Alternative Titles
Anarchist Squatting and Land Tenure:
Direct Action and the Critique of Real Estate
Occupation Insurrection:
Towards an Anarcho-spatialist Land Tenure
Anarcho-spatialism
Towards an Anarchist Land Tenure
Occupy, Resist, Insurrect
Scream, Envision, Squat
Anarcho-agrarianist Thought and Action
Anarcho-agrarianism
The Search and Struggle for an Anarchist Land Tenure
'Squats' are growing as a form of resistance within the anarchist community. In many North American and in most major cities of Europe, anarchists see squatting as a practical way of subverting current dominative constructs of real estate while at the same time creating a space for the growth of community forms which prefigure the sought-for anarchist utopia. This current activity continues an anarchist project against spatial property, that is, the commodification of land and housing, over the last several centuries which have included anarcho-agrarian occupations of land, agrarian uprisings, and rent strikes.
The basic societal construct which anarchist squatting challenges is the ownership of land. Land is the ground upon which we walk, the element from which our food grows, and the object for which generations of anarchists have struggled and died. Land is essential to survival, for every moment that we live we rely on its presence. A 1985 Green Anarchist editorial indicates the importance which anarchists place on the reorganization of dominative land tenure:
The land is the source of all wealth, the source of all freedom and we want back the land. Without land we are condemned to the servility of employment to earn the necessities of our life; we are condemned to Blind Obedience legally implicit in all job contracts; without land our small caring communities are destroyed; without land we can never be self-sufficient; without land we must doff our caps to the landowners and bosses. Without land there can be no freedom. (8)
From the seventeenth century Diggers to squatters in New York City today, land has occupied a central position in anarchist ideology and praxis. In Noam Chomsky's recent film Manufacturing Consent, for example, he mentions the need for a movement that challenges the distribution of resources, pointing to feminist and civil rights movement which has made strong social change. An important area which is not sufficiently addressed, according to Chomsky, is the distribution of natural resources. The number of anarchists who have concentrated on land tenure are many. Most of Joshua K. Ingalls' (1816-1898) anarchist activity in North America revolved around land and Charles Fowlers' (1851-1889) Kansas City paper The Sun committed a significant proportion of its space to the inequitable distribution of land (Reichert 509-512). Several anarchist books and journal issues are solely devoted to land issues, squatting, or housing. George Woodcock's New Life to the Land, written in World War II England, calls for autarchy in the production of food, saying that this would contradict the domestic food deficit needed to balance industrial capitalist exports of manufactured goods. Revolutionary societies, he maintains, must be self-sufficient in that they will be faced with economic boycott by remaining capitalist powers, a theory born out by the economic blockades of Cuba and Nicaragua by the United States. He goes on to outline a system of federated agricultural collectives doubtless patterned on Spain's anarchist collectives of a few years earlier, and ends by calling for action in the realms of 'pan-occupation,' rent strikes, boycotts of the wartime centralized marketing organization and large capitalist farmers, and the organization of mutual-aid societies. Colin Ward's books on housing promote user-control and development. "The Land" issue of London's Anarchy (7/64) makes an initial stab at what anarchists think about land in the introduction, and the articles cover agriculture, soil conservation, and resistance to eviction. The "Use of Land" issue of The Raven (No. 17, 1992) covers matters of property and expropriation, intentional communities, the Spanish collectives, the land question in nineteenth century English politics, the right to communal recreational paths through private property, and the nineteenth century radical land politics, environmentalism, and land war in Scotland. Finally, Green Anarchist's "Land Issue" (1993), covers radical environmental actions, inequitable land distribution, the history and politics of land in Britain, and the compatability of property and land.
Books on anarchist squatting abound, including Ron Bailey's The Squatters, which gives a history of squatting in England and outlines the London squatter scene which he took part in during the 1960s. New Anarchist Review's Ideal Home is a 'how to' book on squatting in London for the 1980s. Hooligan Press' Squatting in West Berlin provides pictoral as well as textual history of an extremely militant squatter struggle during the 1980s. Two issues to date of Shadow Press' Squatter Comics feature cartoonists' vision of the squatter scene of New York's Lower East Side, and the Hackney Community Defense Associations' pamphlet "Squats 'n' Cops" covers some of London's squatter struggles in 1993.
It is not surprising that anarchists are concerned with land issues given that a plethora of problems facing them are caused, at least in part, by inaccessibility to land. Many anarchists walk the line between homelessness and squatting. Without land on which to house themselves or even grow gardens, many are forced to prostrate themselves before an employer for their livelihood. Depending upon a person's sex, race, international location, and class, people are accorded differential access to land (Corr forthcoming 1996). Many, especially in the third world, are plagued with malnutrition. Eviction of individuals and entire communities engenders severe distress and cultural destruction.
Because of the growing importance of land and housing among anarchists, the following is an attempt to compile anarchist literature, current practice, and pertinent non-anarchist literature to form an exposition of anarchist philosophy regarding land and housing.
These statistics are commonly presented as if top-heavy land ownership patterns are unique to the third world, when in fact similar statistics exist for North America and Western Europe. In England 1% of the population owns 75% of the land and 30% is owned by 1,700 individuals - of whom 300 are peers and 700 members of old families of the landed gentry. The 400 richest individuals in the country own 4.4 million acres between them and 103 of them are members of the aristocracy. In 1974 33% of Portuguese families lived in shantytowns or houses with more than one family. For the working class, rent accounted for 40% of the family budget in the Lisbon area (Mailer 204)."The general pattern of large-scale land tenure has changed little in the last few centuries;" writes Francis Reed, "what have been sacrificed are the small proprietor and the Common Rights of the majority, in the cause of Empire and enormous gains for the few." (30)
Statistics and scholarship on the distribution of land within the United States also reveals a dramatic concentration of wealth and widespread impoverishment. According to the publication Geodata (Hartzok 2), 3% of the United States population owns 95% of all U.S. private land. 568 companies control 301.7 million acres of U.S. land, which is more than 22% of all the nation's private land. Totaling up the worldwide land interest of these same companies, their holdings consist of a total area larger than that of Europe -- almost 2 billion acres. International Paper for example, the largest U.S. landowner, controls 8 million U.S. acres and 20 million worldwide, roughly two-thirds the size of England (Riker 43). The bottom 78% of U.S. landowners own only 3% of private land, and when taking into account inter-familial hierarchy, 80% of U.S. residents own no land at all (Lewis 1980). Excepting the 1930s depression, homelessness is greater in the early 1990s than at any other time in U.S. history. The National Union of the Homeless estimated that there are from three to five million homeless people in the United States, and social service agencies and local governments claim that the number is growing (Aulette 253) The situation seems to be worsening as the poor lose land to the rich. Geisler points out that "real estate constitutes 55 percent of the total net worth of all U.S. households (up from 48% in 1963) and the share of all real estate held by the nonrich is falling over time. The shares held by the rich (top 10 percent of households in wealth terms) and the very rich (top 1%) are increasing . . . Not only is real estate highly concentrated, but it constitutes a major wellspring of future wealth, an inauspicious situation for the poor and near poor." (forthcoming in Geisler, 1995)
The above U.S. statistics illustrate the distribution of land held privately. Land owned by the U.S. government, 42% of the national land mass, largely benefits middle and upper class citizens as well. Geisler points out that public land policy routinely subsidizes the wealthy through "one sided access to timber, grazing, water and mineral rights for well-endowed interest groups, lucrative commercial concessions to US and foreign corporations, and private recreational complexes on or near national parks, forests and seashores." Geisler maintains that land is controlled for the advantage of the rich on a governmental level through zoning and land use planning. "Through much of the current century, those in power have used land use control to benefit themselves and to advance their plans for growth or no growth." The losers in this equation are invariably people of color and low-income communities.
