Comments Elsewhere

Kevin: Of course, things might have turned out better in Russia if the peasants hadn’t had to spend forty years retiring the debt on land that was theirs anyway.

Oh, undoubtedly. And it would have been the just thing to do anyway (which I think is more important). But things would have gone even worse if the Emancipation had, like the American Emancipation, simply legitimated all the slave-masters’ claims to their stolen land and left the serfs completely at the mercy of masters-cum-landlords.

P.M. Lawrence: Likewise sharecropper land had been taken from Indians and there was no expropriation from former slaves – their just compensation would not have involved giving them someone else’s land.

The issue isn’t compensation (although the slavers clearly owed their former slaves that too — money or seed would have done nicely). The issue is homesteading and the enforcement of the slavers’ phoney land titles against it. When the prior rightful owners were no longer in a position to exercise their rightful claim to the land it became available for homesteading by those who worked the land. Black people worked the land. Slavers didn’t. Therefore, the land belonged to the Black people. Enforcing the slavers’ illegitimate land titles against Black slaves who lived on and worked the land is thus theft.

The same is true, incidentally, of the landed lords of Russia — whatever legitimate claim that they might ever have held over the land was forfeited when they abandoned it. They abandoned their land when they turned the work over to serfs (who, by the 15th century, had absolutely no legal rights whatever that would differentiate them from slaves). If the labor being done on the land were being done under contract, there might be some case for saying that the lords retained a legitimate proprietary interest in it; but since there was no contract and they had absolutely no legitimate claim whatsoever to the bodies or labor of “their” serfs, they abandoned the land entirely. The ransom that the Czar demanded on their behalf may or may not have been expedient from a political standpoint, but neither the Czar nor the lords had any more right to demand it than the slavers had a right to demand compensation for the loss of their “property” after emancipation in the British Caribbean.