The Criminalization of Gleaning
A Man Gleaning, George Seurat. (British Museum).
This essay was published as the Afterword to “Who Gets the Remainder? The Ethics and Politics of Gleaning,” edited by Amiel Bize and Xenia Cherkaev, in History & Anthropology.
The whole history of capitalism begins with the expropriation of people from the land, turning it into money and them into nothings. The passage from nothing to money is conducted by work, and yet people will cling on and find a way out of no way, because no expropriation is ever total. This is the evidence of remainders, or broadly speaking, the evidence of gleaning.
The essays in Who Gets the Remainder? The Ethics and Politics of Gleaning, have an amazing range of subjects from roadside exchanges of siphoned fuel in East Africa, to the ‘three stalks’ rule of the Hebrew Mishnah, to the scrap metal dealings in Tbilisi, Georgia and Nairobi, Kenya, to artisanal gold mining in Burkina Faso, to Danish ‘fusk’, or Soviet ‘homers’, to the repurposing of beams, joists, and bannisters of abandoned houses in the American rust belt. Xenia Cherkaev and Amiel Bize provide an introduction to these exceptions to the usus, fructus, and abusus of private property. Indeed, such exceptions are the basis of another world of creativity, moral or ethical value, and belonging. What is waste or wild, what is tacitly whispered, what is illicit, sometimes criminalized, and often winked at, all take what was abused and put it to use, even fructifying it as forms of the commons.
It is an encyclopedic project gathered brilliantly and told not without a touch of humour. It rests on investigation and practice, not theory or utopia, helping us see that another world is possible. To this scholarly project we want to sound a religious, a Marxist, and an English note.
Religion. The religious note offers values of human agency and faith in history
The Book of Ruth is at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible. Ruth is a gleaner as well as an outsider. The heart of the story is gleaning, that is, the activity of gathering the stalks and ears of grain left on the ground after the reapers had done harvesting. Gleaning enables her to cross tribal borders, to become accepted by harvesters and proprietors alike, and to marry Boaz, a landlord.
The Book of John is the last of the Gospels in the Christian Bible. Chapter six, verse twelve expresses the aftermath of a ‘miracle’, or clean-up time, time to glean, where, after five loaves and two fishes fed 5,000 people contentedly, Jesus says to his disciples, ‘collect the pieces left over so that nothing may be lost’. This they did and filled twelve baskets of left-overs from the original five barley loaves. Ever since, workers, on hearing how Jesus led his disciples in gleaning, could relate to their own experiences in shop, field, and home with the remainders or what’s left over after production. What had formerly belonged to the craftsmen and craftswomen as part of their customary compensation package will be criminalized.
The history of the commons has a semantics of its own – pannage, chiminage, wainage, estovers, etc. Every craft and trade had its ‘usages’ or ‘perquisites’ or ‘customs’ or ‘fat’ to use the general colloquial term. Servants received vails; shoemakers received clickings; hatters received buggings; the tanner took rumps and birrs; the forester took lops and tops; watchmakers received scrapings; tailors took cabbage; silk weavers took ends; wool weavers took fents and thrums; shipwrights chips; dockers took spillings or scrapings; lumpers took sweepings; coopers waxers; pinions and noils for the wool and silk comber, and on and on in the usually hidden contest across the length and breadth of homo faber, man the maker. These many customary usages were deemed legally criminal and economically inefficient. They are the semantic expression of the incomplete separation of the worker from his or her tools and materials of production. They belonged to the worker’s common.
Taking them away entirely led to immiseration of the craftsperson, the criminalization by police, and technological innovation. It might lead to revolution. In the summer of 1789 in France, the peasants rose up during the grand peur, stating their grievances in cahiers de doléance. The historian, George Lefebvre, provides an important clue. The sickle, he says, was a friendly instrument to the gleaners, as bending over required more frequent standing up for relief than did the swaying scythe, which cut closer to the ground. The commons has a user-friendly technology of its own. The sickle left more behind.