Asses, swine, have litter spread, And with fitting food are fed, All things have a home but one,- Thou, Oh Englishman hast none! (Anarchy 23: 9)
The pain of eviction experienced by communities in early anarchist history continues today. Philadelphia anarchist Aisha tells of her experience being evicted by a landlord:
At first he said I couldn't use the phone anymore. Then he kept yelling at me for leaving the lights on. I used to toast bagels in the oven. I was really dumb, I used to turn the oven to 400 degrees, put a bagel in and forget. I did that one day and he said I had to get out. Where can you find a place to live if you make fifty dollars a week? My last week there I was already evicted, he said I could stay one more week. My last day he said get out. I toasted a bagel again that day, forgot and left the oven on. He called the cops, and told them that I had turned on the gas and was trying to kill him. I was downstairs and these cops came in with a flashlight and they said 'Are you Aisha -----? We hear you are turning the gas on . . ." They were cool but they threw me out immediately. I had to give them back my keys. To get my stuff out of the house I had to have a police escort. I had to call the cops to come and get my stuff out of the house when I was ready to move. This lead into my next squat. (personal interview)
As would have been the case if Aisha did not join a squat, many recent evictees become homeless when they cannot find housing. Anarcho-punk band A.P.P.L.E. sings the "Shantytown Blues (Homelessness)" in a 1987 45 release:
See a man lying in the street He has no home He lives in the streets Asking passing people what they could spare? But they don't reply they only stare And I ask you Why we let this be? "Cause it doesn't concern me" Living in a park Living in a box Living in the subway Can you close your eyes so you just don't see they are human beings just like you and me? And I ask you Why you do not see? "Cause it doesn't concern me" Another Shantytown rises from the ground Has the great state forgotten? Or is it that the state just doesn't care? A sensitive fascist is very rare Ask the state why they let this be? "Cause it doesn't concern me"
The essence of eviction is the dispossession of a user by someone more powerful than they through the use or threat of force. According to anarchist philosophy, eviction wastes human life and energy when the user/evictee has less access to resources than the evictor. Flora Park in Hamburg Germany was designed and tended by squatters and autonome in an abandoned construction site. "It took a lot of work but the results were worth it," according to one participant. "All kinds of people went into the park each day to relax, communicate, etc." (PE early 1992) In the summer of 1991.it took a small battle to evict the squatters:
Altogether 12 demonstrators and six cops were injured that morning. Directly after we were kicked out of the park the bulldozers arrived and turned the park back into a bomb crater . . . In the afternoon 1500 people made a march to protest the closing of the park. A huge fence was built around the back of the Flora and special national police arrived to protect the construction site. (PE early 1992)
Eviction occurs on the macro level as well. The process of city-wide gentrification is particularly widespread, as middle class, and then rich communities displace lower-class neighborhoods. Midnight Notes (Fall 1990) illustrates this process in an almost war-like cartographical representation of bank expansion in Zurich (see figure 1). Indeed, international wars are often the conflict between groups of people vying for control over land and natural resources. The conflicts between Israel and Palestine, British control of Irish territory, the Western invasion of Kuwait and Iraq and the United States invasion of Panama were largely fought to control natural resources and the populations dependent upon them. These are the evictions that North Americans see in the media. What do we not see? According to Ed Emory,
The point I would make is that the Palestinians, when they are driven from their land, have world support and solidarity. But the Egyptian farm labourer who is driven from his land, driven away from his family, driven to other countries, has no face. He just moves, as part of that faceless mass of millions who are uprooted by economic imperatives. It's almost as if he doesn't exist. He doesn't make history, or make culture, or leave his name in lights. His archaeological remains in a few hundred years time will be virtually nothing -- just bones and rags. But without him nothing would be built, nothing made. He, and millions like him, from every nationality. (Emory 29)
The hispanic community near Vermont was forcibly pushed to the East to create Korea-town. The 3rd St. Promenade in Santa Monica, the new hangout of Westside liberal yuppies, was created after small hispanic stores were bought out and the homeless were kicked out. In Venice and Oakwood artists and minorities are forced out of their homes and business by yuppies and developers who come in and raise property values and gentrify the area. (7)
Culture inheres in the people; when they are uprooted en masse by eviction, the reinforcement of culture provided by community is destroyed, a process which anarchists have long-recognized. The first three stanzas of punk lyricist Jello Biafra's song "That's Progress," on the Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors album, describes the loss of culture when long-term residents are evicted to make way for affluence, and gives insight into the critical consciousness of urban punks:
Scuse me Pardon my greed You're evicted, time to leave Don't matter if your family's lived here 30 years We're tripling the rent Times up, the sheriff's here Too bad for you if you freeze out in the street The croissant and cookie palace Downstairs will symbolize The old neighborhood whose soul has slowly died Been gentrified
The fight to retain land and thereby protect culture is a concept championed by indigenous resistance to the expropriation of their lands. Voice of the early 1970s Chicano movement El Grito del Norte states in an editorial "Their struggle is not for what the white man calls 'property,' 'real estate,' but for the land as part of a whole way of living and relating to other human beings." (GN 12/7/70). Aboriginal Australian Robert Kelly similarily associates land with culture:
Land provides my physical needs and my spiritual nurture. It is a regeneration of stories. New stories are sung from contemplation of the land. Stories are handed from parent to child, and are phrased in the language of the sacred place. When we lose a sacred place, we lose our past, our ancestry, our memory. In a very real, almost final sense, we lose ourselves. (NI 11/87)
In agreement with these and other indigenous understandings, some anarchists have also recognized the connection between land and culture. In their position on land tenure, Green Anarchy states:
The land is not only the provider of the necessities of life. It is the stronghold of the small caring community. Without land the community dies, to be replaced by the ersatz care of the welfare state. (5/85)
Likewise, p.m. writes in connection with Zurich struggles that mass evictions are an attempt by landlord and government interests to repress radical culture:
Strength comes from the land, from touchable history, from old and new places and possibilities of cultural exchange, from diversity, from "strangeness," and from certain "idiotic" fantasies of being somebody special. All these factors are lacking in newly constructed, rationalized, de-historicized projects in the suburbs and even more in areas of single family houses. This process is not a pure accident of the expansion of the city, but also an implicit plan of capital to disarm the proletariat (be it "rich" or "poor"). So from the point of view of struggles, land is much more than just housing, it is part of our identity. Historical, mythical, traditional and magical elements are essential and you still don't have to lose your wits because of this. (p.m. 79)
English anarchists similarily trace the destruction of positive English cultures to invasive landownership. By the sacrifice of the small proprietor and common lands to a landed aristocracy, writes Francis Reed, "much of the indigenous culture of England was destroyed . . . What Orwell described as the 'restless, cultureless life' of light industry and arterial roads, has become the fantasy world of Theme Parks, 'Heritage Experiences,' gambling arcades and video tape, used to block the pain of separation from the intimate connection between land and culture." (30-31)
As in Zurich, cultural destruction in the Lower East Side of New York City is not only incidental to land ownership, but a concentrated effort by developers, landowners and government to diffuse the culture of insurrection. A Latino squatter, excommunicated Catholic priest and anarchist notes that:
The Mayor has a panel on the parks called the Blue Ribbon Panel on the Parks and the Constitution. It is an attempt to do the necessary background work as far as clearing the land for gentrification. Some ruling class type names, Cyrus Vance for example, heading it up. I can show you the thing. And they're studying questions around curfews, part of the same effort of spatially deconcentrating the cities, of depopulating the cities of people who would pose a threat -- a revolutionary threat to their control. (MN Fall 1990)
The connection between landed property and unemployment is widely recognized by radical agricultural groups. The Portuguese Red Committee of Alentejo (non-partisan Marxists) representing 1,000 workers, writes in November 1974: "The rich say we can't all be full-time because there isn't work all the year round. But whose fault is that? Who is it who keeps thousands of hectares in poor condition, just so they can go and hunt? Who puts fierce bulls to graze, where wheat should be planted?" (Mailer 159) In 1974 Leftist Portuguese military officers orchestrated a successful coup and instituted many positive reforms. Two years after redistribution of land, acreage under cultivation almost tripled in Alentejo, and many new jobs were created in an area previously plagued with chronic unemployment. The number of people employed in agricultre jumped fourfold after land reform (Lappé 1984: 200).
For the advantages of communal ownership of land are enormous. Under present conditions one has agricultural laborers dying of hunger on estates where large tracts of corn-growing land lie fallow because it does not pay to cultivate them. If the villagers could cultivate their land collectively, using modern machinery, they could feed themselves and sell the surplus. Hunger would disappear and, without injury to the State, their anarchist ideology, or all that matters to them of it, would be satisfied . . . (quoted in Mintz 7)
But today the option Brenan speaks of, communal ownership of land, is barred by the landowners, forcing the unemployed to work for low wages under grueling conditions in order to survive; the only other options being charity or starvation. Where there is no charity, millions are doomed to a slow death from lack of food and shelter. Approximately 60,000 people die each day of hunger or hunger related disease (Oxfam America). That is two people every three seconds. Tolstoy similarily points to a root cause of this hunger as land deprivation. "With whomsoever one talks, all complain of their want and all similarly from one side or another come back to the sole reason," he writes. "There is insufficient bread, and bread is insufficient because there is no land." (1920) Most hunger-related deaths are needless in a society where the poor are denied access to the abundant land and food-producing resources available. Francis Moore Lappé of Food First writes:
Hunger exists in the face of plenty; therein lies the outrage. Right now the earth is producing more than enough to nourish every human being, both on a global level and even within the very countries we all associate with hunger and starvation. (1982: 7)
The current distribution of land and the construct of ownership is the way in which this plentiful supply of food is maldistributed. When I was in close proximity to the hungry in Kenya, a country burdened by exceedingly high land concentration, it became obvious that land ownership creates a disparity of wealth, but it is the creation of an all-encompassing economic inequality between the landowners and the landless that is land ownership's raison d'être. Maldistribution of land engenders economic inequity by channeling rents from the poor to the landowners and a ready labor force (the unemployed) to capitalists. Even if a landless person buys a piece of land they often have to mortgage in order to afford it and are little better off than the renter.
The fear induced among employers by the prospect of giving the unemployed land is evident in the statement by an 1842 English committee on the 'Labouring Poor (Allotments of Land).' They recommended that allotments to the laborer "should not become an inducement to neglect his usual paid labour." (Reed, F. 19) In the dynamic between wage labor and the concentration of land employers and anarchists tend to agree. Punk band Citizen Fish's song "Big Big House" similarily alludes to the impetus to work for all who find themselves landless:
Picture a scene and pull it apart Who built this house at the very start? Who was forced to work for some food in their hand And some space in a corner of the master's land?
The allusion to slavery by Citizen Fish in describing land and housing relations is a telling example of anarchist attitudes. Aisha, who was renting a room at the time I interviewed her, reminisces on her squatting experience and the way in which renting forces her to work:
When I squatted I thought I could never pay rent. I compared it to taking money and throwing it out the window. Spending all this time to get money and handing it over to someone for a place to stay when you can break into a building. Every once in a while I stop and realize that I am paying two or three thousand dollars a year for a place to stay. That seems pretty silly. (Aisha 13)
The entire mass of non-landowning peoples, or those who own mortgaged land (easily two-thirds of the world, if not more) pay, at nearly every moment of their lives, for the simple right to exist on the spot upon which they find themselves. When you sleep you pay rent to your landlord, when you are in a café you pay in heightened coffee prices due to the merchants' and farmers' rent, you even pay when you eat broccoli. Unless you are able to resist, you pay at every moment of your life, but not only that, you pay in decreased wages due to the landowners' cut of the total intake of your work. Add these cuts together and the laborers' real wages decrease drastically (Morris 153; Hellinger 35). They charge us coming in and going out. We are over a barrel and they are emptying our pockets at every moment. And then a friend tells me he has a good landlord, because the rent is lower than market value. Yes, you may, relatively speaking, but your landowner is the great-great grandchild of the good master who never whipped his slaves on Sunday. On the subject of 'good' landlords, Ybarra states:
Yes, an exceptional person here and there manages to retain a bit of decency despite acting as a landlord, but even in the best situation a master-slave relationship prevails, or is present as at least an undercurrent, and its erosive ebb gnaws faintly but surely at the possible friendship and spontaneity, i.e., the equality, that might otherwise exist unchecked between the two parties. (4)
This unequal relationship between landowners and tenants has led many anarchists to describe land ownership as a form of theft, pointing out that both activities use force and threat to extract goods and services from productive workers. The primary difference, according to this line of thought, is a legitimization or codification of land ownership in order to make its particular form of theft highly efficient. For example, Errico Malatesta observes that:
Landowners and capitalists have robbed the people, with violence and dishonesty, of the land and all the means of production, and in consequence of this initial theft can each day take away from the workers the product of their labour. But they have been lucky thieves, they have become strong, have made laws to legitimate their situation, and have organised a whole system of repression to defend themselves both from the demands of the workers as well as from those who would want to replace them by the same means. And now the theft of the former is called property, commerce, industry, etc.; whereas the term robbers in common parlance, is reserved for those who would wish to follow the example of capitalists but who, having arrived too late, and in unfavourable circumstances, cannot do so without rebelling against the law.
