Productivity is tyranny

Today I was listening to Helen Lewis's programme about gurus - The New Gurus - on BBC Sounds. The show was about productivity gurus. How can you make the most of your time? You only have 4,000 weeks to live - yikes! It seems there is a guru industry out there with millions of followers on YouTube. Did I learn anything particularly useful about how to be productive? Er...no. Maybe other people did.

But then I have a problem with productivity, and a large part of that is what 'productivity' is really about. Let's go back in time 500 years or so to medieval England. In those days, before the enclosures, your actual 'peasant' didn't have such a bad life. It wasn't as nasty brutish and short as some would have us believe. Productivity then was seasonal, planting seeds, harvesting, grazing livestock, hunting,  and foraging. In midwinter, where we are now, days were short, and you couldn't plant or sow, so people had holidays and celebrated instead. This is their time of the year for wassailing and celebrating the beginning of a new year. It is reckoned that, in those days, they had 150 or so holidays a year, Saints Days, etc. Not bad compared with now eh?

Fast forward to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the industrial revolution had begun, and the common land, used by those peasants had been enclosed by the ruling class. The industrial revolution had begun. People were forced out of the villages into the growing towns and cities, to work in the mills and factories. It was then that productivity, as we know it now was born, capitalists making workers toil for longer hours and fewer holidays to increase the surplus value of their labour.

Although organised labour brought us the eight-hour day, the weekend, and many other benefits we still live in that productivity trap. Although productivity is more than just about the hours we work it's key to making the wheels of capitalism turn. Of course, if you want to spend sixty hours a week chained to a keyboard as one of the gurus admitted he did that's up to you. Me I'd rather be a wassailing! A much better use of my time.😀 🍻🌲🍎

Merry Yule!

What does Xmas mean to me? In a word nothing. I loved Xmas when I was a child. I was lucky enough to have a loving family and a Mum who was a very good cook. The tree, decorations, the presents, and the food were great. It was a time of genuine warmth and celebration, lit by an open fire. Now things are different. I still like to make merry with family and friends as much as possible but I despise the hype and commercialism. 

I’ve never been remotely religious so that aspect had no impact on me. Now, I’m much more interested in the origins of Xmas as a midwinter festival. In the distant English past midwinter was an important festival with days of celebration. Whole communities participated in wassailing. As a sufferer from SAD, the winter equinox, Yule, is an important day for me. The days get longer and lighter. That’s what mainly I’ll be celebrating, and, as I do, I’ll also take some time to reflect on all those who’ve suffered under a dozen years of Tory government. Merry Yule! 🙂🎄

Privatisation is theft!

In 1840 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously said, "Property is theft". He was right. The worst event in human history occurred when somebody put a fence around a piece of land and said "this belongs to me". All land should be held in common, and for most of our human history, it has been. In England, hundreds of thousands of acres of common land were stolen from the people by the ruling class during the enclosures. The purpose of the theft wasn't just to gain control of the land but to dispossess the English people, starving them of resources, such as food, grazing land, and firewood,  making them less independent and easier to control and dominate. 

If you want to find out more about this I can recommend two very good books on the commons. The first is  'Who Owns England' by Guy Shrubsole. In his book, he describes how the land was stolen and who now owns most of it. Here is a quote from the review:

 'Two-thirds of land in the UK as a whole – 40m acres – is owned by 0.36% of the population; 24m families, meanwhile, share the “urban plot” of 3m acres'

The second is the 'Plunder of the Commons' by Guy Standing. He describes how it's not just land and resources that have been stolen from us but the wealth that goes with them, and what we can do about it. One of his key references is The Charter of the Forest (Carta Foresta) of 1217. This document is as important as Magna Carta but has conveniently been written out of our history. It establishes the people's rights on common land in England.

So what has this got to do with privatisation? Quite a lot actually. Just as our land has been privatised so have our other natural assets. Water is in the news at the moment. Not only have millions of people been outraged by the water companies dumping raw sewage into rivers and onto our beaches but it's clear that these corporations are screwing us by extracting as much profit as possible whilst failing to invest in much-needed infrastructure. As if that wasn't bad enough they have saddled the companies with £54B of debt whilst extracting £66B in profits!

It's clear that water companies must be brought back into common ownership and that this can happen without any cost. This needs to be done as soon as possible so that the mismanagement of our water can be halted and improvements begun. That won't happen though as long as we have a Tory government that puts profit before people, and the Labour 'opposition' has shown no signs of bringing about necessary reform. 

Of course, the same is true for energy, the railway network, education, and the NHS. Such measures prove popular with voters but our politicians are more interested in the wants of corporations and donors. It's not just a massive expansion of common ownership that we need but taxes on the wealth that the 1% extract from us, a land value tax, the right to roam, and a return to the time of Carta Foresta when the commons are once again ours. Our political system is broken but there are many people engaged in the struggle to bring back the commons and public ownership. Get involved and keep on fighting for it! Oh! - and join a union, support the striking key workers, and fight for decent pay!

#EnoughIsEnough! ✊✊✊