Panel 1: Start Here

The Learning Site dome is modelled on the concrete domes that provide light and air to the marketplace called Palika Bazaar. Like the original dome, Palika Market sits beneath the park in which this dome is situated. Learning Site have determined that the dome will explore concepts of markets, open spaces and the environment.

This dome [Poster Dwelling; Land, Market and Economy] has been manufactured from recycled paper gathered in Delhi’s office zone. The area around the dome will be planted with edible plants mirroring the decorative flower-beds that surround the concrete dome on which it is modeled.The dome will exist in the park for 10 days before being recycled as waste paper. The dome is divided into eight panels, including this one. The panels explore a number of interrelated themes.

- Land & Economy
- Enclosure Economics
- Market as Myth
- Globalisation (Deregulating Markets and Commodifying Knowledge)
- Real Markets and Market Ideology
- Farming
- Special Economy Zones and the 2008 Land Grab

Now, isn’t somebody supposed to give me an image so I know where to start and what to talk about...?

Panel 2: Land & Economy

Is there an image of land, so that we can start thinking about markets and economy?







Here it is. A man with a horse-drawn plough, a man not unlike my grandfather in fact. How land is occupied and how it is farmed is central to how we live, how our economy functions, and, most importantly, how our environment is sustained. You would think that was obvious. But, it isn’t to many.

My grandfather was born on a farm in England in 1883. As a child he used a plough exactly like the one in this picture. The design hadn’t changed much in the previous 10,000 years. At 19 my grandfather moved from the farm to the city. Back then there were about a billion people on the earth, and nine out of ten of us lived in villages. Over my grandfathers 97 years, technology expanded at an enormous rate. He got to see the development of cars, radios, televisions and airplanes. I was seven years old, when he died. In that year the world’s population was about three billion. I am now forty-four, and there are now about six billion of us. Half of us now live in a city. How we think about land and the environment that sustains us has changed. In turn, how we think about ourselves has changed. Increasingly, our economic and political systems demand that we think of ourselves, and of land, solely in terms of markets. Complexity must be stripped out. Vital components must be abstracted and purified and set into a simple mechanism.

Whether this abstraction is a consequence of the increases in technology and population, or whether those increases are a consequence of the abstractions of markets is a difficult question. What is sure is that as the world’s population has grown, so has the tendency to see land and people as commodities, as mere functions of the marketplace.

Where did this great abstraction come from? How did we get from the idea of a market as a place to buy and sell things people need to the idea of markets as the only mechanism that makes the world go round? How did this help so many of us to forget the obvious, that how we occupy land and farm are central to our economies and environment?

We need an image. Here’s a piece of a poem know as ‘The Commons’, written by ‘poor, mad’ John Clare in the early 19th century.








Clare’s poem refers to a process of ‘enclosing’ common land, which occurred in England between the 15th and the 19th centuries. The English story is important, because the Enclosure process gave rise to attitudes that were central to British colonialism and, even more importantly, to arguments that are now central to contemporary economic theory. If we want to think about the abstraction of markets and land ownership, this is a good place to start.

Clare’s poem says that the rights of labours have been destroyed. The poor have been enslaved. People and their animals are fenced in on small pieces of land. Little parcels of land create ‘little minds’. The path to freedom is blocked. It’s a no-through road. So what was the process of Enclosure?

Enclosure meant the taking ‘common land’, land that was once used freely by anybody who needed it into private ownership. In other words, making a open, public asset into an exclusive and tradable private property. It’s the process we now call ‘privatisation’.

Before enclosure large areas England were open to grazing. From the 1450s onwards, land over which many poor people had rights to graze animals began to be ‘closed’ off by wealthy farmers for their own use. By the 18th century, half the common fields in England had been turned into private property. Stripped of their historic rights to the land, many poor people starved, and many areas of the country suffered from depopulation. Later on, more ‘common’ or ‘waste’ land – land that had never been owned, such as open heaths, moorlands and highlands – were enclosed. In the final phase, between the 17th and 19th centuries, very large-scale enclosures of all types of land were enabled by act of parliament. Until that time, Enclosures had not had the force of government behind them, but the crown, parliament and the church had lacked the power, or will, to stop them. In the final phase, Enclosure was encouraged by the government and backed by the force of law. The idea of stripping people of their rights and giving the land they occupied to a private owner therefore required conceptual justification.

