If you think about it, it is completely absurd, why anyone assumes the right to ‘own’ a piece of land. Or even more land than the other guy. Someone must have been the person to first come up with the idea of ownership, but it is and was never based on anything other than an idea, and we should question it.
After all inheritance of landownership is a major cornerstone of our unjust and exploitative society.
Every generation, people want to try new things and it’s nice. But landownership can and has been and good thing in a way that just going back to “anarchy” wouldn’t work.
E.g. creation of ghettos, who gets to farm the best land, etc.
So then the suggestions are that the land are owned and “managed” by the state apparatus. Now we have a few famines in history to show us how gaining favor in a political system is not the best way to manage the land.
I’m open to better suggestions but just shitting on land ownership seems easy and unproductive.
I’m pretty sure the Native Americans didn’t believe in land ownership, at least not individual land ownership, more of a communal version, and it worked out well for them. They had huge societies, vast trade networks, and were able to feed themselves fine. It requires a different, non-capitalist, non-Western mindset, but it can work.
Neither was the Western population at the time, but it scaled up fine. There’s nothing saying alternative systems of land ownership can’t scale up either. The only reason we went with the current one is because it benefited the people who killed everyone else.
People like the idea of the stability ownership offers. You can’t be kicked out of your house or off your land you own because your income dropped out lost a job. How would you suggest this stability is maintained?
You’re not wrong but surely you don’t mean to say that mankind should never have discovered agriculture, right? At that point we may as well say that gaining sentience fucked everything up because it was the beginning of wilfully hurting others despite having the capacity for empathy (aka doing evil things).
No I’m serious, and I understand you mean well but I can’t have this discussion meaningfully with you without writing 8 paragraphs of context.
There’s a lot of what Pratchett called ‘lies to children’ when it comes to non-university anthropology, things we learned in school that were kind of outdated already and gross oversimplifications.
We were told that agriculture allowed the free time to specialize and was the beginning of culture but the truth is that all that hunter-gatherer man needed to hunt to feed himself and 3 other people was about 6 hours of actual work a week. And specialization already existed with stone knapping and pottery.
There’s a lot more to it but I don’t really have the patience to keep writing this.
Well, you did a good job condensing where you were coming from in two paragraphs. Enough to make me realise that I mistook your original meaning completely. I hadn’t heard the 6 hours of work a week number before. In fact, I’ve never really questioned the logic I was taught with regards to agriculture being the start of civilisation due to freeing up hands and allowing people to settle down, because hunter gatherers would have to roam around at least a little to follow herds or seasonal effects on available forage. That understanding was based on what I’ve learned in history 101 at high school though.
I started out a bit argumentative because I read your comment as an overly dramatic lamentation that I took to mean something like: “people are so bad I wish we weren’t born/evolved”. Thanks for taking the time to kindly explain. I’m always interested in having a possible blind spot or internalised assumption revealed and to reassess entrenched beliefs.
One other thing to point out is that agriculture allowed for large mobile armies.
For hunter gatherers it wasn’t easy to stockpile enough long term storage portable food to take to war, nor could you predict periods of bounty (which is why so many ancient cultures had prohibitions to making war during winter that almost no one broke) to plan long term campaigns. This style of sustenance also kept nomadic band population low as following the herds and the reduction of ease of hunting and complications in moving gave significant advantage to smaller social units.
We see a radical increase in social group size with the advent of agriculture, eventually leading to more permanent town and eventually city living instead of nomadic bands as you generally needed to be in one place to keep others from taking your crops and tending them year round.
I fully understand that there are a lot of luxuries and even just basic life improvements that wouldn’t be available to us if we had kept as small hunter gatherer bands, and maybe a lot of people alive now couldn’t survive or thrive in that kind of environment, it would be a very, very different world than what we know today but one thing I do know is that of we had never discovered agriculture we would never have eventually become a species that could kill off 95% of the life on the planet with the press of a button.
Unfortunately land will fall into disrepair if someone doesn’t actually own it. They have no incentive to invest in its upkeep if it can just be taken away at any moment. There’s a reason rental buildings have a reputation for being unkempt, the renters don’t want to pay for the upkeep since it’s not theirs and the landlords don’t want to pay for the upkeep because they don’t live there.
It gets even worse if government owns it, it would take 6 months just to get a light bulb changed let alone a new roof or hedges trimmed.
That might be the case in your country, but there are many cultures that are perfectly capable of sharing and keeping common infrastructure in good conditions. Your personal experience isn’t generic and globally true.
A country’s land should not be owned by individuals, in my opinion, but used by those who need it and when they do so. A country’s land is what makes it a land, so it cannot be owned or sold. Someone inheriting it from someone who took it and maybe sold it should give no legitimate claim to possession.
Landownership is wrong all together.
If you think about it, it is completely absurd, why anyone assumes the right to ‘own’ a piece of land. Or even more land than the other guy. Someone must have been the person to first come up with the idea of ownership, but it is and was never based on anything other than an idea, and we should question it.
After all inheritance of landownership is a major cornerstone of our unjust and exploitative society.
