"To achieve a sustainable balance of private sufficiency and public luxury, land is the key": the 40th E.F. Schumacher Lecture, given by George Monbiot
A stirring 40th annual Schumacher Lecture from George Monbiot, titled Private Sufficiency, Public Luxury: Land Is The Key To The Transformation of Society.
Introduced by Jodie Evans from the woman’s activist group Code Pink, the video of the lecture is embedded above, and you can also hear it in podcast form.
Here’s an extract (the web text is here, and it’s also available in PDF or pamphlet formats:
Everybody wants a good life, we all want to share in the natural wealth of the planet, we want to share in prosperity, we want to live decently, we don’t want to be excluded, we don’t want to be marginalized, we don’t want to be so poor that we have a rubbish quality of life. But how can we possibly attain all that if there isn’t enough space?
Well, there is. There’s not enough space for a private luxury, but there is enough space for everyone to enjoy public luxury. If only we use the space more intelligently, there is enough space for everyone to enjoy magnificent public parks and public swimming pools and public museums and public tennis courts and public art galleries and public transport.
By creating public space we create more space for everybody, whereas when we create private space, we exclude the majority of people and create less space for others.
Particularly in cities in the poor parts of the world, you see this profound inequality, with huge numbers of people crammed into tiny living quarters under really squalid and impoverished conditions, with no public space at all, with scarcely any public amenities, public transport, and the rest.
Whereas in other parts of the city, you see enormous villas with huge gardens and their own swimming pools and huge cars which fill up the roads every day. It’s because some people have taken so much that other people have so little.
This is a zero-sum game. Land stopped being made long ago, so if we take more land than is our due, we are excluding other people from that natural wealth. But if we use urban land wisely, and if we ensure that we concentrate primarily on public amenities—on public transport, on public space, on public goods—then we can have public luxury for all. My catchphrase has become “private sufficiency, public luxury.”
Am I saying that vast amounts of land need to belong to the state? No. I think the state has a very important role to play: it’s crucially important for providing education and public health as well as public transport, for regulating society, for ensuring that some people don’t become so big and powerful that they destroy democracy, for ensuring that everybody has an economic safety net.
The state has many crucial roles to play, but if we rely on state provision alone and if we look to the state to meet all our needs, then the state itself becomes too powerful and threatens democracy. Also, state provision alone leads, I think, to a cold transactional set of relationships.
Alongside state provision in the crucial areas, I feel we need much richer and stronger communities. Community power, community strength, comes from something we call the commons. Now, it seems crazy to me that we have to explain what the commons is, because it’s so fundamental to our well-being that everybody should know. But because of the huge lies we tell that sit at the basis of economic thought, the very notion of the commons is alien to perhaps the majority of people…