What if you don't really own your house?

 

Three days in northern Mongolia, and a question I brought from Hong Kong began to come apart in my hands.

The road to the lake fords three rivers and stops, often, for livestock. Goats and yaks hold their ground before a speeding Land Rover with the indifference of animals never once asked to move, because out here there is nowhere they are not allowed to be. At a roadside market I buy a knife, its handle carved from reindeer antler, its blade wrapped in a leather strap; the woman selling it names one price and has no appetite for haggling. Further on, a family of four in a felt ger — the husband away on horseback gathering cattle across half a valley, the children unbothered by clothes or by cold.  Animals, small children just roaming free spirited in this beautiful land: where, exactly, is the boundary for one person with another?

A land lawyer is trained to answer that by looking for the marks of ownership she knows — the fence, the boundary, the title deed, the entry in a register. Finding none of them here, she is tempted to conclude that she has wandered into a world without property at all. This is a category error, and a revealing one. The herder owns his animals with a ferocity that would embarrass a private-equity fund: he knows each beast by sight, counts it, inherits and marries over it. What he declines to own is the ground beneath it. The line between mine and ours has simply been drawn in a different place — the movable thing gripped hard, the earth left open to all. Property is everywhere on this pasture. It has merely refused to attach itself to the permanence of earth, the one asset my work profession is built to register.

To see why that feels so disorienting, it helps to remember how the other arrangement — mine — actually began. Capitalism did not descend fully formed; it was assembled, and its founding act took place in the English countryside between roughly 1500 and 1800. The commons, the open fields that villagers had grazed and gleaned together for centuries, were fenced off and made private. Enclosure, the history books call it, with the mildness the English reserve for their more consequential crimes. Two things happened in a single motion. Land became a pure profit-seeking asset. And the people who had lived from it, stripped of the common ground, were left with nothing to sell but their own hours — which is to say, wage labour was itself manufactured, on purpose, as the precondition of the whole system. Marx called this the "primitive accumulation," the violent prologue that pooled the capital and the propertyless in the same act. It was the pouring of a foundation. Everything we now mistake for the natural order — the mortgage, the tower, the registered charge over the tower — is built on that slab. Mongolia is the place where the concrete was never set.

There is a subtler way to put it, which I owe to Karl Polanyi. What made the modern economy possible was the invention of three "fictitious commodities" — land, labour and money — things bought and sold on markets that were never produced to be sold at all. Land is nature; labour is human life; money is a token of trust. Turning each into a thing with a price was an act of imagination so total that we no longer notice it was imagined. The pasture around the lake is what the earth looks like before that particular fiction is applied to it — ground the to be protected for nature itself against exploitive human development.

The historical joke almost tells itself. The people who most stubbornly refused to own land assembled the largest contiguous empire in the history of the species. Genghis Khan's wealth was horses, loyalty and speed; he took the world in part because he was tied to no corner of it. The un-enclosed mind, it turns out, is portable in more ways than one.

Here my inner skeptic clears her throat: surely this only works while the numbers stay small — few enough people and beasts that the open range is not grazed to dust. And she is right that Mongolia has a real overgrazing problem since the herds were privatised and the old customs that timed everyone's movements began to fray. But listen to what the objection quietly assumes. It cannot scale takes for granted that scaling is the point — that more, forever more, is the axis along which any way of living must be judged. That is the voice of my own system, doing the judging. The commons did not fail for want of fences; they falter when a people outgrows the invisible institutions that once moved everyone along before the pasture gave out. On that reading, capitalism is the disease of scale wearing the cure's clothes — the fence we reach for only after we have forgotten how to keep moving.

One last thing the woman with the knife understood without being told. Our machine does not run on comfort; it runs on the conviction that you are one purchase short of it. A people at ease with wind and cold and enough is a solvent to that machine, because a contented person is a defective customer — and northern Mongolia is full of them.  The bite of the northern wind make them pretty tough warriors that love a bit of exercise and don't mind the grit in their nails. 

I did not come here only to look. I came, if I am honest, half in search of an exit — from the cut throat profit demanding machine, and from the digital overwhelm that is the machine speeded up and aimed at my attention. Three days on, I have gathered fodder for the mind and little else. The trick that holds the whole thing together is older and quieter than any fence or deed: a premise, planted so deep we mistake it for weather, that there is never enough to go around, and that only the discipline of scarcity can hold a people in order. The herders seem to live on the far side of that belief. My tribe lives sealed inside it, and mostly cannot see outside the ger wall.

But walls have a habit of turning out to be misreadings. Consider the man whose face the market prints on its banknotes and quotes over every closure — Adam Smith, enshrined as the founding father of the property economy, patron saint of the invisible hand. Read him and the monument dissolves. Smith opened his life's work by declaring that "there are principles in our nature which interest us in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to our own." He wrote of the landlord who "reaps where he never sowed" with something close to contempt. Sympathy, he held, is the foundation of human nature, and a muscle that wastes when it goes unused. We built a civilisation on a caricature of him and engraved it as his legacy.

Which is where a way out first glimmers. If the founding father was misread — if even the bedrock text can be turned over and found to say the opposite of what the banknotes claim — then the definitions we treat as permanent were only ever agreements, and agreements can be rewritten. Ownership included. Perhaps the border I could not see anyone across was never the edge of the world, only a definition of it. Perhaps saving my tribe is nothing grander, and nothing smaller, than redefining what it means to own: to hold the movable thing gently, and to leave the ground open.

I began that argument as a poem before I ever reached this lake. It ends by asking the same man to do the one thing his monument will not permit — to step down off the banknote and stand up as himself.

▎ not the one on the banknote,

▎ not the one the hedge funds quote,

▎ not the invisible hand waved over every cut…

▎

▎ Kindness, strangely — Necessary.

▎ Has always been standing there.

▎ Would the real Adam Smith please stand up.

— from Would the Real Adam Smith Please Stand Up (https://po3m.com/poem/would-the-real-adam-smith-please-stand-up)