Comments Elsewhere

This turkey is fake.

Lawrence: Even using your definition of homesteading – which, as I pointed out, wasn’t the understood basis of property in those times and places – …

If this is what you were trying to point out, I don’t know what its relevance is supposed to be. People have had lots of wacky ideas about property rights. For example, in the American South ca. 1850 most large planters believed that they could own other human beings; and even further that if they owned any one human being they would also own all of her or his descendents. But they were wrong; the people whom they enslaved were not actually their property, but rather free and independent human beings. The moral of this story is that the proper question is what property rights people actually had, not what property rights some set of people thought that they had.

Lawrence: the plantation owners did apply their own labour to the land. You’ll see a literary example of it in Scarlett O’Hara’s father setting up Tara in “Gone with the Wind” (she later applies her own labour to it).

The fact that you have to resort to fiction — a rather notorious example of wistful apologia for slavery, incidentally — in order to bolster your historical point doesn’t speak well for it. That said, there are certainly plenty of historical examples of white planters who spent a bit of time doing some work on the farm. But so what? I’d be glad to see a land reform plan on which former slaves were recognized as the owners of parcels of land proportionate to the amount of their labor that was spent in cultivating and maintaining it, and in which the planters retained control over parcels of land proportionate to the amount of their labor that was spent in cultivating and maintaining it. I doubt the planters would have been very happy with the results, but it’s not their happiness that I am, or that you should be, concerned with.

Lawrence: But in any case, the slaves were only part of setting up the plantations – the actual “planting”.

This is a plain lie. Slaves ploughed, planted, tended, and harvested. They also cleared land, worked on roads and structures, tended to animals, built and maintained their own houses, built and maintained the master’s manor, cooked, cleaned, cared for children and adults, greeted and entertained guests, ran errands in town, and did any number of other tasks which were set for them by the slave-driver, his family, and his overseers. Slave-drivers also extracted more money from their slaves by forcing them to work on other plantations or in towns or on public works projects, and taking their wages; and by “selling” them and their children. (Even if “all” that slaves were doing was tilling the soil, I can’t imagine why in the world you wouldn’t think that they are doing a substantial and essential part of the labor necessary for running a bloody farm.)

Lawrence: You get a better insight bu looking at the Dutch Patroons of upper New York state

A better insight on what? Why would it offer a better insight on the question of land ownership ca. 1866 in the American South than … considering facts about the American South ca. 1866?

I don’t think that the arbitrary grants of the Dutch West India Company conferred any more right to the estates that the Patroons claimed than the Southern slave-drivers had over the land they claimed. But I think there’s an open question in the theory of property whether you can homestead land by voluntarily arranging for others to cultivate it. If you can, then the Patroons had a legitimate right to as much of their land as was worked by either themselves or by free tenants. (I don’t know how many of their tenants actually were free, and how many were held to illegitimate forms of servitude which were quite common in early modern Europe. Whatever the proportion of free to unfree was, that’s the proportion of land you could say they rightly held.) If you can’t homestead land by voluntarily arranging for others to cultivate it, then the Patroons had only a leigitimate right to as much of their land as they personally worked. I don’t think either of these answers is obviously wrong. (I suspect Kevin has more fixed beliefs than I do on the question.) There is, on the other hand, no open question as towhether you can homestead land by coercing other people to labor on it. The reason that working unowned land is a means to owning is that the labor is yours. If the labor was never yours to begin with, then neither is the land. Conflating this latter case with the former case, where exchange is voluntary, is not an insight into the issue; it’s merely changing the subject.

Lawrence: In those times and places, homesteading didn’t apply.

What do you mean when you say “homesteading didn’t apply”? Are you using homesteading in the same sense that I am, i.e., original appropriation of an unowned or abandoned resource by personal occupancy and honest labor? If not, what do you mean? If so, why wouldn’t original appropriation of an unowned or abandoned parcel of land by personal occupancy and honest labor (which the slaves, but not the slave-drivers, satisfied) “apply” in the American South during the period of emancipation from 1863-1866?

Lawrence: Coming along afterwards and imposing those rules instead would have been a separate injustice (since two wrongs don’t make a right).

A separate injustice against whom? The slave-drivers? On what possible grounds would they have a legitimate proprietary claim to the land in question?

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.

Cocaine and marijuana should not be banned, either.