That was France. During the English Revolution of the 1640s, Abiezer Coppe advocated neither ‘sword levelling’ nor ‘digger levelling’, yet he prophesized how ‘the substantiality of levelling is coming’. So, against the great ones of the earth, he wrote
Well! Do what you will or can, know you have been warned. It is not for nothing, that I the Lord with a strong wind cut off (as with a sickle) the fullest, fairest ears of corn this harvest, and drop’t them on purpose for the poor, who had as much right to them, as those that (impudently and wickedly, thievishly and hoggishly) stile themselves the owners of the Land.
It’s not the first time that religion, and Biblical knowledge, served the class struggle.
Marx. The Marxist Note Offers a Materialist Approach of Class Struggle
Raoul Peck’s film, The Young Karl Marx (2017) begins with a scene of poor people gathering dead wood in a forest, which they customarily had done for centuries. But the government has made it illegal to collect the wood as it is now legally private property of the landlords who profitably float it down the Rhine River to Dutch shipyards and to English builders. Mounted troops charge through the forest to drive out the local people gathering winter’s fuel.1 The poor are left behind, cold and without even a stick for the fire.
The nineteenth-century forest world of the Grimm fairy tales, set among commoners of Marx’s time, was coming to an end as commerce and capitalism took over. Faced with this, Marx went to London for the rest of his life, an exile, an immigrant, a revolutionary in the capital of imperial convergences. Marx, in his 1857 Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, said that the theft of wood articles of 1842 led him to political economy. He writes,
We demand for the poor a customary right, and indeed one which is not of a local character but is a customary right of the poor in all countries. It is by activity that poverty acquires its right. By its act of gathering, the elemental class of human society appoints itself to introduce order among the products of the elemental power of nature.
The stress is on the word ‘elemental’. It refers to humans and to nature. Later he writes, ‘The same thing holds good also in regard to gleaning after the harvest and similar customary rights’.
In 1759 an Irishman, Oliver Goldsmith (‘Custom and Law Compared’), cites John of Antioch: ‘The enslaved are the fittest to be governed by laws, and free men by custom’. Custom ‘is kept by the people themselves, and observed with willing obedience. The observance of it must, therefore, be a mark of freedom … .’ ‘Thus nothing can be more certain than that numerous written laws are a sign of a degenerate community, and are frequently not the consequence of vicious morals in a state, but the causes … .’
In 1788 the Court of Common Pleas, a high court of England, ruled that ‘no person has, at common law, a right to glean in the harvest field’. And the community degenerated, as Goldsmith and John anticipated.
Marx wrote that his most original contribution was analysis of ‘the irrationality of the wage’. He showed how the buying and selling of labour power, itself the result of the loss of subsistence commons, concealed unpaid labour or surplus-value. This is politically and historically important because the wage conceals the unpaid labour to the waged while revealing it to the unwaged. The wage is white, said W.E.B. Dubois. Indeed, the wage becomes a structural means of political division as the basis of slave production and women’s reproduction, while all social relations were poisoned by white supremacy and patriarchal misogyny.
England. England Offers History, Custom, and Locale. Its Social History Depends on Two Millennia of the Bible and Two Centuries on Marx
It’s an old story in England. The Great Charters of Liberty of medieval times protected widow’s estovers. In addition to estovers (gathering wood), the charters spoke of chiminage (right to roam), pannage (acorns and mast for pigs), herbage (grazing for livestock), for fuel, sustenance, and pathways. Together they formed a web of communal rights and powers providing people with access to means of production and subsistence. In 1766, an English law was passed, making it an offence to ‘willfully cut or break down, bark, burn, pluck up, lop, top, crop, or otherwise deface, damage, despoil or destroy or carry away any Timber tree’.
