Tag: sustainability

Nationalization of the Land 9 29 2025 

~ nicholasjayboyes

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

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/04/nationalisation-land.htm

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

Division  of Town and Country. Large Scale Private Property on the Land.

~ nicholasjayboyes

The structure of capitalist agriculture is an extension of the relationship of the owner of the company to wage labour.  The farms are worked by people who do not own the land; they are not even renting it in most cases.  The machinery like the tractors, harvesters, etc. are also not owned by the farming workers.

With the advent of farm machinery, it is now possible for large farms to be worked with a far higher productivity than in the recent past.   There is far less labor in producing, for example, a potato, than ever before.  The farms are a thousand acres or more, owned by a corporation, the workers basically wage labour, just like their proletarian cousins in the city.  

A job in farming has become tending large machinery; driving a tractor,  unloading trucks full of potatoes, etc.  In many cases it is even beyond manufacture; workers are not using tools in skilled labour positions, rather  are unskilled using machinery a child could learn to use.

The fact there are still small farms changes nothing about this.  At best we can say it is remarkable that anyone can compete with the large farms that own and work most of the land.

The family farm, like the family grocery store, is becoming a memory. Those people left on the land have to make a hard decision;  will they invest in large machinery in hopes competition with the corporations is possible?  If they do not it may mean having to work in a town at a factory as well as farming. Or having to get credit to try to compete, knowing most people who attempt to compete with the corporation end up failing, and having to move \to the city.

The people left on the land may own a home and a car, but that is about the extent of the things they own.  They do not own shares in the company they work for on the land, or industrial shares in joint stock companies.  They are basically propertyless, like all wage labour.

There is a clear racial divide, in the north the farms being white owned.  There are migrants though, often Mexican, who work sometimes legally or illegally on the farm.  Needless to say they do not own the land they are working. They  make the profits for the owners of the farms, they work hard, often for a small check they send much of back home to family as a remittance.  It is their wage labour that creates the surplus value, which is the purpose of the operation to capitalists. 

In this respect it is strange to hear the same bourgeoisie who control the farms coming out against migrant farmers.  In the southwest it is common for farms to be worked by Mexicans, many of whom cross the border daily to work the fields.  Without these low paid workers, it is questionable how many farms could even operate.

Yet constantly the republican bourgeoisie tries to remove migrants, and builds ramparts on the border, to stop immigration north.  It looks like an Indian reservation, a  demilitarized zone, and the army is even deployed there.   All this to stop the same people who create the surplus value on the farms. 

The landowners are overwhelmingly republican bourgeois, like the owners of urban factories.  They supported Donald Trump as president , as he represents the owners of the means of production, as opposed to wage labour.  The more concentrated ownership becomes on the land, the stronger corporations who own the land become,  

This creates a rural population only one step removed from moving to the city.  Those displaced by modern machinery stay out of the city only at the large farm owners’ mercy.  They are a sort of unemployed army of workers of the land, like their urban counterparts of the city , who are also living check to check precarious positions as for their employment.  

Unions of farm workers are rare, rebellion can lead to removal from the job and a transition to life in the big city.  The lack of political organization of the wage labour on the farms is mercilessly taken advantage of by the landowners, who squeeze maximum surplus value out of workers, many of whom are recent arrivals from Mexico. 

Production is for commodities; the workers do not work for their own food, at least not on purpose.   They may eat potatoes they farmed, but their job is not to feed themselves, it is social labor.  It is abstract labour, for society, controlled by the owner of the land. 

It may be unfortunate, but large scale farming seems inevitable with the advent of large farm machinery.  Competing with the potato harvester looks futile for a small farmer.  It’s like returning to small business from monopoly; a futile endeavor.  You cannot go back to a simpler time, even though the republican bourgeoisie seems to want a return to a past era, to “Make America Great Again”, when small businesses sold the groceries.

As far as large farms go, cooperative ownership is replacing capitalist ownership.  Already there are large cooperative grocery stores, owned by the workers, selling the produce of cooperative production.  

This isthe logical answer to the large scale corporations control of the land,  employee ownership of large farms.  With the ownership of farms no longer a mom and pop operation, unions mean for wage labour its emancipation from work that is sort of a mix of manufacture and large industry, on machines he does not control, to realization it is his own labour that is responsible for the machinery around him, and the state of the land.  

