WORLD WORLDWIDE CZECH News Journal Update - (en) Czech, CAS: JUSTICE OF RESOURCES (Matyásh Hodek) (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

The two classes, labor and capital, are too different in essence and in
proportion. To merge them under another property means to mix up all
opinions about right and wrong, justice and injustice of ownership. ----
The house and the land on which it stands are both property, because
they are in the possession of someone, and they are also called
homesteads by lawyers. Than they are very different from each other in
their nature and relationship. One is a product of human activity and
belongs to a class in economics called goods. The second is a part of
nature and belongs to the class in the national economy called soil. The
similar nature of one class of things is that they embody work, that
they were produced by human activity, that their existence and
non-existence, their reproduction or decrease, depend on man. The
essential nature of the second class is that it embodies no works, and
that, independent of human effort and man, it stands by itself. It is
the field or surroundings in which one moves; a warehouse from which
must be taken the raw materials and forces upon which only his work can act.

At the same moment when this difference is recognized, it can also be
seen that the approval which shows the natural justification of one
class (of things) does not apply to the other, that the legitimacy of
the private ownership of manufactured things contains in itself the
illegitimacy of the private ownership of land; that the recognition of
the one makes all men equal and ensures to each a proper wage for his
work, whereas the recognition of the other means the denial of equality
and allows those who do not work to adopt the wage of the worker.

Whatever may be said to defend the private ownership of land, it is
clear that it cannot be defended from a legal point of view. The equal
right of all men to use the land is as clear as their equal right to
breathe the air. It is a right that every person is born with. Because
we can't believe that some people have the right and others don't. But
if we are all here with the same right, we are all here with a legal
claim to the enjoyment of what is served to us, with the same right to
use everything that nature provides us so impartially. This is the right
that is natural and undeniable. It is a right that is granted to every
person at birth and which can only be limited by the equal right of
others. There is nothing in nature equal to the exclusive right to land.
There is no power on earth that can legitimately grant exclusive
ownership of land. And if all men resolved upon this, to give up their
equal rights, surely they cannot give up the rights of their
descendants, or are we only usurpers for the day? Or did we create the
earth to waste the right of those who will come after us?

The right of exclusive ownership of a human product is clear. It doesn't
matter how many hands it passed through, before the beginning of the
whole thing was work: someone who made it or produced it through his
activities, and who therefore had a clear legal claim against all of
humanity, who would certainly buy it, or could get it as a gift from one
person to another. But at the end of which series of sales and gifts,
can a legal claim to any part of the material world be proved or
assumed? Such a claim can be found in the case of improvement, but it
only applies to the improvement and not to the land. If I establish a
forest, or improve a swamp and drain mud, that is all I can rightfully
claim, only the price caused by this activity. However, this does not
yet give me rights to the land itself, no other rights to the price of
the land.

However, this does not yet give me any claim to the land itself, no
other claim to the price of the land that it has received through the
development of mankind, except for that claim to which every member of
human society has the same right. Before one could say: Are there any
improvements that cannot really become more different from soil over
time? Before then the claim to improvement is mixed with the claim to
land and the individual right disappears in the common law. The bigger
absorbs the smaller and never vice versa. Nature does not come from man,
but man from nature, and he and his works must return to the bosom of
the earth.

It could also be objected: Since everyone has the right to use and enjoy
nature, he must also give the one who owns the land the exclusive right
to use it, so that he receives the benefit of the proceeds of his work.
However, it is not difficult to determine where the right of the
individual ends and where the right of the whole begins.

A fine and perfect test is given by the price of her help, even if the
population was densest, it is not difficult to establish and ascertain
the perfect right of the individual and the equal right of all.

The price of land is, as we have seen, the price of monopoly. Not
absolute, but relative capabilities determine its price. Regardless of
its intrinsic properties, land that is no better than other usable land
has no value. And the price of the land will always determine the
difference between the land in question and the best that is possible.
And so the price of land expresses in a thorough, comprehensible form
the right of society to land taken from individuals. And the pension
expresses perfectly the amount which the individual of the society
should pay to satisfy the equal right of others to the land. If,
therefore, we were to assign the undisturbed use of the land to whoever
formerly held it, and confiscate the pension for the benefit of society,
then we would reconcile the permanent ownership, which is necessary for
improvement, with a full recognition of the equal right of all to own land.