The story of the criminalization of custom was the theme of ‘the Warwick school’ of social history led by E.P. Thompson. Albion’s Fatal Tree (Hay et al. 1975) and Whigs and Hunters (Thompson 1975) were the pillars of that approach.2 J. Neeson’s wonderful book, Commoners, really established the reality of the destruction of the commons (1993). Robert Malcolmson’s book on The Pig in English history was significant (Malcomson and Mastoris 1998). Another associate of Warwick, David Morgan, was a cow man, whose decades of farm labour made his observations and findings directly valuable, including what he offers about gleaning.3 Here, in Nottinghamshire, in 1860, is the proclaiming of a Queen of the Gleaners:
The villager crier having ‘proclaimed the Queen’, nearly 100 gleaners assembled at the end of the village. Women with their infant charges, boys with green boughs, and girls with flowers, the whole wearing gleaning-pockets; children’s carriages and wheelbarrows, dressed in green and laden with babies, etc., were in requisition … . [A] royal salute was shouted by the boys, and the crown brought out of its temporary depository … .
Then David Morgan quotes the proclamation speech. Assembly, sovereignty, and right were the ideas expressed in this politics ‘from below’.
John Grout remembers the harvesting in East Anglia. In lieu of church, ‘The holy time was the harvest’. Thirty mowers reaped by hand.
“The lord sat atop the last load to leave the field, and then the women and children came to glean the stubble. … we all went shouting home. Shouting in the empty old fields – I don’t know why. But that’s what we did. We’d shout so loud that the boys in the next village would shout back.4”
It is as if the community in its triumph of collective labour let out a collective exhalation.
John Grout joined religion and production inviting an anthropology of work and liturgy. Ronald Blythe’s magnificent Akenfield supplies transcriptions of oral testimony of gleaning in twentieth-century Sussex. Emily Leggett remembered,
“We women and children went gleaning when the last wagons had left the field. We picked up the corn for mother and she cut the ears off with her pig-knife, and put them in a sack. We were allowed to keep all this. We fed it to the fowls or ground it into flour.”
Blythe reflects on the testimonies he gathered as follows. ‘Deep in the nature of such men [and women] and elemental to their entire being here is the internationalism of the planted earth … .’ Again ‘elemental’ is the word of choice for these practices.
The leader of our Warwick collective was E.P. Thompson who showed that custom lies at the interface of law and praxis. He quotes from Samuel Carter in Lex Custumaria (1696). Custom becomes law by its antiquity, continuance, certainty, and reason. Its continuance depends on oral tradition.
“A Custom which hath obtained the force of a Law, is always said to be Jus non scriptum, for it cannot be made or created, either by Charter or by Parliament, which are Acts reduced to Writing, and are always matter of Record: But being only matter of Fact, and consisting in Use and Practice, it can be recorded and registered no where but in the Memory of the People.”
Our ‘Warwick school’ had this in common with anthropologists, a longing to abstract to universals from the living testimony of real people. Yet we eschewed theory and resorted to antiquarian ‘discoveries’ of yet another instance of whatever custom or ‘praxis’ we were examining. Edward Thompson called this ‘the empirical idiom’, though it might lead to evasions. Custom brought with it the lore of rituals and the culture of song and sayings. The Warwick School drew on two centuries of English parochial history and its supreme emphasis on locale. The phrase, ‘when the memory of man runneth not’ is often found in older descriptions of customary right. A moment’s thought reveals, therefore, the authority of the village elders who were the keepers of the communal memory and whose knowledge was passed on by word of mouth and communal celebration. (Lenin scornfully called them grandmothers’ tales.)
I fear that I am offering merely scholarly gleanings of my own when instead we need a framework: we need the shooked, stacked, and carted grain of the whole field, all the bread of life past, present, and future. Again, a framework rather than rhetoric is required (Xenia Cherkaev offers ‘a general theory’). The grain shipments out of Odessa come to mind, hungry bellies of Somalia, and the cultivators of the uprooted olive trees of Palestine.
