Ownership Of Land - A Deeply Flawed Concept?

[ZenitYerkes]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Well thats two point there. Growth (which I dont think healthy at all as it is on the basis of whats destroying this planet now) and working hard for fruits of the land. I know this is utopian, but ideally - ant this was proposed in several ways - people have to work not a lot to get "fruitsof the land". Primitivists argue, that hunter gatherers did not have to work hard for their harvest, as they simply took what nature provided, so the taking was the work, not the maintaining or sowing. Communist utopians argue, that technologcal advances make it a low work intensive task to produce food from the land. In both cases the result would basically be, that people would not have to defend the crops they sweated for because there was no sweat to begin with.

The fact is that we wouldn't fight for the sweat put in but the ownership of what I made or took. It's called egoism. The "I worked hard" argument is just an excuse and an incentive to promote this attitude; just like the old "I am a nobleman and you're a mediocre peasant" or the "I bought it", or even the "I saw it first".

Just like kids who don't work at all fight for toys they were given, or teens face each other for the computer and whose turn is to check Facebook, for example.

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Well - what I say here is not a single step solution. I cannot say, I want to remove ownership from today to tomorrow and all will be blimey. So indeed it is a vision of some future and I very much know that a fast change is unrealistic and that also depresses me. I think it is right, that the human spirit or the way of thinking or the culture has to change fundamentally for this to work. As I mentioned, there are and have been cultures or societies that do manage to think more along these lines. So it is not beyond human nature to do it, but everyone is trained to see the way we live now either as the best way to live, or as flawed but inevitable. Communism failed mostly because it was never tried. What people now call communism was a dictatorship - In the Soviet Union, the original communist movement was hijacked and a Leninist regime was erected that founded itself as much of power, force and ownership of everything as the capitalist system, just that the power and ownership was in the hands of a political party instead of corporations - which is preferrable I leave to everyone, for me both is undesireable as the original communist idea was more along the lines of ownership by the people themselves.

If actual Communism wasn't put in practice it's exactly because some bastard would probably ruin the utopia; most probably by hijacking the movement and making the people work for them in a false "all equals" atmosphere. The same reason applies for all the Anarchist communes.

Human spirit still has to change.

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Generally I think the achievable way to get somewhere is to form tribal structures. And I mean this in the sense of Daniel Quinns writings - not literally as ethnic tribes with tattoos going hunting together, but as small groups of people who share things and work together for whatever they do work for. That can be producing stuff in a small coop company, doing organic farming, printing a newspaper or manageing a Internet coop company. It can also mean to form an ecovillage - whatever, just finding a group of people who "got it" and do things in an egalitarian way and try to be as independent from the larger structures as possible. I dont know if that will cut it or if that will be enough or if that will really lead to utopia, but it is a good start, I think.

Though nice and beautiful idea, all utopias degenerate -if not see how democracy was pictured in the 18th century and how we complain about it in the 21st.

The main reason for this to happen is growth: everything is predictable to a point, but once the system is not small enough to keep working it collapses; just like the organs of every living system, they work well within their limits. Once their cells over-reproduce themselves, a chaotic cancer appears and eventually kills the organ.