land gives them, Canute-like, some kind of special sovereign control over the earth is quickly disabused of that notion as soon as they sow their first crop or experience their first winter storm.
Unfairness of access to land is more serious. There are various dimensions to the problem, but I’d suggest that mostly they boil down to three things:
But all this is a result of the regulatory and tax framework that our political leaders have put in place, not an inevitability. Suppose we created a different framework through land value taxation, inheritance tax, agricultural ties, environmental regulation and so on so that young people could get a mortgage for a farm, earn a modest income from farming the land well, pay off their debts in the course of their farming career, and then fund their retirement by selling the land to the next generation of farmers. Would we still object to private ownership of farmland?
I can’t see any strong grounds for doing so. Such a system would require a lot of state regulation – some might argue that we should go further and put land in public or community ownership. But the likelihood of achieving that in present political circumstances is even slimmer than the minimal chance of implementing the kind of private ownership I’m proposing, and it would have some disadvantages too. I suspect that its allure stems to some degree from the peculiarities of English history, in which successful political radicalism has mostly been urban and collectivist. The English working class, harried out of a countryside dominated by the gentry and into industrial labour in the cities, built over time a municipal socialism that championed the provision of collective goods free for all at the point of delivery. There is much to celebrate in this tradition, especially its emphasis on universalism, from which all other approaches must learn. However, away from the cities – which I’ve argued elsewhere are probably an unsustainable form of social organisation long-term, despite much media commentary to the contrary – the petty proprietorship model does confer certain advantages. Among them are the principles of individual and community self-reliance and whole system thinking locally, which I’d argue are key to future resource sustainability. Most left/eco collectivists that I know seem reasonably comfortable with private house ownership but less so with private rural landownership – it would be interesting to trace the roots of that distinction.
Perhaps the main disadvantage of private small-scale farm ownership that’s often touted is that it may foster sensibilities of private gain rather than community flourishing. That perception is grounded in a view, common among left and green thinkers today, that the motives of small-scale proprietors and large-scale corporations are the same. But I think that’s rarely true. In a farmer-oriented society of the kind I suspect we’ll need in the future, in which it’s hard for anyone to extract economic rent from local landownership, small-scale proprietors would gain much and lose little from investing in their local communities – and while we doubtless should not take too rosy a view of small farm communities historically, a good deal of the history of such communities tends to bear this out.
Anyway, so much for future ideals – how should small farm landowners such as myself behave in the imperfect present? At Vallis Veg, we’ve tried to make our land available to other people locally pursuing various aims and activities that seem to us worthwhile. These include garden allotments, alternative schooling ventures, beekeeping, school and other visits, outdoor courses, and parties/social events. Often, I’ve found that these ventures aren’t as simple to arrange as I’d anticipated. For one thing, people of goodwill on both sides of the arrangement can still bring slightly different sets of assumptions to the table about what the arrangement means – assumptions that aren’t always obvious at first blush. In this sense, for me the experience has been a portent of how extremely difficult it would be to establish a functioning, sustainable commons without some kind of final political arbiter (…which is one of my doubts about anarchism). In my situation, as a landowner I can ultimately decide that an arrangement isn’t working and put an end to it. Common rights would create – literally, and potentially endlessly – a much more contested field.
Another issue bears on getting the financial side of arrangements right. The fundamental fact here is that it costs a lot of money to buy land and to run a farm, money that it’s very difficult to recoup through agricultural income. So while it might be argued that the earth should be a “common treasury for all”, this creates some problems for the small proprietor. If s/he creates rights for others in respect of the land at little or no cost then s/he is effectively subsidising their activities out of already unremunerative farm activities. More importantly, by providing this implicit subsidy s/he is helping to foster the common misconception that the products of the land (food, fibre etc) are cheap and easily procured. If, on the other hand, s/he charges higher rents then s/he risks alienating potential users, and inviting the usually unfounded suspicion that s/he is recouping an economic rent rather than simply a contract rent that contributes to a modest income.