In 1819, the year of the Peterloo Massacre, which is of legendary significance to the history of world trade unions, was also a year of many newspaper articles reporting on the criminalization of gleaning. It was also the year of a lyrical expression of English romanticism in John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819). Its seventh stanza goes like this:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Or perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Keats, faced with the devastations of hunger, violence, and upper-class theft of land, wrote romantically and found aegis in the nightingale. I like to think that we did too at the conclusion of the conference at which these pathbreaking essays were presented.
We departed from Ithaca, New York, to our separate ways, but before doing so, by the light of the full moon in the depths of the Cascadilla Gorge, we found ourselves in separate languages singing the same tune, nightingale-like, “The Internationale.”
Notes.
1. Daniel Bensaïd (2021), Pierre Lascoumes and Hartwig Zander, Marx: du “vol de bois” à la critique du droit (1984), and Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance (2014).
2. Later came The London Hanged (Linebaugh 1991), Magna Carta Manifesto (2008), and Red Round Globe Hot Burning (2019), my books inspired by colleagues at Warwick.
3. David’s essay can be found in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Village Life and Labour (London, 1975).
4. Ronald Blythe (1973, 56).
References.
Bensaïd, Daniel. 2021. The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on wood theft and the rights of the poor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Blythe, Ronald. 1973. Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village. London: Guild Publishing.
Hay, C. Douglas, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow. 1975. Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Pantheon Books.
Lascoumes, Pierre, and Hartwig Zander. 1984. Marx: du ‘vol de bois’ à la critique du droit. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Linebaugh, Peter. 1991. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Penguin Books.
Linebaugh, Peter. 2008. The Magna Carta Manifesto Liberties and Commons. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Linebaugh, Peter. 2014. Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Linebaugh, Peter. 2019. Red Round Globe Hot Burning A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Malcolmson, Robert, and Stephanos Mastoris. 1998. The English Pig: A History. London and Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press.
Morgan, David H. 1975. “The place of havesters in nineteenth-century village life.” In Village Life and Labour, edited by Raphael Samuel, 27–72. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.
Neeson, J. M. 1993. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge: Past and Present Publications, Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, E. P. 1975. Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. New York: Pantheon Books.
The Minimal Paradise and Creative
Economics
As humanity enters a new civilizational phase, it has the productive capacity to build the Minimal Paradise ─ an infrastructure in which every household can live a decent life, free from the constant worry of securing food, shelter, and other necessities. With approximately 8 billion people on the planet, they could be grouped into 2 billion households of four for macroeconomic modeling purposes, rather than as a mandatory social structure. The Minimal Paradise would require approximately 20% of the world’s total GDP, measured in purchasing power parity (PPP), to sustain 2 billion households. As explained below, this 20% is the upper limit; significantly less would suffice. This allocation would leave roughly 80% of global GDP available for Creative Economics, encompassing innovation, entrepreneurship, exploration, scientific development, engineering, and ambitious projects such as the habitation of other planets.
In common usage, the term “Paradise” carries profound theological associations with the afterlife. Here, however, the term evokes universal psychological resonance ─ a sense of security, dignity, and relief from subsistence anxiety. Religious believers may rest assured that the Minimal Paradise does not compete with or preclude the far greater “luxuriant paradise” promised in the next life. The Minimal Paradise is intended as an earthly civic order where all people live with dignity.
The Minimal Paradise is not a utopian fantasy, a political manifesto, a moral fable, back-door communism, or an aspirational legal framework drawn from United Nations resolutions. It is the emergent quality of human civilization, as transformative as a larva becoming a butterfly. A larva does not become a butterfly because it chooses to, or because it adopts a new ideology; it does so because its structural conditions and internal programming dictate that it must fly to survive the next phase of its life cycle. (This metaphor for social transformation is borrowed from The Extinction of Nation States.)
While the metaphor is insightful, the Minimal Paradise is not preordained; it is a pragmatic structure that emerges from a rapidly accelerating productive capacity of the twenty-first century. It marks a critical inflection point at which humanity abandons centuries-old conditions of destitution and the concomitant ideologies of slavery, forced labor, exploitation, class warfare, racism, caste systems, and mandatory work for even minimal benefits. By removing the threat of destitution, the Minimal Paradise liberates human potential worldwide, thereby bolstering the next phase of civilization.