Are you trying to suggest here that it’s wrong to decriminalize ANY drug unless you simultaneously decriminalize ALL of them? Or that it’s wrong to decriminalize a drug if you think the people who stand to benefit financially are bad people?

Before I abstain from voting on my own category, and vote on the others, I’m a bit curious to know how Theory & Practice can be both a New Libertarian/Classical Liberal Group Academic Blog and a New Libertarian/Classical Liberal Individual Academic Blog. Irfan’s a good writer, but I’m not sure he’s good enough to transcend the law of identity…

Kevin: Actually, Rad Geek, that was just an indirect paraphrase of Jeffrey Tucker’s two examples of forced industrialization.

Fair enough. I thought you were accepting what he claimed as well as paraphrasing; if that was too strong a reading, my bad.

Kevin: Along the lines of what Adam and AWolf said, it also occurs to me that the state-created and state-subsidized railroads, with their discriminatory pricing had a lot to do with driving farmers into the whole. And the banks and railroads fought what amounted to a war against farmer attempts at cooperative finance, crop storage and marketing.

Sure, but that doesn’t, as far as I know, have much to do with the South specifically; it happened in the South, as it did everywhere, but the area where this was most intense was by far the West (for obvious reasons). To tip my hand a bit, the reason I ask is because I don’t know of much in the way of land-grab politics that were specific to the South in the immediate post-war period (the New Deal era thievery by the TVA etc. clearly belongs to a different, albeit related historical era). That doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, but if it did I’d need to hear more about it and I expect most other readers would as well. What I fear is that Tucker has the usual Von Mises Institute / Gone With The Wind picture of Reconstruction in mind rather than something rooted in historical fact, and is using comparisons to Stalinist Russia in order to beat one of the VMI’s favorite dead horses. I would like to be proven wrong, though.

Kevin:, And that’s not even getting into the black sharecroppers, working land that should have been theirs, who got tractored off after WWII and flooded northern cities with destitute and unemployable refugees.

This is quite true. In fact I’d say that the legitimation and complicity with the plantation system after the Civil War and during Reconstruction, and the refusal to recognize slaves’ rights to the land that they had worked all their lives (an idea put into practice only by wild-eyed radicals like Czar Alexander II), amounted to the final stamp of federal approval for one of the largest and most destructive land robberies in American history. (The coerced Black exodus northwards towards industrial centers began well before WWII, for what it’s worth — under pressure from both state coercion and freelance racial terrorism.) But what I suspect is that this isn’t quite what Tucker had in mind. (If it is, I’d enjoy being proven wrong.)

Just out of curiosity, what do you mean when you describe the fate of the American South “after the Civil War” as “forced industrialization”? Are you referring to Reconstruction, or to a bunch of other stuff that happened decades after the civil war (thanks to the TVA and other assorted thieves)? If you’re referring to Reconstruction, what specific aspects do you have in mind?

Glaivester:

But a lot of people would never think of that unless they asked the question “why didn’t she just leave?” and then search for the answer.

There is more than one way to ask a question. If all you’re saying is that we ought to be willing to honestly inquire into the conditions that keep women in abusive situations, I can’t think of anyone who would disagree with you. (At most, feminists will — rightly — point out that we also need to inquire into why men abuse women, rather than simply treating that as a given fact.) If women who have survived abuse volunteer the information, all for the best. But if you mean that we are entitled to demand an accounting of her reasons from any woman who is battered or raped (rather than presuming that she did have her reasons, like any other human being, and letting her explain them or not explain them as she sees fit); and that we ought to interrogate specific women in specific cases about why they didn’t leave, and suggest that — whatever reasons they may have had — it’s that that’s necessary and sufficient for systematic male violence against women to continue — then what you’re doing is fucked up and it needs to stop. Because yes, that is victim-blaming, and yes, that is making excuses for the rapists and batterers, and yes, that is a hostile and hurtful way to treat survivors of violence. This kind of attitude can be either ignorant or malicious. Often it’s a bit of both. If it’s malicious then there’s precious little reason to care whether your response helps the interrogator to understand or not, because people who do this maliciously generally don’t care and don’t want to understand. If it’s ignorance, then I don’t think it’s obvious that sympathetically catering to ignorance is always either obligatory or helpful as a means to getting people to understand better. And, on the subject of ignorant interrogations that weren’t malicious in intent, you should be aware that it’s very easy to ask a question that you think is just honest inquiry, but which really comes across as a demand or an interrogation. Particularly to someone who has been through hell and is already struggling with self-doubt and self-blame.

