Nationalization of the Land 9 29 2025
“The property in the soil is the original source of all wealth, and has become the great problem upon the solution of which depends the future of the working class.”
“I do not intend discussing here all the arguments put forward by the advocates of private property in land, by jurists, philosophers and political economists, but shall confine myself firstly to state that they have tried hard to disguise the primitive fact of conquest under the cloak of “Natural Right”. If conquest constituted a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them.”
Karl Marx Nationalization of the Land
It is a sorry fact that the small farmer is rarely in control of most of the farming that is occurring on the land. Large corporations have replaced the family farm, just as they did the grocery store, gas station, etc.
It is beyond returning control to small farmers; rather the struggle becomes one of unions, cooperatives, and nationalization. Returning to small scale farming, where the small farmer was his own capitalist, would only revert again to large scale farming, after a few generations as farmers would sell their lands, and ownership would become concentrated in the hands of a few large farmers again.
This does not mean cultivating the land on one’s own, purely for use value, would stop. It just means labour on the farm would be more like working in a factory, with a union, and the right to strike. Land will be owned by farmers, but they will be free to cultivate ecology or gardens for themselves on their own land, as a family unit. The man or woman will work for a collective farm, or both, and if they want to own some land it will be available to them, just not for capitalist purposes.
Labor on the large farms is already industrial. Unloading the trucks, sorting the vegetables for defects, etc. is all industrial labor. Even tilling the soil becomes an industrial activity of driving the tractor.
The current model of capitalist farming is destroying our ecology, with pesticides, genetically modified crops, patented seeds from Monsanto,etc. becoming a perfect example of the plunder of land exacted by the bourgeoisie.
There may have been a golden time when farming was not done by large farmers, when they were a petty bourgeoisie, but now they are heavily weighted towards the big bourgeoisie, Donald Trump’s supporters.
The latter is connected with removal of the farms from the small farmer, through patented seeds and subsidies to large farms based on the number of acres farmed.
“If cultivation on a large scale proves (even under its present capitalist form, that degrades the cultivator himself to a mere beast of burden) so superior, from an economical point of view, to small and piecemeal husbandry, would it not give an increased impulse to production if applied on national dimensions?”
“The ever-growing wants of the people on the one side, the ever-increasing price of agricultural produce on the other, afford the irrefutable evidence that the nationalisation of land has become a social necessity.”
Kar Marx ibid.
The farm worker harvesting today is overworked, using machinery from dawn to dusk, for a few months out of the year. Often this labor is done by migrants from Mexico, sometimes the only workers who can work long hours with little pay. Sometimes they are illegally working, constantly in fear of deportation.
Capitalists obviously have concluded large scale farming is the answer. As Marx points out, would it not be superior for the nation if the benefits of large scale farming was for all?
The plunder of the soil for capitalist agriculture, and the exploitation of the laborer, could be better addressed with employee ownership of large farms, and nationalization of the land.
“France was frequently alluded to, but with its peasant proprietorship it is farther off the nationalisation of land than England with its landlordism. In France, it is true, the soil is accessible to all who can buy it, but this very facility has brought about a division into small plots cultivated by men with small means and mainly relying upon the land by exertions of themselves and their families. This form of landed property and the piecemeal cultivation it necessitates, while excluding all appliances of modern agricultural improvements, converts the tiller himself into the most decided enemy to social progress and, above all, the nationalisation of land. Enchained to the soil upon which he has to spend all his vital energies in order to get a relatively small return, having to give away the greater part of his produce to the state, in the form of taxes, to the law tribe in the form of judiciary costs, and to the usurer in the form of interest, utterly ignorant of the social movements outside his petty field of employment; still he clings with fanatic fondness to his bit of land and his merely nominal proprietorship in the same. In this way the French peasant has been thrown into a most fatal antagonism to the industrial working class. “
Karl Marx iibid.
A similar phenomenon is the support from the petty bourgeois farmers of the reactionary bourgeoisie of Donald Trump. It’s gotten to the point if you are rural and farming, you are expected to support Trump. The residents of the small towns also like Trump, even though they own little land, and work for large scale agriculture.
It has destroyed the very thing we put our hopes in, the ability of the worker own land. Instead he is landless, or trying to be a small businessman with his land, attempting to obtain as much land as possible, and remain competitive.
“Peasant proprietorship being then the greatest obstacle to the nationalisation of land, France, in its present state, is certainly not the place where we must look to for a solution of this great problem.”
“To nationalise the land, in order to let it out in small plots to individuals or working men’s societies, would, under a middle-class government, only engender a reckless competition among themselves and thus result in a progressive increase of “Rent” which, in its turn, would afford new facilities to the appropriators of feeding upon the producers.”
“At the International Congress of Brussels, in 1868, one of our friends [César De Paepe, in his report on land property: meeting of the Brussels Congress of the International Working Men’s Association of Sept. 11 1868] said:”
“”Small private property in land is doomed by the verdict of science, large land property by that of justice. There remains then but one alternative. The soil must become the property of rural associations or the property of the whole nation. The future will decide that question.””
“I say on the contrary; the social movement will lead to this decision that the land can but be owned by the nation itself. To give up the soil to the hands of associated rural labourers, would be to surrender society to one exclusive class of producers.”
Karl Marx
Iibid
Nationalization of the land would give the cities a larger say over what and how land is farmed. The large scale agricultural producers now have a lock on the city with Trump. It has become a matter of guaranteeing the supply of food to the city for affordable prices, which could be an issue if the farmers boycotted the cities their leader keeps calling shitholes to live in. Then the nation would be forced to exert a say over the land.
It has yet to come to this, but the decision was already evident in 1872 when this was written. Things are even further along now, and even attempting to buy land for individual farming is something that just no longer happens. Jobs in agriculture almost always come from large scale farm farming; at most there is a distant view of a small capitalist farmer making his way up to be a big farmer.
But once there he remembers not his peasant roots, and supports Trump. His help is wage labour, his motive profit.
“The nationalisation of land will work a complete change in the relations between labour and capital, and finally, do away with the capitalist form of production, whether industrial or rural. Then class distinctions and privileges will disappear together with the economical basis upon which they rest. To live on other people’s labour will become a thing of the past. There will be no longer any government or state power, distinct from society itself! Agriculture, mining, manufacture, in one word, all branches of production, will gradually be organised in the most adequate manner. National centralisation of the means of production will become the national basis of a society composed of associations of free and equal producers, carrying on the social business on a common and rational plan. Such is the humanitarian goal to which the great economic movement of the 19th century is tending.”
Karl Marx conclusion, ibid.
All one can say is society is still moving in this direction, but has yet to remove the large farms, and the urban bourgeoisie, who work in tandem. There has yet to be a firm break from this , indicating it will not be imperceivable when it happens. Rather it will be abrupt, a real change felt by all. At which point “the expropriators will be expropriated” in Marx’s words.
Nicholas Jay Boyes
Milwaukee Wisconsin
American Democratic Republic
9 29 2025
Ecological Era 