It was in these arguments presented in the British parliament to justify enclosure and the dispossession of the rural poor that some key arguments of modern economics developed. The early phases of Enclosure and dispossession of the poor were backed by nothing more than the naked self-interest of the powerful families who took land for themselves. But before parliament conceptual justification of the process was required. It was here that the idea that public assets are better off in private hands was first rehearsed. It was here that the idea of ‘the tragedy of the commons’ was developed. Many ideas about the importance of private property were also clarified here. And so too were many modern ideas about investment. Without the development of these arguments, many of the ideas that have come to the fore in the last 30 years under the rubric of ‘neo-liberalism’ would not exist. But lets not get ahead of ourselves.

The enclosure of English common land, had a huge influence on the later methods of British colonialism. But, it took an Austrian-Hungarian economist and historian writing in the 1940s to point it out. Karl Polanyi observed that the process that begun in England, later encompassed the earliest English colonies – in Wales, Ireland and Scotland – and eventually spread throughout the whole of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Colonialisation can be thought of in many ways. But the process we are interested in is the way complex cultural and social systems are stripped down, abstracted and bought into what Polanyi called the ‘Market Society’. In this sense, the period of European colonialisation is not over. Armies may have retreated. Direct political control may have receded. But concepts remain. The concepts developed from Enclosure continue in our own time. Indeed they have spread, and not only in terms of the way we think about land. If the Enclosures were about dividing up and putting fences around things that were suddenly deemed to be private property, we now have fences around knowledge. But lets not get ahead of ourselves. Lets stay with the history for a moment.

What happened to those poor people who lost their rights to their land? The old agricultural system of economic ‘householding’ (sometime called ‘subsistence farming’) virtually disappeared. Householding was based on the ability of the poor to access common land where they could graze small animals and collect wild fruit and vegetables and firewood.







Enclosure ended that access. As Enclosure got into its stride in the 17th and 18th centuries, it led to a growth of landless peasants, who now offered their labour in exchange for a wage. The supply of labour to the rapidly growing cities of the 18th and 19th centuries Britain was one of the key factors in the rise of ‘Industrial Revolution’. The destruction of traditional land occupation and use systems, and traditional cultural systems, was the chief reason why Britain was the first country in the world to industrialise. The movement from land to the city that uprooted hundreds of thousands in England a few hundred years ago, now uproots millions of people a year around the globe. It is the same process, but of a different magnitude.

Karl Polanyi famously drew a devastating conclusion from studying the English Enclosures. One that is still observable in the world today. The destruction of traditional systems of cultural and social organisation was a prerequisite for the rapid industrialisation. It is observable now in rapidly industrialising countries such as India, China and Brazil. In order to ensure a supply of cheap labour, existing support systems must be removed. That entails destroying the systems through which people occupy land, and grow their own food. That also entails destroying their socio-cultural systems. Only when people are fundamentally uprooted and abstracted from their ‘traditional’ systems of sustenance are they fully rendered as ‘commodities’ – wage labourers – who can be moved in and out of the market mechanism. Polanyi recounted the ways in which all 19th century colonialists in Africa systematically set out to destroy social support systems, such as the custom of feeding even your enemies in times of famine.

From this historical process it is possible to see the outline of a political-economic ideology that has dominated the world for the last thirty years. When the historical process of Enclosures and industrialisation are wrapped up into a series of ‘lessons’ or ‘conclusions’, they form an ideology. Polanyi called this ideology the “Market Society”. It is a society – if we can call it that – in which all values derive from the relations of the market. That ideology rejects broad notions of society, the idea of culture, religion and ethics. To reach its aim of total efficiency those notions must not be permitted to ‘distort’ or ‘interrupt’ the order of the market. Thus the Market Society must seek to eradicate all alternative systems of being, thinking and doing. Ironically, this ideology relies on certain cultural myths, and certain social practices, in order that it can function.



Panel 3: Enclosure Economics

The ideology of the Market Society is highly abstract, reductive and controlling. As we said in Panel 2 English Enclosures provided a blueprint for later colonial attitudes towards land. But the Enclosure movement also furnished the world with some key concepts in economic theory.

Justifying the dispossession of the poor before parliament required a powerful set of arguments. Those concepts are still used in economic theory. Most obviously, the theory that land is a commodity is still with us. But so too is the idea of privatisation - the idea public assets are inefficiently managed and are therefore better off in private hands.

The key concept developed in the early 19th century to enable the movement from public to private control was called ‘the tragedy of the commons’. The concept helped to clarify the modern idea of property and its role in contemporary political economy. It also reinforced pre-existing ideas about investment, giving investment its modern conceptual form. Lets look at these ideas. Do we have another image?







