dude knew who he was and what he was about. today his works are treated as if he wrote in our time. districts want to pull his books because he used the n-word, missing that through the course of the Adventures of Huck Finn he was writing about a man whose society didn’t see him as fully human. but how does the author’s protagonist see him? he loves him. he’s his friend.

the book has been labeled by modern audiences as racist despite in its context being a rebuke of racism. the fact that we read Huckleberry Finn and feel uncomfortable is a demonstration that it succeeded. someday books from our time will have the same effect on audiences.

i think today, Mark Twain would write things inspired by people like Ursula K Le Guin, Becky Chambers, or Sarena Ulibarri

my dude i enjoy your semi-drunken ramblings. not just because they make me feel better about my high ramblings :3, but because they give me a peek into who you are. so y’know, feel free.

What’s the distinction between owning your home being okay and owning land not being okay?

The commenter above gave you a very long answer that I think can be summarized more effectively.

The difference between personal property and private property is that private property is used for its potential for earning money, and personal property is used for its practical purpose by a person to satisfy their needs. You owning a DVD and watching it at home for pleasure is personal property, a cinema owning a DVD and playing it for profit makes it private property.

There’s no agreeing or disagreeing about philosophy anymore, whether something is used for profit or not is self evident if you apply this distinction.

The idea is the land belongs to everyone, and each is entitled to make use of their fair share of it by simple virtue of being human. You wouldn’t “own” your home in such a society, merely be the current inhabitant of it. If you are familiar with these legal concepts, think of the entirety of humanity having naked ownership of the entire planet, and people having usufruct of what they can actually use.

An example that might help clarify: imagine a trucker working for a logistics company that lends her a truck for long hauls. This trucker might tell people “yeah, it’s my truck” in that she drives it and maintains it and sleeps in it and uses it all the time. Yet legally speaking, the truck belong to the company, which itself belongs to its shareholders — people who might not even have ever seen the truck in question, and only care for the profits it might bring through the work performed with it. One is ownership through usage and the other the current legal concept of propriety; they are in fact quite different.

People coming to your home and changing stuff without your agreement wouldn’t be OK since the freedom of one person stops where that of another begins. How that would be enforced is a an open question — left-anarchism advocates organization without hierarchy, which means it would be possible to form citizen courts and militias, which might belong to a federation for nation-wide or world-wide coordination without a state body. But we should remember the main point of all this however is to remove the main reasons theft is a thing in the first place (along with rectifying the greatest theft of all time), so it can be questioned how much enforcement would be necessary. Certainly not to the current extent where society must bear the weight of the state maintaining a land registry, escrow officers, dedicated justice system, police force, and army to defend it all.

These concepts of “fair share” and deserving of material wealth by mere existence are very weak or absent in our current system, which is built on the core idea that only immaterial things (rights) are granted by default to everyone, and material wealth is only acquired through contracts (work, inheritance, purchase — all these from people who do have all the material wealth one seeks).

You are correct in pointing out that, without a critical mass of adherents, left-anarchism cannot function. However this simply means that rather than being an ideology imposed from above by politicians, it is one that must be adopted by actual people. For this reason left-anarchists usually believe in contributing to local free associations (not necessarily political), promoting horizontal organization there through example, and therefore building a “revolution” from the bottom up rather than from the top down as advocated by some leftist groups.

I mean, plenty of people have differing views on this.

I think I would support the idea of private ownership, but owning things like land should pay a land tax. Ownership means that improvements that you make to your property come back to benefit you, and that it cannot be arbitrarly re-assigned away from you by your co-operative/government (taking this further, a veto right against a democratic majority taking your non-commodity property).

All regular work and production should be paid back to the workers in the form of voting shares in the democratic co-operative that owns the factory, to prevent authoritarian capitalists from embezzling labor like the billionaires do today.

But I understand that many disagree with these statist ideas.

People tend to equate ownership with protections. So they think “owning” land (e.g. property with a house) allows them safety from things like “other random people living too close to me”.

Therefore, if they didn’t own their property, another person might start cohabiting with them, steal from them, harm them, etc, and they would be powerless to prevent this scenario.

This isn’t to say that this is correct, but this is the reality people have bought into. So even if they don’t own their workplace, nobody technically “owning” the workplace feels less secure (to them) than if it were “owned”.

Again, this is not my disposition, but one that I have come to understand many people hold.

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