Land Redistribution Quotes

[...] violent revolutions do not so much redistribute wealth as destroy it. There may be a redivision of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as in the old. The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. …[T]his was achieved under the rubric of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession.

I'll govern for the good of the governed. I'll make sure every citizen is properly educated and doctored. I'll cease wasteful spending and ease the burden on the poor through redistribution of land and goods and taxation.

Every once in a while, however, the subordinates of this world contest their fates. They protest their conditions, write letters and petitions, join movements, and make demands. Their goals may be minimal and discrete — better safety guards on factory machines, an end to marital rape—but in voicing them, they raise the specter of a more fundamental change in power. They cease to be servants or supplicants and become agents, speaking and acting on their own behalf. More than the reforms themselves, it is this assertion of agency by the subject class—the appearance of an insistent and independent voice of demand — that vexes their superiors. Guatemala’s Agrarian Reform of 1952 redistributed a million and a half acres of land to 100,000 peasant families. That was nothing, in the minds of the country’s ruling classes, compared to the riot of political talk the bill seemed to unleash. Progressive reformers, Guatemala’s arch-bishop complained, sent local peasants “gifted with facility with words” to the capital, where they were given opportunities “to speak in public.” That was the great evil of the Agrarian Reform.

This better world—that is the world I’m fighting for from inside the whale, this world I want to be birthed into. A world that is kinder, more generous, more just. A world that takes care of the marginalized, the poor, the sick. Where wealth and resources are redistributed, where reparations are made for the harms of history, where stolen land is given back. Where the environment is cared for and respected, and all species are cared for and respected. Where conflicts are dealt with in gentleness. Where people take care of each other and feel empowered to be their truest selves. Where anger is allowed and joy is allowed and fun is allowed and quietness is allowed and loudness is allowed and being wrong is allowed and everything, everything, everything is rooted in love. And maybe that’s an unattainable utopia.But I’ve found a few smaller versions of this world—in the ground rules Liv and I set on the bus en route to meeting my family; in the grace Cara showed me when I came out to her; in the patience with which Zu mentored me. I’m not naïve enough to think we’ll reach this utopia in my lifetime or possibly ever, but I’m also not faithless enough to think that the direction in which I strive doesn’t matter, that these smaller versions of the world aren’t leading us there.

The alienation, the downright visceral frustration, of the new American ideologues, the bone in their craw, is the unacknowledged fact that America has never been an especially capitalist country. The postal system, the land grant provision for public education, the national park system, the Homestead Act, the graduated income tax, the Social Security system, the G.I. Bill -- all of these were and are massive distributions or redistributions of wealth meant to benefit the population at large.

In order to detach caste from the political economy, from conditions of enslavement in which most dalits lived and worked, in order to slide the questions of entitlement, land reforms and the redistribution of wealth, Hindu reformers cleverly narrowed the question of caste to the issue of untouchability. They framed it as an erroneous religious and cultural practice that needed to be reformed.

It is the occupation of politicians to deny this ubiquity, nay, universality of corroded hearts, to discount the barren laboriousness of all paths. Reduce corporate taxes, they say, or redistribute the wealth of the parasitic class to the desperate class, and then all who matter can cross the Jordan together and enter into a new land of happiness whose prior inhabitants will dissolve into sea-colored ghosts of dust.

Reforms that advance the conditions of life for the general public are not as materially intractable or as dependent on capital resources as we have been led to believe. There is no great mystery to building a health clinic, or carrying out programs for food rationing, land redistribution, literacy, jobs, and housing. Such tasks are well within the capacity of any state—if there is the political will and a mobilization of popular class power.

I use “anticapitalist” because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are “anticapitalist.” They say attempts to prevent monopolies are “anticapitalist.” They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are “anticapitalist.” They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are “anticapitalist.” They say laws taxing the richest more than the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic incomes are “anticapitalist.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.

