The International Workingmen's Association, 1872

The Nationalisation of the Land


The property in the soil is the original source
of all wealth, and has become the great problem upon the solution of which
depends the future of the working class.

I do not intend discussing here all the arguments put forward
by the advocates of private property in land, by jurists, philosophers
and political economists, but shall confine myself firstly to state that
they have tried hard to disguise the primitive fact of conquest under the
cloak of "Natural Right". If conquest constituted a natural right
on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength
in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken
from them.

In the progress of history the conquerors found it convenient
to give to their original titles, derived from brute force, a sort of social
standing through the instrumentality of laws imposed by themselves.

At last comes the philosopher and demonstrates that those laws
imply and express the universal consent of mankind. If private property
in land be indeed founded upon such an universal consent, it will evidently
become extinct from the moment the majority of a society dissent from warranting
it.

However, leaving aside the so-called "rights" of property, I assert
that the economical development of society, the increase and concentration
of people, the very circumstances that compel the capitalist farmer to
apply to agriculture collective and organised labour, and to have recourse
to machinery and similar contrivances, will more and more render the nationalisation
of land a "Social Necessity", against which no amount of talk about
the rights of property can be of any avail. The imperative wants of society
will and must be satisfied, changes dictated by social necessity will work
their own way, and sooner or later adapt legislation to their interests.

What we require is a daily increasing production and its exigencies
cannot be met by allowing a few individuals to regulate it according to
their whims and private interests, or to ignorantly exhaust the powers
of the soil. All modern methods, such as irrigation, drainage, steam ploughing,
chemical treatment and so forth, ought to be applied to agriculture at
large. But the scientific knowledge we possess, and the technical means
of agriculture we command, such as machinery, etc., can never be successfully
applied but by cultivating the land on a large scale.

If cultivation on a large scale proves (even under its present
capitalist form, that degrades the cultivator himself to a mere beast of
burden) so superior, from an economical point of view, to small and piecemeal
husbandry, would it not give an increased impulse to production if applied
on national dimensions?

The ever-growing wants of the people on the one side, the ever-increasing
price of agricultural produce on the other, afford the irrefutable evidence
that the nationalisation of land has become a social necessity.

Such a diminution of agricultural produce as springs from individual
abuse, will, of course, become impossible whenever cultivation is carried
on under the control and for the benefit of the nation.

All the citizens I have heard here today during the progress of
the debate, on this question, defended the nationalisation of land, but
they took very different views of it.

France was frequently alluded to, but with its peasant proprietorship
it is farther off the nationalisation of land than England with its landlordism.
In France, it is true, the soil is accessible to all who can buy it, but
this very facility has brought about a division into small plots cultivated
by men with small means and mainly relying upon the land by exertions of
themselves and their families. This form of landed property and the piecemeal
cultivation it necessitates, while excluding all appliances of modern agricultural
improvements, converts the tiller himself into the most decided enemy to
social progress and, above all, the nationalisation of land. Enchained
to the soil upon which he has to spend all his vital energies in order
to get a relatively small return, having to give away the greater part
of his produce to the state, in the form of taxes, to the law tribe in
the form of judiciary costs, and to the usurer in the form of interest,
utterly ignorant of the social movements outside his petty field of employment;
still he clings with fanatic fondness to his bit of land and his merely
nominal proprietorship in the same. In this way the French peasant has
been thrown into a most fatal antagonism to the industrial working class.

Peasant proprietorship being then the greatest obstacle to the
nationalisation of land, France, in its present state, is certainly not
the place where we must look to for a solution of this great problem.

To nationalise the land, in order to let it out in small plots
to individuals or working men's societies, would, under a middle-class
government, only engender a reckless competition among themselves and thus
result in a progressive increase of "Rent" which, in its turn, would
afford new facilities to the appropriators of feeding upon the producers.

At the International Congress of Brussels, in 1868, one of our
friends [César De Paepe, in his report on land property: meeting
of the Brussels Congress of the International Working Men's Association
of Sept. 11 1868] said:

"Small private property in land is doomed by the verdict of science,
large land property by that of justice. There remains then but one alternative.
The soil must become the property of rural associations or the property
of the whole nation. The future will decide that question."

I say on the contrary; the social movement will lead to this decision that
the land can but be owned by the nation itself. To give up the soil to
the hands of associated rural labourers, would be to surrender society
to one exclusive class of producers.

The nationalisation of land will work a complete change in the
relations between labour and capital, and finally, do away with the capitalist
form of production, whether industrial or rural. Then class distinctions
and privileges will disappear together with the economical basis upon which
they rest. To live on other people's labour will become a thing of the
past. There will be no longer any government or state power, distinct from
society itself! Agriculture, mining, manufacture, in one word, all branches
of production, will gradually be organised in the most adequate manner.
National centralisation of the means of production will become the
national basis of a society composed of associations of free and equal
producers, carrying on the social business on a common and rational plan.
Such is the humanitarian goal to which the great economic movement of the
19th century is tending.