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.
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.
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).
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called ‘lies to children’ when it comes to non-university anthropology, things we learned in school that were kind of outdated already and gross oversimplifications.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.
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.
Their huge societies in no way are comparable to the population we have today.
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.
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.
If someone owns a house, they kinda have to own at the very least some land around it. I just don’t really see any other way for that to work. Would be interesting to hear how that could work otherwise.
There’s a thing called leasehold whereby you own the building and lease the land usually for 99 years after which it returns to the freeholder. It’s one of the reasons that the US embassy in London moved from Mayfair to Nine Elms. It was the only US embassy in the world that the US government didn’t own, the freehold belongs to the Grosvenor family (i.e. Lord Grosvenor). When the US tried to buy the freehold the Grosvenor family refused but agreed to a 999 year lease in exchange for the return of 12000 acres of Florida that was confiscated from them after the Revolutionary War - yes, they’ve been landowners for a very long time! I think the US made sure to buy the freehold of the new site at Nine Elms (they sold the remainder of the 999 year lease in Mayfair for an undisclosed sum) 😀
This isn’t something I know a whole lot about, because I don’t believe in the abolition of private property on an individual level, but it’s my understanding the crunchy types would ask:
What makes you think they have to own the land around it? There are plenty of home owners right now who don’t have yards.
Define for the class what you think anarchy means, and, wait one minute, you think ghettos are created by people not recognizing private land ownership?
Anarchy in 2 words, no state. It’s mostly a thing in history in opposition to something else.
Don’t be silly, I know why ghettos are created. My point was more towards the organization of urbanization through land ownership can help.
Now what do you propose we implement instead?