The only landowner who does not dominate others, and is thus not a thief, is the one who uses no more than their fair share of land, and who receives no payment for other people's use of land. Indominative landowners, or those who do not dominate, by the very fact that they had to pay for the land they use is oppressed like others who pay for land in the form of rent. This is recognized, among other anarchists, by promoter of a 'rent and mortgage boycott' Marco Grandino. While renters and mortgagors significantly differ in their class positions, he advocates the mobilization of both groups because among other things, each pays a similar percentage of their income for housing.
Today the land, though it owes its value to the needs of a ceaselessly increasing population, belongs to a minority who can hinder the people from cultivating it, and which does so -- or at least does not permit the people to cultivate it in a manner accordant with modern needs. (quoted in Eltzbacher 110)
Because land is distributed according to profit as opposed to equity and need, many workers must settle for land which is ill-suited for their purposes, while much better land is idle or used unproductively in the speculative wait for higher prices. This affects the individual in their place of habitation as well, observed in the checkerboard urban sprawl created by speculation, forcing people to go many miles from the center of town or their work to find affordable housing.
One process which causes inefficiency is insecurity of tenure. Once an individual finds a spot upon which to produce or live, and begins renting from a landowner, it is likely in some regions of the world that after the lease runs out, any permanent improvements which they have made to the property, and which they can not bring with them, will be absorbed by the landowner without recompense. Writes the editor of London's Anarchy in introduction to their issue dedicated to land (7/64):
The idea of continuity, whether or not it has a foundation in fact, is the key to good husbandry. For from it springs the concern for conservation and improvement of the soil, which is certainly weakened by impermanence of tenure. This is the basis of the "land problem" in many parts of the world. If a man improves his land and only his landlord benefits, why should he bother? (195)
This appropriation of fixed or unmoveable tenant labor is by no means a relic of the past or limited to the third world. A 1993 lease that I signed states that "All alterations, additions or improvements upon the premises, made by either party, shall become the property of Landlord and shall remain upon, and be surrendered with said premises . . ." As the writer for Anarchy noted, nobody is going to spend a lot of time improving their residence with such a legal provision for its loss. Those without a lease, being liable for eviction with an even shorter notice, are at an even greater disadvantage.
Some theoreticians of land ownership have tried to turn this critique on its head, claiming that the inefficiency associated with insecurity of tenure is precisely why land ownership is important. If they were to then promote the ownership of land by those who work it and the ownership of houses by those who live in them, many anarchists might strongly agree, but instead these theoreticians use this argument to justify the abstract principle of landownership and the concentration which it maintains. For them, the juridical concept of property in land is inseparable from 'occasional' concentrations and hierarchies. In order to have efficient use of land, one must endure the concentration which 'naturally' accompanies its organization along the lines of ownership. Anarchists have exposed this argument as a simple justification for hierarchical land tenure. Tolstoy writes:
History shows that property in land did not arise from any wish to make the cultivator's tenure more secure, but resulted from the seizure of communal lands by conquerors, and its distribution to those who served the conquerors. So that property in land was not established with the object of stimulating the agriculturists. Present-day facts show the fallacy of the assertion that landed property enables those who work the land to be sure that they will not be deprived of the land they cultivate. In reality just the contrary has everywhere happened, and is happening. The right of landed property, by which the great proprietors have profited most, and are profiting, has produced the result that all, or most, i.e. the immense majority of the agriculturists, are now in the position of people who cultivate other people's land, from which they may be driven at the whim of men who do not cultivate it. So that the existing right of landed property certainly does not defend the rights of the agriculturist to enjoy the fruits of the labour he puts into the land, but, on the contrary, it is a way of depriving the agriculturists of the land on which they work, and handing it over to those who have not worked it; and therefore it is certainly not a means for the improvement of agriculture, but, on the contrary, a means of deteriorating it. (Tolstoy: 1900, 36)
The Roman law defined property as the right to use and abuse one's own within the limits of the law -- jus utendi et abutendi re suâ, quatenus juris ratio patitur. A justification of the word abuse has been attempted, on the ground that it signifies, not senseless and immoral abuse, but only absolute domain. Vain distinction! invented as an excuse for property, and powerless against the frenzy of possession, which it neither prevents nor represses. The proprietor may, if he chooses, allow his crops to rot under foot; sow his field with salt; milk his cows on the sand; change his vineyard into a desert, and use his vegetable-garden as a park: do these things constitute abuse, or not? In the matter of property, use and abuse are necessarily indistinguishable. (Proudhon 42)
The legal definition of "property" used by Proudhon remains substantially unaltered in the contemporary United States. According to American Jurisprudence,
As a matter of legal definition, "property" refers not to a particular material object but to the right and interest or domination rightfully obtained over such object, with the unrestricted right to its use, enjoyment and disposition. In other words, its [sic] strict legal sense "property" signifies that dominion or indefinite right of use, control, and disposition which one may lawfully exercise over particular things or objects. (228)
The right of landowners to destroy their little piece of the environment is made obvious in laws common around the world which offer monetary compensation in exchange for landlord agreement not to violate environmental codes. In Britain, for example, upon agreement not to destroy "Sites of Special Scientific Interest," landowners are entitled to compensatory payments. One wealthy Scot was awarded nearly one million pounds, which was more than the initial cost of the land shortly after its purchase (Nichols 95). As even American Jurisprudence admits, property is dominion. It does not ask whether or not that dominion is just or unjust. The status of property can be applied to children, workers, women, air, the seas, space, you, or me. When applied to land, the philosophy of property confers an absolute right to the use of what could be common forests, rivers, air, seas, soils, and hills upon an individual or corporate entity to the exclusion of all other species and generations present and future. It is insensitive to the independent 'desire' of plants and animals to the enjoyment of their own lives, treating them, within the definition of property, as unworthy of consideration, and it embraces the maxim 'one may do with one's own what one wills,' a justification to environmentally disenfranchise the future. One anarchist farm worker from Sussex quotes Edward Hyams' Soil and Civilisation in order to buttress his view that the present system of land ownership contributes to the degradation of soil and harms agriculture generally:
"Agricultural slavery leads inevitably to the abuse of soil: the actual labourers on the land have little or no interest in its condition, while its owners look upon it merely as a source of personal not communal wealth." I would go further and say that wage slavery, interest and commerce accelerates abuse of the soil, perpetuates a divided community of privileged and underprivileged, divides a huge insecure industrial proletariat from the source of its life and debases values. Agriculture is too serious a matter to leave in the hands of politicians, industrialists and profiteers, and the soil heritage left from the depredation of militarism, ignorance and greed, is too precious to be squandered by the wastefulness of a consumer society. At the moment the agricultural system that provided the initial surplus value that was the basis of the industrial revolution is being refashioned to commercial needs and on the pattern of modern industrial production. It is, in Hyams' expression, ceasing to be a soil-making agriculture and is becoming a soil-consuming agriculture. (Albon 199)
In addition to impoverishing soil according to anarchists, inequality of distribution impedes the worker -- who by nature of her or his work has an individual and personal relationship with the land, air and water -- from making decisions regarding the best way to treat the environment. Profit-driven orders issue forth from a class of owners who can have no visceral understanding of the amount of environmental destruction that their policies, often decided far away in corporate headquarters, actually perpetrate. But even when corporate heads are cognizant of the destruction which they cause, they have less access and motivation to stop the destruction. "The potentiality of environmental disaster is always recognizable first at the local level," writes George Woodcock (1992: 121). "Indeed, centralized administrations are more likely than decentralized ones to ignore environmental danger signs in the interests of so-called national welfare or even of openly-admitted corporate interests." Were the laborer the decision maker and steward of natural resources, the responsibility and benefits of environmentally sustainable industry and agriculture would be squarely on the shoulders of those with the closest relationship to the land (Plant).
Government is only one part of an apparatus, according to anarchist thought, which serves to maintain political, economic, and social domination over the worker, an apparatus which includes many dominatory constructs, one of which is the ownership of land. Other systems include slavery, gender hierarchy, serfdom, and taxation, all of which are at least partially interchangeable. When one system is overthrown or proves inefficient, another method of extraction often continues the hierarchical flow of labor, a trend anarchists often note. Nineteenth-century American anarchist Joshua K. Ingalls, who was primarily concerned with issues of land, could not understand why it was not obvious to reformers that the system of land ownership largely replaced acquisitions of labor through slavery (Martin, 146). After abolition, the importance of land ownership as a philosophy increased for those who needed justification to forcefully acquire the labor of others, leading to a tightening of economic constrictions on former slaves. During the American Civil War 550,000 acres were confiscated and redistributed among blacks in 40-acre parcels as the keystone of African-American reparations. As soon as the war ended, however, and black soldiers were no longer needed, President Johnson rescinded all redistribution proclamations and ordered the immediate restoration of confiscated lands to their former owners (Boston 447). Furthermore, postbellum Southern planters reclaimed the labor of ex-slaves by legally restricting their mobility, alternative employment opportunities, and access to the means of production and subsistence, thereby tying them to the land as a propertyless work force (Hahn 37). The January 1992 issue of anarchist journal Love and Rage notes:
When slavery was abolished 4 million people of African descent were ultimately dispossessed of the land they had tilled for centuries and that was by any measure rightfully theirs. The promise of 40 acres and a mule for every former slave family unit that was to be the basis of Reconstruction was broken and the Black worker was forced to accept the continuation of his or her status as a colonial laborer: overworked, underpaid, politically powerless, and subject to the abuse of any white man.
While slavery and landownership were interchangeable, the disciplinary effect of the two systems are, according to many anarchists, ultimately of the same type. 'Bob,' a writer for Green Anarchy's land issue, equates dispossession from the land with slavery, and delineates the instruments of coercion as cold, starvation, and massacre:
We, the masses of dispossessed had no greater legal right to British soil than did black slaves. Like slaves, if we refused to work for the boss, we were doomed to die of cold and starvation. Those of us who claimed vacant land to try communal self-sufficiency were massacred by the State, as was done to the Diggers in the 17th century. (7)
As occured during colonialism, some anarchists foresee the exportation of this relationship into any new geographical realms which might host human activity. As governments explore the extremities of this solar system and other extraterrestrial spaces and bodies, they have already begun the ideological exportation of spatial property and the coercion which it entails. The untitled poem appearing on the first page of Midnight Notes (7/81) points out that space "is lusted for not because of the minerals on Mars -- no more than the gold and silver in the rivers of the Caribbean isles was -- but for what they can do to you on Mars when they get you there."
