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Regeneracion, March 18, 1911.
El Derecho de Propiedad
[The Right of Property]
Among all of the absurdities that man reveres, this is one of the
greatest and one of the most revered.
The right of property is ancient, as ancient as man's stupidity and
blindness; but just the antiquity of a right can not give it the
"right" to survive. If it is an absurd right, it is necessary to
abolish it without giving importance to its birth at the time when man
covered his nakedness with the animal skins.
The right of property is an absurd right because it had its origins in
crime, fraud, and abuse of power. In the beginning, the individual's
right of territorial property did not exist. Land was worked in
common, forests provided firewood to the hearths of all, harvests were
distributed among the members of the community according to their
needs. Examples of this nature can still be seen in some primitive
tribes, and even in Mexico this custom thrived in indigenous
communities in the era of Spanish domination, and lived until
relatively recently, being the attempted act of despotism to take away
the lands of those indigenous tribes, lands that they had cultivated
in common for many centuries the cause of the Yaqui Wars in Sonora and
of the Mayas in the Yucatan.
The individual's right of territorial property was born of the attempt
of the first ambitious person that brought war on a neighboring tribe
to commit it into the servitude, the land that the tribe cultivated in
common coming under the power of the conqueror and his captains. Thus
through the means of violence, through the means of force was born
private, territorial property. Speculation, fraud, theft -- more or
less legal, but still theft -- are other origins of private,
territorial property. Then the first thieves having seized the land,
they themselves created laws to defend what they called and still call
in this century a "right", that is, the right they gave themselves to
use the lands that they had stolen and to enjoy the product of them
without anyone bothering them. It is important to note that the
displaced were not the ones to give those thieves the right of
property; it was not the people of any country who gave the power to
confiscate that resource, to which all humankind has the right. It
was the thieves themselves, who protected by the force, wrote the law
that would protect their crimes and hold in check the displaced from
possible revenge.
This so-called right has been passed from fathers to sons through
inheritance, so that resources which should be common, have remained
in the command of a social caste only with obvious prejudice of the
rest of humanity whose members were born when land was already divided
among the few shirkers.
The origin of territorial property has been violence, through violence
it is still maintained; since if someone wants to use a piece of land
without the consent of the so-called owner, he must go to jail, taken
into custody precisely by the henchmen that are maintained not by the
landowners but by the common worker, although the contributions
apparently come from the coffers of the rich, they are very skillful
at finding ways to reimburse themselves by paying starving wages to
the farmers and selling them articles of primary necessity at high
prices. Then in that way then the people, with their work, maintain
the henchmen that deprive them from taking what belongs to them.
And if this is the origin of territorial property, if the right of
property is nothing more than the legal consecration of crime, why
lift arms to heaven when it is known that the Mexican Liberal Party
works to expropriate the land that the rich monopolize, that is, the
descendants of the thieves that had taken possession through crime, to
turn it over to the natural owner, that is, the people, that is all
the citizens of Mexico?
Some Maderistas sympathize with the idea of turning the land over to
the people; but conservatives in the end, they want the act to reflect
a legal solemnity, that is, they want a congress to decree the
expropriation. I have written much on this topic, and I am amazed
that there are still those who cannot understand what I have said,
because I presume that I have spoken with complete clarity. "No
congress, I have said, would dare to decree the expropriation of land,
because the Congressional seats will not go to the workers but to the
bosses; they will not go to the uneducated and the poor, but to the
intellectuals and the rich." That is to say, in Congress the
so-called ruling classes: the rich, intellectuals, scientists,
professionals will be represented; but it would not permit any worker
of pick and shovel, any unskilled laborer, any workman to sneak in and
if through a true miracle any worker was to freely obtain the
threshold of the dwelling-place of the law, how could he struggle
against men practiced in the art of verbal debate? How could he have
his ideas considered if he lacked the scientific knowledge that the
bourgeois possessed in abundance? But one could say that the working
people would send competent people to Congress to represent them.
Throughout the world the so-called representatives of labor in the
parliaments have been discredited. They are as much bourgeois as any
other representative. What have the workers' representatives of the
English people done in the House of Commons? What objective gain have
the workers' representatives obtained in the French Parliament? In
the German Parliament there are a large number of workers'
representatives and what have they accomplished in favor of the
economic freedom of the workers? The Austrian-Hungarian Parliament is
noted or the enlarged number of workers' representatives that sit on
its boards and nevertheless the problem of hunger in Austria- Hungary
is unresolved, just as in any other country where there are no
representatives of labor in Congress.
There is, then, the need to let go of the illusion. The expropriation
of the land possessed by the rich, should be realized during the
present insurrection. We liberals will not be commiting a crime by
turning over the land to the working people, because it belongs to
them, the people; it is the land that their most distant ancestors
lived on and watered with their sweat; the land that the Spaniards
robbed by force from our Indian fathers; the land that those Spaniards
gave as inheritance to their descendants, who are the ones that
actually possess them. That land belongs to all Mexicans by natural
law. Some of them might have bought it; but where did they get the
money to make the purchase if not from the work of the Mexican
unskilled workers and laborers? Others took that land denouncing it
as wasteland; but if it was wasteland, it belongs to the people and no
one had the right to give it to whomever offered a few dollars for it.
Others might have acquired the land by taking advantage of their
friendship with government men to obtain it without it costing them a
cent if it were wasteland, or through judicial dealings if it belonged
to an enemy of the dictatorship or a person of no influence or money.
Others still acquired the land by giving loans with high interest to
the small farmers that ended up compelled to leave the land in the
hands of the Matatías [hired assasins], unable to pay the debt.
Compañeros: All who hold the conviction that the action the Liberal
Party is going to take is humanitarian, endeavor to convince those who
still adore capital and revere this so- called right of property, that
the Liberal Party is in the right, that their work will be a work of
justice and that the Mexican people will be truly great when they can
reap the benefits of land and liberty without obstacles.
Ricardo Flores Magon
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