this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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Landownership is wrong all together.
If you think about it, it is completely absurd, why anyone assumes the right to 'own' a piece of land. Or even more land than the other guy. Someone must have been the person to first come up with the idea of ownership, but it is and was never based on anything other than an idea, and we should question it.
After all inheritance of landownership is a major cornerstone of our unjust and exploitative society.
Every generation, people want to try new things and it's nice. But landownership can and has been and good thing in a way that just going back to "anarchy" wouldn't work. E.g. creation of ghettos, who gets to farm the best land, etc.
So then the suggestions are that the land are owned and "managed" by the state apparatus. Now we have a few famines in history to show us how gaining favor in a political system is not the best way to manage the land.
I'm open to better suggestions but just shitting on land ownership seems easy and unproductive.
If someone owns a house, they kinda have to own at the very least some land around it. I just don't really see any other way for that to work. Would be interesting to hear how that could work otherwise.
There's a thing called leasehold whereby you own the building and lease the land usually for 99 years after which it returns to the freeholder. It's one of the reasons that the US embassy in London moved from Mayfair to Nine Elms. It was the only US embassy in the world that the US government didn't own, the freehold belongs to the Grosvenor family (i.e. Lord Grosvenor). When the US tried to buy the freehold the Grosvenor family refused but agreed to a 999 year lease in exchange for the return of 12000 acres of Florida that was confiscated from them after the Revolutionary War - yes, they've been landowners for a very long time! I think the US made sure to buy the freehold of the new site at Nine Elms (they sold the remainder of the 999 year lease in Mayfair for an undisclosed sum) 😀
Ah okay so private land ownership but all it takes is the slightest bit of corruption to 'lease' a plot of land for free, for essentially forever. Because that's what 999 years essentially is.
We already have these systems with Water tables, and we can already see the problems.
Saudi Arabia is running the Arizona water tables dry because some shit agreed to 'lease' them unlimited water usage. They did this for the price of less than a smart phone in today's dollars.
I want this to be fixed by not allowing non citizens to own american soil. It doesnt make sense to me to allow non us citizens to buy up land in america.
Like why cant the Saudis just buy hay from arizonans this transfering monies into local economies?
That will just make middle-man agreements.
This isn't something I know a whole lot about, because I don't believe in the abolition of private property on an individual level, but it's my understanding the crunchy types would ask:
What makes you think they have to own the land around it? There are plenty of home owners right now who don't have yards.
I think he means more like an arms length or enough to walk around it. Not a full on yard.
This is really going to blow some suburbanite heads right off, apparently, but a lot of people live in duplexes too.
Those still exist? It's been a long time since I've seen one, in the wild.
You can rent the land too. It's cheaper in the short term, more expensive in the long term.
Doesn't that also mean The Irish famine shows private land ownership isn't the best way to manage land?
The potato famine was caused by a new type of blight being brought from the Americas back to Europe.
I don't see how being beaten by a novel disease has anything to do with private land ownership.
The blight affected all of Europe, yet only Ireland had severe famine because while the French government bought food for their citizens, the English government publicly declared the invisible hand of the free market would fix the famine.
Similarly the Ukraine famine was crop failure due to bad weather conditions that affected all of Eastern Europe. The crop failure wasn't caused by the Soviets. Yet only Ukrainians died because the Soviets shipped Ukrainian food to Moscow in the same way Irish died because of free markets shipping Irish food to London. (Yes, Ireland was still a net exporter of food during the famine.)
When natural disasters occured it's, "Millions died because of communism." Yet when millions die under the free market it's only the natural disaster and not capitalism.
They grew enough potatoes to feed the population in spite of the blight losses. However said taters fetched a higher price abroad. So fuck the poor, I guess.
Yeah ok, I didn't consider that.
Hard to argue with that.
Also they would have had a higher diversity of crops if not for landlords. Landlords were extorting farmers and the only way the farmers could pay the bills was with the vegetable that had the highest margin. Farmers were forced to switch from other crops to growing potatoes by their landlords.
Define for the class what you think anarchy means, and, wait one minute, you think ghettos are created by people not recognizing private land ownership?
Anarchy in 2 words, no state. It's mostly a thing in history in opposition to something else.
Don't be silly, I know why ghettos are created. My point was more towards the organization of urbanization through land ownership can help.
Now what do you propose we implement instead?
There's quite a lot of thought missing from your definition of anarchy, including, ya know, all of the ideas on how to make that work, and the assumption by most that it wouldn't be an immediate process, and for someone that knows how ghettos are created, you sure used it as a criticism of an idea that would make them literally impossible, while doubling down on insisting that the thing creating ghettos can solve the ghettos if you... Do it more, and harder?
I don't actually believe in the dissolution of private property, at least in regards to individual land ownership, up to a certain point. I just take issue with people stating their opinions as facts, especially when they're just flat out wrong.
Tbf, that seems like it would depend on the flavor of anarchism.
Which is rather part of the problem, as a lot of modern anarchists don't believe in the dissolution of the state, at least as a deliberate policy, thus the idea that Marxists and anarchists are ultimately working towards the same goal (communism) and disagreeing on the methods to achieve it.
