Owning the future, p.15
Owning the Future, page 15
Broadband communism
In the 2019 UK general election, the Labour Party’s proposal to build a publicly owned full fibre network was ridiculed as ‘broadband communism’. This derision both naturalised the failures of actually existing ‘broadband capitalism’ – under-investment in remote communities amid redundant overcapacity in city centres, digital redlining, and a focus on financial extraction over network delivery – and missed the point: delivering a universal infrastructure is most equitably and efficiently done through democratic planning and investment, not financialised competition. The stark digital divide so painfully evident during the pandemic would be best addressed by building a publicly owned full fibre broadband network that can provide connection free at the point of use as a twenty-first century right. Instead of leaving its development to the prerogatives and time horizons of commercial actors, we should learn from how previous nationwide infrastructures like railways, telephones, and roads were developed: as projects of developmental, modernising states that prioritised universality, equity, and efficiency over returns to shareholders.
Housing security for all
Home ownership is a structuring force of the asset economy. There are a host of proposals to tackle its power, but ultimately the goal should be the guarantee of decent, secure, and beautiful housing for all regardless of whether one owns their home.
In reality, a blended approach is likely necessary to achieve this: expanding in tandem the supply of publicly owned homes for social rent and affordable private ownership; challenging credit-based drivers of house-price inflation while mediating that process fairly; democratising planning to ensure quality and sustainability of housing and built environments, not just quantity. This is a formidable task that faces several obstacles: in Berlin, for example, where long-standing stable rents have given way to soaring costs in recent years amid expanding ‘housing as asset class’ investor ownership, the efforts of renters’ unions have faced an uphill battle. A successful city-wide referendum to impose rent caps was later struck down by the German courts, while professional investors continue to fight tooth and nail against proposals to buy back hundreds of thousands of formerly public housing units.17 Thus, in economies marked by widespread but not universal home ownership, achieving progress on housing security will require sensitively building a coalition of renters and asset owners behind an agenda that ensures everyone has a safe and secure place to live and be, regardless of whether they own housing wealth, rather than treating the home as an object of accumulation.
The return of public ownership
Beyond these sectors, decommodifying the foundations of life means reembracing democratic public ownership. There are many spheres in which the fundamentals of a good life are compromised by the prerogatives of commercial provision, stymying investment where it’s needed and creating unsustainable inefficiencies with damaging impacts both within and beyond borders. Recognition of the need for systemic change is stirring. The Transnational Institute has tracked almost 1,000 recent re-municipalisations across the world as communities – from Paris’s water network to new public telecommunication services in Chattanooga – have reclaimed essential services from private operators, bringing their delivery back into the public sphere.18 Just as public ownership and investment helped build the infrastructure and technologies of the twentieth-century economy, from electrification to transport, so it should play a central role in creating the conditions for a post-carbon world.
Shielded from the imperative of maximising returns and shareholder demands, publicly owned enterprise can drive economic, social, and ecological transformation by undertaking the riskier innovation and less immediately profitable provision (for instance servicing remote communities, driving more ambitious climate strategies, or reclaiming resources for local use) that the private sector is both failing and unwilling to deliver. It can also more effectively coordinate action at scale, which is a fatal flaw in the private sector’s response to planetary crisis. At the same time, governance must adapt to the twenty-first century: it must differ from top-down, managerial forms of public ownership that were excessively centralising and undemocratic, embracing management and decision-making processes that value the knowledge of workers, users, and citizens.19
Equality as ecology
Decommodifying the foundational economy is also essential to erode the profound inequalities of wealth, power, and consumption currently driving the environmental and climate crisis. Environmental advocates are fond of referencing ‘Earth Overshoot Day’ – the day each year on which the global population surpasses the amount of resources that can sustainably be consumed in a given year. But contrary to the reactionary narratives this often supports – that there are ‘too many’ humans for the Earth to handle, or that economic ‘development’ and birth rates in the Global South are driving us to ruin – the limits against which we are pressing are not simply ‘natural’ or ‘planetary’, but overwhelmingly the product of social relations and political settlements, which can and must be replaced.
A small fraction of the global population is responsible for the vast majority of energy and resource consumption. The average citizen of the UK will have been responsible for more carbon emissions in just two weeks than someone living in Rwanda or Ethiopia will in a whole year, and produces 200 times the climate emissions of the average Congolese person; in the US it is 585 times as much.20 But evidence also shows the world is capable of supporting a population three times as large as we currently have with just 60 percent of the energy we currently consume.21 The obstacle to a world of universal abundance, dignity, and freedom is therefore not physical, but relational. The good news: this means we can overcome it. But it also means that any commitment to decommodifying the fundamentals of a decent life requires a global perspective to be realised. Indeed, the freedom of a ‘universal’ abundance that is contained within borders and requires the domination and exploitation of others, is no freedom at all.
