The Enclosure Movement Privatized Land — Here’s What It Foreshadows About AI
Productive assets in the economy have changed. Here's what that means for ownership in an AI-dominate world.
The world is on the cusp of the next great digital revolution. Like the industrial revolutions of the past, today’s digital revolutions represent a dramatic change in the methods of production, the meaning of work, and how society is structured.
The change that’s underway redefines the value proposition of human labor altogether. For the first time in history, the human mind will compete with machines — not just their brawn. This will change the role of humans as economic participants in the economy as a whole, reshaping society as we know it.
With the advent of inorganic forms of labor, such as artificial intelligence, humans will have to compete in a labor market that no longer demands its labor. What will become of societies, governments, and civilizations when the fullness of this digital revolution comes to fruition?
History reveals that humans have been here before. During the Middle Ages, leading up to the advent of capitalism, society was organized around small manors where peasants toiled at the behest of their lords. While peasants didn’t own the land they worked on, manors came with communal plots of land they could use to grow their own crops or graze livestock. Communal land made it possible for peasants to generate surplus for themselves beyond their obligations to their lord.
Access to communal land went through a process of privatization referred to as enclosure. The elimination of peasant-accessible land ushered in a transition of human labor. Rather than obliging one’s self to their lord, a peasant sold their labor instead. Combined with other events of the period — like the Black Death — changed the demand for human labor. What followed was the gradual emergence of the market-based urban industrial economic system that is commonly recognized today.
This article will dive into the consequences of enclosure and the lessons that can be learned today. It will reveal that in the absence of owning the means of production — or at the bare minimum access to those means — peasants are unable to support themselves. They inevitably become wards of their employer or wards of the state for sustenance.
With the arrival of artificial intelligence, a great deal of human cognitive labor will become redundant and obsolete. Just as bands of despondent farmers vainly searched for work in the Middle Ages, the same thing will happen to today’s knowledge workers. This will necessitate the emergence of a new economic system that doesn’t emphasize the ownership of the means of production or the allocation of human labor that accompanies it.
Enclosure was a process of privatizing communal public lands. Without the means to independently grow their own food, peasants became paupers, turning to the sale of their labor for survival.
The economy of Medieval Europe was a feudal economy where peasants — referred to as serfs — worked the land of noblemen. While the economy was organized around private ownership of land, manors often contained parcels of land that individual peasants could use for their own sustenance. That changed beginning as early as the 12th century as communal lands became privatized.
The process of enclosure lasted several centuries. According to E.K. Hunt and Mark Lautzenheiser in History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective:
“The enclosure movement reached its peak in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when in some areas as many as three-fourths to nine-tenths of the tenants were forced out of the countryside and into the cities to try to support themselves.” (Hunt and Lautzenheiser, 17)
What’s important about the enclosure movement isn’t so much why it happened but the consequences of it. Without common land to farm or graze animals on, peasants had no way to produce anything for themselves. As the economic realities of the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War made feudalism less viable, serfs became destitute.
Robert Heilbroner writes in The Worldly Philosophers:
“Deprived of the right to use the common land, [the peasant] could no longer maintain himself as a “farmer”…Instead, he became the most miserable of social classes, an agricultural proletarian, and where agricultural work was lacking, a beggar, sometimes a robber, usually a pauper.” (Heilbroner, 32)
At this point, Europe was organized around monarchies rather than independently recognized nation-states. The Catholic Church was the closest thing to a centralized government. As a result, it became the primary provider for the “agricultural poor” creating the early foundation for the modern welfare state.
More importantly, enclosure slowly eroded the social fabric that bound members of society together. Feudal Europe didn’t have a system of laws to follow. Instead, it was governed according to the customs and traditions of individual manors.
Land was important, not just as a means of providing sustenance, but as a means of adhering to customs and defining your role in society:
“The social hierarchy [of Medieval Europe] was based on individuals’ ties to the land, and the entire social system rested on an agricultural base.” (Hunt and Lautzenheiser, 10)
As enclosure was implemented, the traditions that governed work diminished while the peasants’ ties to the land became severed. As a result, their status within society waned.