Every generation, people want to try new things and it’s nice. But landownership can and has been and good thing in a way that just going back to “anarchy” wouldn’t work. E.g. creation of ghettos, who gets to farm the best land, etc.
So then the suggestions are that the land are owned and “managed” by the state apparatus. Now we have a few famines in history to show us how gaining favor in a political system is not the best way to manage the land.
I’m open to better suggestions but just shitting on land ownership seems easy and unproductive.
Holy shit I didn’t expect such a quality comment in this discussion.
I would argue that corporations shouldn’t be able to own residential land, and regular people shouldn’t own more than two land pieces.
I’m pretty sure the Native Americans didn’t believe in land ownership, at least not individual land ownership, more of a communal version, and it worked out well for them. They had huge societies, vast trade networks, and were able to feed themselves fine. It requires a different, non-capitalist, non-Western mindset, but it can work.
Their huge societies in no way are comparable to the population we have today.
Neither was the Western population at the time, but it scaled up fine. There’s nothing saying alternative systems of land ownership can’t scale up either. The only reason we went with the current one is because it benefited the people who killed everyone else.
Doesn’t that also mean The Irish famine shows private land ownership isn’t the best way to manage land?
The potato famine was caused by a new type of blight being brought from the Americas back to Europe.
I don’t see how being beaten by a novel disease has anything to do with private land ownership.
People like the idea of the stability ownership offers. You can’t be kicked out of your house or off your land you own because your income dropped out lost a job. How would you suggest this stability is maintained?
It goes back to when good agricultural land discovered to be so ridiculously effective at feeding people.
Not the beginning of wealth, but certainly one of the oldest still used store of wealth.
So much has been fucked up by discovering agriculture, it was also the beginning of institutional slavery.
You’re not wrong but surely you don’t mean to say that mankind should never have discovered agriculture, right? At that point we may as well say that gaining sentience fucked everything up because it was the beginning of wilfully hurting others despite having the capacity for empathy (aka doing evil things).
RETURN TO MONKE
No I’m serious, and I understand you mean well but I can’t have this discussion meaningfully with you without writing 8 paragraphs of context.
There’s a lot of what Pratchett called ‘lies to children’ when it comes to non-university anthropology, things we learned in school that were kind of outdated already and gross oversimplifications.
We were told that agriculture allowed the free time to specialize and was the beginning of culture but the truth is that all that hunter-gatherer man needed to hunt to feed himself and 3 other people was about 6 hours of actual work a week. And specialization already existed with stone knapping and pottery.
There’s a lot more to it but I don’t really have the patience to keep writing this.
Well, you did a good job condensing where you were coming from in two paragraphs. Enough to make me realise that I mistook your original meaning completely. I hadn’t heard the 6 hours of work a week number before. In fact, I’ve never really questioned the logic I was taught with regards to agriculture being the start of civilisation due to freeing up hands and allowing people to settle down, because hunter gatherers would have to roam around at least a little to follow herds or seasonal effects on available forage. That understanding was based on what I’ve learned in history 101 at high school though.
I started out a bit argumentative because I read your comment as an overly dramatic lamentation that I took to mean something like: “people are so bad I wish we weren’t born/evolved”. Thanks for taking the time to kindly explain. I’m always interested in having a possible blind spot or internalised assumption revealed and to reassess entrenched beliefs.
One other thing to point out is that agriculture allowed for large mobile armies.
For hunter gatherers it wasn’t easy to stockpile enough long term storage portable food to take to war, nor could you predict periods of bounty (which is why so many ancient cultures had prohibitions to making war during winter that almost no one broke) to plan long term campaigns. This style of sustenance also kept nomadic band population low as following the herds and the reduction of ease of hunting and complications in moving gave significant advantage to smaller social units.
We see a radical increase in social group size with the advent of agriculture, eventually leading to more permanent town and eventually city living instead of nomadic bands as you generally needed to be in one place to keep others from taking your crops and tending them year round.
I fully understand that there are a lot of luxuries and even just basic life improvements that wouldn’t be available to us if we had kept as small hunter gatherer bands, and maybe a lot of people alive now couldn’t survive or thrive in that kind of environment, it would be a very, very different world than what we know today but one thing I do know is that of we had never discovered agriculture we would never have eventually become a species that could kill off 95% of the life on the planet with the press of a button.
Unfortunately land will fall into disrepair if someone doesn’t actually own it. They have no incentive to invest in its upkeep if it can just be taken away at any moment. There’s a reason rental buildings have a reputation for being unkempt, the renters don’t want to pay for the upkeep since it’s not theirs and the landlords don’t want to pay for the upkeep because they don’t live there.
It gets even worse if government owns it, it would take 6 months just to get a light bulb changed let alone a new roof or hedges trimmed.
That might be the case in your country, but there are many cultures that are perfectly capable of sharing and keeping common infrastructure in good conditions. Your personal experience isn’t generic and globally true.
A country’s land should not be owned by individuals, in my opinion, but used by those who need it and when they do so. A country’s land is what makes it a land, so it cannot be owned or sold. Someone inheriting it from someone who took it and maybe sold it should give no legitimate claim to possession.