Also published in the Adelaide Review, June 1999
Did you know that the United States started off communist?
Both the original Jamestown settlement, and that of the Plymouth colony of the Pilgrim Fathers, started off with all property held in common. The settlements were inspired by religion, and such communal property was held to be the way to replicate the original state of man, free of the corruptions of private property (and a way of ensuring the investors back in England got a return).
They starved, of course.
In each case, nowhere near enough food was produced to feed the colony and most of the colonists succumbed to starvation and disease. Colonists bought or begged food from the neighbouring Indians.
In each case, the colony was only saved because a newly-arrived official from England identified the problem -- everyone received an equal share regardless of how much or little they worked or improved things, so needs greatly exceeded work done. Both officials promptly privatised the land, distributing blocks to each surviving family. In each case, as families were able to keep the fruits of their labour, food production boomed. So much so, that the colonists were soon selling corn to the local Indians.
China's Deng Xiaoping achieved the same result with his 1979 decollectivisation of agriculture, kicking off the long Chinese boom.
When Boris Yeltsin said the Soviet experiment was over, he also said it would have been better if it had been tried on a small-scale first. To which the Americans could reply -- "yep, and we did; but we got over it".
The early Americans found that even religious enthusiasm, tied to the whips of hunger, in a small community, could not make communism work -- and the original American colonists had no fall-back of developed institutions and productive capital to tied them over. So they swiftly starved -- until the rules of property were changed. And these patterns have keep repeating themselves. Collectivisation of agriculture resulted in mass death in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cambodia, in Ethiopia. Ethiopia being a land of unreliable rainfall, the peasantry had long been used to keep back seed grain in sufficient quantity to tied them over. Mengistu, the Ethiopian leader, said that such "hoarding" was "bourgeois accumulation" and confiscated their stores. The rains failed, as they did regularly, and the people starved by the hundreds of thousands: men, women and children. It was not drought that killed them, but the ideological delusions of their own government. However, to the Mengistu regime, death was clearly preferable to the "sin" of bourgeois accumulation.
It has been one of the terrible delusions of the twentieth century that one can change human nature by changing the rules of property. Homo sapiens are the product of millions of years of evolution, and thousands of years of social and cultural evolution. Human behaviour, in its essentials, does not actually change all that much. The suggestion that it is somehow completely malleable by changing property relations is a nonsense, but a nonsense which has killed tens of millions of people this century.
Even now, North Korea hovers on the brink of starvation. Again, it is not nature that is killing them, but yet another failure of collectivised agriculture. Whether the Pilgrim Fathers, Russians, Chinese, Koreans or Ethiopians, regardless of race or culture, collectivised agriculture is a failure.
So, if we know it does not work, why are we currently inflicting it on indigenous Australians?
Land granted to indigenous Australians by various land rights Acts typically provides that land as communal, inalienable freehold. The land is held in common and can't be sold. All the owners receive the benefit regardless of how little, or how much, effort they put into it.
Sound familiar?
The Australian welfare system ensures no one starves, but the land (now more than 15 per cent of Australia) is certainly not used to best advantage. In particular, it is not being successfully utilised to wean indigenous Australians off welfare -- the welfare dependency that Aboriginal community leader Noel Pearson denounced so strongly recently. The creation of the special category of "indigenous freehold" gives very limited entry into ordinary commercial life, participation in which is the only genuine route to indigenous independence and advancement, the only way out of poverty and dependency.
There were about 300 indigenous cultures in Australian when Europeans arrived, cultures which varied greatly in ideas, beliefs, practices and language. The notion that there is a single Aboriginal identity, single Aboriginal people, a typical Aboriginal form of ownership, a single Aboriginal culture are all post-colonial abstractions. The creation of "indigenous freehold" represents the law imposing a lowest common denominator indigenous pseudo-culture -- far more of a fantasy of social justice than anything genuinely indigenous.
Worse than that, it actually denies to owners differentiated by "race" -- that stupid, empty concept -- the full advantages of property ownership the rest of us take for granted. We can buy and sell our property, we can individually benefit directly from the care and use we invest in it, but apparently our indigenous brethren are to be "protected" from such snares and temptations for their "special land".
And we call this imposition of a second-rate form of property "social justice". I can just see the "stolen ownership" report of 30 years from now, with apologies being demanded from the government of the day by progressive opinion for policies that current progressive opinion deems so wonderful. At least with the "stolen children" the intent was to give them the full benefit of participation in wider society, not isolate them from it.
But then, weren't there a few progressives who told us that Joe Stalin was a good bloke and Mao a giant of social justice?
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