Defining the Minimal Paradise
The Minimal Paradise is a life infrastructure, comparable to public roads, parks, libraries, Linux, and the Global Positioning System (GPS), that guarantees everyone on the planet freedom from fear of survival. This infrastructure can be realized without revolution or radical changes to political systems, markets, moral frameworks, or legal orders. The Minimal Paradise is available unconditionally to all humans, regardless of national origin, race, religion, gender, culture, occupation, or any other classification. Access is not contingent on employment, education, or productivity. It extends equally to poets, artists, dancers, caregivers, writers, monks, and others who choose a life of contemplation. No one is excluded; the Minimal Paradise has no literal or metaphorical gates or sentries.
The Minimal Paradise rejects any philosophy of idleness. On the contrary, it inspires ambition, productive work, and excellence. It provides a robust environment in which higher forms of human flourishing ─ creativity, knowledge, cooperation, virtue, courage, and self-actualization ─ can develop more fully. Creative Economics is integral to the Minimal Paradise; the two are inseparable as mutualists. Scientists, engineers, physicians, lawyers, accountants, economists, writers, plumbers, construction workers, and other workforces support both Creative Economics and Minimal Paradise.
Under the mutualist effects of the Minimal Paradise and Creative Economics, human choices expand rather than contract: people may have large or small houses, live in cities or the countryside, work in restaurants or factories, teach in colleges or schools, or be farmers or caregivers. Aesthetics and dignity remain integral to both the social fabric and the cultural environment.
Diversity of options is a defining feature of the Minimal Paradise, because there is no single template to follow in Africa, Asia, Europe, or the Americas. The Minimal Paradise does not require a global bureaucracy to ensure that every household lives with dignity and beauty. International cooperation is not excluded and might be necessary, as it respects local cultures, faith traditions, cuisines, weather, architecture, and dietary preferences. Each country and each province or state within the nation is free to imagine and implement the Minimal Paradise as it sees fit, provided it does not exclude anyone for any reason.
It is essential to clarify what the Minimal Paradise is not. This life infrastructure rejects old prototypes and must not be confused with care for the indigent, urban housing projects, soup kitchens for the hungry, or emergency shelters for the homeless. The Minimal Paradise is not built on charity or donations from the rich. It is not a Robin Hood experiment that transfers wealth from the rich to the poor. It is not the safety net for the poor envisioned in benevolent capitalism. It is not built on pity. Nor is it built on the guilt of wealthy sinners or on the desire to please gods.
The Minimal Paradise is a foundational investment to support the next phase of human civilization, in which every household lives free from hardship and contributes to Creative Economics.
GDP Allocation
To demonstrate that the emerging life infrastructure is a concrete reality rather than an idealized concept, we must examine the macroeconomic resources available to humanity today. We will achieve the Minimal Paradise not only because it is morally right and legally protectable, but because, for the first time in human history, we have the macroeconomic resources to build it. Conceptually, the model demonstrates that dedicating just 20% of global GDP is sufficient to establish the Minimal Paradise for all 2 billion households.
Macroeconomic numbers are often contested, and because critics obscure substance with numbers, the Minimal Paradise may be tentatively understood in terms of official GDP aggregates. When measured in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), global GDP and per-household income provide a more complete picture because PPP adjusts for the lower cost of living and cheaper local goods in developing nations, reflecting real-world purchasing power.
Global GDP in PPP terms stands at approximately $223 trillion, significantly exceeding the nominal GDP of $126 trillion. Currently, the World Bank uses $8.30 per person per day in PPP terms as the poverty line in Upper Middle-income countries. The international poverty line stands at $3.0 in PPP. Capitalizing on the inherent economic efficiencies of shared domestic life over isolated individual living, a household of four requires approximately $12,000 in PPP terms annually to meet this upper-middle-income threshold.