All hierarchical labor-extractive systems, from slavery and serfdom to the twentieth-century computerized, assessed land parcel, have taken from the producer the product of their labor. Notwithstanding the illusion of affluence Western nations have surrounded themselves with, little has changed for the world's poor, who are kept in conditions of nineteenth century slavery through the power of property.
The first owner appeared with the first man who had slaves to work his fields, and who, that he might make himself master of those slaves and of those fields, found it necessary to take up arms and levy war against a hostile tribe. Violence, then, was the origin of private property in the land, and by violence it has been upheld to our own days.Invasions, wars of conquest, political revolutions, wars for the control of markets, and acts of spoilation carried through by governors or those under their protection -- these constitute the titles to private property in land; titles sealed with the blood and enslavement of humanity. (Magón 44)
Land ownership, according to these theories, exists when an individual has the violent forces necessary to evict or subdue the inhabitants of a given piece of land and claims 'ownership.' Title to land is secure to the extent that the violence which enforces title is unchallenged. Individual landowners band together in governmental form to acquire, hold, and defend land. In Alexander Berkman's The ABC of Anarchism, he invites us to imagine we are shipwrecked on a fertile island. One of the ship-mates suddenly claims ownership of the island and demands tribute from the rest. They laugh at him and continue collecting fruits for free. Berkman continues the analogy:
Suppose further that we ourselves and our forefathers had cultivated the island and stocked it with everything needed for life and comfort, and that some one should arrive and claim it all as his. What would we say? We'd ignore him, wouldn't we? We might tell him that he could share with us and join us in our work. But suppose that he insists on his ownership and that he produces a slip of paper and says that it proves that everything belongs to him? We'd tell him he's crazy and we'd go about our business. But if he should have a government back of him, he would appeal to it for the protection of "his rights," and the government would send police and soldiers who would evict us and put the "lawful owner in possession."That is the function of government; that is what government exists for and what it is doing all the time. (183-184)
The real arbiter of landownership then, is government, and thus government is the greatest landowner, the one which parcels ownership rights among its lesser cousins. In order to attain this position, governments must utilize violence against competing macro-landowners in the arena of international conflict. As the power of a particular government expands and contracts, so does their ownership of land. In fact, this is the history of the expansion and contraction of politico-geographical bodies. Anarchist Max Stirner writes:
When the Romans no longer had any might against the Germans, the world-empire of Rome belonged to the latter, and it would sound ridiculous to insist that the Romans had nevertheless remained properly the proprietors. Whoever knows how to take and to defend the thing, to him it belongs till it is again taken from him, as liberty belongs to him who takes it. (332)
England takes Ireland, Israel takes Palestine, the United States takes Panama, Grenada, Kuwait, South/east Asia, ad nauseam. The world is in a perpetual dispute over all land claims, and will remain that way inasmuch as the system and ideology of spatial property is the salient inter-human relation to land. Frank Bardacke wrote the following position paper, published in Fifth Estate, for the People's Park protest in Berkeley. It highlights the pervasive relationship of violence to the transfer of legal title to land.
A long time ago the Costanoan [more specifically, the 'Ohlone'] Indians lived in the area now called Berkeley. They had no concept of land ownership. They believed that the land was under the care and guardianship of the people who used it and lived on it.Catholic missionaries took the land away from the Indians. No agreements were made. No papers were signed. They ripped it off in the name of God.
The Mexican Government took the land away from the Church. The Mexican Government had guns and an army. God's word was not as strong.
The Mexican Government wanted to pretend that it was not the army that guaranteed them the land. They drew up some papers which said they legally owned it. No Indians signed those papers. The Americans were not fooled by the papers. They had a stronger army than the Mexicans. They beat them in a war and took the land. Then they wrote some papers of their own and forced the Mexicans to sign them. The American Government sold the land to some white settlers. The Government gave the settlers a piece of paper called a land title in exchange for some money. All this time there were still some Indians around who claimed the land. The American army killed most of them. The piece of paper saying who owned the land was passed around among rich white men. Sometimes the white men were interested in taking care of the land. Usually they were just interested in making money. Finally some very rich men, who run the University of California, bought the land. Immediately these men destroyed the houses that had been built on the land. The land went the way of so much other land in America -- it became a parking lot. (Bardacke 1)
As is evident from the above, once a government or group of landowners has secured a piece of property from the original inhabitants and rival governments, they search for submissive settlers who they can tax, charge rent, and in the above example, exact parking fees. In the following passage, Kropotkin uses the example of feudalism to illustrate this process (Kropotkin 1970: 163).
A feudal baron seizes a fertile valley. But as long as the fertile valley is unpopulated our baron is not rich. His land brings him nothing; he might as well possess property on the moon. Now what does our baron do to enrich himself? He looks for peasants!But if every peasant-farmer had a piece of land, free from rent and taxes, if he had in addition the tools and the stock necessary for farm labor, who would plow the lands of the baron? Each would look after his own. But there are whole tribes of destitute persons ruined by wars, or drought, or pestilence. They have neither horse nor plow. (Iron was costly in the Middle Ages, and a draft horse still more so.)
All these destitute creatures are trying to better their condition. One day they see on the road at the confines of our baron's estate a notice board indicating by certain signs adapted to their comprehension that the laborer who is willing to settle on this estate will receive the tools and materials to build his cottage and sow his fields, and a portion of land rent free for a certain number of years. The number of years is represented by so many crosses on the sign board, and the peasant understands the meaning of these crosses.
So the poor wretches swarm over the baron's lands, making roads, draining marshes, building villages. In nine years he begins to tax them. Five years later he levies rent. Then he doubles it. The peasant accepts these new conditions because he cannot find better ones elsewhere; and little by little, by the aid of laws made by the oppressors, the poverty of the peasants becomes the source of the landlord's wealth. And it is not only the lord of the manor who preys upon him. A whole host of usurers swoop down upon the villages, increasing as the wretchedness of the peasants increases. That is how things went in the Middle Ages; and today is it not still the same thing? If there were free lands which the peasant could cultivate if he pleased, would he pay fifty pounds to some "Monsieur le Vicomte" for condescending to sell him a scrap? Would he burden himself with a lease which absorbed a third of the produce? would he -- on the métayer system -- consent to give the half of his harvest to the landowner? But he has nothing. So he will accept any conditions, if only he can keep body and soul together, while he tills the soil and enriches the landlord.
So in the nineteenth century, just as in the Middle Ages, the poverty of the peasant is a source of wealth to the landed proprietor.
The coextension of land ownership and hierarchical government is commonly recognized by anarchists. Young Russia, a proclamation issued May 1862 in the context of Russian anarchist activity, did not distinguish landowners from government, but divided society into two classes, members of the czarist party (which included landowners), and the nonpossessing revolutionaries. Historian Thomas Masaryk paraphrases the proclamation: "The existing order was based solely upon private property; the czar was merely the man standing on the highest rung of the ladder, whose lower rungs were occupied by landowners, merchants, and officials -- all alike capitalists." (Masaryk 466) About 60 years later Peter Arshinov, the Ukrainian Makhnovists' organizer of cultural and educational activities, and several Makhnovist proclamations, similarily drew connections between landownership and government by mentioning their enemies in the same breath as the "landowners and Austro-Germans," (48), the "bourgeois landlord authority" (265), the "generals and landlords," (277), the "tyrants and landlords," the "State apparatus of landowners and private capitalists," (37) and by calling the invading Polish Army the "Polish landlords" (277, 282, 284). Battling the White Army of Denikin, Makhno was described as the "peasant hero of the Ukraine, proudly opposed to the landowners." (Berland 471)
This anarchist observation of landowner-government osmotic symbiosis is not limited to the nineteenth century. 'Bob,' a writer for Green Anarchy in 1993, adopted and parodied the voices of industrialists, landlords, and government, conflating them into a singular entity:
"Work hard in my factory, pay rent to live in my house, pay for food in my shop, pay tax to keep my armies, pay subsidies for my farm, keep off my land and then maybe, if I like the look of you, I'll allow you to live in my country." (7)
The landlord-government similarity is also perceived in the London squatters guide of 1986, Ideal Home: "We can see that the world's been carved up into various sized chunks - from huge unworkable nation states down to tiny square footaged plots." (6) This conflation of landowners and government is at least somewhat justified after the examination of government forms throughout history which explicitly defined themselves as landowners by limiting the voter franchise to owners of real estate. Such was the case with the Roman Republic and the government of England following the Revolution of 1688 (Hyams 1969: 46).
The similarity is further illustrated when one is reminded that the primary criterion to be a government, like that of being a landowner, is control over activity upon a certain piece of territory. There is no place in this schema for the use of land without hierarchical and codified boundaries. When a squatter has used a piece of land for seven years, title reverts to her/him in U.S. law. When a government seizes control of a piece of territory, the conquered government gradually loses its title as the proto-government forces its neighbors to recognize its de facto existence as the governing body.
Land ownership and government use exploitation and manipulation in a similar manner. Where a landowner builds a fence, the government erects a boundary. When a landowner charges rent, a government levies taxes. Where a landowner advertises a vacant house, so as not to waste it as an income-producing property, a government encourages migration to those of its territories which are not producing adequate revenue. Where a landowner evicts a tenant, a government wages war against a population.
