— AI translation — Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic)

Part Four — Allocating land otherwise · Chapter 13

13 Allocation from below

In every case assembled in the previous chapter (the five urban regimes as well as the land revolutions), allocation was always held by someone other than the users: the party, the bureaucracy, the employer, the State. The third term of the alternative (deliberation) seemed, on that showing, a dead letter: all those regimes abolished rent for the people, never by it. Two contemporary experiments, born against the State and not through it, compel a qualification.

13.1 Where the assembly allocates

The first comes straight out of the Mexican counter-reform. On 1 January 1994 (the day NAFTA came into force and article 27 ceased to promise land), the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rose up in Chiapas and occupied the fincas. Its Revolutionary Agrarian Law invokes Zapata and stands “against the reforms of article 27”; the recovered lands are declared collective property, neither sold nor rented, and allocated by the community assembly — the very one which, in the long run of chapter 2, allocated land without selling it.¹ The delegates who coordinate (formerly the Juntas de buen gobierno, since 2023 structures in which, explicitly, “the base commands”) hold a mandate revocable at any moment, non-renewable, unsalaried: mandar obedeciendo, to command by obeying. And in 2023 the movement pushes the logic to its conclusion: it declares portions of recovered land “common, that is, without property — neither private, nor ejidal, nor communal, nor state, nor anything […] a land without papers […] which can be neither sold nor bought”.² Never has “land is to be allocated, not sold” been stated more plainly. The limits: the scale is regional (some 300 000 people), the tenure mixed (integral collective tenure has receded before the family milpa), part of the land was bought back from the owners by the State rather than expropriated, and the zone lives under paramilitary pressure.

The second is Kurdish. In Rojava (the Syrian north-east withdrawn from the State from 2012 to 2024), the Social Contract makes “land, water and resources” public property and posits the commune (the komin, neighbourhood or village) as “the essential, basic organisational form of direct democracy”.³ The roughly five hundred thousand hectares of Baathist state land are communalised (not nationalised, but handed over to the communes and cooperatives in non-transferable use) and allocated, like everything else, according to “needs, determined not by the State or capital, but by the communes”.⁴ The women’s village of Jinwar (houses built collectively and handed over for use, rent-free) is its emblem. But the gap between principle and practice is, here, at its widest: the large private estates were not expropriated (the lever was the pooling of the state domain alone); the cooperatives remain marginal; the real economy rests, to more than eighty per cent, on oil rent — the exact opposite of an economy of use; and the democratic life of the communes is, by the admission of otherwise sympathetic observers, largely “an illusion of consultation” under the thumb of a single party.⁵ From the experiment one will therefore retain that the commune can allocate — but not that a party, once master of the apparatus, lets it do so: it is in this gap between the communal principle and partisan tutelage that the limit of the Kurdish case is measured.

Two further experiments. At Villa El Salvador, the Peruvian community explicitly demanded “to decide in assemblies where, to whom and for what reasons housing should be allocated” — and the State kept the land and the power to allocate: deliberation named as a programme, and the obstacle laid bare.⁶ In Bolivia, finally, community allocation has entered the Constitution itself. The Tierras Comunitarias de Origen (around 24 million hectares, more than a fifth of the country) are collective and inalienable, and, within the title, the 2009 Constitution expressly recognises the “communities’ own norms”: the assembly allocates, according to uses and customs, land that no one may sell. The same text goes so far as to prohibit, word for word, “ground rent arising from the speculative use of land”, and the people settled the ceiling on estates by referendum: five thousand hectares, at 78 %.⁷ But the boundary is twofold, and instructive. This is allocation within the enclave: outside the collective title, the overall regime remains. The five-thousand-hectare ceiling holds only for the future (the Constitution took care not to make it retroactive), so that the agro-industrial East of Santa Cruz kept its estates, and the State went on titling large properties there: what the country’s leading land-rights NGO called a silent agrarian counter-reform.⁸ None of these cases reaches the scale of a developed State. All show the same thing: wherever deliberation seized the land, it withdrew it from the market and allocated it according to need — and everywhere it was the State, the party or war that hemmed it in, never an internal impossibility.

The received formula must therefore be corrected by a word. Democratic allocation of land has never been attempted at the scale of a developed State at peace; it has been attempted, and it has worked, at the scale of entire regions — in Chiapas for thirty years, in Rojava for a decade — under the extreme constraints of war and embargo — which does not establish that such allocation is desirable, but does establish that it is possible. The third term is no longer a philosopher’s hypothesis: it is an attested practice, which remains to be grounded in law and carried to another scale.

Assessment

One last witness, to close the inventory and open what follows — no longer a revolutionary, but a senior French civil servant, at the heart of the State of advanced capitalism. In 1976, in Le Monde diplomatique, Max Querrien — former director of Architecture at the Ministry of Cultural Affairs — concluded his indictment, “La propriété contre l’urbanisme”, by calling for legislation that would “settle accounts with abusus, enshrine and protect usus, and stop making land a commodity when it should give rise to nothing but a right of use”.⁹ The severance of use from gain is thus no exotic import from the East or the South: it has forced itself on anyone who has looked the problem in the face, even inside the French state apparatus. What is missing everywhere is what was missing from every attempt in these two chapters: a grounded right of use, institutions capable of carrying it, and an allocation returned to those concerned. That is precisely the programme of the three chapters that follow.

The twentieth century tried to abolish the landlord, and it succeeded — in Moscow by decree, in Vienna by taxation, in Belgrade by social property, in Tripoli and Havana by the transfer of titles, and, from Mexico to Ethiopia, by land revolutions that returned the land to those who work it. This fact establishes, by direct experience and on four continents, what chapter 2 established through long history: rent is not a necessity of human housing. But almost no attempt united the three conditions that the grid of these two chapters has drawn out: the extinction of rent (all achieved it), respect for the home (Moscow denied it for forty years; Vienna, Cuba and Libya held to it), and democratic allocation — which only the experiments from below truly approached (Chiapas and Rojava practise it, Villa El Salvador demanded it), status everywhere else replacing price: card, diploma, favour, counter, agrarian bureaucracy. The failures were failures of the home, of allocation, or of reflux (the transformation handed back to the market or recaptured by the apparatus), never failures of abolition itself; and the pieces of the regime to be built exist, scattered — rent reduced to the cost of upkeep (Vienna), lifelong and transmissible security of use (the stanarsko pravo), inalienable communal use (the ejido, Rojava’s communalised lands), the inviolable individual dwelling (Vienna, Havana), allocation by the assembly (Chiapas), the public and contestable scale (the Punktesystem).