The division of town and country has become stark, with the large farm starting immediately adjacent to the suburban worker’s dwelling.  He owns no chickens or gardens,  yet there is land all around him, often lying vacant.  He has no gardens or land to speak of.  The division between town and country could not be more evident.  

It is this division which is also a product of the corporations owning the farms.  They seem to be worried the workers will not be producing commodities, and will instead produce their own food.  It’s like a fetish; any labour not subsumed by the social production of commodities is the target.

This barrier must be broken, and with it large scale private property on the land.  When the proletariat is unleashed on the land a new stage of material and social development will have been reached.  The city and the country will no longer be so divided,   The two will merge into a fluid mesh, with city and country division becoming less obvious. 

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

9 17 2025

Ecological Material Conditions and Theories of Value

~ nicholasjayboyes

Ecological Material Conditions and Theories of Value

The climate is changing, it is getting hotter everywhere, due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.  Heavy reliance on fossil fuels has actually increased the global temperatures.

  • “Since 1901, the average surface temperature across the contiguous 48 states has risen at an average rate of 0.16°F per decade. Average temperatures have risen more quickly since the late 1970s (0.31 to 0.54°F per decade since 1979). Eight of the top 10 warmest years on record for the contiguous 48 states have occurred since 1998, and 2012 and 2016 were the two warmest years on record.
  • “Worldwide, 2016 was the warmest year on record, 2020 was the second-warmest, and 2011–2020 was the warmest decade on record since thermometer-based observations began. Global average surface temperature has risen at an average rate of 0.17°F per decade since 1901 , similar to the rate of warming within the contiguous 48 states. Since the late 1970s, however, the United States has warmed faster than the global rate.

United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Climate Change Indicators

The temperature in Lytton British Columbia on June 29th 2021 was 49.6 degrees Celciuis.  

“Lytton, a village in the Fraser Canyon located about 260 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, also saw record-breaking highs of 47.9 C on Monday and 46. 6 C on Sunday.  Before this week, the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada was 45 C in Saskatchewan in 1937.

“On Tuesday alone, seven locations in B.C. met or exceeded the 45 C mark, including Lytton, Cache Creek (47.4 C), Grand Forks (45 C), Kamloops (47.3 C), Kelowna (45.2 C), Lillooet (46.7 C) and Osoyoos (45 C).’

“The BC Coroners Service said there has been a significant increase in deaths since Friday, with extreme heat suspected to have played a role.

“From Friday to Monday, there were 233 reported deaths in the province, up from an average 130 deaths over a four-day period.

“In Vancouver, police said Tuesday they have responded to more than 65 sudden deaths since the heat wave began on Friday. The city normally sees about three or four sudden deaths every day.

CBC 6 29 2021

Climate change is racking our world.  Deforestation in British Columbia, due to the logging and timber industries, who have been at it for years, are a contributing factor.  Cutting the forest, especially the old growth, raises temperatures.  Photosynthesis in plants creates oxygen, it breaks the Carbon Dioxide, fixing the carbon in the plant, and and storing it in the process.  The Oxygen is given off from the photosynthesis, which all animals breathe.

Deforestation removes the forests ability to fix CO2 from the atmosphere; the cut trees are no longer producing oxygen, and transpiring water, cooling the climate.  British Columbia, like Alaska, has been cutting the old growth pristine forests to make a profit.  In twisted logic they feel the forests are just sitting there doing nothing, they see no value in the forests, so they cut them down mercilessly.

This has been the dominant economic idea since Adam Smith wrote Wealth Of Nations, when a forest was seen as being a free resource, sometimes with rent paid to the landowner to log it, but basically a resource to capitalists, when we consider the landowner as being one of them.  To make a long story short, the value of a commodity is how much labour is required to produce it. The current idea of a forest is it is worth the amount of trees or minerals beneath it.  It is open game for capitalists to remove the trees and mine the metals or petroleum underneath it.

Recognition of forests as important for stopping climate change is only just beginning.  The idea of an old growth forest as a resource with a price tag is the paradigm.  It is not seen as a priceless work of art for future generations of humans or sovereign ecological territory, rather the value of it is as a commodity that can be bought or sold.