Roosevelt and Root deputized Taft to inform the Holy See that the United States would purchase the lands for a fair price so long as the hated friars never returned to the archipelago. The land would then be redistributed among the poor Filipino farmers.

The crucial lesson of Brexit and of Trump’s victory, is that leaders who are seen as representing the failed neoliberal status quo are no match for the demagogues and neo-fascists. Only a bold and genuinely redistributive progressive agenda can offer real answers to inequality and the crises in democracy, while directing popular rage where it belongs: at those who have benefited so extravagantly from the auctioning off of public wealth; the polluting of land, air, and water; and the deregulation of the financial sphere.

Peasants farmed nine-tenths of arable land. Most allotments were cultivated by peasant households within a land commune, one of whose functions was to reallocate arable plots periodically in accordance with changes in family size and composition. (A German critic called periodic redistribution a device 'to ensure an equal right for everyone to die of starvation').

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order, commanding the army to throw tens of thousands of freedpeople off the land and reinstall the plantation owners.39 While this could have come from a simple ideological aversion to land redistribution, that was not the case and, for Johnson, not the issue; who received it was. Beginning in 1843, when he was first elected to the U.S. Congress, and over the next nineteen years, Johnson had championed the Homestead Act,

Lenin's political strength was produced to a great extent by the sincerity of his anti-war attitude and by his oratorical ability in making his sincerity felt. It was evident'.....'when he spoke to soldiers of the Izmailovsky regiment. The Provisional Government, he stated, was continuing the war in the interests of the capitalists, whereas a government of the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies would redistribute the land and remove the incentive for war. He went on: 'Do not allow the police to be re-established, do not let the state power or the administration of the state pass into the hands of the bureaucracy, who are non-elective, undisplaceable, and paid on a bourgeois scale; get together, unite yourselves, trusting no one, depending only on your own intelligence and experience - and Russia will be able to move with a firm, measured, unerring trend toward the liberation of both our own country and of all humanity from the yoke of capital as well as from the horrors of war.

With this political power structure in place, one of Caesar’s first actions as consul was to order the redistribution of lands to the poor. Although this managed to skyrocket Caesar’s popularity with the common people of Rome, it sparked animosity among many of the wealthy, land owning Senators who had the most to lose in the motion. As a result, the Senate attempted to block Caesar’s legislation, but with the help of his triumvirate and the general support of the Romans, Caesar was able to thwart their will and for the most part ignored the wishes of the Senate.

Tokugawa also valued Hideyoshi's policy of domain (han) redistribution. The shogun himself owned about 1/4 of cultivated land, along with major cities, ports and mines. The remaining land was strategically divided between the 275 or so daimyo on the basis of whether they were shinpan (relatives), fudai (traditional retainers) or tozama (outer daimyo of questionable loyalty). Thought numbers fluctuated, typically there were around 25 shinpan, 150 fudai and 100 tozama.

Since the 1950s, several democratically elected socialist governments have nationalized large parts of their extractive sectors and begun to redistribute to the poor and middle class the wealth that had previously hemorrhaged into foreign bank accounts, most notably Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile. But those experiments were interrupted by foreign-sponsored coups d’etat before reaching their potential. Indeed postcolonial independence movements — which so often had the redistribution of unjustly concentrated resources, whether of land or minerals, as their core missions — were consistently undermined through political assassinations, foreign interference, and, more recently, the chains of debt-driven structural adjustment programs (not to mention the corruption of local elites).

The blueprint for their ruin had already been drafted. Just as they had had no idea that their land had been handed from Spain to Mexico in 1821, the Mohaves were probably unaware that the United States had acquired the region at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. Soon after, with no perceived conflict of interest, the Department of the Interior had combined the government agency that was designed to protect Indians (the Bureau of Indian Affairs) with the departments responsible for assessing, dividing, and redistributing their land (the General Land Office and the Geological Survey and Territorial Office). “Indian Removal” was the precursor to a transcontinental railroad, and in its first two years of statehood, California spent over a million dollars executing it. 12