I’m not sure what the best solution is here. In general terms, I think much could be gained if the quality of the dialogue between agricultural landowners and rural land users were improved. Farmers are doing a difficult and poorly paid job which a lot of people – even those who’ve lived in rural areas all their lives – don’t always understand. Equally, land possesses other social values which cannot be commanded by farmers alone.
For my part, I think I’ve made various mistakes in the past in the way that I’ve gone about organising access to our land. The lessons I’ve learned, I think, are that it’s always good to try to make land available to people of goodwill in the wider community, but that it’s important to be as clear as possible about the assumptions involved in the agreement, that it’s probably not helpful in the long term to undervalue such land agreements financially, but equally that if you consider such agreements primarily through the lens of money you risk losing much of what makes them worth having. But of course all of that is easy to say in general terms, and much harder to realise in practice. I hope I’ll get better at it when future opportunities come along.
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Its not only access to the land that is a difficult issue, but also access to the products grown on the land. We have a similar venture and have found that freinds/relatives almost think that they have a right to as much of the bounty of your labour that miraculously springs from the earth, as they want, for free. I dont begrudge giving away a few spuds, but there is a limit. Free access to the land is all very well, but there arent that many out there that that would be willing to put the work in.
Thanks for your comment, Daniel. Yes I agree. This was partly what was behind my point about the misconception that the products of the land are cheap & easily procured!
You don’t mention why those advocating global commons do so. To be free of “dysfunctional and unsustainable systems of power, finance and knowledge” yes, but why. Can I infer from your later comment that sustainable land use is the aim. If so then I agree with your point about cod mining suggesting that open access commons wouldn’t work any better than soil, forest, fossil fuel, ground water, mineral (etc) mining that occurs under private ownership but both are taking place within the very “dysfunctional and unsustainable systems of power, finance and knowledge” that are supposed to be removed by the application of commons. Both common ownership and your proposed agrarian society seem to me to suffer from the same problem – they will just replace one system of power, finance and knowledge with another. This wont stop the farmer from abusing his land in our names any more than the existing system. [Common ownership at least has the benefit that the land users will feel some pressure not to misuse the land from their co-owners].
I take from your later comments that no two people will never agree on how to use the land even if they both have the aim of sustainability at heart and as Daniel points out there will also always be the problem of personal relationships to contend with. How will farmers exchange their product with non-farmers without a form of money? So whatever system we come up with will require power, finance and knowledge to keep it working. Or does it? I find it interesting to consider that for many hundreds of thousands of years we did have a global commons and perhaps the greatest lesson that humanity could learn would be to truly understand what happened when we replaced that system and through the application of power, finance and knowledge went on to rape the world.
How you should behave as a land owner– you should leave the land in better shape than you found it. Don’t rob the future by mining the past. If I had my way I would force you to employ an agricultural system of my devising and you would pay me for the privilege of using my ideas. You may well argue that I can’t possibly define “better shape” and therefore must have developed a flawed system. You would be correct but at least my heart would be in the right place. I have bought your vegetables in the past, when I have been unable grow my own, even though I don’t agree with all of your methods. But I know that your heart is in the right place and therefore for me you are better than the alternatives. When considering whether to grant use of your land to others perhaps you simply need to know that applicant’s heart is in the right place?
How about this rule – no one should be allowed to own more land than is required to provide for the needs of their immediate family?
Hi Paul, I can’t say I fully understand all of the points you’re making, but hell I’ll wade in with a few responses anyway.
I don’t agree that for many hundreds of thousands of years we had a global commons. For that, there would have had to have been globally agreed usage rights…and there weren’t.
There have been human societies that have done without finance, at least as we’d understand the term nowadays, but there have been none – I’d suggest – that have done without power and knowledge. So I’d argue that it’s always going to be a matter of trying to shape power and knowledge to deliver wellbeing, and that three important aspects of wellbeing are sustainability, equity and autonomy, which were the main focus of my post.
I agree that no abstract system in and of itself will necessarily make people behave in any particular way. However, some abstract systems will make it easier for people to behave in certain ways than others, and I think the system I suggested will make it easier to achieve agricultural sustainability and social equity than the one we presently have.
