The Commodification of Land, Time, and Money – Three Illusions Fueling Perpetual Poverty and Exploitation
Written by Dr Mwenda Mbaka & Dr Katherine Baxter. August 2025
*This essay draws heavily on the work of Karl Polanyi and his concept of ‘fictitious commodities’ outlined in his 1947 work, ‘The Great Transformation’
Opening
The landlord’s letter lay on the kitchen table, unopened but already heavy with meaning and implication. You knew what it said—another rent increase, another reminder that the ground beneath your feet was never really yours. Outside, the street hummed with the rhythm of people rushing to work, each bound by their own invisible contracts. You sipped your coffee, calculating the hours you would need to work just to cover the new amount, contemplating how many years and moments of life had been spent this way—trading time, or ‘labor’, for the right to exist somewhere.
It wasn’t that you hadn’t tried. You had followed the rules, worked hard at school, worked longer hours when asked, saved where you could. You had done everything the story said would work. Yet here you were, still paying for the same square of ground, still watching the clock as the months on the calendar rolled by, still running to stay in the same place.
And in that moment, it hit you. The problem wasn’t you. The problem was the game itself—and it had been rigged long before you learned the rules.
Preface
You were born into a promise. It arrived quietly, not in a single moment, but as the steady, background narrative of modern life: work hard, save what you can, play by the rules, and you will earn your place in the world. You will be worthy of a ‘good life’. It was in the school essays about the virtue of diligence. It was in the late-night talks around kitchen tables where parents told you how to “get ahead.” It ran like an invisible thread through every success story you heard.
But life had other lessons. The day rent was due arrived again and again before you could catch your breath. The hours you sold each week grew longer, yet your savings barely moved. Every step forward felt as though the ground beneath you shifted backwards. And then one day – maybe as you stared at a pay slip, a loan statement, or the title deed you could never quite afford – you realized. You understood that this game of monopoly had been fixed long before you took your first roll of the dice.
The fixing hides behind three great illusions: the commodification of land, time, and money. They were not always commodities. Once, they belonged to the commons—life’s essentials, shared and inseparable from human existence. For most of history, land was not a thing to be owned outright; it was the shared ground where generations planted, grazed, and returned their dead to soil. Time was not something sold by the hour; it flowed with the seasons, guided by light and dark, planting and harvest. Money was not an idol; it was a modest tool to measure and exchange.
Then history shifted. The enclosures in Europe fenced off fields, meadows, and forests—spaces that had fed communities for centuries. Lands once walked freely became private holdings with boundaries and deeds. Those who had lived by the fruits of their own ground became tenants or wanderers, selling their labor for wages. Colonial powers exported this transformation to every land they touched, mapping and claiming territories that were never theirs, forcing indigenous peoples into systems where worth was measured by title deeds and market value rather than stewardship.
The industrial revolution changed not just work, but our human relationship to time itself. The church bell gave way to the factory whistle; the rhythm of seasons was replaced by the relentless tick of the clock. Life became shifts and schedules, productivity charts and punch cards. Human hours were carved into blocks for sale to the highest bidder. Children went to school, not to learn how to be human, but instead to learn how to contort themselves in ways that would best equip them to feed into the insatiable machine of ‘productivity’.
Money, too, changed its nature. It stopped being a servant of exchange and became a master. It was no longer simply passed from hand to hand—it was hoarded, speculated upon, and multiplied without ever touching soil or sweat. Banks learned to conjure it from nothing, attaching interest so that debt became a constant shadow over those without wealth.
None of this was an accident. It was a deliberate reordering of the world. Land, time, and money were reshaped from shared necessities into instruments of control, building a quiet machinery of inequality that funnels wealth upward and keeps the majority paying for what should never have been for sale.
1. The Architecture of Inequality
Across cultures and centuries, human life has been organized around three shared needs: land to live on, time to live in, and a means to exchange what we have for what we need. In their natural state, these were not commodities. They were part of the commons—land as a shared inheritance, time as the essence of life, and money as a tool to help communities flourish.
