this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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Tell them to give the land back and they lose their shit.
I don't understand what "give the land back" means. Would you mind explaining it?
There are a lot of poor, oppressed people who live on land their ancestors didn't own. In the US, all Black people and most native Americans don't live within 1000 km of where their ancestors lived 600 years ago. So when land is given back, what happens to the people that currently reside there? Do natives become landlords? Is there ethnic cleansing? Or is it only land where people don't reside? Also, many native cultures didn't even have land ownership, so how do you give land back without forcing them into a western mould?
We could just abolish private property rights and accept that no individual or corporation can own land. That would be my preferred solution.
How does that function in practice? Doesn't that just immediately turn into a stupid bullshit version of mad max?
Commons - land maintained by the people in common - are a very common thing in non-capitalist societies. People in medieval England used to tend their animals on common land and get pissed at people who let their animals graze too much, eventually kicking them out by force if they continued to act selfishly.
Basically, acting selfishly is treated as a crime. Breaking into someone's home to sleep there when there is a vacant home available is selfish. Taking all the computers from the public library to earn respect in the next village over is selfish. Meanwhile doing good is appreciated and means others will do good to you in turn, but by default people are considered deserving of all basic necessities.
You might get a Mad Max scenario if you magically get unguarded commons by fiat. But we live in capitalism where the commons are looted into non-existence by default. For an anticapitalist movement to be successful, it has to guard and maintain its own commons against capitalism, compared to which Mad Maxoids are child's play. If we live in a society where private property can be abolished, we live in a society where the commons can be guarded.
How do you enforce it? How do you prevent enforcers from seizing power if they have a monopoly on violence?
In anarchocommunism, those that use violence to enforce it wouldn't have monopoly on violence, they would be group of volunteers from the community. Those volunteers could act under a mandate given to them by the community, or they could organize spontaneously and take justice into their own hands. The community can retroactively endorse, tolerate, or condemn their actions. If their actions are condemned by the community their mandate can be revoked if they had one, and they can be held accountable nonviolently or, if necessary, opposed violently to prevent them from causing further harm.
Defending an anarchocommunist society against capitalism would likely happen through guerilla warfare, like how the Taliban successfully defended itself against NATO. The guerillas would also naturally be volunteers without any monopoly on violence, and their actions could either be under mandate from some revolutionary commune or spontaneous. Offensively, guerillas win by bleeding the logistics of their opponent dry, leading to the mass surrender of underpaid and undersupplied soldiers, allowing the guerilla to storm the halls of power with minimal resistance. Less dramatically, anarchocommunists can win political victories through terrorism (like the British suffragettes), riots, strikes, and more.
That said, violence is a measure of last resort. Most of the time in an anarchist society it's enough to tell someone they are doing a bad thing and help them with unlearning it, to redesign the tools or systems through which they caused harm, to no longer give them the tools that allow them to harm others, to warn others of their history of harm an divest from them, or to be a barrier between them and the tools that allow them to harm others, or to threaten them.
So if you had a group of enforcers that abuses their capacity for violence, then firstly their mandate can be revoked. If that doesn't work, people can try to take their weapons. If that doesn't work, people can sanction them. If that doesn't work, people can follow them around and attack them if they try to use their violence to intimidate others. If that doesn't work, people can ask the help of other communities to help defeat them. If that doesn't work, people can burn their houses down. If that doesn't work, people can assassinate them.
If that doesn't work, people can go scorched earth: evacuate the path ahead of them and destroy whatever they need to survive until they starve to death. If that doesn't work, people can surrender and murder them when they let their guard down. If that doesn't work, people can engage in economic sabotage and propaganda for revolution. If that doesn't work, people can make art and inspire a dream for a brighter future in later generations while mitigating what harm they can. If that doesn't work, well, they'll be long dead before they know that for certain.
Why would it? Private property only refers to land, we can just centrally manage land use through some system that's fairer than capitalism. It seems like really quite a minor change compared to what I usually advocate for tbh
You lost me at "centrally manage." That never works out.
Yeah the current system we have is working perfectly let's never change it because change is scary
If you centrally manage things we'll be right back here in a couple hundred years anyway, so go on with your bad self.
You would have to overthrow capitalism first. Which would be quite the task in the good old USA.
We need to do that anyways, Capitalism inevitably leads to fascism.
It means that it's up to the natives. It sucks for the descendants of settlers, but the alternative, that the descendants of the people it was stolen from keep being oppressed is worse. The natives get to say what happens on their land, and withholding stewardship until there is an alternative that the settlers agree to is perpetuating oppression. Land back means land back.
I know it's up to the natives, that's why I'm asking. Because if they choose to build an oppressive system then those with power within the new system are the new oppressors to fight, and it would be nice to avoid that.
There's a weird dissonance in these conversations where "justice" turns into "poetic justice" without the speaker realizing it. It's an ironic reversal of positions that sounds good without any rational backing for why it would be good.
Would it be a satisfying narrative loop to result in indigenous people retaking what they historically had? Of course.
Does being a member of a marginalized group grant some specific virtue that makes you a just leader or caretaker? ...Maybe tangentially? At the very least you might have more practical understanding of oppression.
Does being in a marginalized group that has a bloodline traced to an arbitrarily collection of humans who once lived in a place give you some inherent "connectedness" to (or "ownership" of) that place?...
No. That's actually a pretty fucked up line of reasoning. That kind of argument is what propped up "Europe for Aryans" and "Blacks back to Africa".
Your value in a community is in the bonds you have to it. Sure, some of those are family bonds, but a lifetime is far more than just that. We're strengthened by our living connections to each other today, not by our unchosen connections to a string of dead people who can't reciprocate.
None of us can go back in time and reverse genocides; how can those tragedies get special correction beyond curing the echoes of injustice that exist today?
In my opinion there are two simple facts:
If we were committed to live by those the rest becomes moot.
Oppressors can only exist if there are oppressed. It's a dialectical relationship. And if you give the land back and the stewardship of the land into the hand of the oppressed, there won't be an oppressive system by the definition of what oppression is. Could a new oppressive system (lets just say capitalism from now on) arise from that? Sure, even the USSR wasn't immune to liberalism festering in it's vanguard party leading to a complete collapse.
In fact, the soviet system and the october revolution with its subsequent wars give a good idea what giving the land to the people that work on it looks like.
Yeah forget about sending those squatters back to Europe. We don't fucking want them.
Well the germans had to deal with the settlers the soviets sent back across the Oder it's not like there isn't historical precedent for it...
Oof, but then we're stuck with them!
That's kind of why I like the casino model. Local tribes put here have been buying their land back bit by bit and the casino goers gladly shovel money at them.
I just wish we could rope corporate entities into it. Imagine if casino losses could be a corporate tax writeoff. C-suites would be stumbling onto the floor with the company cards. The overnight wealth distribution would be staggering.
Gambling is a hugely exploitative industry which predominantly negatively impacts the poorest and most vulnerable. Casinos are also a dying business model.
Casinos are a parasitic and non-value added industry, exploiting lower classes and without any material gain.