When government is unable to maintain the requisite standard of living in order to stave off revolution, the last option for governmental survival, and thus the survival of land ownership, is to force upon property holders the obligation of providing that standard of living by reducing rents, giving charity, or providing military force. The only other option for the landowner is to face the prospect of losing control of their property to an insurrectionary situation. In Spain of 1931 for example, when agricultural production fell and governmental aid to the destitute was insufficient, the mayor of Casas Viejas placed the burden of supporting the populace on the landowners by forcing them to pay wages for workers they did not want. (Mintz 134) In times of crisis for authority such as the above, land ownership and government are mutually reinforcing. "Private property is at once the consequence and the basis of the State," writes Bakunin (quoted in Eltzbacher 86). The government protects the landowner from both outside and internal armed threat and the landowner maintains local order and collects revenue for the government, which it forwards through taxes. This symbiotic relationship is similar to that of local and federal governments. The Hackney Community Defence Association finds these concepts elementary in their 1992 pamphlet "Squats 'n' Cops:"
It's only natural that the cops should hate anyone they can identify as a squatter (although there's plenty of squatters who wouldn't stand out in a crowd) - you don't need a degree in politics to know that property is the cornerstone of this society, property is power, and the need to own is what keeps us in line - particularly the need to pay for a home. (7)
Anarchist agreement on this point seems widespread. "The origin of the State," writes Kropotkin "and its reason for existence, lie in the fact that it interferes in the favor of the propertied and to the disadvantage of the propertyless." (quoted in Eltzbacher 110) The propertied, in effect, pay the state to protect their property, through taxes and at times through direct bribes to the judiciary, police and army. If governmental protection was not available, land ownership would atrophy. Ybarra puts it bluntly:
The slogan of the National Association of Landlords, as shown in the tabloid, is the comma-less "We Shelter You America". The truth of the matter, however, is that land-lords shelter no one, while in fact the LAW shelters THEM . . . from the immediate expropriation that would occur if there were no force of gun and jail to back up this phoney, abusive, so-called property right. (Ybarra 13)
Tolstoy writes in The Kingdom of God is Within You:
If there did not exist these men [the police and army] who are ready to discipline or kill any one whatever at the word of command, no one would dare assert what the non-laboring landlords now do all of them so confidently assert -- that the soil which surrounds the peasants who die off for lack of land is the property of a man who does not work on it . . . (quoted in Eltzbacher 173)
Even with centralized government protection however, landlords seem compelled to hire private paramilitary forces to stave off land occupations by the landless. Large landowners in the third world become the undisputed dictators of their locality and in an oligarchy often hold direct control of the national state apparatus. This undue influence by landlords on supposedly democratic governments is not limited to the third world or the West previous to the twentieth century. "In Britain," writes the editor of New Internaitonalist, "where about 1,700 individuals own one third of the country, you only have to look down the list of landholdings of Oxbridge-educated Members of Parliament to see the persistent connection between land and power." (11/87) It is here that the distinction between landowner and government blurs to a graded wash.
The government's ownership of land alluded to by Stirner is obscured under authoritarian socialism's use of the classic justification of the state: 'the government is the people.' Socialists have told anarchists that because the government controls land, and the government is the people, by transitive deduction the people control the land. In contradiction to this reasoning, anarchists have pointed out that the individual is beholden to approach an authority for permission to use land, which, within the concept of equality, should be her or his birthright, undependent upon contract with governmental entities. Where individuals disagree with the socialist governments, they are evicted and have no control over a crucial aspect of their lives. Domination over the use of land changes its name from capitalism to socialism, but leaves itself intact.
Communists, who "feared the radicalisation of the countryside because of global political considerations" (Oved 53), exhibited their ideology of centralized control when they attempted to nationalize autonomous anarchist collectives in Makhno's Ukraine and during the Spanish Civil War. In June of 1919 Trotsky sent Communist troops to destroy the Rosa Luxemburg Commune, but was only partially successful. This in retaliation for the refusal of Makhno's local soviets and Insurrectionary Army to honor the Red Army's banning of their congress. A few days later the Bolsheviks purposefully opened the front to the czarist army of Denikin, which wiped out all the communes in the area, destroyed villages and killed much of the population. Throughout the struggle, Arshinov estimates 200,000 noncombatant peasants and workers executed, with at least the same amount deported by Bolshevik authorities (Arshinov 126-127; Fighting the Revolution 12). He critiques the Communist ideal of centralized control:
The peasants made good use of the land of former pomeshchiks, princes and other landlords. However, this well-being was not given to them by the Communist power, but by the [Makhnovist] revolution. For dozens of years they had desired the land and in 1917 they took it, long before the Soviet power was established. If Bolshevism marched with the peasants in their seizure of the pomeshchiks' lands, it was only in order to defeat the agrarian bourgeoisie. But this in no way indicated that the future Communist power had the intention of furnishing the peasants land. On the contrary. The ideal of this power is the organization of a single agricultural economy belonging altogether to the same lord, the State. Soviet agricultural estates cultivated by wage workers and peasants - this is the model for the State agriculture which the Communist power strives to extend to the entire country. (72)
This goal of centralized administration manifested itself during the Spanish Civil War as an aggressive intransigence towards all those outside the ambit of communist influence. Members of the Spanish communist organizations were instructed not to join anarchist collectives, but to remain individuals holding private property or to join nationalized, communist-controlled farms. Beginning in March and July of 1937, a coalition of Republican and Communist forces attacked anarchist agricultural collectives with tanks and soldiers, destroying some, and severely limiting economic activity in others (Dolgoff 44). According to Yaacov Oved's "Communismo Libertario and Communalism in the Spanish Collectivisations (1936-1939),"
In August [1937] a battalion under the communist Enrique Lister was transferred to the region and ordered to abolish the Aragon defence council and the anarchist collectives. On August 11th, the action began. The Aragon council was dissolved and its anarchist members arrested. It was replaced by Jose Ignacio Mantecon, who was appointed governor general by the central government. Immediately he ordered Lister's brigades to start actions against the collectives. A third of all collectives were affected; about 600 office-holders were arrested, some executed and others exiled never to return to the region. The governor appointed committees to manage the communities and to abolish their collective framework. Land, cattle and machinery were to be returned to their former owners. Those who were responsible for this policy, were convinced that the farmers would greet it joyfully because they had been coerced into joining the collectives. But they were proven wrong. Except for the rich estate owners who were glad to get their land back, most members of the agricultural collectives objected and lacking all motivation they were reluctant to resume the same effort in the agricultural work. This phenomenon was so widespread that the authorities and the communist minister of agriculture were forced to retreat from their hostile policy. (1992: 53)
The tension between ideologies of anarchist and socialist land tenure has continued during modern revolutions. The introduction to Midnight Note's "New Enclosures" critiques Third World Marxists, claiming that the perpetuation of a land tenure which is not controlled by workers denies national self-sufficiency and ultimately endangers what revolutionary gains are made:
"Third world" Marxists accept the notion of the progressivity of original accumulation. Consequently, even though they officially fight against the New Enclosures, they envision their party and state as carrying out their own Enclosures on their own people even more efficiently and "progressively" than the capitalists could do. They interpret communal ownership of land and the local market exchanges as being the marks of "petty bourgeois" characteristics they must extirpate. Their revolutionary action aims to nationalize land and wipe out local markets as well as kick out the IMF and the "comprador" ruling elite. Yet the first goal is an anathema to many of those people attracted by the struggle against the New Enclosures in the first place! The confusion thickens at victory where there is a tendency to create or continue the two "advanced" forms of land tenure -- state plantations (Mozambique) or capitalist farms (Zimbabwe) -- at the expense of communal possibilities and actualities. Inevitably the conditions for counterrevolution ripen while the impossibility of carrying out autarkic economic measures becomes clear, since the very structures that might have sustained autarky and denied land to the "contras" have been destroyed by the revolutionary forces themselves. (7)
What anarchists seem to argue against is not collective organization or the redistribution of land from the landowners to the workers, but the centralization of power among a managerial elite. The anarchist Latin American newspaper Accion Libertaria (Buenos Aires) criticizes Cuban agrarian organization in their article entitled "Cuba: Revolution and Counter Revolution."
To seize the lands for those who work them, organizing them in free peasant communities - THAT IS REVOLUTION. But to twist the Agrarian Reform, exploiting the guajiro as an employee of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform - THIS IS COUNTER-REVOLUTION. (reprinted in AN 9/67)
The fatal weakness of Democracy, and of all such movements as Political Socialism and the Single Tax, which pledge themselves at the start to follow Democratic principles, is that they promise the impossible. Either of the movements named may cheer its followers with the assurance that it is adding steadily to its army of adherents, that it is permeating thought, and so forth. But all the eloquence in the world cannot conceal the fact, that, so far as action is concerned, it has taken the vow of perpetual impotence, since the basis of its programme is that no new departure shall be taken until the majority is on its side. (Poole 58)
Despite their commitment to polite electoralism and a few victories in some Pennsylvania counties and New Zealand, where they have won higher taxes on land than buildings, Georgist thought has remained outside the mainstream political arena. Even in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet republics, where popular Georgist movements have recently had access to governments in an attempt to persuade them to maintain control over the rent of land, they have won no major victories, in part because of opposition by the immensely powerful International Monetary Fund.
Even if a Georgist society were to be successfuly voted into existence however, it would rely on a centralized state power of taxation, against which anarchists would likely raise objections similar to those against socialism. Errico Malatesta, for example, notes that Georgism."pre-supposes the continuation of the bourgeois order, apart from the growing power of the State and the governmental and bureaucratic powers with which one would have to contend." (98) Anarchists tend to eschew the granting of power to a state, even if that power is meant to equalize the use-value of land.
Another critique of Georgism by anarchists is its use of the liberal-capitalist market mechanism of land distribution. According to the Georgist ideal, he or she would receive the land who offers the collectivity (embodied by the state), the largest rent in the market mechanism. The state would then distribute this revenue, which is based upon collective ownership of the land, to the collectivity by means of social services or per capita dividends. While this is an ingenious and relatively practical way of distributing the social benefit of land, anarchists have indicated a desire to distribute land not on the basis of the greatest rent, but on the basis of the greatest social good, which can be calculated not by a market mechanism, but by diverse and constant community dialogue. In her essay "Impressions of an Anarchist Landscape," Myrna Breitbart of Clark University promotes land utilization for community need rather than profit.
The use of agricultural land under anarchy would be determined by, on the one hand, its suitability to particular uses, and on the other by local or regional needs. Land would be used not for the purpose which yields the highest money rent, but rather, for that which offers the greatest social utility. (48)
While from an anarchist perspective the Georgists have introduced an important observation of landed property in that they attempt to equalize the differential value of land, anarchists tend to prefer the distribution of this value without the use of government and market mechanisms, or to bypass the need for this distribution altogether by working on an anarcho-communist or collective basis.
As in Columbia, many anarchists perceive the purpose for government land reform, when it is enacted, as a palliative measure to a revolutionary situation in order to maintain government control. In an essay whose title, "On Its Knees Government Offers Agrarian Reforms," says everything, Mexican anarchist Antonio. de P. Araujo elaborates:
In the heart of the Mexican proletariat there are beating today anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist sentiments, and they will not allow themselves to be deceived as they have been in the past. They will not swallow the hook of a repartition of the lands at the hands of the government. (Poole 51)
The goal of land reform as bait and political quiesence as hook is illustrated by the intentions of a land reform act passed by Madrid politicians in September 1932 on the footsteps of a failed military coup. The government was weak and had opposition from the left and right. The measure was an attempt to garner popular support, but their plan backfired when the reform proved too weak to make change, and the land that was distributed remained under government control. The Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), who advocated a revolutionary solution, took advantage of this situation and benefitted when the failed reform created discontent (Kern 113).
