This is a summary of a long article on housing, work and unemploment which is on my blog.

The economic structure of the modern Industrial society is based on the appropriation of the land; this process also creates the financial hierarchy of values dependent on the landowners ability to extort rents. Further to this process the commodification of labour enabled by the necessity of paying rent and survival gives us the context of the division of wage values and its relation to unemployment.

Historically speaking, land was stolen from the peasants as a common resource and was known as the commons, giving us the idea of common land or more euphemistically a village common. However this idea rightly refers to the common wealth or common good and also has overtones of common sense; effectively that in society which was shared and acted as a means of social cohesion both economic and spiritual.

Fundamentally it was this concept of a cultural binding force which was attacked by Enclosures or Clearances, rather than the modern idea that wealth was something contained within a material dimension which could be separated from the human process integral to its cultural conception. This article looks at the ways in which the motivation of the Aristocratic land grabbers concealed a deeper sense of denial of the livelihood of the common people as a natural paradigm.

From this perspective of how land came to be considered a resource to be exploited for the private gain of a capitalist class, the concept of Labour emerges as a quantification of the production process which is distinct from any previous culture of subsistence. In so far as work is defined in terms of its usefulness to Industry, unemployment merely acts as a negative description of the compulsion to work for an employer. As such it is loaded with all the stigmatisation of non-conformity to the myth of the work ethic.

The crucial factor in the equation of work with production and classical economics is the sense that not only does it define the moral basis on which people are forced into slave labour and low wages, but by pretending that such a situation reflects the laziness of those unwilling to join such a system it effectively obscures the appalling working conditions forced on the labourer. Through their conformity to the industrial process the peasants are forced to accept a denial of the nurturing effect of work in its natural context.

Equally, as the capitalist system gives rise to new forms of technology and communications, civil unrest polarises society between political ideology and pure financial regulation. It is the culture of scientific rationalism which exerts a greater pressure and gives us the modern paradox that while ownership is championed as the ultimate virtue it is, nonetheless, an expression of our cultures complete denaturisation and defines the absence of a sense of belonging.