I recently had an unfriendly exchange (on his part, not mine) with the author of two books which might have interested me (his books, I mean), given my interest in land, but which didn’t because my interest has always been in land use – and land degradation – and not in land ownership. I’ll call this writer AK, the ‘A’ standing for ‘anal’ and ‘arrogant’, the ‘K’ for his first name. He is anal about information he has gathered through his very impressive research projects, out of the first of which he drew a particular factoid which he claims to have ‘popularised’: ‘Britain has about the same number (60 million) of acres of land as it has people living here, so by rights we ought to have an acre apiece.’ (This is my particular wording, not AK’s.) Now I’ve cited that factoid often, and I’ve no recollection of having got it from AK. As far as I’m aware, I either got it from noticing that correspondence myself, or from being told it by my father, who collected snippets of information like that, and forty years ago it would have been true of England, but with the number being 32 million (acres and people).

This little episode got me thinking: ‘what’s this all about?’, which led to the thought that we live in two worlds, a virtual one and a real one, and although someone can own information in the virtual world by means of intellectual property rights and copyright, no one owns information about the real world. The reason for AK’s anal frustration is that the virtual and the real worlds affect each other and have a correspondence, and the only part of this factoid that is virtual and so ‘ownable’ is the idea of ‘ownership’ itself, which is central to the ideology that AK buys into, but the factoid is actually independent of ownership, because it is about physical things: land and people, which are of the real world.

As I’ve said, the reason I overlooked AK’s earlier book is probably because it’s about ownership of land and I’m more interested in the use of land. Another reason is that I’ve been an active and deeply committed Marxist socialist, working for a future, post-capitalist, world where there will be no ownership (or complete common ownership, which amounts to the same thing). That world will also have no money, which is another big part of the virtual world which people now live by and believe in, whilst being alienated from the real world, in particular from the land from which all their needs and wants are met. A number of Marxist scholars have been fascinated with how the ideology of the capitalist system is perpetuated. The French Marxist, Louis Althusser, coined the term ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (ISAs), for social arrangements such as the family and the educational system which replicate the interests of the dominant class. He contrasted ISAs with coercive systems for controlling people, such as the police, armed forces, surveillance systems, and the political and legal structures which back these up. It has always intrigued me how much more powerful it is for the state to bend people’s ideas through ISAs than to use force – although in Britain, the use of compulsion is being brought increasingly into play, with ‘the war on terror’ as the supposed justification.

The peculiar and interesting thing about ideology having persuaded people that the virtual world – of ownership and money – is real, is that when we see injustice and suffering happening, we seek to address these problems through the virtual world: we raise money to help ‘the poor’, buy supposedly ‘fairly traded’ goods, lobby for more state Aid. And where land is concerned, we buy a bit of land when we can, with money we’ve earned or borrowed, and perhaps we challenge the laws and planning regulations which govern how we may use it. The real world is affected by all this, as it is by all the machinations of the virtual world, but indirectly and often insecurely. We engage with the world by remote control, and fail even to take advantage of the access to the real world which we are allowed, having little or no interest, for example, in providing for our needs, in particular growing food and measuring and improving the yields of what little we may grow.

To come back to AK and our unfriendly exchange, that arose when I posted a message on a discussion forum, in which I used ‘his’ factoid. What I said was: ‘A young and very keen permie (someone actively involved in permaculture) told me recently that we can forget about feeding the people of Britain from the land of Britain; it’s not possible. I asked why not, given that there’s roughly an acre apiece (not that we’d cultivate as individuals, of course)? His answer was to do with cities. I said that my vision was of a return to pre-enclosures, open field strips etc. and lots of small hamlets. We’d need to regenerate degraded soil and improve marginal land and raise yields (something the founders of permaculture assumed it would be about) – so the plots are as productive as well-husbanded allotments. But even if one expects people in future to stay in the – transformed and greened – cities, and works in reformist mode in that direction, surely it’s unnecessarily defeatist, and perpetuating alienation from the land, to assume we can’t ever hope to feed everybody in the land from the land.’ I will not repeat what AK said in reply; it was very rude and abusive, but I’m grateful to him in a way. Everything gets one thinking, doesn’t it?

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