Over time, each of these essentials was captured, monetized, and redefined. Land became private property, measured in deeds and speculation. Time became a commodity, chopped into labor hours for sale. Money ceased to be a neutral tool and became an asset in itself. Together, they form the invisible scaffolding of inequality—a structure so embedded in our daily lives that it passes for the natural order.
2. Land – From Commons to Capital
The theft began with the enclosure of common lands in Europe. Villages that had once grazed their herds and grown food in shared fields found those spaces fenced and titled. The dispossessed were driven into wage labor, trading independence for survival. And that survival included paying for the basic necessity of shelter – so those without the opportunity or ‘skillset’ to generate money to acquire shelter were doomed to homelessness. And those without adequate money, to live in shanties and other sub-standard abodes, sharing them with vermin in what can only be understood as systematic dehumanization.
When colonial powers crossed oceans, they brought the same logic. They surveyed and seized indigenous territories, carving them into plots and assigning ownership to outsiders. Land was no longer seen as a living system to be tended, but as a unit of value to be traded.
Owning land became the bedrock of wealth because land passively appreciated in value. Those without it had to rent it or borrow to access it, creating a steady flow of income from the many to the few. The story told to the landless was that hard work could earn them a place of their own. But more often, ownership was the reward for inheritance, political power, or early access to credit—advantages beyond the reach of most.
3. Time – Selling Life by the Hour
For centuries, labor moved to the pace of the land. Planting, tending, and harvesting defined the work year, leaving periods of rest or other pursuits. But the rise of industrial capitalism turned time itself into a product.
The clock became a tool of discipline. Work was no longer measured in tasks completed but in hours sold. Wage labor was built on a simple, harsh truth: the value a worker created was always greater than the wage they were paid, and the surplus flowed upward as profit. Even when productivity increased, the benefit went not to the one selling their time, but to the one buying it.
The popular saying “time is money” masked the deeper reality: time is life. And once sold, it cannot be bought back. Working longer hours rarely brought freedom because wages almost never rose faster than the cost of living—especially the cost of land.
4. Money – From Servant to Master
Money began as a facilitator of exchange, but today it behaves as a commodity in its own right. Debt-based money creation means most currency enters circulation as a loan, already shackled with interest.
Those with wealth can multiply it through investment and speculation without lifting a hand. Those without begin life already behind, paying interest for the privilege of participating in the economy. Scarcity is deliberately manufactured to protect the value of currency, even in times of material abundance.
We are taught to believe that money equals wealth. In reality, money is only a claim on wealth—on land, on labor time, on resources. Its distribution says more about power than it does about effort.
5. How the Pillars Reinforce Each Other
These three illusions— the commodification of land, time, and money—do not just coexist; they feed one another in a cycle that ensures capital reproduces itself faster than labor can ever catch up. Those with money buy land. Those without must sell time to access it. Selling time transfers value upward, allowing the wealthy to acquire more money, which is then used to buy more land and labor hours. Around and around it goes, generation after generation. This feedback loop ensures that capital reproduces itself faster than labor can accumulate it. By design, the majority will never “catch up.”
6. The Cost:
6.1. Assetless Lifetimes
The outcome is a society where most people will spend their most productive years paying for shelter on land they do not own. They will sell the majority of their waking hours to employers, often for wages that barely cover survival. Debt—whether from housing, education, or the cost of living—will shadow them until death. And for many, the cycle will not end with them; it will be passed on to their children.
In this system, dying without assets is not a personal failure. It is the predictable outcome of the design.
6.2 Ecological Anthropocentric Footprints
The inhumane treatment of fellow humans has deep roots in a political culture that thrives on deception. For generations, the masses have been schooled in an education system designed less to cultivate wisdom than to instill compliance—producing citizens trained to recite the rules, not to question them. This system is upheld by a hubris forged in politics: dupe the masses through politics [“democracy” for a society who barely knows or understands who or what they are voting for; liberal economy where capitalism entrenches assetlessness because you can only harvest what you invest and you can’t invest if you don’t have the “seed”; “aid” which is in reality a “raid” to vanquish the “beneficiaries’’ resources, etc.] It rests on the belief that controlling how people see the world is the surest way to control their place within it.