I don’t think money is the root of the problem. Money (as opposed to capital) is just a medium of exchange, and if we didn’t have it we’d reinvent it in one form or another. This brings to mind the widely misquoted passage from the Bible which states “the love of money is the root of all evil”. People often render this as “money is the root of all evil”. Those two statements are utterly different.
I like your comment about forcing me to employ an agricultural system of your devising and paying you for the privilege of using your ideas. I think that summarises beautifully how commons actually work in practice, and it’s why I don’t think they’re generally a good idea. That said, and as I hope was clear from my post, nor do I think it’s a good idea if private landowners are empowered to do whatever they please.
I think that judging someone’s heart is in the right place is a good starting point for land agreements, but it’s not enough in itself. The vast number of failed commons, communes, communities, cooperatives, gentleman’s agreements, community groups and so on is testament enough to that. Once you think that you’ve got some common basis for entering into a land relationship, that’s when the hard graft of sorting out the details needs to begin if it’s going to work in the long term.
Your suggestion that no one should be allowed to own more land than is required to provide for the needs of their immediate family obviously pushes the logic of my small farm vision a lot further. Of course, the chances of my vision being realised politically any time soon are virtually nil and the chances of yours are several orders of magnitude less than that, but that’s no reason not to float these ideas. I guess first of all I’d be inclined to question why your or my immediate family is such an important unit as to base your entire theory of property around it (of course, your suggestion would also create incentives for people to acquire very big ‘immediate families’, wherein no doubt lies the origins of many local chieftanships). And second of all, what you’re effectively suggesting is that everybody should be made to be a subsistence farmer. Much as I admire subsistence farmers, that sounds way too prescriptive to me, and the recent history of attempts to realise it – mostly by Maoists of one sort or another – has been extraordinarily blood-soaked. What’s so wrong with advocating an economy where ordinary people can afford to buy a small farm and can expect to earn a modest income from farming it well and producing things that other people need?
OK let me make some comments about your proposed system of land tenure before returning to my main point. I should say that I would agree that any system of land use where the number of people who have access increases has to be good. I also agree that the motivations of small and large scale land users are likely to be different. But I do have some objections to your idea, for the sake of discussion.
1/ Presumably the debt required to acquire the farm will need to be financed and the repayments will cause the land user to farm in a way that produces an even income stream over the period. So we wont get orchards, coppice or any form of perennial agriculture that requires a lag period before the income comes on stream. At least with private ownership the situation becomes more mixed so that some people, who have other income sources will have the luxury of long term thinking.
2/ It is a characteristic of many land users to want to pass on the land to their children in some way. It could be argued that this is an important motivator in sustainable farming methods. Your proposal does not allow for this.
3/ Although you may increase the number of people farming by say a factor of 10 we will still be left with a massive majority of the population without productive land access.
4/ Whilst you may improve the frequency of land tenure there has been little change to the systems of control that exist to greatly influence farming practice the worst of them all being market forces.
Back to my other points. I must admit that since neither of us have a hope in hell of making our ideas work in the real world I thought you were conducting a thought experiment. I find it useful when experimenting like this to go to the extreme because this is where the issues present themselves more clearly. My suggestion does not require subsistence agricultural practice since we are talking about land ownership which does not mean that the land has to be farmed by the owner. What is created is a direct link between population size and land area which in any system of sustainable food production, that has an element of localism in it, has to address. The idea could also be constituted in such a way that the land area becomes a limit to population growth at least in the minds of the policy makers. This has to be a good thing.
Leaving aside the semantic argument you must surely agree that during the majority of the recent human evolution fee land access was the norm. It is difficult for me to have an anthropological argument with a trained anthropologist but…. what the hell I think this is important. I have read 4 detailed anthropological studies of particular peoples selected by me for their “primitiveness”. I have also read several overviews of “primitive” ways of life by the likes of Jarred Diamond for example. So I know for sure that human society can be constituted in such a way that there are no systems of control based on power or knowledge and no abstract mechanisms of exchange between members of the population. I also suggest that it was highly probably that for the majority of the period of human existence on earth that this way of life was the norm. Now at this point in our discussions you would normally accuse me of advocating a return to hunting and gathering. I am not, I am conducting a thought experiment with the aim of teasing out some principles that can be applied to today at personal and policy level. Here is one that applies to your recent post.>>> The reason that it is possible for humans to live an egalitarian life style is self sufficiency. Any system of land tenure would do well to take this into account.
