 depression. In 1932 he approached Ameringer and declared:
“What we got to have is this here revolution you used to preach about.”
“You mean divide up and start all over again?” asked Ameringer.
“No, not divide up,” exclaimed the cattleman angrily, “but own our land and cattle and things in common like the Indians use to do before the government robbed them of everything by giving them title deeds.”
“That’s better,” Ameringer acknowledged, “provided we add railroads, banks, packing plants and a great many other things to those you mentioned.”
The impact of the oncoming social crises will undoubtedly call forth similar responses from considerable sections of farmers who today appear eternally wedded to “free enterprise.”
The actual cultivators of the soil, small farmers, indentured servants, tenants or slaves, never reconciled themselves in the past to the exploiters of labor on the land, to landlordism or absentee ownership. The embattled farmers carried through the fight for independence and democracy against British-backed feudalism during the First American Revolution. Their vanguard in Kansas first challenged in action the slave power, the forerunners of the farmers who filled the Union armies in the Civil War. The agrarian Populists conducted stubborn struggles against the tyranny of the plutocrats in the last part of the nineteenth century. These memorable precedents prefigure how the toilers on the land, whether small owners, sharecroppers, or wage workers, are bound to assert their presence and power as the oppressions – and depressions – of monopoly capitalism drive them to seek a new road. Whatever phases the struggle for the land will go through as class antagonisms become more pronounced, the method of its final solution has already been indicated by Marx:
“From the point of view of a higher economic form of society, the private ownership of the globe on the part of some individuals will appear quite as absurd as the private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all societies together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its users, and they haye to hand it down to the coming generations in an improved condition, like the good fathers of families.” (Capital, Vol. III, pp. 901-2.)
Just as the private ownership of one man by another had to be abolished in this country 76 years ago, so the socialist revolution of our time will have to abolish private ownership of the land.
The destruction of primitive communism based on common land ownership by the Indian tribes was indispensable to the development of American capitalism. The rapid growth of unalloyed bourgeois relations in the United States was made possible by the thoroughness with which the bourgeois forces swept aside all precapitalist institutions, beginning with those of the Indian.
Now this historical cycle is coming to a close and a new one is opening up. The main direction of American society since the crushing of the Indian has been away from primitive collectivism toward private property in more and more developed capitalist forms. In the reversal of social trends now under way, the main line of progress is away from private property and toward collectivism in socialist forms.
When the American people, under the leadership of the industrial workers, succeed in their task of converting capitalist landed property into public property, they will in effect revive on a far higher level and in more mature forms the common ownership of the soil and the collective use of the means of production that we meet on the very threshold of modern American history.
Thus the struggle for the land in America is reproducing, at its own pace and in its own peculiar ways, the basic pattern of development being traced out by civilized society as a whole. This pattern, too, has been explained and foreseen by the founders of Marxism.
“All civilized peoples begin with the common ownership of the land,” wrote Engels. “With all peoples who have passed a certain primitive stage, in the course of the development of agric