"Period Of Perilous Transformation": Labour And Land Commodities And The Environmental Crisis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper uses the critical apparatus developed by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation to identify the ways in which the treatment of both labour and land as commodities have negative effects on society and the natural environment. Commodified labour is identified as coercive, non-democratic and anti-social, and disembedded from the society in which the labourer and the firm is situated. Similarly, the commodity status of land encourages the ignoring of the specific environmental and social context of that land. In contrast to the commodity, the non-commodity brings with it many and specific social responsibilities and many society members have access to it; it does not stay in the possession of one society member for long. Despite the ubiquity of labour and land commodities, efforts to decommodify both labour and land spring up spontaneously in many places. The examination of decommodified labour reveals that the commonly held beliefs about work – that it is a disutility that people undertake only for gain, and that the optimal organization form is a top-down hierarchy - turn out to be erroneous. Similarly, ownership of land tends to result in its degradation and the degradation of other parcels, while simultaneously fragmenting and degrading human society. This paper suggests Universal Basic Income at just above subsistence level as a way to decommodify labour to realize social benefits such as emphasis on the work rather than the wage, work becomes voluntary not coerced, varied and democratic, and environmental benefits from the elimination of environmentally harmful industries. Community Land Trusts based on Transition Towns are suggested to decommodify land, environmental benefits being realized through democratic land use decision making and community self-provisioning and sustainability projects on the Transition Town model.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".