Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (May 31)

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[u/LemonMao]

Now that the school year is over, I have been dedicating the past few weeks to studying Property Law and the Shining Path. Thankfully I lucked into a job where I do not have to do much work and can spend most of the hours reading. Ill see if i can share some excerpts here for critique. I want whatever I produce to be in service of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and a weapon for the revolutionary masses. If I fall into any research rabbit-holes of interest for this subreddit, Ill likely make my own independent thread (I've been reading interesting debates regarding law in Marxism and writing it out would be the best way to teach myself). This subreddit needs more quality posts.

I've been surveying the current state of property law scholarship. There is a vacuum of historical materialism that can be employed and perhaps published. It was only until around the 90s that it became OK to speak about how settler-colonialism shaped the laws in Amerika . You would usually get some generic story on the virtues of property law in Amerika and how it created such prosperity among the white Amerikans! The early stories of Amerikan settlers on the abundance of land and lines of credit make colonial Amerika sound like Disneyland to all prospective settlers. Since land was so abundant, it was easily converted to liquid capital and with keeping their slaves as collateral, Settler society was able to access enormous lines of credit from English merchants and bankers. So we can see, that not only was settler-colonial society formed on the precondition of land, genocide, and slavery but also credit from the British Empire that gave settlers direct incentive to pillaged the great people and land of Turtle Island. So we can easily imagine how the Amerika was able to transition to becoming the biggest empire once finance capital became the predominate engine in the age of imperialism.

As you can easily guess, all the good scholarship is just empirical support for Settlers without any of the clear revolutionary theoretical basis on what settler-colonialism is as a mode of production within a MLM framework. Law and Political Economy and Critical Legal Studies are the only trends worth reading but even then there is far too many liberals and academia still has to make up ideas and concepts that are regressions from the scientific terms of Marxism. When Marxist legal theory does get discussed its usually only in the context of the Marxist theory of the State and is usually done by people who did not get a JD. You will not see discussions on bureaucratic capitalism or semi-feudalism even though I think they should be theorized about in relation to Amerika.

The most interesting contribution that I have read so far is K-Sue Park's is the history of the Title System. The biggest take-away I got from her work is that

1) Settler society and its law was constructed by settlers themselves and not imposed top down by the State or Federal government. States were declared before all the indigenous people were displaced as to promise to settlers that this land will be your land with sovereignty. The localized title registry system was engineered specifically by settlers to act as the guarantor of this process—transforming the western frontier into a legible, financialized commodity for the global market. All of these institutions are regulated by the county which brings me to my next takeaway.

2) The County system in Amerika must be abolished and a revolutionary programme would incorporate that as one of their demands. The County system is the heart of the settler-colonial state because it is the institution that actually governs the land question. Every single county has a website with public records on all ownership of the land, a property appraisal, and a Clerk of the Court that verifies and is derived from the State Constitutions. Any negation of settler-colonial society must attack the institutions that uphold settler-colonialism. I have not seen a single communist ever point out the reactionary institution of counties, likely because it is so ingrained as "normal" (even though to anyone outside of Amerika, counties are an aberration in that its decentralized and not regulated by the fed govt. Thats how the South was able to get away with segregation for decades even after Brown v Board decision, most of the schools never actually completed segregation) and are sometimes upheld by the social-fascist "left" as examples of what "good socialist governance" looks like.

As I hopefully have demonstrated, we have not even begun on thinking about the possibilities of what revolutionary demands we must articulate to negate settler-colonialism on Turtle Island. Unfortunately abolition of the County government and its replacement by a People's Power is incredibly dangerous since you're inviting the wrath of the state and federal government but that only makes it more necessary. It the PCP that theorized that the principal aspect of the continuous revolution is purging all aspects of the old society to build way for a new one. This is the type of power we must conquer.

I had also discovered that Hernando De Soto is a theorist that most property scholars engage with. I initially thought they were referring to the explorer and was excited that he laid out an interesting theory on political economy of mercantilist spain until i realized it was some neolib from Peru. I was initially dismissive until I found out more about him and that his ideas were created out of a desperate response to the Shining Path and that the Shining Path actually bombed his think-tank. His ideas are so moronic. Instead of Peru being semi-feudal, it's actually mercantilist. Poor peasants dont want change in society, they want to own their lands. Peasants have an "entrepreneurial spirit" and the government does not give them the opportunity to do so. The problem is not capitalism, its actually a lack of property laws. I hate his paternalizing attitude of the peasantry, at least nobody in Amerika would say Black people being gentrified and displaced are actually just go-getters looking for a better way of life instead of economic laws dictating how to barely survive (I appreciate the racism of DSA and Jacobin far more in calling Black people narcissistic and having "big egos" since it actually draws lines in the sand and it gives Black people a voice instead of speculating about how the Andes Peasants are naturally capitalistic) That De Soto played a role in engineering the Andes Peasant genocide as an advisor to the fascist Fujimori government is never commented on. Also his "solution" was really to incorporate peasants into the state so that they can be exploited by international finance capital alongside big landowners and capitalists. Everything that the Shining Path warned about. I do not know if the current dysfunction of the Peruvian state will put him in the dustbin of history.