The anarchist critique of land reform has also occurred in the United States. Joshua Ingalls criticized the Homestead Act of 1862, which was billed as a free distribution of federal land to frontier farmers. He considered the act "so emasculated by political trickery," that it did little to alleviate the conditions of the increasing numbers of the landless, while politicians had voted enough land to railroads to have furnished a farm of 25 acres to every family in the country (Martin 141).Even if this reform had succeeded in distributing land to the landless, it's utility to the United States government, like the ager publicus of the Roman Empire (Weber 267-268), was the colonization and subsequent dispossession of indigenous communities.
On the few occasions when anarchists have acceded to state power, their land reforms proved no more effective, being unable to maintain gains within a system designed for hierarchy and domination. Pi y Margall, a Spanish anarchist, became President of the Spanish Republic in June of 1873. Among other anarchistic programs, he made an unusually sincere attempt to introduce expropriation of uncultivated lands and the establishment on them of communities of peasants. Agrarian credit banks were to be set up and all short-term leases changed to an enfiteusis perpetua (perpetual holding) (Horowitz 373). When the political will to carry out radical change is present however, government easily sheds its own: Pi y Margall was forced to resign after less than two months in office.
To the extremely limited extent that land reform does redistribute land, it often imposes hierarchical principles on communally-oriented land tenure and disenfranchises women in favor of individual male holdings. According to feminist analyst Barbara Rogers,
Land registration and reform is almost everywhere concerned with replacing systems of co-ownership with the concept of individual title to land, bestowed on the person seen as the 'head of household'. This is invariably a man unless the household in question is 'headed' by a widow, single mother or other manless woman. The hierarchical principle whereby even a family has to have a 'head' is deeply entrenched in development thinking, data collection and planning. (101-102)
It is apparent that anarchists have rejected a reliance on government or authoritarian revolution to make the desired changes in the realm of land tenure. In his essay "If Fight You Must -- Fight for Realities, Not Shams!" Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón writes,
. . . we must bear in mind that no government, however honourable, can decree the abolition of misery. The people themselves -- the hungry and disinherited -- are they who must abolish misery, by taking into their possession, as the very first step, the land which by natural right, should not be monopolised by a few but must be the property of every human being. . . . Be not deceived! What you need is to secure the well-being of your families -- their daily bread -- and this no government can give you. You yourselves must conquer these good things, and you must do it by taking immediate possession of the land, which is the original source of all wealth. Understand this well; no government will be able to give you that, for the law defends the "right" of those who are withholding wealth. You yourselves must take it, despite the law., despite the government, despite the pretended right of property. (Magón 1977: 61)
José María González, a prominent Mexican anarchist of the mid-1870s follows in the same line of thought with a poem (Hart 63):
The Social Revolution. What is the Object of that revolution? To abolish the proletariat. Then, cannot the government pass laws to bring about this goal? The government is unable to do anything. Why? Because it is the first enslaver.
Nevertheless, in order to facilitate the destruction of the old structure, anarchists have made an attempt to paint a picture, however two dimensional, of the new social relationships for which they strive. "The question of land refuses to go away." writes Hakim Bey in T.A.Z. "How can we separate the concept of space from the mechanisms of control? The territorial gangsters, the Nation/States, have hogged the entire map. Who can invent for us a cartography of autonomy, who can draw a map that includes our desires?" (64)
Different anarchists have different answers to this question. The Kingsgate Squatters and Rent Strikers Cooperative for Self-Management poses the goal of "territory organised for the joy of living." (AN 1975). In his book On Common Ground, Francis Reed looks to idyllic pastoral paintings which he claims compensated the 'national psyche' for common lands lost to enclosure during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reed posits the images as a template for a future anarchist society that will "stand as a record of 'a world of pastoral beauty that could be ours, if we did but desire it passionately enough'; icons to be carried through the desert on our exodus from the land." (44-45) These vague imaginings of the future are important, but they raise more questions than answers.
In the following pages I review some of the stated goals which anarchists have alluded to in their writings or speech, and a few of the actual experiments undertaken in the realm of land and housing. Briefly, anarchist land tenure as outlined by these clues is one which attempts to organize the use of land and housing on autonomic, egalitarian, and nondominative principles. As a land tenure which fits into the larger framework of a modern anarchism which is cognizant of the new social movements, it is likely to attempt conscious provisions against gender, race, colonial, and international hierarchies as well as its foundational provisions against class stratification and government. An equitable system of land tenure, according to anarchists, must be built upon the foundation of an end to all oppression, and is itself a part of that foundation.
Anarchist land tenure has as its basis an end to domination and the distribution of land according to need and equality. The holding of land and houses will be based on use (usufructuary) or planned use, and the producer on land will receive the entire product of her/his labor, leaving none for extraction by landowners. This will have the effect of leveling wealth and ending malnutrition, landlessness, and homelessness. With access to presently unused lands and the entirety of their product, workers will be empowered in economic relations with employers due to the option of self-sufficiency. Individuals will have complete freedom to work for themselves with their own capital, work by contract with the capital of others on free land, or join collectives. While certain anarchists want to simplify their lives by deindustrializing production, others have exhibited a desire to promote and utilize advanced technology. For radical environmentalists, anarchist land tenure will include sensitivity to the needs of animals and plants, and thus a balance will have to be struck between humans, as one species, and the millions of other species that exist. In any case, anarchists look forward to a land tenure marked by higher efficiency due to worker control, equitable distribution, and a reward to the worker (whether it be individuals or a collective) of the entire product of their labor.
In an imperfect world, attempts at anarchist land tenure is sporadically discernible. Makhno's Ukraine during the early twentieth century, Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, and on a much smaller scale anarchist communes following the revolutions of France, the United States and Brazil (Oved 58). More recently, anarchist land tenure is evident in squatting communities throughout Europe and the United States in, among other places, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Rome, New York and Philadelphia. All of the above anarchist incidents tend towards impermanence, a la Hakim Bey's temporary autonomous zone (TAZ), one example of which was the ten house Mainzerstrasse squat in Germany during 1990. While for a time it functioned as an anarchist community within the shell of a dying industrial militarist society, it was eventually evicted after a two hour battle between 500 squatters and German riot police (SH 12/90). But eviction did not destroy the anarchist autonomy which only temporarily inhabited the Maizerstrasse zone. According to TAZ theory, anarchist actions are designed to be highly mobile and impervious to massive and cumbersome state apparatus of control. Most of the Mainzerstrasse squatters simply relocated to other squatted buildings in the area.
Even with limited success, there are cracks in an anarchist land tenure situated in a violent world. Where small pieces of land are liberated through purchase or violence, the very means used to secure the land are often in contradiction to the pacifist goals of anarchism. In the case of nineteenth and twentieth century anarchist intentional communities, which were often based on communal ownership of land, they were forced into coexistence with larger and often antagonistic populations and legal systems. Revolutionary anarchist armies subjected themselves to authoritarian and time-consuming wars which made inroads on their ideals, energy and the ability to construct new social relationships. In the anarchist Ukraine for example, the Second Congress of the people met on February 12, 1919, but was unable to devote itself to the problems of peaceful construction because sssions were entirely occupied by questions of defence against invaders (Voline 461). Cultural and political theoretician and active participant in the Makhnovist army Peter Arshinov believed the basic shortcoming of Makhnovist movement to be its unavoidable concentration on military activities.
Three years of uninterrupted civil wars made the southern Ukraine a permanent battlefield. Numerous armies of various parties traversed it in every direction, wreaking material, social and moral destruction on the peasants. This exhausted the peasants. It destroyed their first experiments in the field of workers' self-management. Their spirit of social creativity was crushed. These conditions tore the Makhnovshchina away from its healthy foundation, away from socially creative work among the masses, and forced it to concentrate on war - revolutionary war, it is true, but war nevertheless. (252)
Though anarchists have never experienced utopia, and their communities are constantly subjected to a politico-economic atmosphere not of their choosing, ideals were dreamed of and some achieved. During the revolutionary upheaval after 1917 the anarchist army of Nestor Makhno destroyed the power of government and landlords in a signifigant area of the southern Ukraine, freeing lands for use by the peasantry.
In the rural areas, followers of Makhno expropriated farm lands, livestock and implements from the landed estates as well as from wealthy small holders, leaving their owners, according to Makhno "two pairs of horses, one or two cows (depending on the size of the family), a plough, a seeder, a mower and a pitchfork. . ." With this expropriated property the peasants organised communes. . . . Makhno reports that there were four of these communes within three or four miles of Gulyai Polya and many more in the surrounding district. A commune apparently had from 100-300 members, each being allotted sufficient land by "district congresses of land committees". (Barclay 108)
In addition to experiments in land tenure that label themselves anarchist, theoriticians of anarchy have used non-explicit anarchic communities to illustrate their goals. Colin Ward quotes William Mangin and John Turner's research on the Peruvian squatter shanty towns as an example which anarchist land tenure might emulate.
