Earth Day to May Day: The absurdity of owning the earth
Posted by Mike E on April 24, 2011
“…. the slave-holder considers a Negro, whom he has purchased, as his property, not because the institution of slavery as such entitles him to that Negro, but because he has acquired him like any other commodity, through sale and purchase. But the title itself is simply transferred, and not created by the sale. The title must exist before it can be sold, and a series of sales can no more create this title through continued repetition than a single sale can.
“What created it in the first place were the production relations. As soon as these have reached a point where they must shed their skin, the material source of the title, justified economically and historically and arising from the process which creates social life, falls by the wayside, along with all transactions based upon it.
“From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another.
“Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.”
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Definition: Usufructuary means having the rights to the harvest of the land (to use the fruits), without ownership rights (to fundamentally possess or alter). For example U.S. treaties with the Ojibwe people (Chippewas) of Wisconsin gave them usufructuary rights to timber, hunting and fishing over the state, but only ownership rights to very small reservations on the worst land.