Lets look at land. The idea that land is a commodity, like say, bread, cloth or steel, is rather odd. Real markets, like the one at Palika Bazaar, exist to buy and sell objects, things that have been created to be exchanged. The most accurate definition of a commodity is an item that has been produced for exchange. However, there are some things we now treat as commodities that aren’t really commodities. That is, they are not objects, and they were not created to exchange in marketplaces. But, confusingly, we have come to regard them as commodities, as object-like things to be exchanged.

Karl Polanyi identified three ‘fictitious commodities’ – land, labour and money. Land simply exists. It is not produced to exchange in a marketplace. It is deeply embedded in complex social, spiritual, cultural and environmental relationships. Complexity also applies to labour. Humans are not objects produced for exchange, but are complex social and cultural beings. Similarly, money is not produced as a commodity, but as a method of enabling the markets on which commodities are exchanged to function more smoothly. The object in our hand has no intrinsic worth; it is merely a representation of a socially agreed value.

The commodity logic creates a view of land as ‘fungible’. That is it renders land as an object that is as easily exchangeable in a marketplace. Yet, land and people exist in value systems that exist outside of the marketplace. To treat land as a commodity it must be forcibly stripped of those complex socio-cultural and environmental characteristics. Treating land that way has allowed our economic system to do some very strange things, as we shall see.

Lets have an image.

The arguments for Enclosure also furnished economists with the concept of ‘tragedy of the commons’. The concept emerged in the justifications of land enclosure put before parliament. But it was popularised in economic theory in the early 19th century by William Foster Lloyd. In the 1940s, elements of the theory re-emerged in the concept of ‘public goods’ laid out by Paul Samuelson. Those ideas have since been greatly elaborated in theories of political economy, most recently and notably by Joseph Stiglitz. In the late 1960s, the ecologist Garrett Harding popularised Lloyd’s theoretical account for environmentalists. And from Hardin, it has become popular in debates about the future of internet and what is termed the ‘digital commons’.

So, what was the original ‘tragedy of the commons’? In the late 18th and early 19th centuries a powerful argument was needed to justify stripping the poor of their rights and throwing them off land they had occupied for centuries. The ‘Tragedy’ argument was simple. If many people had access to a piece of land for gathering plants and firewood and for grazing animals, the land would quickly become depleted of natural resources. Each person would selfishly take as much of the natural resource as they could get away with. The food and fuel sources would eventually disappear. Without plants, the soil would wash away, and, eventually, they and their neighbours would starve. This was the ‘tragedy’ of unenclosed land – the commons. Thus is was argued that in order to save the land and the people from destruction, the land should be made into property and given a private owner. This was done by act of parliament. The concept of privatisation as it has been known in our own time has been broadly applied around the world to many natural resources and to businesses that were previously controlled by states.

The advocates of parliamentary Enclosures argued that if common land was bought under private ownership, the new owners would have an ‘incen tive’ not to overgraze the land. Why would they willingly destroy their own property? Indeed, it was argued that, if the land was owned as private property, there would be an additional incentive for the new owner to ‘invest’ in the land in order to ‘improve’ its productivity. If the land was left as a commons, it was argued, the people who used it had no ‘incentive’ to limit their overgrazing. Nor was there any ‘incentive’ for an individual to invest in the land in order to improve it. Why would an individual do that, the advocates argued? If they did so, they would not receive the full benefit of their personal investment. Rather the benefits of their personal investment would be spread amongst all the people who had access to commons (what modern economists call the ‘free rider’ problem). The individual would loose out. Therefore no rational individual would invest in the land. Thus it was that, in the name of improving the land, and making it more productive, in order to ‘feed more people’, hundreds of thousands of people were moved off their land and vast tracks of common land were privatised.

It is a persuasive argument. Many have found it so. But, the fact that its origin lies in the justification of placing common resources in the hands of individuals should make one wary. The argument works wonderfully well if one believes that people are solitary, selfish and competitive individuals. It works if one believes that such individuals are calculatingly rational. It works if those individuals are without history, custom and ethical codes of behaviour, that they exist without knowledge of their environment, and without the ability to do what is in their own, and their community’s, interest.