Instead of chaos and disorganisation, the evidence instead points to highly organised invasions of public land in the face of violent police opposition, internal political organisation with yearly local elections, thousands of people living together in an orderly fashion with no police protection or public services. The original straw houses constructed during the invasions are converted as rapidly as possible into brick and cement structures with an investment totalling millions of dollars in labour and materials. Employment rates, wages, literacy, and educational levels are all higher than in central city slums (from which most barriada residents have escaped) and higher than the national average. Crime, juvenile delinquency, prostitution and gambling are rare, except for petty thievery, the incidence of which is seemingly smaller than in other parts of the city. (1973, 69)
Ward then analyzes his quote:
The poor of the Third World shanty-towns, acting anarchically, because no authority is powerful enough to prevent them from doing so, have three freedoms which the poor of the rich world have lost. As John Turner puts it, they have the freedom of community self selection, the freedom to budget one's own resources and the freedom to shape one's own environment. (1973, 70)
I believe that God created the light, created the water, created the earth and the air for all equally. Nobody should have a right to usurp a part of these things, these substances. If they are usurped by anyone, it is to the detriment of the rest. (Mintz, 4)
Joshua Ingalls, a North American anarchist of the nineteenth century who dedicated much of his work to the question of land, took a similar position. Laurence Moss paraphrases his writings:
In his pamphlet, Land and Labor, Ingalls argued that the productive powers of the soil were indestructible and did not owe to any man's individual efforts. Therefore, no man had a legitimate right to establish his perpetual dominion over what in actuality belonged to men in common. Among modern anarchists, Hakim Bey draws inspiration from the eighteenth century pirate Republic of Libertatia, which he claims held land in common (119), and in the prolix and erethistic writings of situationist Guy Debord can be found, if one does a lot of sifting, the desire to "subject space to living experience," and promote the rediscovery of autonomous places "without reintroducing an exclusive attachment to the soil." (25)
Even in the most adverse of situations, these concepts are extremely important to anarchists, as is illustrated by the tragi-comic example of Carlo Cafiero. A financial supporter of Bakunin who played an important role in the International Brotherhood, Cafiero was hospitalized in a mental institution after being found in 1883 wandering naked in the hills near Florence. Writes historian of anarchism Robert Suskind, "He died nine years later, obsessed with the thought that he was getting more than his just share of sunlight through the windows of his room at the asylum." (107)
The desire for an equitable distribution of land and housing among anarchists has focused much of their attention on the denunciation and expropriation of absentee landowners. Those who have little need to use land are commonly told that they have no right to charge rent; holding of land will be for those who use it only. The first point of Bakunin's "National Catechism" (1866) states: "The land is the common property of society. But its fruits and use shall be open only to those who cultivate it by their labor; accordingly, ground rents must be abolished." (1972: 99). Late nineteenth century French anarchist Elisée Reclus explains:
Thus we shall take the land -- yes, we shall take it -- but away from those who hold it without working it, in order to return it to those who do work it . . . what you cultivate, my brother, is yours, and we shall do everything in our power to help you keep it; but what you do not cultivate belongs to a comrade. Make room for him. (Fleming, 146)
In an introductory proclamation to Ukrainian peasants, the Makhnovists made clear their position against absentee landlordism as well. "The lands of the service gentry, of the monasteries, of the princes and other enemies of the toiling masses, with all their live stock and goods, are passed on to the use of those peasants who support themselves solely through their own labor." (Arshinov 266) According to Arshinov, these principles were put into practice by Makhno in 1917 as president of the regional peasants' union during the period of the Kerensky government, and in the October days of the same year:
. . . in August, 1917, he assembled all the pomeshchiks (landed gentry) of the region and made them give him all the documents relating to lands and buildings. He proceeded to take an exact inventory of all this property, and then made a report on it, first at a session of the local soviet, then at the district congress of soviets, and finally at the regional congress of soviets. He proceeded to equalize the rights of the pomeshchiks and the kulaks with those of the poor peasant laborers in regard to the use of the land. Following his proposal, the congress decided to let the pomeshchiks and the kulaks have a share of the land, as well as tools and livestock, equal to that of the laborers. (54)
Resentment towards absentee landlordism motivated many during the Spanish Civil War as well. An anonymous anarchist writer stated the principle simply:
One man wouldn't be able to live off the work of another. It was the wish that each man work and not desire to live in luxury. One wouldn't be able to suck another's produce, and we would all eat. (quote Mintz, 5)
Some anarchists, however, did not always follow this template. Bakunin, who always considered himself a disciple of Marxist economics, promoted absolute control of land by the collective instead of allowing for both collective and individual agriculture. This lead him to depict the future anarchist land tenure in a way identical with the essence of the communist ideal (Pyzim 41), which maintained control of production by the collective in order to gain members. In point XVIII part III of his Social and Economic Bases of Anarchism (quoted in Horowitz 141) he promotes the "Appropriation of land by agricultural associations, and of capital and all the means of production by the industrial associations." In his explanation he goes on to state:
Freed from the tutelage of society, they [the workers] are at liberty to enter or not to enter any of the labor associations. However, they will necessarily want to enter such associations, for with the abolition of the right of inheritance and the passing of all the land, capital, and means of production into the hands of the international federation of free workers' associations, there will be no more room nor opportunity for competition, that is, for the existence of isolated labor.
Bakunin's scenario depicts the control of individual production by the collective, a method adopted in many areas during the early stages of the Spanish civil war, when anarchist militias used coercion to collectivize peasants. According to historian Yaacov Oved,
Forced collectivisation was justified, in some libertarian eyes by "the need to feed the columns at the front . . . One must remember that a war was going on and that coercion was not always to be avoided." (1992: 49).
Sixty percent of anarchist land in Spain was quickly brought under collective cultivation (Dolgoff, 6), hosting about 2,000 anarchist agricultural collectives involving approximately 800,000 people (Oved 40). Only a small percentage of these collectives were subject to force in the collectivization process, as those who advocated forced collectivization seemed to be a minority. Much more common, especially in the latter stages of the war, was the dual acceptance of individual farmers and non-coercive encouragement of collectives. Says Augustin Souchy, one-time international secretary of the FAI (Kern 184), "Economic variety, for example coexistence of collective and privately conducted enterprises, will not adversely affect the economy, but is, on the contrary, the true manifestation and the indispensable prerequisite for a free society." (Dolgoff, 134) Sam Dolgoff writes of this principle put into practice in anarchist collectives during the late civil war (while conveniently eliding examples of anarchist forced collectivisation during the early period):
. . . collectivization was not (as in the Soviet Union or Cuba) imposed from above by decree, but achieved from below by the initiative of the peasants themselves. Nor did the libertarian collectives, like Stalin, adopt disastrous measures to force poor peasant proprietors to surrender their land and join the collectives. On the contrary, the collectives respected the rights of individual proprietors who worked their land themselves and did not employ wage labor, relying on persuasion and example to convince individual peasant owners to join the collectives. By and large this policy was remarkably effective (Dolgoff 111).
Spain is the only instance I know of where anarchists forced collectivization on an unwilling population. With this exception, they have generally advocated a more pluralist approach. "The squabbling ideologues of anarchism and libertarianism each prescribe some utopia congenial to their various brands of tunnel-vision," writes Bey, "ranging from the peasant commune to the L-5 Space City. We say, let a thousand flowers bloom -- with no gardener to lop off weeds and sports according to some moralizing or eugenical scheme." (46) Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta concurs, stating that decisions regarding the formation of anarchist production can only occur as expropriation takes place.
What forms will production and exchange assume? Will it be the triumph of communism (production in association and free consumption for all) or collectivism (production in common and the distribution of goods on the basis of work done by each individual), or individualism (to each the individual ownership of the means of production and the enjoyment of the full product of his labour), or other composite forms that individual interest and social instinct, illuminated by experience, will suggest? Probably every possible form of possession and utilisation of the means of production and all ways of distribution of produce will be tried out at the same time in one or many regions, and they will combine and be modified in various ways until experience will indicate which form, or forms, is or are, the most suitable. (104)
Vinoba Bhave, a mid-twentieth century pacifist whose thought some liken to anarchism (Ostergaard 1971; Bhave 1964; Dootor 55), voiced similar sentiments over fifty years later in India. He prescribes what he calls "also-ism" for the distribution of land:
You can have big schemes of co-operative farming if you want to or you may also not have them if you are so inclined. In gramadan, I believe in "also-ism" and not in "only-ism". In other words, this also would be permissible, and that also would be permissible. It would be decided according as the villagers think it best. Gramadan is as it were a voluntary declaration of Grama-Swarajya, the commencement of real village self-government. Therefore, that system alone will prevail which the villagers after mutual discussions and understanding approve of. No system or arrangement would be thrust upon them from outside. If each of them prefers separate individual cultivation of the land, he can do so; and if two, four or even more persons want to come together or even if the whole village wants to have collective farming they are welcome to follow their inclination. All will, however, work with complete unanimity. If the opinion seems to be divided, both the experiments would be undertaken. (quoted in Hoffman 1961; Ram 1962)
In a system of land tenure based upon anarchist principles of plurality, though individuals will be completely free to remain apart from collectives, it is expected that joining will be in their self-interest. Four small communes in the anarchist Ukraine, all located near the center of Makhnovist power, serve as an example of collectivity freely chosen by the peasants. Arshinov writes that though they were not numerous,
. . . what was most precious was that these communes were formed on the initiative of the poor peasants themselves. The Makhnovists never exerted any pressure on the peasants, confining themselves to propagating the idea of free communes. The communes were not created on the basis of example or caprice, but exclusively on the basis of the vital needs of peasants who had possessed nothing before the revolution and who, after their victory, set about organizing their economic life on a communal basis. These were not at all the artificial communes of the Communist Party, in which people assembled by chance worked together - people who only wasted the grain and damaged the soil, who enjoyed the support of the State and thus lived from the labor of those whom they pretended to teach how to work. These were real working communes of peasants who, themselves accustomed to work, valued work in themselves and in others. The peasants worked in these communes first of all to provide their daily bread. In addition, each found there whatever moral and material support he needed. The principles of brotherhood and equality permeated the communes. Everyone - men, women and children - worked according to his or her abilities. Organizational work was assigned to one or two comrades who, after finishing it, took up the remaining tasks together with the other members of the commune. It is evident that these communes had these traits because they grew out of a working milieu and that their development followed a natural course. (87)
In most anarchist villages during the Spanish Civil War, the number of individualists voluntarily decreased over time, due to a feeling of isolation which encouuraged them to join the collectives (Guérin 133) Speaking of the relationship between the collectives and individuals in the liberated zones, historian Jose Peirats states:
Small landlords more or less opposed to collectivization, who were called "individualists," found the going tough, especially around harvest time, because they could not hire wage laborers, and because their holdings were too small to use machinery (which they couldn't afford anyhow). In some towns or villages the "individualists" would cooperate by helping each other with the work, but the crops were small and of poor quality. Most of the collectivists treated the "individualists" well. In Monzon the collective loaned them machinery and certain necessary supplies. Some "individualists" distributed their produce through the collective's cooperatives. And some finally joined the collective . . . (Dolgoff 112)
Once one joined, groups or individuals had complete freedom to resign, but the right of resignation, where the benefits of the collective were so great, was seldom invoked (Dolgoff 136). Guérin analyzes the propaganda and class factors influencing an individualist decision to collectivize in Spain:
. . . libertarian education and a collectivist tradition compensated for technical underdevelopment, countered the individualistic tendencies of the peasants, and turned them directly toward socialism. The latter was the choice of the poorer peasants, while those who were slightly better off, as in Catalonia, clung to individualism. A great majority (90 percent) of land workers chose to join collectives from the very beginning. (131)
Although collectives seemed to offer an egalitarian alternative to the capitalism which it replaced, they too were subject to difficulties. One problem which manifested itself during the Spanish Civil War was an income differential due to varying qualities of the anarchist collectives' resource base. Oved writes:
The growing differentiation between affluent and poor collectives signified a severe deterioration. In 1938 many anarchists criticised the emerging 'neo-capitalism', due to the collectives' different points of departure. Some had started on rich estates, productive land and high income produce, while others were poor to begin with and deteriorated rapidly. According to these critics: "Instead of solidarity and mutual aid, collective selfishness prevails and the poor collectives are exploited by the richer ones". (55)
Not all anarchists exclusively emphaize common ownership, with the provision for personal farming as only an afterthought or exception to the rule. In their July 1964 issue devoted to land, editors of London's Anarchy use Proudhon to point out that anarchist movement is not necessarily to confiscate the small home or farm, and may even allow for slightly altered concepts of property.