The $12,000 PPP figure serves as a global macroeconomic baseline used to demonstrate mathematical feasibility on a planetary scale. It does not imply a flat, uniform cash distribution or living standard across all nations. In higher-cost economies like the United States and Switzerland, the nominal dollar allocation drawn from the logistical reserve would scale upward significantly to reflect local market realities and maintain a comparable middle-class standard of living.
Thus, the world’s 2 billion households need $24 trillion per year in PPP terms to achieve an above-poverty standard of living in upper-middle-income countries. This amounts to a modest 11% of global GDP, which is 223 trillion in PPP terms.
However, the Minimal Paradise deliberately allocates 20% of global GDP ($44-45 trillion in PPP terms), far above the $24 trillion required for a global baseline. This additional $20 trillion represents a massive logistical surplus. Under the 20% allocation of global GDP ($44–45 trillion), the Minimal Paradise would provide an average of approximately $22,000 to $22,500 PPP per household annually for the world’s 2 billion households.
This surplus aligns with the security, dignity, and beauty of the Minimal Paradise. Even with this commitment, a staggering 80% of global GDP ($178.4 trillion PPP) is available for Creative Economics to sponsor creativity, discovery, entrepreneurship, scientific exploration, and massive development, further reinforcing the Minimal Paradise.
The Minimal Paradise and Creative Economics are not competitors; they form a symbiotic loop. As more people enjoy the unshakable security of the Minimal Paradise, they naturally contribute more to national and global resources. Building the Minimal Paradise is not a forced transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor; it is a strategic investment designed to generate new wealth. Just as successful corporations spend a significant share of their revenue on Research and Development to ensure future manufacturing breakthroughs, humanity will now invest a share of its wealth to underwrite the very people and their intelligence and skills that drive progress.
Scarcity Mindset
To understand why there might be hesitation to make a strategic 20% investment in the Minimal Paradise, we must examine the historical conditioning of the scarcity mindset. Historically, the exploitation of labor and the mistreatment of the poor were seen as the inevitable consequences of resource scarcity. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), the ultimate theorist of scarcity, argued that if a child’s parents cannot support them and society does not need their labor, that child has no inherent claim to food and no right to exist. Fearful of an exponential population explosion that would outstrip food supplies, Malthus made survival contingent on market demands. While he often comes across as a ruthless thinker, Malthus was grappling with a very real problem of limited resources. Today, when systemic deprivation drives destitute parents to abandon or harm their children, society witnesses a tragic, real-world expression of Malthusian logic, even if those parents have never heard of Malthus.
Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), an Anglo-Dutch physician and satirist, formulated a cynical philosophy. In The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville uses a hive of bees that thrives on greed and deceit but collapses when the bees become virtuous and honest, to illustrate that individual selfishness inadvertently protects the public good. Mandeville argued that a nation cannot amass wealth unless its working class remains hungry and eager for employment. He feared that a comfortable, satisfied human would grow lazy and refuse to work.
As a satirist, Mandeville may have intended the opposite of what his words literally mean; nevertheless, the Mandevillian philosophy of labor exploitation remains widely held in certain economic circles. It persists not necessarily out of sheer moral bankruptcy, but out of a rigid belief that desperation is required to create wealth. Modern sweatshops, debt bondage, and predatory labor practices are classic Mandevillian projects.
In law, the tension between resource scarcity and human dignity is starkly illustrated in the famous 1884 English common law case, Regina v. Dudley and Stephens, a lesson in jurisprudence for centuries. Stranded in a fragile lifeboat in the South Atlantic after their yacht sank, four English sailors ran entirely out of food and water. After weeks of starvation, the captain and mate decided to kill the weakest among them ─ a 17-year-old cabin boy named Richard Parker ─ and eat his flesh to survive. Upon their rescue and return to England, public sympathy was immense, and the trial jury took the rare step of issuing a “special verdict,” refusing to convict the men outright and instead sending the ultimate legal question to the higher courts: Can extreme necessity ever excuse murder?