If any of the common land had in fact been used as the ‘Tragedy’ narrative suggested, overgrazing would have already exhausted the land by the time the parliamentary acts came into force. In fact, common land was subject to rights of access, or ‘usufructs’. Customary laws and cultural practices ordered the general use of such land. There is no evidence that, in traditional systems, peasant farmers acted like the selfish, rational, purely profit seeking individuals of the theory. To presume so, presupposes that the rural communities treated common land not as a resource critical to their own, and their families and neighbour’s survival, but as ‘free property’ to do with what they personally wanted. But a right to ‘access’ is categorically not the same thing as the right to ‘exclude’ and the right to ‘dispose’ at ones own will – those are the rights that define private property, not common land. Every farmer knows not to overgraze their fields, whether or not they own those fields as private property is immaterial. Static rural communities are embedded in local environmental knowledge, which as many anthropologists acknowledge, is the seedbed from which cultural traditions develop. It is exactly within such cultural traditions that knowledge about overgrazing and respect for ones neighbours in transmitted. The ‘tragedy of the commons’ was then a convenient fiction.

The ‘Tragedy’ concept is beautifully ‘logical’ and has had an enduring appeal to economists. Historically and politically, it was never much more than an excuse for wholesale shifts in land occupation and the concentration of economic power in fewer hands. Thus it remains a potent political tool for those today who wish to increase their personal fortune.

From the ‘Tragedy’ many contemporary ideas flow. The discourse of individual incentives was given far greater clarification. The contemporary notion of a ‘public good’ – a good from which it is difficult to exclude others – that was first articulated by Paul Samuelson in the 1940s, derived directly from the discourse of the ‘Tragedy’. As did the idea that such goods lack investment because there are few incentives for private investors. The critical public goods concepts ‘non-rivalousness’, ‘non-excludability ’ and the ‘free rider problem’, are sophisticated descendants of the ‘Tragedy’.

In the era of globalisation, the notion that such common or public assets are an inefficient use of resources has become a central tenet of ‘neo-liberalism’, or the ‘Washington Consensus’. The privatisation of public assets, whether they are land, services or business, that were a few decades ago controlled by the state, has become commonplace. In political circles, derision for public goods has become intense. Where common or state ownership still exists, the practice has been to destroy it.

The Tragedy has turned up in increasingly strange places. We will look at some in the other Panels.



Panel 4: Market as Myth

Do we have another image? What’s this? A toad? Oh, I see, it’s the famous ceramic toad of Osaka.







All those clever, logical concepts that came out of the Enclosures debates… you would almost think that they described the world we really live in. But, real markets aren’t like the markets of economic theory. You couldn’t call them good examples of clear, rational logical thinking. Rather they are embedded in cultural traditions and mythology, in practice and habit rather than abstract calculation.

So, what’s with the ceramic toad? Well, for most of the 20th century, mainstream economists has attempted to persuade us that economics is a ‘science’. If economics is a science, then questions of subjective value – based on cultural, religious or ethical beliefs – have no place. Yet, human behaviour is moved by many factors that have no place in economic textbooks. Take the toad of Madame Onoe Nui for example.

The toad has been described as “the single most important player in the Japanese stockmarket” in the early 1990s. Senior executives from the Industrial Bank of Japan and JP Morgan, along with stockbrokers from Yamaichi Securities, used to visit Madame Nui’s home in Osaka. They would pat the ‘magic toad’ on the head and Madame Nui would go into a trance. The toad, speaking through Madame Nui, would then deliver advice about which stocks to buy or sell. By 1990, it was estimated that Madame Nui and her toad controlled $10 Billion worth of investments. She was simultaneously the world’s largest individual investor and the world’s largest individual borrower. When the toad’s magic failed 1991, Nui was bankrupted owing 2.8 trillion yen, or US$22billion in 1991 prices. In Japan, toad’s are thought to have magical qualities. What may seem to be irrational behaviour to a professor of economics at Harvard University may be quite normal in another culture, and more importantly, real markets are moved by such non-rational thinking. Rarely, if ever, do actual people behave as they are presumed to do in economic models.

Next page >



PDF for Learning Book #003, [Poster Dwelling; Land, Market and Economy], Delhi, 2008

Texts: From Corporate Land Grab To Land Sovereignty (Bhu Swaraj), Charter for Land Sovereignty (Bhu Swaraj) - From Corporate Hijak of Land, INDIA DIVIDED Vs INDIVISIBLE INDIA: DEFENDING DIVERSITY AND DEMOCRACY IN TIMES OF VIOLENCE, FEAR AND TERROR by Vandana Shiva

Delhi’s Urban Dilemma by Arunava Dasgupta



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