Rather the point of having fundamental Marxists as part of the media ecosystem is that we get people willing to think of the fundamentals. If we’re not to have folk talking about the base levers of power and how they’re manipulated to benefit the ruling class then there’s really very little point in having folk pottering about claiming to be Marxists.
Which is a bit of a pity really, as Novara Media do self-proclaim as actual out and out Marxists. Yet they appear incapable of the basic analysis they’re there for.
They’re complaining about allotments here. A very British thing to complain about, obviously.
To Abbots Leigh residents, the fence was a further incursion by a pernicious invading force: a company called Roots Allotments, which has selected the North Somerset location as the latest stepping stone in its quest to create “allotments of the future”. What this means in practice is privatised allotments that turn would-be users from tenants into customers.
Roots is a subscription service: sign-ups pay a yearly fee, plus a £39.99 deposit to secure their space. The bang is notably weaker for the buck someone could get for a council plot; Roots’ starter offer of £9.99 a month only bags you a ‘mini’ 12 sqm space. Its biggest plot is 108 sqm, priced at £49.99 a month, or £549.89 a year. By comparison, council-run plots in England average £45 annually for 125 sqm of space. Roots charges customers 12 times more for 17 sqm less land.
Clearly and obviously this is horrors. The state is not providing what the people want. But a private sector economic actor providing the same thing is an ‘orror. Cue chuntering about the exploitation of the masses and so on.
That’s the sort of nonce we’d expect from The Guardian and the Fabians. We can and should expect more from the Marxists. A bit of fundamental analysis that is. As I say, if the Marxists aren’t going to do that then what’s the point of having the loons around anyway?
The actual problem is this:
Yes, Abbots Leigh is in the green belt. This means that no one can build houses with gardens. Thus the desire for allotments.
We can - possibly should - take a step back here.
Housing is indeed a technology, it’s a machine for living in. Like all technologies, like all machines, it has several bits, each of which is necessary for the system as a whole to work.
We humans are mildly developed plains apes. We do indeed like having something nice, toasty and snug. We also like that bit outside - that we own, or at least control - where we can grow a carrot, laze in the Sun and scratch a flea or two. Nothing right or wrong with these things, they’re just part of humans being humans, being mildly developed plains apes.
It is possible to deliver those joint desires through a couple of variations of housing technology. One, largely the continental one, is that we all live in flats in town - the toasty snug bit - and also then have access to the country cottage. Or at least some scrap piece of a field we can knock up a shed upon, along with a little salad garden. These go by different names across that continent - dacha, chalupa, recentlydeadgranny’speasantcottage.
The English solution has been, over the centuries, a house with a garden - toasty, snug bit and flea-scratch and carrot area.
Now, either solution works in giving the plains ape what the plains ape desires. But both are complete technologies, requiring their moving parts to work. Quite why the difference I’ve no more idea than you do. My idea being that - as with Paul Krugman and British food - we industrialised and urbanised that generation or two earlier. Before the transport systems really existed to whisk us from rural idyll to snug and toasty. Thus we went for rus in urbe, rather than continuing with the geographical divide. The advantage of this explanation is that it does actually explain.
Sure, I know the back to backs didn’t have a garden, they had a back with a potty in it. Often a shared potty too. But anyone with any marginally higher income did move into a terrace with a front and back garden. And that then became the cultural standard. The Des Res is the house with garden.
It is also true that this isn’t true in most to many of those continental countries. A townhouse in Spain with a garden is either a once home of the very rich indeed or a modern build for Northern Europeans. We’ve just spent time buying a house in Portugal (no, not that rich, it’s our only house) and we desired that rus in urbe. Urbe in the sense of walking down the street for milk and fresh bread, rus in perhaps a quarter acre garden, perhaps something a tad larger. Very difficult to find in Portugal. Sure, the house with land is a cinch - but it’s a mile outside the city or more. And the city house is easily available, but unless you’ve the cash to be buying the manor house (we don’t) there won’t be a garden. We did find, but it wasn’t easy to do so.
The housing technology is different. Ho Hum. But that also tells us that the English housing technology is different. We - as in we English - use the garden plus house as the solution, not the flat plus country cottage.
Allotments are not a solution, they’re a stop gap. Those back to backs, folk did need - really need too - access to a bit of land for the carrots to feed the family. So, the council provides a bit of field sliced up into veg patches for the urban poor. But as I say, this is a stop gap. It doesn’t replace - it merely provides a poor substitute for - either of the two full solutions. The country cottage or the garden. One proof that it’s a poor substitute is that it’s illegal in England to stay overnight on an allotment. It’s not, not in that real and plains ape sense, actually owned - for you can do what you like on your owned land. OK, maybe not build a new house (tho’ you can on the dacha, chalupa and so on) but a shack and you can deffo sleep out in a tent in the summer. Not on an allotment you can’t.
OK. Now we’re all rich enough that a house - perhaps just a terraced one but still - with front and back garden is entirely within reach for every household in the country. Well, sorta - there’s enough land, we know we can build such houses for £130k a piece and so on. The only reason we can’t is because of the price of land that we’re allowed to build upon. It’s not even the land - £10,000 will buy a hectare of farmland pretty much anywhere in the country (and most of a county in Scotland) but the planning permission, ah, the planning permission.
We nationalised the use of land back with the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. The current rules insist upon 30 dwellings or more per hectare of land. You can’t stick 30 dwellings upon a hectare of land and provide a front and back garden for each of them. Thus it’s actually illegal in England to build the standard English Des Res.
Bit of a problem. What’s worse, of course, is that we’re all abjured from adopting the continental technology as well. Because second houses are anathema too.
So, why has this happened? Which is where we should be getting the Marxists explaining it to us. That nationalisation of the use of land was hijacked by the haute bourgeoisie. Allowing the proles to build out around towns just could not be allowed as that would impact upon those older Des Res’s owned by the haute bourgeoisie yet still with a reasonable commute into town.
We, the English, must be crammed into urban hovels so that our betters retain their own desired lifestyle. And they’ve shanghaied the powers of the state to enforce it upon us.
Allotments are the very proof of that. Absent the TCPA we’d all have gardens and not require the bad substitute. If we still have a shortage of the bad substitute then we’re clearly not being allowed to solve the problem properly - restrained by the law imposed upon us by the class interests.
If we actually had a proper Marxist media then this is the sort of thing they’d be telling us. Instead we’ve got Novara that has a shrieking fit about a private company providing allotments. Marxists are supposed to detail the structural unfairnesses, not have the vapours over trivia.
Ho Hum, aren’t we the lucky ones?
Wherever I travel in Germany, I see lots of tiny patches of land with garden sheds and vegetables growing. look an awful lot like allotments to me.