The one thing that most people know about the 19th century French anarchist Proudhon is that he coined the slogan "Property is Theft" and later in life modified this to "Property is Freedom." This always raises a laugh, but Proudhon was in fact talking about two different kinds of property. The property of the man who draws an income from thousands of acres, or from the ownership of an oilwell or a factory, or from speculation, is obviously different from the property of the peasant cultivator. There is a difference between owning your means of livelihood and owning ICI. (41: 194)
Russians affiliated with Land and Liberty in the nineteenth century envisioned a system whereby land belongs to the whole people in an abstract sense, but is parcelled individually for practical farming. Land which was hitherto held privately was to be held only on terms of usufruct, and after the usufructuary's death would accrue to the village for redistribution (Masaryk, 466). North American anarchist of the nineteenth century Joshua Ingalls, who dedicated much of his work to the question of land, took a similar position. Laurence Moss paraphrases his writings, which provide for a right of temporary exclusion by the user to replace concepts of heritable absentee property:
In his pamphlet, Land and Labor, Ingalls argued that . . . the only claim an individual had to fencing off a portion of land for his own was that he occupied the land and made use of it in the satisfaction of his individual needs. Upon his death or departure the individual's tenure ends and the next occupant, who employs the land productively while living on it, acquires a similar but temporary right to exclude others from the land. At all times the right of exclusion is temporary and not absolute. (11)
An anarchist praxis, or theory into action, occurred when the Whiteway Colony adopted these principles at their intentional community in turn of the century England. According to historian Tom Keell Wolfe,
In 1899 the title deeds were burnt with some ceremony and the Colony's basis was laid down -- there should be no private ownership of land -- control of the land and any business to do with it should be in the hands of the Colony Meeting -- individual plots of land were held on the basis of use-occupation. Plots were allocated by the Meeting, which had no power to take it away. Where the occupier left Whiteway the land reverted to the control of the Meeting, and could be reallocated. (Wolfe 34)
The uninheritability of land in this ideology indicates that, like the Maoris of New Zealand, many anarchists demand not only that land be shared equally among the present population, but that living persons will share the earth with future persons in an infinite extension of time. In an extrapolation of this not made explicit in the above instances, some anarchists might even demand that none will use the earth's resources in a way that is unsustainable, or for which an alternative would not be available when the resources are exhausted, for to do so would deprive future persons of equal access to the land.
But even by sharing the land with all future generations of humans, the concerns of eco-anarchists such as constitute the members of Earth First! are not fully addressed. They demand that land and the animals on it be respected in their own right, not mistreated as resources for exploitation (even if by anarchist modalities).
Clearly, anarchists have not yet resolved the multitude of problems and issues which have arisen in the attempt to actualize the goal of 'an equal right to the earth' and collective production. The tension that accompanies the interaction between individualists and collectives, anthropocentric anarchists and eco-anarchists, and a multi-collective stratification of wealth is likely to reaccur in future and current anarchist societies.
A central tenet of anarchism, hard for many to grasp, is the eradication of authority in favor of autonomy, or self-rule. In the context of a land dispute, anarchists might encourage those individuals who are concerned with the outcome, not an outside authority, to resolve the conflict amongst themselves. Of course, where an entity used violence to flaunt community standards and prevent others from using their 'fair share' of land, which is tantamount to the present system of land ownership, individuals would surely cooperate with outside forces in liberating themselves, much as anarchists cooperate in their own liberation today.
As noted above, it is likely that many anarchists will choose to work and consume collectively, as they have in the past, and as current examples of anarchist organization such as the squatting and popular kitchens like Food Not Bombs in the United States illustrate. On a larger scale however, it is likely that many will want to produce privately and consume their own product. In the latter instances it may be useful to selectively adopt concepts and systems of land tenure developed by Marxists and Georgists.
Marxists do well to divide the rent we pay for land between 'absolute rent' and 'differential rent' (Dwyer 18). Absolute rent is the monopolistic cost of land, created by an artificial scarcity orchestrated by landlords and the government, who deprive the population of large areas that could be used to decrease demand for land and thus make it cheaper. This monopoly is fostered by governments which are loyal to landowners by keeping land scarce through public land, zoning, and planning policies.
Added to 'absolute rent' in the rent that you pay periodically is 'differential rent,' which is created because some lands are desired by the tenant over others for reasons such as its better location, natural resources, fertility, or any other feature that makes one piece of land more desireable than another. In an anarchistic society the monopolistic 'absolute rent' would disappear because it is based on domination and violence, but the differential rent would only disappear in an anarcho-collectivist, or anarcho-communist society. Individualist anarchists might choose to utilize the concept of differential rents in the distribution of land.
If there are two pieces of land, one of which is not as desirable as the other, and two people who wish to use these lands, individualists can equalize the benefits of the land with a variation of the system popularized by Henry George, alluded to earlier. He used the classical economist David Ricardo's theory called the 'law of rent,' which states that the margin of production is the amount produced (given equal productive capacity) on the least productive land in use. George stated that whatever is produced under the margin of production should be given to the producer, not the landlord. Whatever individuals produce above the margin of production, in order to equalize the benefits of differently-valued land, should be combined, divided on a per capita basis, and equally distributed. Explained with Marxist language, absolute rent should be abolished, and differential rent should be combined, divided on a per capita basis, and equally distributed.
I know of only one actual experiment in which anarchist and Georgist philosophy was combined. According to William Reichert:
The Vale, an intentional community at Yellow Springs, Ohio, implemented the basic teachings of Ingalls, Fowler, Owen, [all anarchists] and Henry George in their system of allocating the use of their lands in leaseholds rather than individual ownership and control. As each family of the community is assigned an acre or more of land which it may work for its own living, rent is based not on the improvements made to the property but its intrinsic worth, and the monies thus derived are devoted to the support of libertarian projects selected in common by the members of the community. (1976: 529)
In a similar manner to the members of Vale, current individualists who do not wish to consume produce collectively can equalize the benefits of different qualities of land by the distribution of produce collected as 'differential rent' to all those who forego, to their detriment, the use of land from which differential rent is created. As an example we have Emma the anarchist orange grower, who moves to a region in which no settlers yet live. There are several areas in which she can plant orange trees, but she chooses the best, which will yield her 200 bushels of oranges a month. Ricardo, another anarchist orange grower, then moves into the area and chooses the second best land for oranges. It produces 100 bushels of oranges a month with the same amount of work that Emma does to receive 200 bushels from her field. Ricardo and Emma are both, for the sake of this discussion, identically hard-working and capable orange growers. If both work the same length of time, and both are equally hard-working and proficient laborers, both should receive the same amount of produce in an egalitarian society. However, Emma arrived in the region first, understandably planting on the superior land, and receives more in produce from the same amount of work as Ricardo. Because by anarhist land ethics Emma has no greater right to land based upon first arrival, she has no greater right to the superior land. Realizing this, Emma and Ricardo arrive at an agreement which will equalize the amount they receive from their labor and thus equalize their right to land. Emma gives Ricardo 50 bushels of oranges a month, thus equalizing the amount of oranges each receives at 150 bushels per month.
This scenario could be depicted in an infinite number of ways depending upon the needs of the conflicting parties. For example, Maria wants to start a shop near the cultural downtown of a large city to trade in queer zines, sex videos and set up a printing collective. George wants to start a photography studio and gallery at the same site. They each have an equal right to the space, but there is room for only one of them. There are many ways to resolve this, but they choose what seems most appropriate for them. George agrees to arrange the studio a few blocks away in an industrial district that has space available. Maria will give him free zines and videos and agrees to find someone who will permanently display the photography in the cultural downtown as well as providing wall space within the zine shop itself.
The other option, of course, is for Emma, Ricardo, George, and Maria to share all goods communally. This is particularly true in the case of orange-growing, where Emma and Ricardo could tear-down the fence between their respective orange groves and keep each other company while communally working and consuming. As the example describes the case of George and Maria, however, they might already be in a collective, which illustrates that even in the idyllic collectives of which so many anarchists dream, competing land and housing needs will need to be addressed.
Just one of the many predictable paradoxes of housing in Britain is the gulf between the owner-occupier and the municipal tenant. Nearly a third of the population live in municipally-owned houses or flats, but there is not a single estate controlled by its tenants, apart from a handful of co-operative housing societies. The owner-occupier cherishes and improves his home, although its space standards and structural quality may be lower than that of the prize-winning piece of municipal architecture whose tenant displays little pride or pleasure in his home. The municipal tenant is trapped in a syndrome of dependence and resentment, which is an accurate reflection of his housing situation. People care about what is theirs, what they can modify, alter, adapt to changing needs and improve for themselves. They must be able to attack their environment to make it truly their own. They must have a direct responsibility for it. (Ward: 1973, 73)
Congruent with Ward's observation of housing in modern England, the agricultural transformation from landlord-owned to user-controlled collectives during the Spanish Civil War similarly saw a rise in productivity. Despite the loss from many Spanish libertarian collectives of up to 40% of the labor force as soldiers mobilized to the front, increased production and improved infrastructure relative to pre-collectivisation was almost always achieved (Guillen 7), Guérin claiming an overall yield increase of from thirty to fifty percent (134). Anarchists in Aragón claimed a 30% increase (20% according to official data) in production following collectivization, while in the same period Catalonia, which had not collectivized to the same extent, registered a decrease in production (Thomas 515; Oved 50). Leval relates the astounding increases of production in Graus and Carcagente:
Through more efficient cultivation and the use of better fertilizers [in Graus], production of potatoes increased 50% (three-quarters of the crop was sold to Catalonia in exchange for other commodities . . .) and the production of sugar beets and feed for livestock doubled. Previously uncultivated smaller plots of ground were used to plant 400 fruit trees, . . . and there were a host of other interesting innovations. Through this use of better machinery and chemical fertilizers and, by no means least, through the introduction of voluntary collective labor, the yield per hectare was 50% greater on collective property than on individually worked land. (Dolgoff, 138)It is worth noting that in one year the area [in Carcagente] seeded with wheat increased from 1,938 to 4,522 hectares (one hectare is about 2 1/2 acres), and with barley in