As for the derivation of a perfect and exclusive right to land from
prior possession of the land, it is a foolish plea to defend the
ownership of land. Should previous possession of property confer an
exclusive and permanent claim to the surface of the earth, on which,
according to the order of nature, numerous generations succeed one
another? Would the people of the last age hundreds or thousands of years
ago have a greater right to enjoy the land than we do? They were perhaps
inhabited by cave dwellers, perhaps contemporaries of the mastodon and
the three-hooved horse, or people of an even older period who followed
them on the earth in the dark, geological periods that we only suspect.

The first arrival at the feast has the right to turn all the chairs and
ask that none of the other guests at the feast attend, rather than
agreeing with him about it. Does the person who first hands over a
ticket at the door of the theater and then enters acquires, by this
earlier entry, the right to have the door closed and perform a
performance for himself? Will the person who enters the railway car
first get the right to cover all the seats with their luggage and thus
force the others to stand?

These examples are exactly the same. We come and go to an ever-covered
table, as spectators and participants in entertainment, at which there
is a place for all comers, as passengers from station to station, on a
sphere that flies through the space of the world - our right to take and
to have cannot therefore be exclusive, it must be from everywhere
limited by the equal right of others. Just as a passenger on a railroad
can take as many seats as he likes until other passengers arrive, so a
settler can take and use as much land as he likes until the land is
occupied by more settlers and used by another-a circumstance which
appears when prices rise; and here his right is limited by the right of
others, and no previous appropriation of land can confer a right which
abridges the equal right of others. If this were not the case, someone
could not only acquire the exclusive right to the entire city, but also
to the entire region, or even the entire country, through earlier
appropriation.

The recognition of personal rights to the ownership of land leads to
this obvious nonsense, when these are carried to extreme consequences:
that some man has a personal right to the possession of the land of a
certain country, and that therefore he can drive away all the other
inhabitants at will. And if he concentrated in himself the personal
right over the entire land area, only one of all the inhabitants of the
land should reside here.

What could happen with the acceptance of this matter, is actually
happening to a lesser extent here. The British landlords once again
drove out the indigenous population, whose ancestors had lived on this
mass since time immemorial, drove them into exile and left them to the
mercy of misery and death by hunger. And on the uneducated land in the
new state of California, one can see the smoke-blackened hearths of
former dwellings, from which the inhabitants were driven out by the
violence of laws that do not spare the rights of nature. Large tracts of
land which could be inhabited are desolate, because the recognition of
exclusive ownership of land has given the human creature the power to
deprive his fellow men of the right to use the land. The few people who
hold the soil of the British Isles would do only what British law
entitles them to do-and what some of them have already done in a lesser
degree-to drive millions of the British people from their home islands.

  And such an exclusion, where a few hundred thousand people might drive
more than 30 millions out of their country, would be more conspicuous,
but not a little more repugnant to natural right, than the example
shown, where a great number of the British people are compelled to pay
to a few of themselves an extraordinary leave fee, should live on and
use the land which they so fondly call their own, which they hold dear
as famous reminders, and for which, in case of necessity, they shed
their blood, sacrifice their lives.

I only mention the British Isles, because ownership is more concentrated
there, and because of that it shows a beautiful example of what private
ownership of land necessarily entails. "To whomsoever the land belongs
for a time, to him also belongs its fruit"; this is a truth which can be
more and more certainly recognized, the denser the population, the more
inventions and improvements increase the productive power. This is held
to be true everywhere, in the new states no less than in the British
Isles and on the Indus.

Matyásh Hodek (1856 - 1924) was among the prominent Czech anarchist
communists in emigration to the USA. He worked in Chicago, where he was
involved in local associations of Czech anarcho-communists. He was also
a member of the anarcho-communist national organization International
Workers' Unity - MDJ (1883 - 1900). Later he moves to New York, or
rather to nearby Newark. Here he was a member of the local Czech
Workers' Educational Association, which was part of the MDJ. He
contributed articles to the anarcho-communist magazine "Delnické listy"
(1893-1898). In 1896, he translated Petr Kropotkin's publication "The
Ant's Anarchy" into Czech, which was then published as a sequel in
"Delnické Listy" and as a separate publication. In the same year, he
also translated Leo Tolstoy's poems and other texts.

https://anarchiste.org/spravedlnost-prostredku-matyas-hodek/
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