By only seeing activity that creates a material commodity as being productive, capitalism is rapidly destroying the ecology.  In BC and Alaska this perverse logic still exists, in a condition not much different from Adam Smith’s time.  The consciousness of the human being has been expanding with technological development, we now have satellites in space orbiting Earth, and we can map out climate change scientifically.   Our data shows consistent warming in the last century, which is damaging ecology.  In the past we could only record temperatures on the ground, often without even computers to help us. 

Now we are mapping climate change with powerful computers, and the Republican bourgeoisie are left to question the science. 

This group of dinosaurs is caught in capitalist logic, which considers ecology to have no value besides as exchange value, money, which can be had by logging.

This paradigm has to change.  The logging of old growth in BC and Alaska is resulting in climate change.  The economic ideas have to change, ecology must have value beyond simply a resource for human exploitation.  The land has to be viewed as more than a commodity which only has exchange value as a resource to exploit, sold to create capital. 

A revolutionary shift in consciousness is taking hold, with climate change starting to figure into the capitalist mind.  Even large capitalists are seeing the science, the liberal progressive bourgeoisie is shifting towards acknowledging climate change as real, and recognizing that society is going to have to change their economic ideas to stop the ecological consequences of uncontrolled exploitation of the ecology for exchange value.  The Republican bourgeois are way behind, Donald Trump disbelieved climate change was real, he thought it was a hoax designed to keep the ruling class weak, and hinder the ability of capitalists to make a profit.  The ruling class seems to still be largely subordinate to Trump; he is still the leader of their party.  

Perhaps it is an issue of quality, where the right not to make a mess is part of the value of a commodity.  Clearly simply the amount of labour required to log a forest cannot continue to be the value of a commodity.  Something is going to have to give, political economy is not a completed science.  The ideas of value and surplus value are still evolving, our science demands we formulate new ideas of value including the life of other species, ecology, in what we consider the value of a commodity to be.  This shift in material reality, a world where climate change is recognized, and forests are not simply judged as x amount of dollars worth of trees, has to be the reality.

Specifically we have to change the practice of the value of a commodity to include ecology as an integral part of it.  The right not to make a mess, the idea behind recycling, is there to guide us. The days are gone when a forest can simply be exploited with no real view of climate change and ecological destruction.  Political economy is coming with, its laws changing with new ideas, it is the essence of the science.

Society is ready for further progress. It is up to us to figure how the value of a commodity is not simply what the base cost of exploitation of ecology is, rather social and ecological factors figure into the value of a commodity.  A paradigm shift brought forward by the natural sciences, meshing with economic ideas.  A revolutionary change of the consciousness level of the human being.

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

Purpose of State Industry Under Capitalism. Expenditures at Maximum Limit.

~ nicholasjayboyes

It is interesting to see the capitalists suggesting the state is too expensive, and attempting to pay less money towards it.  This would be the idea of Elon Musk, the white South African billionaire, also the world’s richest man; that the state is wasting money, and its expenditures need to be cut drastically.

I guess we have to look at what is owned by the state.  We have a passenger railroad industry, Amtrak, the Post Office,  and waste pickup among others.

The railroad is owned by the state, and usually loses money.  But every other industrialized nation has passenger railways, with Western Europe having high speed railroads, and advanced locomotives that have their own tracks, that go in the mountains and such.

They serve the practical purpose of connecting people between large cities, from downtown regions to other downtown regions.  It’s like going between downtown Chicago and Milwaukee, you don’t always want to drive your car as you encounter traffic , and even if it did not slow you down (which is ridiculous),  driving to downtown Chicago can be a real adventure.

Even if you fly 150 km south, which uses large amounts of energy compared to Amtrak, you still have to ride the L or rent a car to get from O’hare to downtown.  It is about a 45 minute ride between the train station to O’Hare on the L, making flying down there kind of rough.

So the bourgeoisie rises to the occasion, and even though Amtrak does not make a profit, passenger rail is seen as needed, and paid for by a subdivision of taxes from the profit.  

Perhaps to remind us that the capitalist state does good things too, Musk will try to cut railroad money.   He owns a luxury car company; I guess he must be in favor of auto travel.  