Avenir:

Punish the individual men, for sure, but cure whatever societal disease is producing these men, too.

Glaivester:

I am not questioning why society is treating them like they are helpless. I am questioning what society is doing to make them helpless.

Avenir:

I do think that society raises women in a way that makes them vulnerable to victimization.

Y’all keep talking about “society” as if it were a gaseous medium or an airborne disease instead of a bunch of individual men and women living in roughly the same area. “Society” doesn’t “raise women,” or treat anyone like they’re helpless, or make them helpless, and male violence against women is not a medical condition that “society” contracted. Men and women raise children; men and women can choose to, or decline to, treat people as if they are helpless or make them helpless; and male violence against women is something that men choose to do to women, every day, everywhere. I mention these things because when you start to talk about “society” doing this or that you are quickly and thoroughly changing the subject from the real facts of real men and women’s daily lives to some reified abstraction, treated as if it were some looming presence outside of us (when in fact it just is you, and I, and our neighbors), and in the process nicely obscure questions such as: who in “society” is doing the actual hitting and raping; who in “society” is making the excuses for it in conversation, commentary, and high theory; who has the most power to determine what we learn to say and do when we are being brought up, and so on. Here’s a hint: it’s mostly men. If you sincerely want to stop encouraging passivity and irresponsibility, maybe you should start by talking in a way that actually demands that actual men be actually accountable for the specific things they do wrong, rather than passing the buck to “society” and treating male violence as if it were a given natural fact.

No. I don’t see the need to document every single thing I repeat that I have heard from many sources throughout my life.

I see. So you took the opportunity of Rosa Parks’ recent death to confidently assert, as matters of fact, sensationalist, defamatory >> rumors about her which you have absolutely no basis for asserting other than half-remembered gossip.

I hardly see how it’s defamatory to have been a civil rights organizer. It just detracts from the mystique.

Read back a bit before you shoot off your replies. It’s not defamatory to claim that someone was civil rights organizer. Especially not when that’s demonstrably true. What is defamatory is asserting without any evidence whatsoever that Rosa Parks was having an affair with Martin Luther King Jr. before (or for that matter after) her arrest in 1955. Which is what you made clear you were doing in the passage that I quoted.

Just because of what I have heard, again, from a few people. Someone even told me it was mentioned on the radio in Texas after her death. Many people think it’s even more admirable that she was already a political operative beforehand. This is based in something.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever bothered to actually read something about Rosa Parks’ life or the Montgomery Bus Boycott? (I mean actually read something, like a book- or chapter-length treatment, from beginning to end.) If not, then you ought to read something about it before you start flapping your yap about it.

No, because I don’t find it interesting. It was just a comment on an inner thread of a message board. Get a grip. I even said on that thread that I am not sure at all.

It’s no sin not to read about things you don’t find interesting, but it is totally irresponsible to go around making confident assertions about the topic if you haven’t done anything in particular to make yourself less than ignorant about it. If you didn’t know what you were talking about, then why did you talk about it?

I also think that seeing that kind of perserverance pay off in spectacular ways is, when it happens, a wonderful, inspiring thing. Don’t you?

Actually, the only good thing to have happened was that the government stopped forcing segregation. They immediately began forcing integration which is almost as bad, and they got to take the credit for “ending institutional racism” — as if they were just victims of the status quo previously.

I’m not sure what “forcing integration” has to do with Rosa Parks or the Montgomery Bus Boycott — the bus boycott first sought better treatment for blacks on segregated busses, and then an end to bus segregation, by means of a voluntary boycott; the legal case (culminating in the Supreme Court’s Browder v. Gale decision) did nothing more than strike down city and state segregation laws concerning public transportation. As it happens, I think that any honest accounting of what Jim Crow meant for blacks, as compared with what the rights-violating portions of antidiscrimination law mean for whites, ought to make it incredibly obvious that government-enforced integration — though bad — is not even remotely as bad as Jim Crow was. But in any case the shift from Rosa Parks’ legacy to the legacy of the Freedom Movement as a whole — however mixed that may be — is just a change in subject.

As for the government taking undue credit, well, what else is new? Governments lie and aggrandize themselves without basis all the time. That’s not the Freedom Movement’s fault, let alone Rosa Parks’s personally. So I don’t see how it has anything to do with how we should or shouldn’t remember her.