Like colonialism, which commodified lands, peoples, and cultures for imperial gain, this political hubris has spilled outward to encompass the entire living world. The logic is disturbingly familiar: just as human lives were once catalogued, taxed, and traded, so too are the Earth’s soils, forests, rivers, seas, and wildlife now surveyed, monetized, and extracted. The same machinery that reduced people to economic units now reduces ecosystems to inventories of exploitable resources.
This extractivism is bolstered by another strain of hubris—this one rooted in technology: we will fix it through technology. It promotes the illusion that there are no limits to what can be taken from nature because clever machines, chemical formulas, and engineering feats will restore what is lost. It offers a moral alibi for exploitation: the belief that damage is temporary, reversible at will, and that nature can be endlessly bent to human ambition without consequence.
These two hubrises mirror each other. The political version seeks to control people; the technological version seeks to control nature. Both treat their subjects—human societies in one case, ecosystems in the other—not as living, interdependent systems to be respected, but as objects to be manipulated for short-term gain. And both, by their very design, are destined to overreach.
This attitude lies at the heart of many conflicts around human–animal coexistence. When political hubris convinces populations that land and resources are possessions to be conquered rather than shared trusts, it legitimizes the displacement of both people and wildlife for profit. When technological hubris promises that lost habitats can be “offset” by artificial reserves, captive breeding, or genetic engineering, it distracts from the urgent need to protect intact, living ecosystems.
Across Africa, elephant migratory corridors are blocked by settlements and industrial farms, with the displacement justified as “necessary development.” In the oceans, industrial fleets deplete fish stocks far beyond sustainable limits, justifying the damage with promises that aquaculture will “replace” wild fish—a promise that often leads to further ecological degradation through pollution, disease, and the commodification of aquatic life. In rangeland regions, apex predators such as lions and hyenas are exterminated to protect commercial livestock interests, while token conservation projects promise to “restore” balance without addressing the underlying loss of wild prey, habitat, or cultural coexistence traditions.
The belief that technology can patch over every ecological wound emboldens continued destruction. If coexistence can supposedly be reconstructed in a lab, why protect it in the wild? This thinking narrows the physical and moral spaces in which humans and animals can truly share the Earth, turning relationships into managed transactions rather than mutual survival.
History shows what happens when political systems push human societies beyond endurance: revolutions, collapses, and the crumbling of the very order they were meant to uphold. The same fate now looms for the ecological order. A planetary system treated as an infinite storehouse will, sooner or later, reach its breaking point. The collapse of human systems born from political hubris is now shadowed by the collapse of the living Earth born from technological hubris.
Together, the political and technological hubris leave behind an anthropocentric footprint so deep it threatens to radically alter the conditions for life on this planet—human and non-human alike. Unless confronted, the collapse of our political order and the collapse of the biosphere will not be separate events, but one and the same.
7. Breaking the Illusions
The cycle is not inevitable. Land can be removed from speculative markets through community trusts. Tax systems can be reshaped to discourage hoarding and reward equitable use. Indigenous stewardship models can be revived to treat land as a living trust rather than a tradable good.
Time can be reclaimed by shortening the workweek, ensuring productivity benefits those who create it, and providing a basic income so survival is no longer tied to endless labor. This model would require being built around disrupting price exploitation, so that money flows equitably from the producers to the consumers, serving all along the value chain fairly.
Thus, money can be restored to its original role as a public tool—created for the benefit of communities, not just for private profit. Public banking, debt relief, and currencies designed to circulate rather than accumulate could all break the stranglehold.
8. Conclusion – Beyond the Illusions
The commodification of land, time, and money is not the result of nature’s laws. It is a human-made architecture of control. And what is made can be unmade. By dismantling these illusions, we can restore land as a shared inheritance, time as the essence of life, and money as a humble facilitator of exchange.
Until then, the cycle will continue: lifetimes spent working for access to what should never have been for sale, ending with nothing but the receipts for rent, bills, and interest paid.
The task before us is to reform markets, to reclaim the commons of existence itself, and to restore human dignity. Only then can we step out of the illusions and into a reality where life—not its commodified shadows—is the measure of wealth.