Free land, free men
A bit of a quote dump regarding the connection between land, capitalism and freedom. I (🐻) really do believe most problems people have with "capitalism" can be traced back to the issue of land.
From Henry George, Social Problems:
No amount of force will break an egg-shell if exerted on one side alone. So capital could not squeeze labor as long as labor was free to natural opportunities, and in a world where these natural materials and opportunities were as free to all as is the air to us, there could be no difficulty in finding employment, no willing hands conjoined with hungry stomachs, no tendency of wages toward the minimum on which the worker could barely live. In such a world we would no more think of thanking anybody for furnishing us employment than we here think of thanking anybody for furnishing us with appetites.
I quite like George's egg metaphor here. The gist of it meaning: a capitalist alone cannot exploit and dominate someone if there is nothing compelling a person to exist within that relationship. If an individual was free to leave and seek opportunity elsewhere, then the capitalist cannot domineer.
We actually have a few historic examples of precisely this occurring. In fact, Marx sees the very basis of capitalist production as being the separation of workers from the land. Marx, in Capital:
First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. [4] Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” [5] Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!
..."If,” says Wakefield, “all members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of labourers for hire.” [6] So long, therefore, as the labourer can accumulate for himself — and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production — capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible. The class of wage labourers, essential to these, is wanting...
...We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.
Kevin Carson in The Subsidy of History provides some particularly damning quotes from Wakefield about the deliberate intention of creating a servile proletariat by separating workers from the land:
...in the colonization of settler societies like America and Australia, by which the colonial powers and their landed elites attempted to replicate feudal patterns of property ownership. In such colonies, the state preempted ownership of vacant land and restricted working people’s access to it. Sometimes they gave title to vacant land to privileged land speculators, who were able to charge rent to those who homesteaded it...
...E. G. Wakefield, an early nineteenth-century British theorist of colonialism, advocated just such preemption on the same grounds that the propertied and employing classes of Britain had supported Enclosure: it was easier to hire labor on favorable terms to the employer. In England and America, he wrote:
"In colonies, labourers for hire are scarce. The scarcity of labourers for hire is the universal complaint of colonies. It is the one cause, both of the high wages which put the colonial labourer at his ease, and of the exorbitant wages which sometimes harass the capitalist. . . .
Where land is cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourers’ share of the product, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price."
Consequently, “[f]ew, even of those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.”
Wakefield’s disciple, Thomas Merivale, wrote of the “urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers—for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them.”
In Why Nations Fail Acemoglu and Robinson discuss how relatively broad access to land helped establish a relatively free, equal and democratic society in North America:
If the indigenous peoples could not be exploited, reasoned the Virginia Company, perhaps the colonists could. The new model of colonial development entailed the Virginia Company owning all the land. Men were housed in barracks, and given company-determined rations. Work gangs were chosen, each one overseen by an agent of the company. It was close to martial law, with execution as the punishment of first resort. As part of the new institutions for the colony, the first clause just given is significant. The company threatened with death those who ran away. Given the new work regime, running away to live with the locals became more and more of an attractive option for the colonists who had to do the work. Also available, given the low density of even indigenous populations in Virginia at that time, was the prospect of going it alone on the frontier beyond the control of the Virginia Company. The power of the company in the face of these options was limited. It could not coerce the English settlers into hard work at subsistence rations...
Since it was possible to coerce neither the locals nor the settlers, the only alternative was to give the settlers incentives. In 1618 the company began the “headright system,” which gave each male settler fifty acres of land and fifty more acres for each member of his family and for all servants that a family could bring to Virginia. Settlers were given their houses and freed from their contracts, and in 1619 a General Assembly was introduced that effectively gave all adult men a say in the laws and institutions governing the colony. It was the start of democracy in the United State.
And more examples:
In 1632 ten million acres of land on the upper Chesapeake Bay were granted by the English king Charles I to Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore. The Charter of Maryland gave Lord Baltimore complete freedom to create a government along any lines he wished, with clause VII noting that Baltimore had “...free, full, and absolute Power..."
Baltimore drew up a detailed plan for creating a manorial society, a North American variant of an idealized version of seventeenth-century rural England. It entailed dividing the land into plots of thousands of acres, which would be run by lords. The lords would recruit tenants, who would work the lands and pay rents to the privileged elite controlling the land. Another similar attempt was made later in 1663, with the founding of Carolina by eight proprietors... provided a blueprint for an elitist, hierarchical society based on control by a landed elite.