The high court firmly rejected the necessity defense. In upholding capital punishment, Chief Justice Lord Coleridge opined: “Who is to be the judge of this sort of necessity? By what measure is the comparative value of lives to be measured? Is it to be strength, or intellect, or ‘what? It is plain that the principle leaves to him who is to profit by it to determine the necessity which will justify him in deliberately taking another’s life to save his own. In this case the weakest, the youngest, the most unresisting, was chosen. Was it more necessary to kill him than one of the grown men?” The answer is “No,” says the Lord.
Although the court sentenced the men to death, Queen Victoria commuted their sentence to just six months in prison, acknowledging the agonizing human tragedy of the case.
The utilitarian argument that a portion of the population must be sacrificed, exploited, or consumed to ensure the well-being of the remainder has long been regarded as an inescapable law of nature. While this position represented a moral failure, it arose primarily from concerns about genuine scarcity and limited resources. In the modern era, however, this ancient conflict between law and necessity, or morality and scarcity, has lost its rationale. Humanity now possesses the collective wealth, technology, and productive capacity to feed and shelter every household on Earth with relative ease.
Malthusianism Overturned
It is no miracle that China, with a population of 1.41 billion, is rapidly emerging as the world’s largest economy, with a GDP of $44.3 trillion measured in PPP terms. It is the emergent result of mobilizing millions of Chinese into Creative Economics. Likewise, India, with a population of 1.48 billion, is rapidly emerging as a robust economy ($18.9 trillion GDP) because millions of people, once excluded from the economy, are actively engaged in producing wealth, though millions more are still waiting to be included.
The United States, the world’s third most populous nation with a $32.38 trillion GDP, has been an economic powerhouse due to decades of broad-based participation. Virtually its entire demographic base, including immigrants of every legal status, serves as a robust engine for wealth creation. These three most populous countries in the world have a combined population of over 3 billion and a combined GDP of $95.58 trillion in PPP terms. Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, is also growing rapidly.
The large population that Malthus considered a curse has become a blessing for wealth creation. More people yield larger pools of potential scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and artists. One brilliant idea, whether a new agricultural technique, software code, or a manufacturing process, can be replicated at zero marginal cost to benefit millions. Population is no longer a drain on resources; it is the very engine that creates resource abundance.
When the world’s resources are driven by Creative Economics, following the example of China, India, and the U.S., the primary goal should be to maximize people’s participation everywhere. Currently, millions of brilliant minds across the globe are unemployed or trapped in low-income jobs just to afford substandard housing and basic groceries. By establishing the Minimal Paradise, nations will upgrade their life infrastructure. When millions of citizens enter the Creative Economy, the nation undergoes a profound metamorphosis, transforming from a larva into a butterfly. This transformation is bound to be global, as nations, almost like an evolutionary compulsion, realize that a healthy, secure, and dignified population is the ultimate economic superpower.
Modern Critics
Many objections to the Minimal Paradise may stem from intellectual frameworks developed during historical periods of genuine scarcity. Economic systems shaped by feudalism, industrial labor exploitation, and resource insecurity often assumed that poverty and desperation were necessary drivers of productivity. These assumptions function as inherited civilizational software, persisting long after technological abundance has fundamentally altered humanity’s productive capacity.
Modern critics often echo Patrick Colquhoun (1745-1820), a merchant and the pioneer of the preventive police force in England, who sums up the old view in the following words: “Poverty is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization.”
The Minimal Paradise challenges the continued relevance of scarcity-based assumptions in the twenty-first century. The scarcity phase is coming to an end, unless wars precipitate a regression of civilization. Contemporary economists rarely subscribe to Colquhoun’s idea that planned poverty is necessary for economic growth. Yet they will be reluctant to accept the mutualism between the Minimal Paradise and Creative Economics.
