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 agriculture this common ownership becomes a fetter on production. It is abolished, negated, and after a longer or shorter series of intermediate stages is transformed into private property.
“But at a higher stage of agricultural development, brought about by private property in land itself, private property in turn becomes a fetter on production as is the ease today, both with small and large landownership. The demand that it also should be negated, that it should once again be transformed into common property necessarily arises. But this demand does not mean the restoration of the old original common ownership, but the institution of a far higher and more developed form of possession in common which, far from being a hindrance to production, on the contrary for the first time frees production from all fetters and gives it the possibility of making full use of modern chemical discoveries and mechanical inventions.” (Anti-Dühring, pp. 156-7.)
Champions of capitalism such as Conant imply or imagine that, thanks to its unique features and exceptional capacities, capitalist America is set apart from the rest of the capitalist world. All its peculiarities and powers, however, will not suffice in the future, any more than they have in the past, to enable the bourgeoisie in this country to escape the operation of the laws of the class struggle. These laws, which formerly worked in their favor, are now more and more turning against their regime. Although American capitalism may follow paths marked out by the special conditions of its own historical development, these lead toward the same ultimate destination as its European counterparts: the graveyard where obsolete social systems are buried.
The transition from ancient Indian collectivism to the various forms of production rooted in private property also casts considerable light upon the ways and means by which the forces of bourgeois society arrived at their present eminence in America.
In their catalogue of crimes against humanity, the spokesmen for capitalism include the 