Thanks for those thoughts Paul – very interesting. Just to follow up on a few:
– Debt & market forces: yes, encouraging long-term thinking is a problem in market systems. Of course, if energy wasn’t so cheap even the most capitalist-oriented of landowners would be busily coppicing, orcharding etc (bearing in mind also that coppice woodlands have always been associated with industry). A proper carbon tax would go a long way to ensuring that people farmed with a long-term vision. Beyond that, the devil would be in the detail of the tax and tenure system – people who do not fear the imminent loss of their land would be likely to invest in low input, long-term, sustainable projects, especially if they were subject to environmental regulation concerning water, soils etc. For me that’s a key reason why peasant farming is such an important model. I realise I’m being a bit vague here – economists are good are figuring out these sorts of details, once they’ve been told what the overall goals are. The problems occur when we let economists devise the overall goals.
– Inheritance: again, yes I can see the advantages of farm inheritance. But there are also disadvantages. Chief among them is the fact that over time it tends to create a powerful caste of landholders which it is difficult for anyone else to break into. It can also create a lot of family conflict over inheritance and a conservative and oppressive sense of obligation to the forebears. Another issue is that, although I agree with you that perhaps our most pressing modern problem is an under-valuation of people’s relationship to the land, it’s also possible to over-value people’s relationship to the land, or at least the relationship of particular people to particular lands. This has fuelled a lot of unpleasant, nationalistic, scapegoating politics around land and identity historically. I find the idea of putting my energy as an individual into a piece of land and then letting go of it more appealing. On balance, I think the disadvantages of inheritance outweigh the advantages. Interesting issues though.
– subsistence agriculture. Maybe I’m not understanding your suggestion properly, but if you limit ownership as you suggest I can’t see how it could produce anything but subsistence farming – unless you allow aggregation of holdings, which I’d have thought would undermine the basic point, or allow absentee landlordism, which would be fundamentally inequitable.
– I agree with you that self-sufficiency and equity tend to go hand in hand. I think we’re both trying to articulate ideas that promote both of those aims to varying degrees. I’m happy with thought experiments to push at the assumptions. Still, I think there are also other important social goals which are harder to attain if you push too strongly for self-sufficiency, so it’s tricky.
– on anthropology, again I agree that there’s a lot to be gained by seeking to learn from other cultures and other periods. But I disagree with you that there are human societies that lack relations of power, knowledge or abstract exchange. Centralised power or monetary exchange, yes, but there are endless other power and exchange relations – around gender, age, social status, ritual knowledge, status goods to name a few, but also material resources. That’s why I don’t think it’s just semantics to say that historically there haven’t been global commons, or free land access – key resources (both material and cultural) have long been contested, going way back into the Palaeolithic and doubtless beyond. The (unconvincing) claims of the post-scarcity anarchists aside, I see no way out of that other than trying to create the best possible (and culturally intelligible) social agreements over resource use.
Could it be that the world would be a better place or at least freer from “dysfunctional and unsustainable systems of power, finance and knowledge” if there was a net increase in self sufficiency and that this is actually what the advocates of global commons are driving at.
Could it also be that, in a slightly oxymoronic way, self sufficiency need not be thought of solely at the level of a whole individual but could be a beneficial concept at community level or at a partially self sufficient individual level.
If you in your role as a land owner are able to increase the total net self sufficiency in the world, for your self or the users of your land then I would say you are on the right track. I’ve checked and you are. Good job.
Paul, my answers in brief to your last posting are yes, yes, and thank you very much. And my slightly less brief answer to your first question is to say that I do think there’s a place for commons in some situations, and that the idea of global commons is certainly useful, but that we need to go on from there to a more detailed appraisal of the property regimes that will best serve wellbeing, and that small-scale private farm ownership is probably one of them.