Chapter 11 - Reflections on Capital and Land by Massey and Catalano

Summary

Picking up this book again has been a curious form of time-travel. Doreen Massey was our friend, mentor and comrade for over thirty years, and our ideas and concerns evolved in tandem over those decades. Now to go back and confront some of Doreen’s earliest work has been an eye-opener about where we all started, our relative naiveté in many respects, and the recurring need to reflect on the basic elements of one’s intellectual edifice. The thinking at work in Capital and Land reflects a very different time and place from today, for better and worse.

One thing that jumps out from the pages of Capital and Land is the clarion voice of Doreen’s authorship. The book is alight with good sense and careful reasoning, backed up by serious research. There is little to quibble with in how Massey and Catalano go about their business of investigating capital and land in postwar Britain. The study is well grounded in empirical data about landownership and rents. The authors are extremely precise in their delineation of different categories of ownership, both empirically and theoretically, and they are determined to tease out in a rigorous way the modes of landownership pursued by various forms of capital (i.e. agrarian, industrial and financial).

One thing that surprises is how much empirical data on land ownership the authors were able to muster. If one were to try to update this work, one would still run into a wall of data silence. Property ownership continues to be a taboo subject in terms of published, publicly accessible data. There is a better chance of getting details on CIA black sites (Paglen 2009). In California, for example, landownership filings are masked by all sorts of false-fronts registered to corporate attorneys, untraceable entities and offshore holdings. This informational black hole is only likely to get worse in the present political conjuncture.

On the theoretical side, the authors offer a remarkable short course in Marxism, including the transition from feudalism to capitalism – which was still relevant to understanding the origins of certain categories of land ownership in the UK, even if their economic and political salience had been transformed.