[P2P-F] Fwd: Land reform and its history

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Pat Conaty <pat.commonfutures at phonecoop.coop>
Date: Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 8:58 PM
Subject: Land reform and its history

Just thought I would recommend a very good book to you all. It is called
Owning the Earth (the Transforming history of land ownership) by the
Scottish writer, Andro Linklater. He died a week before this beautiful book
came out in 2013. He was researching then his next book on land reform in
Scotland. He did an earlier book called Measuring America that was highly
acclaimed.

This his last book covers some 500 years since the emergence of private
property rights under Queen Elizabeth 1, but covers so much stuff and in so
many different countries and continents. He explores communal property
systems, the land reform struggles in Latin America, the Mexican ejidos,
the reasons why serfdom collapsed under its own contradictions in Russia
when the serfs were then liberated in the 1860s to access basically finance
to pay off their insolvent landlords.

He also delves into the different philosophical perspectives of property
rights and shows how these have trumped human rights again and again. Hence
the perversity of their sanctity if private property excludes other human
and social rights. The views of Austrian economists like Von Mises and
Hayek is the worst on this score and extreme compared to Locke (which is
bad enough)

His analysis of financialisation is interesting and spans the twist and
turns of the 100 years up to 2008. He shows how housing finance underpins
the entire money system and this was the antidote to a perspective like
that of Keynes.

What is very revealing in his analysis is the reasons why private property
does make sense up to certain very constrained limits (to meet household or
personal needs). This was implicit in the thinking of Rousseau in his
Discourse on Inequality. But also post World War 2 to eradicate feudalism
and limit a return to fascism in Japan, US policy was to instigate a Land
to the Tiller programme that broke up the feudal estates still strong in
order to provide small plots to farmers who were heavily oppressed by the
residual power of the samurai. But also in Taiwan and South Korea the same
Land to the Tiller reforms were introduced then. As a consequence what this
led to was the Asian Tiger levels of productivity that could feed cities
and a form of republicanism that forged democracy.

However this was at risk of gaining in popularity more widely. Indeed the
land reform in Guatemala in 1954 and the threat this posed to US interests
led to a super fast curtailment of Land to the Tiller programmes support by
US foreign policy and a repression of anything like this again.

The data Linklater provides shows the sound economics of systems where land
can be managed in both mutual or commons ways with leases to small
producers. So very much a Community Land Trust approach. This partially
happened in late 19th century Russia under the Mir system and before the
Lenin and Stalin fully nationalised land. But what seems crucial is the
balance between limited private property rights under a leasehold system
and broader stewardship/commons rights.

What Linklater argues is that the ownership question viz. land and
intellectual property is key as this is where the politics reside, not in
the economics and markets as is standard but the wrong-headed view.

He touches on a clear understanding of the commons here and there. This is
implicit but it does not take away from what a fabulous book this is.

His critique of Thatcherism, Reaganomics and Austrian economics is
blisteringly brilliant I think.

So sad he died. Well worth a read and a book I really could not put down.
He is a wonderful historian.

All the best

Pat




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