Just as the attempt to impose draconian rule in Virginia failed, so did the plans for the same type of institutions in Maryland and Carolina. The reasons were similar. In all cases it proved to be impossible to force settlers into a rigid hierarchical society, because there were simply too many options open to them in the New World.
It goes without saying, that these relative freedoms did not extend to all. Slaves were deprived of their rights, but this of course is directly linked to their exclusion from accessing land. But even here, access to the American frontier provided slaves with an opportunity. James C. Scott relates in The Art of Not Being Governed:
The Great Dismal Swamp on the eastern Virginia–North Carolina border was home to thousands of escaped slaves for several generations, “right in the midst of the strongest slave-holding communities in the South.” They joined renegade whites, southerners avoiding conscription, deserters, those fleeing the law, moonshine distillers, hunters, shingle-cutters, and trappers... As with the sanctuary of the Marsh Arabs, there were repeated calls to have the Great Dismal drained because it allowed the “lowest sort” of people to find freedom and independence.
In fact, the major theme of James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed is that the availability of land on the frontier allowed ready escape for people domineered by the State:
Until at least the early nineteenth century, the difficulties of transportation, the state of military technology, and, above all, demographic realities placed sharp limits on the reach of even the most ambitious states. Operating in a population density of only 5.5 persons per square kilometer in 1600 (compared with roughly 35 for India and China), a ruler’s subjects in Southeast Asia had relatively easy access to a vast, land-rich frontier. That frontier operated as a rough and ready homeostatic device; the more a state pressed its subjects, the fewer subjects it had. The frontier underwrote popular freedom. Richard O’Connor captures this dialectic nicely: “Once states appeared, adaptive conditions changed yet again—at least for farmers. At that moment, mobility allowed farmers to escape the impositions of states and their wars. I call this tertiary dispersion. The other two revolutions — agriculture and complex society — were secure but the state’s domination of its peasantry was not, and so we find a strategy of ‘collecting people... and establishing villages.’”
The point is clear through history: easy availability to land is counter to domination.
Of course in an era where the State has penetrated all but the most formidable terrains, where their are no more frontiers to be explored, and we rely upon the benefits of industrialised urbanisation, it is impossible to suggest homesteading as a realistic response to the issues of authoritarianism and domination today. Hency, to finish with Henry George (from On the Condition of Labor) on how to give everyone their rightful access to land in the modern day:
Thus Cain and Abel, were there only two men on earth, might by agreement divide the earth between them. Under this compact each might claim exclusive right to his share as against the other. But neither could rightfully continue such claim against the next man born. For since no one comes into the world without God’s permission, his presence attests his equal right to the use of God’s bounty. For them to refuse him any use of the earth which they had divided between them would therefore be for them to commit murder. And for them to refuse him any use of the earth, unless by laboring for them or by giving them part of the products of his labor he bought it of them, would be for them to commit theft...
...In our cities of millions and our states of scores of millions, in a civilization where the division of labor has gone so far that large numbers are hardly conscious that they are land-users, it still remains true that we are all land animals and can live only on land, and that land is God’s bounty to all, of which no one can be deprived without being murdered, and for which no one can be compelled to pay another without being robbed. But even in a state of society where the elaboration of industry and the increase of permanent improvements have made the need for private possession of land wide-spread, there is no difficulty in conforming individual possession with the equal right to land. For as soon as any piece of land will yield to the possessor a larger return than is had by similar labor on other land a value attaches to it which is shown when it is sold or rented. Thus, the value of the land itself, irrespective of the value of any improvements in or on it, always indicates the precise value of the benefit to which all are entitled in its use, as distinguished from the value which, as producer or successor of a producer, belongs to the possessor in individual right.
To combine the advantages of private possession with the justice of common ownership it is only necessary therefore to take for common uses what value attaches to land irrespective of any exertion of labor on it...
...We do not propose to assert equal rights to land by keeping land common, letting anyone use any part of it at any time. We do not propose the task, impossible in the present state of society, of dividing land in equal shares; still less the yet more impossible task of keeping it so divided.
We propose — leaving land in the private possession of individuals, with full liberty on their part to give, sell or bequeath it— simply to levy on it for public uses a tax that shall equal the annual value of the land itself, irrespective of the use made of it or the improvements on it.