Defending the Commons
Common knowledge
Technology is our common inheritance. Over generations of collective endeavour, we have created the technical possibilities for us all to enjoy lives of greater freedom and security. The extraordinary speed of the development of the Covid-19 vaccine is a testament to this remarkable innovative capacity. Too often, however, the liberatory potential contained within technical systems is hindered by the legally enforced enclosure of technology and its spoils, and by the direction of investment based on imperatives of private accumulation. A break with the institutions of private ownership and investment that presently corral and limit human knowledge is long overdue; in their place, we can build a flourishing technological commons.
Perhaps most immediately pressing in this respect are steps towards commoning intellectual property (IP). As conditions of vaccine apartheid amid a global public health emergency made clear, existing approaches to IP threaten the safety and livelihoods of millions of people around the world. This is not an aberration. Rather, it reflects a system in which knowledge created through public investment or support is quickly enclosed at a global scale by legal regimes that create exclusive rights to use – and consequently to profit. False scarcity imposed by the enclosure – exclusion dynamic currently enables rent extraction on a vast scale at a terrible cost to human life, well-being, and capability.
At the same time, the climate and public health emergencies demand a transformative increase in public investment focused on addressing the intersecting economic, social, and ecological crises we now face. Currently, new technologies are developed mainly in order to expand market share, control, and accumulation, not to free humanity from drudgery or expand our capabilities. As David Graeber once asked: Where are the flying cars we were promised? Though perhaps tongue-in-cheek, the question contains a firm kernel of truth: Why haven’t we created the world of technological wonder envisioned in the science fiction of the twentieth century? His answer (and ours) is that the imperatives of profit making and capital accumulation have produced a system in which the security of private property is a chief concern (hence our tremendous investment in the technologies of war and defence), while the technology to liberate humankind from drudgery is not needed, as there will always be people desperate to perform it to achieve basic security.22 Changing this – rapidly developing and adopting pro-labour, decarbonised technologies and technical systems – means decoupling investment in innovation from the profit imperative and private monopolisation of allocation. Given the urgency of the climate and nature crises, the need – ‘to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history’,23 – is immense.
Data socialism
If knowledge is power, data is its source, providing the raw material for automating technologies. Rather than enabling important and socially generated data to be enclosed for private ends, any project capable of securing post-scarcity conditions will harness data’s inherently social quality to plan to meet needs. For instance, data could be commoned through a network of ‘data trusts’, such as those established in municipalist cities including Barcelona and Amsterdam, used to enhance low-carbon mobility and public health. These autonomous legal bodies would act as custodians and stewards of specific data sets, providing residents, workers, and organisations with access to and democratic control over data that could improve their lives, enabling us to move beyond inequality-generating models of city growth and development.
At the same time, however, we should resist the data panopticon. There are certain things that should never be a target for the extraction, analysis, and use of data. Instead, we need new ways of deciding whether to collect data in the first place, and how it should be used, rather than leaving these decisions in the hands of private corporations and weakly unaccountable state apparatuses. Building a genuine data commons therefore implies leaving some data ‘in the ground’, determined through collective deliberation.
Return to Eden
Though carbon emissions and their catastrophic effects have dominated the public debate on the state of our planet, a changing climate is only one piece of the puzzle; biodiversity loss and the collapse of ecosystems (intimately related to rising global temperatures) are as much a risk to humankind. Land and nature are the original sites of enclosure. What was once a commonly shared resource has been parcelled up for private benefit to the exclusion of the world’s vast majority. Now, nature is once again becoming the frontier for expansion and enclosure, with offset markets and financial constructions striving to segment its complexity into tidy, tradable assets.
The agenda for converting what remains of the commons, nature, and biodiversity into tradable financial assets is marching swiftly forward. From the United Nations to the World Bank and an array of private investment summits, the hunger for markets in ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘bio-diversity offsets’ is immense. In a market-based society, so the logic goes, nature is worth nothing unless it has a price; by enabling private investors and corporations to trade the destruction of a mature wetland for a freshly planted monospecies forest of equivalent financial ‘value’ somewhere else in the world, we can conserve biodiversity, the carbon cycle, water systems, and beyond. In this view, man is inherently selfish, collective stewardship untenable, and private interest the only route to preservation.
