A price for everything, the right to nothing

Photo by Lucas Vieira dos Santos on Unsplash

They used to call it a right. Now it’s a product. Water flows, assuming you can afford the bill. Roads exist, but only through toll gates. Shelter, movement, your digital identity, and even your privacy now come with a price tag. What was once assumed as part of life is sold back to us, behind walls built by corporations and upheld by law.

This is not a bug in the system. It is the system. Prosperity today is not built by work but by control. You don’t become prosperous by producing - you become prosperous by owning what others cannot avoid using.

We have seen this before. Rome once hollowed itself out in the same way. Rights were stripped, access was narrowed, and people were forced into a new kind of servitude. That is the direction in which we are heading.

The Mechanism of Privilege

You don’t need to invent something useful to become rich - you only need to control access to what others cannot do without. That is the logic behind rent. It is the engine of most modern fortunes.

Across the economy, the same pattern repeats. A handful of corporations own the pipelines of daily life, whether those pipelines move money, electricity, data, or food. They charge for the right to pass through. Landlords extract rent from those who need a place to live, platform owners extract fees from those who need visibility, and banks extract interest from those who need money to survive.

These are not productive arrangements but ransoms disguised as rights, and you don’t get to participate unless you pay. What once belonged to the commons is locked behind legal privileges, most of them protected and subsidised by the state. These privileges are the scaffolding of modern power and do not reflect merit. More often, they are a form of institutional thuggery.

From Commons to Control

There was a time when much of what sustained life was shared. Land was used by communities, forests gathered from, water drawn without charge. These were the commons. They fed people, sheltered them, and made freedom real.

Then came enclosure. Fields were fenced, customs were rewritten, and what once belonged to all was claimed by a few. Access once assumed was made conditional, and what was once shared for all to use was made costly. We call it innovation, but much of it is enclosure by another name.

Karl Polanyi warned that treating essential goods like land and labour as market commodities would unravel the social fabric. That warning now reads like a headline.

Rome offers a clear example. As wealth and land concentrated in the hands of the elite, free citizens were pushed into dependency. Smallholders became tenants, tenants became debtors, and debt became a tool of control. Over time, rights faded, and a class of people emerged who became bound to the land and to the will of landowners. The republic gave way to an empire. The empire gave way to serfdom.

We’re not drifting towards serfdom, but charging headlong into it with our eyes closed.

Debt Before Bondage

In the Roman Empire, serfdom did not begin with shackles. It began with debt. The same is true today. People are not property by law but by obligation. Rent is due and loans must be repaid. Access to work, housing, and education depends on your ability to pay those who control the ticket gate.

What we call freedom is often just a choice between toll roads. If you want visibility, you pay a platform. If you want credit, you pay a bank. If you want stability, you pay a landlord. Work is no longer a path out of dependence that it ought to be. In many cases, it is the mechanism of dependence.

Even in the digital world, we labour under someone else’s terms. Algorithms set the pace, data is extracted, and surveillance replaces trust. The boss has been replaced by a platform, but the result is the same. Your time, energy, and attention are turned into someone else's revenue.

This is not the new serfdom. That would be a comfort because, while serfdom comes with certain obligations, it also has certain protections. What we are living through is pre-serfdom. It is a state of deepening exposure, where dependence grows but recognition does not. Power is exercised without duty and extraction comes without limits. We need to understand what comes next. Because we have seen it before.

This Is Not Natural

None of this is inevitable and none of it is natural. It’s the outcome of decisions, laws, and systems built to protect those who profit from control. The stories we are told about merit, markets, and innovation are often cover for legalised looting by those who write the rules in their own favour.

Governments do not merely tolerate these privileges, they fund and enforce them. Public research becomes private profit, essential infrastructure is handed to monopolies, and tax systems reward asset holders while punishing labour. Even risk itself is socialised - when the rich fail, they are rescued. But when the rest are on their knees, they are blamed.

This is not a free market - it’s a rigged market, shaped by those who already hold power. The illusion of fairness hides a structure that bleeds the public while calling it progress.

Once again, we are paying for what we already built. And the rent never stops rising.

A Different Future

It doesn't have to be this way. A different future is possible, but only if we recover what has been taken: the power to shape our systems, the rights that make participation real, and the shared privileges that have been locked away behind gates. The commons can be rebuilt. Land, knowledge, and infrastructure can serve people, not profits. We can govern collectively what we once shared instinctively.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a survival strategy.

We have already seen glimpses of that future in community land trusts that protect housing from speculation, in public banks that reinvest in local needs, in renewable energy cooperatives owned by the people they serve. We’ve also seen it in cities that bring transport, water, and energy back into public hands. These are not isolated gestures. They are signs that people remember what it means to share power, and are acting on that memory.

Wherever people organise to take back what they built, something changes. The logic of rent is interrupted. The gate is opened. The terms of use become the terms of freedom.

The alternative is a future where everything is owned, and everyone rents their place in it. But that isn’t the only story we can tell - we still have time to choose and time to act.

When rights become ransoms, resistance becomes duty.

In 1799, Scotland passed a law to abolish the last legal form of serfdom in the coalfields. But it was not until 1830 that the practice truly ended. One of those bound to the mines was my six-times great-grandfather, James Davidson, a serf at a pit in Dailly, Ayrshire. He was born into bondage, owned by the industry he worked for. That is not distant history. It is a reminder of how easily rights can be stripped, and how hard they are to win back. We should not let any family return to that fate.