Throughout the pandemic and the period of economic pain it brought, the news cycle has been gripped by a series of mounting disasters. Global vaccine apartheid, the result of the Global North’s refusal to allow nonproprietary sharing of vaccine technology, meant that, by late 2021, 80 percent of adults in the EU were fully vaccinated, but only 9.5 percent of people in low-income countries had received a single dose. As housing wealth surged to record highs, renters have endured ongoing insecurity. As up to 500 million people were thrown into extreme poverty, with the incomes of 99 percent of the world’s population falling between March 2020 and October 2021, the wealth of the world’s ten richest men doubled to $1.5 trillion, and a new billionaire was minted every seventeen hours.

Since then, spiraling energy prices have driven acutely painful inflation across much of the world, with projections suggesting an astonishing two-thirds of UK households could be in fuel poverty by next year, even as energy producers and suppliers maintain enormous profits and payouts. And beneath it all, the climate and ecological emergencies have continued to unfurl at astonishing pace: unprecedented droughts grip the agricultural regions of Europe; temperatures in parts of England surpass 40 degrees Celsius; and fires tear through “carbon offset” sites across the world, sending the promise of carbon sequestration up in smoke.

None of these events are isolated. Rather, they are the fruits of a particular social and economic arrangement. The crises we face today are both overlapping and unevenly felt, and running through each is an essential thread: the way ownership is currently organized. The pandemic set alight the mass of dry tinder piled up over decades in which the rights of property have been prioritized over collective well-being.