However, the reverse has repeatedly proved true. In the Brazilian Amazon, where land invasions surged 135 percent in 2019 alone,24 forests within the territories of Indigenous communities with full collective governance rights show deforestation ‘significant orders of magnitude’ lower than areas even immediately outside the territory.25 Importantly, more than 2 million hectares of Brazilian Amazon remain only partially under the collective governance of the Indigenous communities living there; fraught political processes have denied them certain key rights over these territories. This is first and foremost an indefensible injustice; it is also to the detriment of the forest’s health. In Peru, granting land titles to Indigenous communities led to almost immediate reductions in forest clearance and ecosystem disturbances. And in Mexico, the state-supported establishment of community forest trusts has created a large and highly effective system of stewardship which has seen communities balance their use of forest resources with long-term conservation.26
Agriculture, too, has been shown to benefit from collective governance and stewardship: from trials of community land management in Germany27 to enduring legacies of ‘agro-ecological’ smallhold farming in the Global South, shifts away from ultra-intensive, soil eroding, and dispossessing industrial agriculture have the potential to secure a food system that is ‘carbon-dioxide-absorbing, biodiversity defending, and resilient in the face of climate change’, while producing more per land unit than industrial agriculture.28 There are proposals at hand for how these forms of governance could work even in a country with as much large-scale private ownership as the UK; for instance, the ‘Public Commons Partnership’, proposed by academics Keir Milburn, Kai Heron, and Bertie Russell, offers a blueprint for the public sector to support community stewardship of assets, including land, developing new democratic subjectivities in the process.29
The evidence in favour of collective, sovereign governance and stewardship of land and natural commons is striking but should come as no surprise. Indigenous communities have managed land in the collective interest throughout history, and as a result they remain the stewards of an astonishing 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, despite representing just 5 percent of the human population.30 Indigenous sovereignty should be respected and extended, in the vein of the Land Back movement, as a matter of justice – not as a crude tool to serve someone else’s ecological aims. In stewarding all of Earth’s remaining ecological diversity, these should be the models of stewardship and governance which we emulate. The so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ is a misconstrual; private control and exploitation of resources continues to deliver the real tragedy.31 The clarion call of market-based mechanisms must therefore be resisted, and the rights to land and vital resources restored to forms of public, community, and common governance.
Shell won’t save us: Reprise
Finding our way out of the fossil fuel economy is a life-and-death task for humanity. We are up against the extraordinary rights fossil fuel firms have been granted in determining the future of the planet – powers they have thus far used to enrich themselves and shareholders while deceiving the public about the damage they’ve wrought in doing so. Fortunately, these rights are publicly granted through the protections of private property law, and are therefore contestable and subject to change. Courts are already beginning to recognise this. Multiple rulings in domestic judiciaries against fossil fuel companies have weighed the relative rights afforded to private property versus human life, and found – in a decisive break with the history of Anglo-American capitalism – that human life is worth more. In this sense, regulation to prevent fossil fuel extraction is as much a change in private property rights as public ownership. Rather than formally taking the assets under its management, the state has simply removed part of a private firm’s rights to do with its property as it will. Regulation that is demanding enough to end fossil fuel extraction at the pace and scale the climate crisis demands will, ultimately, not be very different from public ownership as a tool to constrain extraction. Whichever path is taken, it must be one in which the dominion of private property is no longer asserted above the needs of human and non-human life, and it must be taken swiftly.
There are, admittedly, few immediate examples to draw on in this respect, in large part because fossil fuels remain so deeply imbricated in every aspect of our lives. However, bold ideas have begun to emerge which propose bringing domestic fossil fuel producers into public ownership, for example in the United States by using the Federal Reserve’s existing legal power to ‘buy and sell financial assets to regulate systemic risk’.32 Given the existential risk of continued fossil fuel exploration and production, utilising this power is eminently reasonable. Moreover, throughout the pandemic’s economic rupture, countless fossil fuel companies entered financial difficulty owing to their fragile balance sheets and sought public assistance. These crisis moments are not unique to global pandemics; rather, ‘history shows these are systemic cycles of a privately owned fossil fuel industry – features, not bugs’.33 Rather than occurring in cycles, and providing no-strings-attached relief for corporate executives and shareholders, bailouts should support workers, people, and planet; to achieve this, states should utilise bailout negotiations to take controlling stakes in companies, for instance through debt-to-equity mechanisms, giving them publicly accountable control over their operations.
There is no silver bullet for overcoming the use of fossil fuels as an energy source. Our approach is one of pragmatism, and of bringing under democratic control those reserves that do lie within our purview. Sudden and sweeping legislation that can bring the fossil fuel industry in line with a 1.5 °C world is likely to result in years of trade agreement disputes. Domestic court rulings in favour of binding emissions reductions as in the Dutch case against Shell, despite providing piercing moments of hope, are similarly beleaguered by extensive appeals processes and loopholes to be exploited by the corporations involved. Waiting for these resolutions is time we do not have to spare.
Securing post-carbon prosperity will require more than fairly winding down fossil fuel production and consumption. We must simultaneously rapidly scale a fair and clean energy future for all. If the energy profile of fossil fuels – a stock that lends itself to privatised control and concentrated ownership34 – underpins carbon capitalism and all the unequal and hierarchical relationships this entrains, then the flow of wind, wave, and solar power points in a radically different direction: towards collective management and democratic planning, the communal stewardship of shared renewable resources, and the abundance of a nurtured commons. Decentralised, decarbonised, and democratically guided, a clean energy future will be best secured on foundations of common ownership and governance that are radically distinct to the institutional arrangements that undergirded the carbon empire.