By the 1500s, a working class emerged, distinct from that of its agrarian predecessors. Without land to work, the only thing peasants had left to sell was themselves which:
“Creat[ed] a working class that was systematically stripped of any control over the production process and forced into a situation in which the sale of its labor power was its only means of survival.” (Hunt and Lautzenheiser, 17)
Centuries of privatization led to the emergence of a labor market who had to sell their labor in order to survive. This idea of a market became a central organizing principle in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations which ushered in the current economic system we govern ourselves around today — capitalism.
While the excess supply of labor wasn’t the only driving force that led to the creation of a market-based economic system, it was a major contributor. Without it, peasants revolted, wreaking havoc across Medieval Europe.
Today’s market-based system emerged from the need to put people to work. A new system will inevitably emerge as AI is poised to displace billions of workers around the globe.
The end of feudalism and the process of privatizing communal lands created a surplus of workers without work to do. This required a new economic system to generate value and give those workers a stake in benefiting from that value.
This new system — capitalism — was defined by markets that exchanged value. Human labor found value in producing excess quantities of goods — first farm goods then later industrially manufactured goods — that could be sold commercially. It was determined that trade from the sale of goods contributed to the national wealth of newly established countries and determined how those countries ranked in the fledgling international system.
Capitalism redefined what was valuable within an economy and, thus, how it should be organized. According to Heilbroner:
“Labor, not nature, was the source of “value” that was one of Smith’s greatest insights.” (Heilbroner, 49)
While capitalism gives individuals the ability to own the means of production — rather than the state — it really only benefits those who already own something that can be used for production: a farm, a factory, or tools. It doesn’t help individual workers:
“The typical worker enters the market owning or controlling only one thing — the capacity to work, that is, his or her labor power.” (Hunt and Lautzenheiser, 6)
This creates a new problem as we enter into an age of automation and artificial intelligence. Manual labor power has been in decline for decades which prompted increasing numbers of laborers to pursue cognitive work. This is the basis of today’s knowledge workforce. But with AI challenging humans for cognitive supremacy, there will be nothing left for humans to sell.
Complicating things is the role consumerism plays in how society is structured today. While in the past, status was conferred by ties to land, status today is obtained through possessions purchased through the value derived from one’s labor. Possessions outwardly convey wealth and status, or at a minimum, the appearance of those things.
The emergence of consumerism as a guiding principle for the social order was deliberate and by design. It was an incentive that was necessary to keep the productive capacity of workers at profitable levels:
“The new philosophy brought with it a new social problem: how to keep the poor poor…unless the poor were poor, they could not be counted upon to do an honest day’s toil without asking for exorbitant wages.” (Heilbroner, 40)
As the demand for human workers wanes, so too will their ability to keep up appearances with their designated social class. Just as the social fabric slowly degraded in Medieval Europe, the same dissolution of order can be anticipated for society today.
The history of enclosure and the emergence of AI reveal a new system will have to be created just as Adam Smith brought capitalism to light in the 18th century. The new system will need to define an organizing principle for participants in the economy, as well as the social order that holds that economy together. Without these two things, production will grind to a halt and civilization as we know it will be unable to sustain itself.
Final takeaway.
The lessons of land enclosure in England are important to understanding the distribution of productive assets in today’s economy. Those assets — algorithms, digital platforms, and data — are used by all but owned by just a few.
Control over these assets and the productive capabilities they possess — the ability to capture attention at scale — will define the new digital economy that emerges.
Like the peasants of Europe, today’s workers — ranging from esteemed lawyers in Boston to garbage pickers in the slums of New Delhi — will be left equally dispossessedd by the new economic system that will inevitably replace the consumer-capitalist system we know today.
As AI comes online and more and more companies adopt it, employment opportunities for knowledge workers will become scarce. Just as bands of farmers roamed the English countryside in search of work during Smith’s time, a similar phenomenon is already underway today.
Whatever economic system emerges from the latest digital revolution is likely to be highly individualistic in nature. Workers will have agency and choice to participate in the economy — or not. They will be able to independently sell their labor on a truly free market or opt-out entirely.
History reveals that change at this scale has happened before and it is inevitable that it will happen again. Understanding the role modern workers play in the economy — not the role they think they play — will provide clarity as the new system emerges.
This essay is part of a ChatGPT-generated course The History of Modern Economic Thought. Read more about it here.
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