A Free Left Blog

I’m not trained in economics but I do know a bit and have been intermittently digging through Karl Polanyi’s book ‘ The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time ; said to be a core text for Ed Miliband and his close political gang. Perhaps the most interesting and arresting ideas in The Great Transformation concern what Polanyi called the ‘ fictitious commodities’ : land, labour and money. I was reminded of this when reading a post by Chris Dillow on his Stumbling and Mumbling blog yesterday. Dillow's piece jumped off from the most read post on this blog – about how our immigration debate misses the main point by focusing only on economic aspects and treating how people feel as somehow illegitimate (something which is thankfully no longer the case – partly due to the excellent recent work of British Future ). In his fascinating argument to which I’ll digress for a while here, Dillow discusses how and why public opinion differs from ...

We don’t talk about land much. We don’t talk about it enough. For the whole of human history and indeed the history of the natural world, land has been fought over, often to the death. But now, in our world, land is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold. For the most part its principal value is monetary value. Any meaning attached to land, place and property is subject to market values. This way of treating the land is probably unique to our ‘Western’ civilisation that has now gone global and is impinging upon all aspects of life on our planet. It is often assumed to be a neutral way, but this is not the case. Every way has values, and our way’s principle value is money. This value elbows out other values which attach different meanings to the land, for example those of ‘native’ tribes in the Americas who venerate the earth, in Britain with common land which became subject to ‘ Enclosures ’, and nowadays with the socialised provision of housing under relentl...