Herbert Gans (1927-2025) argues that poverty is functionally useful because an underclass is needed to do undesirable jobs ─ an idea that mirrors the structural logic of Hindu casteism. In this paradigm, an impoverished underclass is preserved to create demand for goods and services others avoid, such as used clothes and surplus food. Crucially, Gans demonstrates that entire echelons of middle-class employment, including social services, specialized education, and law enforcement, depend on the perpetuation of poverty to justify their institutional existence.
Milton Friedman (1912-2006) and George Stigler (1911-1991), both Nobel Prize winners in Economics, along with some Chicago School economists, stressed that wage floors or generous welfare create dependency and reduce work incentives. They view a certain level of inequality and economic pressure as necessary to maintain labor supply and productivity.
Political rhetoric that draws upon theoretical justification for poverty can, at times, adopt a harsh tone. For instance, certain lawmakers have defended work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP by criticizing what they describe as able-bodied workers… sitting on their couches playing video games. Such statements often portray welfare recipients as idle and contend that benefits provided without strict conditions foster dependency and laziness.
The religious critique of welfare is often reinforced by a selective, fatalistic reading of scripture. Specifically, the biblical phrase “The poor will always be with you” is routinely weaponized to cast destitution as an immutable, preordained condition of human existence. By declaring this scriptural statement as an eternal economic mandate, status-quo rhetoric attempts to render systemic efforts to eradicate poverty not only futile but also counterproductive.
Arguments against Universal Basic Income often claim: “If people don’t have to work to survive, they won’t work.”
The Minimal Paradise rejects these assumptions about the human mind and behavior, economic growth, and civilizational advance because, even if valid, they are all theories rooted in a scarcity mindset. The minds cultivated in abundance will have no reason to perpetuate poverty because such a notion is irreconcilable with Creative Economics.
Paths to the Minimal Paradise
Once the intellect is liberated from the scarcity assumptions, the challenge shifts from theoretical justification to practical engineering. Fortunately, there are many ways to implement the Minimal Paradise and Creative Economics. No single blueprint will work everywhere and all the time. Concepts such as Universal Basic Income and Universal Basic Services mark the initiation of the Minimal Paradise. Similarly, the negative income tax, in which people receive income rather than pay taxes, has been proposed to facilitate the provision of necessities. Heavily subsidized food, housing, education, and basic health services are also being examined. These transitional frameworks require further intellectual development before the outdated semantics of welfare, charity, and wealth redistribution can be permanently retired from public discourse.
The proposed model does not believe that any single design will work for all communities. As the human mind embraces the mutualism of the Minimal Paradise and Creative Economics, it will find ways to reconstruct the infrastructure that underpins a decent life for all. In this case, the old maxim acquires renewed force: where there’s a will, there’s a way. The Minimal Paradise is an emergent development within Creative Economics, and once this symbiosis is understood, methodologies will compete to deliver goods and services more efficiently. The Minimal Paradise will assume different cultural forms in Chad, China, Peru, or Pakistan, each shaped by its own history, aesthetics, and social traditions.
Conclusion
Together, the Minimal Paradise and Creative Economics herald a transformative new stage in human civilization. For millennia, scarcity shaped political systems, labor relations, and moral frameworks, subjecting billions of people to the perpetual threat of destitution. That era is ending. Advances in productive capacity, technology, and global wealth have made it feasible to build a universal infrastructure that guarantees food, shelter, dignity, and security for every household on Earth. This transformation does not weaken economic growth; it strengthens it. By alleviating destitution anxiety, societies unlock human potential for science, engineering, entrepreneurship, caregiving, the arts, and discovery. A secure and dignified population becomes a productive engine of wealth rather than a burden. The Minimal Paradise is neither charity, utopia, welfare, nor enforced equality. It is not even a moral imperative. It is a strategic investment in human capital. As Creative Economics expands, humanity will advance toward a higher stage of shared prosperity and collective achievement.
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