Fight for $15! Or Maybe Not? A Shifting Perspective

What if the key to reducing poverty is not just higher wages but uninhibited access to land and housing?

The fight for a higher minimum wage is picking up around the country in many forms. It’s a long time coming, and a higher base wage will help many survive with greater ease than is now possible on meager pay currently standard for so many jobs. However, I’ve been less excited about these efforts than my former union- organizing self would have expected to be. I have a sneaking suspicion we’re putting immense time and resources into a battle we’ll just be repeating a few years down the line, when prices of basic goods will rise yet again to unsustainable levels for the majority of people. It doesn’t matter much if you have a 50% increase in pay if the price of shelter jumps 100 to 200%.

I’ve had the same concern about basic income programs. Yes, a guaranteed income would allow many of us to worry less about how we’ll take care of our basic needs, or it might free up time to do necessary care work or other important pursuits. But only so long as that monthly allowance covers enough of one’s expenses—and there is little to suggest, at this moment in time, that the cost of critical items like housing or healthcare will stay down.

The fight for higher wages is ultimately a fight for people to be better able to afford what they need to live. But it is a specific strategy to that end, and one which has trade-offs I’ve seen little discussed among worker-supporting organizers and campaigners. Quite noticeably, it continues the dependent relationship of the majority of people upon a smaller minority with access to greater levels of capital—upon the owning class. It continues a system by which labor must be exchanged for cash that can then be used to purchase basic goods needed for life. It does not do the work of creating systems by which we could meet our needs without being dependent on the owning class both for the production of daily necessities and for the income to access them. Basic income proposals, as opposed to higher minimum wages, try to shift this power relationship at least a bit, by providing a means of access to cash that does not come through an employer. But they, too, leave the broader system intact, and create a reliance on the state that is also questionable.

I am curious about why those of us aiming to build a more just society have been so willing to accept the basic structure of unjust social systems. One of the most basic rules of our current economy is that things have a price, and that money must be paid for them. Rather than fighting for more money—which adheres to the current economic rules—why not consider strategies that challenge that fundamental notion?

Again, the fight for more money—for higher wages—is a fight for people to be better able to purchase commodities necessary for life. It seems to me simpler and more conducive to general human happiness and wellbeing to make sure that those necessities need not be purchased at all. That is, they should be decommodified—taken out of market spaces. (As many of them were for quite a long time, before the wizards of modern capitalism worked their magic to make us believe they were things that could only be purchased, rather than things that could be made, given, or enjoyed without the semi-mystical object known as money.) A strategy of decommodification undermines the dependent relationship of workers upon the owning class, and potentially—depending on how it is carried out—the state as well.[1] It’s a strategy aimed more at reconstructing the foundation on which our economy is built rather than rearranging the furniture in the existing house.

What does it mean to decommodify a basic good like housing or land? It means to deny it a market, to deny the ability for it to be traded for other goods or for cash. We already have items that, socially or legally, we attempt to keep decommodified: human organs might be the most obvious one, along with organs and other parts of endangered animals. What’s more, we have in our historical memory the clearest example of choosing to decommodify that which had been commonly understood as a commodity: the decommodification of people themselves. The banning of slavery is a declaration that some things—like a human life itself—should not have a price, and should not be subjected to the whims of those with greater financial means, or to the forms of state violence required to enforce their participation as a commodity in the marketplace.

Some might wonder why I choose to use the word “decommodify” rather than to just say that such things should be free. I think that “free” also obscures all that goes into production. It obscures labor, both of humans and the land, and the productivity of grand interlocking ecological systems whose value we are beginning to dearly pay for ignoring. The making and exchanging of all that sustains us is not free. But that does not mean we need to be locked into paying for it with whatever modern form of currency has been cooked up, be it bank notes or bitcoin. We may still need to labor for it, but in a different manner than many of us do so today.

The one item on which we’ve made much headway in the discussion around decommodification is healthcare, with the movement for Medicare for All. Enough people have not only struggled to meet those costs but have had their life upended by them so that the fog has cleared, and we see the hospital charges and insurance bills as they really are: putting a price on life, and a ruthless denial of life to those who cannot pay. And there is good debate right now on how to transform the systems of exchange that deliver medical care so that one need not have access to cash or credit to be able to participate in that exchange.

This same type of conversation should be happening for every other sector necessary to our survival. I do think they are beginning to happen, though the progress can feel painfully slow: discussions of public housing are beginning to take place or replace discussions of affordable housing. There are active efforts to decommodify land, through increasingly creative forms of land trusts. Yet these are taking place at the same time as well-resourced pushes by the owning class to further commodify that which has yet been fully captured by the market; the last year saw water listed as a commodity on the stock exchange for the first time.

There are those who want to ensure that we must pay simply to live—that we must pay more than we ever have, for more things than we ever have, just to survive. Such minds will do what they can to extract and hoard whatever higher wages workers manage to secure for themselves. We know that there are many such minds in the world; they’ve been running things for some time now. We aid them in their goals when we allow them to continue putting a price on everything, when we accept that as a natural and given fact about how the world works, and ask only that they give us moderately more means to buy what they have marked for sale.

Don’t misunderstand me; if there can be an easy win on higher minimum wages under the current administration, then it should be pursued. Given the many years of wage stagnation, though, there will be much applause should this happen. We can expect triumphant declarations, excessive use of the phrase “major milestone” in headlines. We should not be fooled by these. It is not a major milestone to help keep the majority of those laboring in our society barely floating along, as would still be the case even with a higher minimum wage. It will be a major milestone when, in a culture that says everything is up for sale, we begin saying, “No, not this. This is something we all need; we will make sure it is something we can all have, money or no.”

So what does decommodification look like, especially in relation to land? And is such a strategy in solidarity with efforts for land return to Native communities, or is it another form of land grab in social justice garb? I’ll be sorting through these questions in upcoming posts. If you know of any exemplary projects or interesting campaigns on this front, please send them my way at unsettling@substack.com.



[1] Many current proposals that use the language of ‘decommodify’ when talking about housing, for instance, don’t genuinely take housing out of the marketplace; they simply change the rules of the market, such as how much a landlord may increase rent. Or, alternatively, they offer up schemes for nationalizing housing, which seems to me rather risky given government tendencies towards surveillance and control of those most reliant on its services. A true decommodification scheme would seek to find methods of common ownership that diffuse and decentralize state power, rather than concentrate it.