But selling it to anyone who has had to commute downtown, and drive it, is a hard sell.

Perhaps gutting the Post Office would be a source of savings.  They committed the sin of moving the mail in ballots we all use to vote, when we were losing the drop boxes the Republican bourgeoisie have come to detest. 

But the bills from the electricity and gas monopoly come in the mail.  They get the money from the bank automatically, but send a receipt showing your energy usage.  Paper receipts are essential in a failure, such as crashed computers.

So no real help there.  Taxes are also sent by mail; every year it comes time to pay the taxman, and it goes in checks by mail.  

This system seems to be working.  There is also mail that has to leave the country. Ever tried to use United Parcel Service, UPS, to send something outside the country? Try Canada, it’s like 10 times more expensive to send a letter UPS than the mail.    Need to send a package? Milwaukee to near Toronto Canada, about 900 miles, our package would have cost 217 dollars for Worldwide Express plus (same day),  $166 for the end of the day.  It costs $153 for worldwide expedited, and for standard (5 days or less), about $44.  The package was less than a pound.

Perhaps the fact recycling is now being done with Waste Management instead of the city sorter would be some savings.  Considering the city sorter burned down, it is now Waste Management that is sorting recyclables. 

But it certainly looks like using the city to get started recycling was effective.  We always said it would save money to recycle, now it is profitable.  Recycling proved to be a real success.  I guess the only question is if you really want to tamper with a working system of city garbage pickup.  It is one of the few remaining parts of our recycling program still not privatized. It may fall, but the fact remains recycling was accomplished without surplus value as a goal of the movement.  And the city pickup created no surplus value, it was not the reason for recycling, we were concerned about what disposable society was doing to the ecology. It is an example of the state giving in ot the desires of workers to do something that the profit motive was neglecting,, helping ecology. So they can give in sometimes, but once it could be done with a profit Waste Management commenced doing the recycling.

They look an awful lot like a monopoly, or a trust. They seem to be handling most of Milwaukee’s recycling, doing the sorting. Whether they own the recyclables is a more difficult question. Capitalists often prefer monopoly to state ownership, like NASA and Elon Musk. He now has a monopoly on what NASA used to do, launch men to the space station. He gets government contracts to do this. All this has done is move capital from the state to Musk’s pocketbook, from industry that was functioning just fine before capitalists decided they wanted a private company to do the launches.

So here we have 3 or 4 of the things the state owns, and it doesn’t look possible to remove the money being used to keep this industry productive and working.  

Maybe instate college tuition?  That is huge.  But it is a subsidy to the petty bourgeoisie and the middle class, who vote and support the Republicans.  It would be very surprising to see this gravy train come to a halt.  Our bourgeois political economists Ivory Towers are connected to this; good luck getting that through Congress. 

So we are really left to ponder, where will these massive savings Musk wants will come from?  Cutting off welfare, Social Security payments, could keep them from having to spend their sacred profits on senior citizens pensions.  But that is not popular with their following either, many of whom are retired or going to retire soon.  

Given any industry that can make a profit is made to do so, through privatization of nationalized assets, what could be unnationalized?  School systems?  There are capitalists who may be supportive of religion in schools,  but their beloved Constitution divides Church and State very  directly.  They have been promoting using state money for religious schools, they call them charter schools.  But they have shown no real promise of providing a better education than the state schools they are meant to replace.  And the right to an education is a thing all of us value, it is not socially acceptable to have children labouring instead of in school.

Basically the state really cannot be removed more than it already is without causing a social crisis for capitalists.  The industry the state controls is only this way as it is needed but cannot create a profit.  Are we to believe Musk can make the Post Office create a surplus this year?  Welcome back to planet Earth Elon.  It hasn’t created a surplus in decades, and unless something big really changes, expect  it to remain a government institution paid for by the state.  

It is sort of amusing to see the same institution, the state, which is used to hold down the proletariat, shrinking.  In this respect it is hard to take Musk and Donald Trump seriously.  We all remember the movement to pay less money to the riot police, defunding the police became a rallying call for the bourgeois.  No savings there either.  

The more you look at it, the more foolish it looks. It would seem to be an empty threat, from a rich man and his puppet.  It remains to be seen if doctrinaire experiments will follow. 

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic