Rent went up again this year. Not a little — enough that we did the math and it doesn't work anymore, not with everything else going up at the same time. You called the landlord. They said there's nothing they can do: costs are up everywhere, they have to stay competitive. You know this isn't quite true. You also know there's nothing you can do about it.
To create this system of privilege, land that was common had to become property. The people who farmed it for generations were pushed out, became landless, had to sell their labor to survive. Care that was communal — healing, childcare, the tending of the elderly — became unpaid domestic labor, then a convenience for those who can afford it, an unaffordable luxury for the rest of us, a multitrillion-dollar industry. Knowledge that was shared became intellectual property. Credit, which began as a social relationship between neighbors who trusted each other, became a product that extracts from the people who need it most. The most fundamental decisions about the places you live became something administered on your behalf, or simply done to you.
In 1981, the year Ronald Reagan took office and began the federal withdrawal of funding for affordable housing and community development, a thirty-nine-year-old democratic socialist named Bernie Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, by ten votes. He served four terms. In his second term, in 1983, members of his administration brought him a proposal for a community land trust — a nonprofit corporation that would own land permanently while selling the houses on it to working-class families, with a resale formula limiting how much the seller could capture from appreciation.
Sanders had reservations. Why should the working class be limited to shared equity when middle- and upper-class families could build full wealth from their homes? Wouldn't this create a second-class form of ownership? He was talked through it. The city's land trust would not be a substitute for full homeownership for those who could otherwise afford it; it would be a route into housing for those who otherwise could not. And crucially, the land's value — the speculative gain that otherwise flowed to whoever happened to buy at the right moment — would stay in the trust, available to the next family that needed a home.
The system produces surplus — the difference between what workers are paid and the value they produce. That surplus has to be realized somewhere: it has to find buyers. But the same system keeps wages low enough that the workers who make everything can't buy it back at the prices the system needs to charge. The math doesn't close. And yet the system keeps running. Which means it must be closing the math somewhere else.
Her argument resurfaced in the second half of the twentieth century when economists studying development kept running into something the models couldn't explain: why do the regions most integrated into global markets keep staying poor? Countries exporting raw materials, manufacturing goods, receiving investment — and the wealth was flowing the wrong direction. Dependency theorists called it underdevelopment, structural adjustment, the resource curse. The same mechanism would later be traced in the colonized body, named racial capitalism, extended into necropolitics. The mechanism is Luxemburg's. The outside is where the extraction happens. Integration doesn't close the gap. It is the gap.
In Ghana, structural adjustment required cutting the cocoa marketing board — the state body that had given Ghanaian cocoa farmers some negotiating leverage against international commodity prices. The farmers who had grown cocoa for generations found themselves selling directly into a market controlled by a handful of multinational traders, at prices set in London. The leverage was gone. The extraction continued.
There is a way to take from a field that takes the harvest, and a way that takes the field. The colonial period took the harvest — cocoa, labor, ore — and held the taking in place by force. Structural adjustment took the field. The marketing board was the seed bank: the stored capacity to start again on your own terms. The public services were the moisture in the ground. Burn those out and the land doesn't just yield less — it loses the power to regenerate, season after season, however hard the people on it work. An artificially depleted ground does not recover on its own. Whoever burned out the seed bank owes the seed. That is the case for reparations: not charity for a misfortune — restitution for a removal.
The fishing commons worked the same way. The Narmada River had supported fishing communities whose knowledge of the fishery — where fish concentrated at different seasons, who could fish where, the practices that prevented overfishing — lived entirely in the relationship between the community and this particular stretch of river, accumulated over generations. The dam altered the hydrology. The fish populations collapsed. The knowledge had nowhere to go.
Roy named this in terms the development economists hadn't used: the Narmada project was not trading some people's interests for others'. It was destroying governance capacity that couldn't be measured in the project's accounting but that had been sustaining people for centuries. The "greater common good" that justified the displacement was not common. It transferred value from people with less political power to people with more, and called the transfer progress.
The economist Henry George saw the mechanism in 1879 and proposed a precise response: tax the value of land itself — not buildings, not improvements, not the labor of people who developed the land — but the value created by the surrounding community's investment. Every hospital built with public funds increases the value of the private land adjacent to it. Every school, every transit line, every neighborhood improvement creates value for adjacent landholders who did nothing to create it. George's argument: that value belongs to the community that created it.
A home health aide in the Bronx — one of roughly two million in the United States — works twelve-hour shifts caring for an elderly client with advanced dementia: bathing, feeding, managing medications, providing the continuity of presence that is itself a form of care. The median wage for home health aides in New York is under $18 an hour, with no health insurance, no paid sick leave, and no pension. When the aide gets sick, she doesn't get paid. The client's family may pay $8,000 to $12,000 a month through the agency; the aide receives a fraction of that.
This is not an anomaly. It is the structure of the care economy: the work is real, the need is urgent, the skill required is genuine, and none of that translates into compensation adequate to the labor. The $10.8 trillion in unpaid care work is the shadow economy that the visible one runs on. The paid care sector, at wages that push workers into poverty, is its visible edge.
This is care under enclosure: the labor made to look like love, priced below its cost, extracted from people with few other options, generating profit for the institution that mediates between the care worker and the family that needs her.
What they built became the infrastructure of the digital world. None of them became billionaires. The people who built platforms on top of their gift did.
Six weeks after closing the restaurant and two burnouts in, I don't have faith in humanity. Not the sweeping kind — the kind that says people will rise to meet the moment and the arc bends toward justice. I've spent enough time in the rooms where things don't bend to say that plainly.
What I have instead: faith in the wisdom traditions. Faith in the indigenous elders who are quietly saving their corners of the world, who never needed the theory of the commons because they were living it. Faith in the cocinero in Ilocos, feeding his community while they rebuild what the storm took, the way someone has in that village for centuries — there will always be Filipinos out there feeding people. Faith in the awareness practices that let you see the trickle when the catastrophe has trained you to expect the flood.
Enclosure arrives like a catastrophe — sudden, total, a betrayal. Recovery doesn't come back the same way. It comes as a trickle. The farmers market is back and not bad. There's a music gig next week. The open protocols still running underneath the platforms that tried to enclose them — doing things the enclosures can't, because they were built to give away. The Airbnb guests who sit at the kitchen table in the morning and don't want to leave. The meadow not cut. The muskrats last year, first time I'd seen them here. The black-and-white warbler that just arrived in the park down the street.
You need the awareness practices to see the trickle. Most people don't have them. Part of what this book is trying to be is an awareness practice — a way of training the attention so that the trickle becomes visible, so that the seed sprouting in someone else's consciousness registers as something worth watering.