Yeah i was referring to the dissolution of property rights when referring to anarchy. It was more colloquial than the actual system. Yes I didn't copy the wiki for anarchy because it was irrelevant.
Not sure where you took the opinion as facts thing but okay...
I'm pretty sure the Native Americans didn't believe in land ownership, at least not individual land ownership, more of a communal version, and it worked out well for them. They had huge societies, vast trade networks, and were able to feed themselves fine. It requires a different, non-capitalist, non-Western mindset, but it can work.
Their huge societies in no way are comparable to the population we have today.
Neither was the Western population at the time, but it scaled up fine. There's nothing saying alternative systems of land ownership can't scale up either. The only reason we went with the current one is because it benefited the people who killed everyone else.
Why is it that their population hasn't grown in the same way as people with other views on land ownership, do you think? Is it because the other people were the good guys in your imagination?
Holy shit I didn't expect such a quality comment in this discussion.
I would argue that corporations shouldn't be able to own residential land, and regular people shouldn't own more than two land pieces.
That's all well and good but I don't want you living in my garden.
People like the idea of the stability ownership offers. You can't be kicked out of your house or off your land you own because your income dropped out lost a job. How would you suggest this stability is maintained?
It goes back to when good agricultural land discovered to be so ridiculously effective at feeding people.
Not the beginning of wealth, but certainly one of the oldest still used store of wealth.
So much has been fucked up by discovering agriculture, it was also the beginning of institutional slavery.
You're not wrong but surely you don't mean to say that mankind should never have discovered agriculture, right? At that point we may as well say that gaining sentience fucked everything up because it was the beginning of wilfully hurting others despite having the capacity for empathy (aka doing evil things).
RETURN TO MONKE
No I'm serious, and I understand you mean well but I can't have this discussion meaningfully with you without writing 8 paragraphs of context.
There's a lot of what Pratchett called 'lies to children' when it comes to non-university anthropology, things we learned in school that were kind of outdated already and gross oversimplifications.
We were told that agriculture allowed the free time to specialize and was the beginning of culture but the truth is that all that hunter-gatherer man needed to hunt to feed himself and 3 other people was about 6 hours of actual work a week. And specialization already existed with stone knapping and pottery.
There's a lot more to it but I don't really have the patience to keep writing this.
Well, you did a good job condensing where you were coming from in two paragraphs. Enough to make me realise that I mistook your original meaning completely. I hadn't heard the 6 hours of work a week number before. In fact, I've never really questioned the logic I was taught with regards to agriculture being the start of civilisation due to freeing up hands and allowing people to settle down, because hunter gatherers would have to roam around at least a little to follow herds or seasonal effects on available forage. That understanding was based on what I've learned in history 101 at high school though.
I started out a bit argumentative because I read your comment as an overly dramatic lamentation that I took to mean something like: "people are so bad I wish we weren't born/evolved". Thanks for taking the time to kindly explain. I'm always interested in having a possible blind spot or internalised assumption revealed and to reassess entrenched beliefs.
Their previous comment read the same way to me, too; just so you know it's not only you that thought that's what they meant.
Sometimes when I misinterpret something, I wonder if I'm the only one, or if others would've interpreted it similarly, so I can take that information and have a better idea of how to move forward and learn from the situation. So, I dunno, just thought I'd say something just in case you're similar ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One other thing to point out is that agriculture allowed for large mobile armies.
For hunter gatherers it wasn't easy to stockpile enough long term storage portable food to take to war, nor could you predict periods of bounty (which is why so many ancient cultures had prohibitions to making war during winter that almost no one broke) to plan long term campaigns. This style of sustenance also kept nomadic band population low as following the herds and the reduction of ease of hunting and complications in moving gave significant advantage to smaller social units.
We see a radical increase in social group size with the advent of agriculture, eventually leading to more permanent town and eventually city living instead of nomadic bands as you generally needed to be in one place to keep others from taking your crops and tending them year round.
I fully understand that there are a lot of luxuries and even just basic life improvements that wouldn't be available to us if we had kept as small hunter gatherer bands, and maybe a lot of people alive now couldn't survive or thrive in that kind of environment, it would be a very, very different world than what we know today but one thing I do know is that of we had never discovered agriculture we would never have eventually become a species that could kill off 95% of the life on the planet with the press of a button.
Unfortunately land will fall into disrepair if someone doesn't actually own it. They have no incentive to invest in its upkeep if it can just be taken away at any moment. There's a reason rental buildings have a reputation for being unkempt, the renters don't want to pay for the upkeep since it's not theirs and the landlords don't want to pay for the upkeep because they don't live there.
It gets even worse if government owns it, it would take 6 months just to get a light bulb changed let alone a new roof or hedges trimmed.
Land that falls into "disrepair" has already been savaged, devastated and altered by greedy human hands in the first place.
so i guess over 20% of houses in Austria, Netherlands, or Denmark have no lights and leaking roofs. if only those people got their own...
That might be the case in your country, but there are many cultures that are perfectly capable of sharing and keeping common infrastructure in good conditions. Your personal experience isn't generic and globally true.
A country's land should not be owned by individuals, in my opinion, but used by those who need it and when they do so. A country's land is what makes it a land, so it cannot be owned or sold. Someone inheriting it from someone who took it and maybe sold it should give no legitimate claim to possession.