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Kōhei Saito is a Japanese philosopher. He is an associate professor at the University of Tokyo. Saito works on ecology and political economy from a Marxist perspective. His 2020 book Capital in the Anthropocene has been credited for inspiring a resurgence of interest in Marxist thought in Japan.

For the 150th issue of The Internationalist, we turn to Saito’s Slow Down to examine how capitalism manufactures scarcity by enclosing what once belonged to everyone.

THE COMMONS WERE ABUNDANT

One thing that’s important to remember is that before the emergence of primitive accumulation, the commons of land and water were plentiful and abundant. Any member of the communal societies organized around them could freely take what they needed and use it.

This is not to say that usage was completely unrestricted. There were specific social mores that had to be respected and sometimes punishments for those who transgressed them. But as long as these rules were upheld, the commons were a form of open, freely accessible, communally owned wealth.

Precisely because the commons were a commonly held form of wealth, people made use of them appropriately, coexisting with nature without intruding upon it unduly, since there was no profitmaking incentive for overproduction. The sustainability of the Markgenossenschaft rests on this as well.

The private property system that followed the enclosure of the commons, by contrast, destroyed this sustainable relationship between humans and nature founded on abundance. Land that had previously been free for anyone to use became available only to those able to pay for the privilege (via rent). Primitive accumulation divided the commons, imposing artificial scarcity in their stead.

What was once the commons became private property. Once people spent money to possess a piece of land, they could do anything they wished with it—no one had the right to interfere. Everything became dependent on the discretion of the private property owner. Due to this form of freedom, no one can stop an owner from doing anything, even if it results in the worsening of the lives of people who live nearby, even if the land itself becomes depleted, even if the water in the area becomes polluted.

It is in this way that the quality of everyone else’s lives suffered in the name of the rights of the few.

PRIVATE RICHES DIMINISH PUBLIC WEALTH

In fact, this contradiction was already being written about in the nineteenth century. James Maitland, the eighth Earl of Lauderdale, a Scottish politician and scientist active in the early 1800s, discussed this exact problem in his book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth (1804).

Lauderdale’s ideas became famous enough that the contradiction between the commons and private property is known even now as the Lauderdale Paradox. This paradox states that any increase in private riches comes about only through the diminishment of public wealth.

For Lauderdale, “public wealth” refers to wealth accessible to the common man, defined as “all that man desires, as useful or delightful to him.” By contrast, Lauderdale defines “private riches” as that which is accessible only to an individual. As he puts it, private riches “consist of all that man desires as useful and delightful to him; which exists in a degree of scarcity.”

In other words, the sole difference between private riches and public wealth is scarcity.

Public wealth is commonly held by citizens and therefore isn’t defined by scarcity. Private riches, on the other hand, cannot increase without increasing scarcity—otherwise they don’t exist. Private riches come into being through the deliberate creation of scarcity by dividing up the public wealth needed by everyone. Private riches only increase by increasing scarcity.

As hard as it might be to believe, what Lauderdale was seeing occur right before his eyes was the justification of sacrificing others in the name of personal enrichment. Which, indeed, is the essence of capitalism itself and is a problem that persists today.

For example, water is abundant and is something that everyone desires and needs. In such a situation, water should be free. It is thus an ideal form of public wealth. Yet these days, water has, by whatever means necessary, been rendered scarce, commodified, and assigned a price. And thus another freely available form of public wealth disappears. Enclosing water in plastic bottles and selling it for a profit increases private riches (and of course plastic waste) instead, which also increases “national wealth” as measured in monetary terms.

And indeed, we can see Lauderdale’s book as a direct criticism of Adam Smith’s proposition that the wealth of nations is measurable as the sum of the private riches held within them. Lauderdale asserts that while national wealth, when measured this way, increases as private riches increase, the true wealth of a nation resides in its citizens’ access to public wealth—that is, the very commons whose diminishment produces private riches in the first place. This results in the citizens of a nation losing their rights to the things they need to live and falling into destitution. The nation’s wealth defined in terms of money may increase, but the quality of its citizens’ lives decreases. In this way, Lauderdale differs from Adam Smith, as he sees that the true wealth of a nation resides in its public wealth.

Lauderdale provides many examples of what he means. He points to capitalists burning tobacco harvests when there was a surplus and forbidding the cultivation of vineyards to reduce wine production, measures designed to create scarcity of tobacco and wine. Large harvests should, by rights, be cause for rejoicing. Yet excessive supply lowers prices, so surplus ends up wasted as a form of price support.

Scarcity expands as abundance shrinks. This is the fundamental truth behind the Lauderdale Paradox’s assertion that private riches only increase at the expense of public wealth.

Excerpted from SLOW DOWN THE DEGROWTH MANIFESTO by Kōhei Saito, translated by Brian Bergstrom. Copyright © 2020 by Kōhei Saito, Translation copyright © 2024 by Brian Bergstrom. First published in Japan in 2020 by Shueisha Inc., Tokyo.  Published on January 9, 2024 by Astra Publishing House. Reprinted by permission.

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