June 11, 2004

• So what's the over/under on how much longer Mugabe is going to stay in power before he either gets assassinated, overthrown, or pressured to resign?
• This dictator's not as funny as that other one. Grauniad has a little more. Interestingly enough, I was googling for some more information about the practise of enclosure in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries - the formation of large amounts of private property which marked a shift from feudalism to capitalism, which this move might be seen as reversing. My thought was that although this technically reverses the change in economic system, the actual effects very likely will be extremely similar to those which enclosure caused (the disenfranchisement of those who live off the land, destruction of a certain rural way of life, movement of population towards cities, etc.) In effect, you could see it as the ultimate act of enclosure - the enclosure of an entire country. But that's just an initial reaction - I am so not an economic social historian - and in any case I doubt the measure (or Mugabe) will last that long. But anyway, what I was going to say was, when I was googling about enclosure, guess what one of the first links that turned up was?
• I suspect the grim reaper will get Mugabe before any political opponents do ... He's surrounded himelf with a pretty strong core of bodyguards and seems to have state control pretty well sewn-up. I thought the MDC might get somewhere last year but they didn't. Unfortunately when he karks it there'll probably be an all out bloodbath. Maybe he'll be brought to his knees by a ban on test cricket
• My family's from South Africa, so I always keep an eye out for stories on Zimbabwe (or as some of them still call it, Rhodesia). In terms of Mugabe getting forced out? Fat chance. He's been pulling this crap since 1987. His main focus has always been to take power (i.e., land) away from whites and give it to blacks. Unfortunately, all he's done is push more and more farmers out so that now the country has no food. This next move will only cause more instability - who's going to want to farm now or invest in the country at all, black or white, if the government can just decide to take it all away? I think it was about two years ago when they last had "elections", and special EU monitors left disgusted at what a travesty it had all been. This is just another blatant exercise of gross power - probably intended to solve the difficulties entailed in getting white land owners to give up their land. The problem is, yes he's a horrible dictator but who's going to do anything about it? As the article says, Mbeki probably won't do anything about it - this is the guy who isn't convinced that AIDS is a result of HIV and also thinks that the AIDS epidemic isn't that big a deal.
• Isn't this essentially Marxist communism, except without the state planning committees?
• I may have missed it, but I didn't see any logical justification for this action in the linked article... if Mugabe wants to redistribute white owned land to blacks, why didn't he just continue seizing white owned farms and land? He clearly had the power to do so.. I don't see why he needs to justification of a sham law that has the same authority as his word would anyway.
• Frankly, nicola, if Mugabe's only interest was taking land and power away from whites, he would be pretty benign by comparison. It's fairly clear that he's damn keen on making sure he stays in power, no matter what. Whites are, like German Jews were for Hitler, a small minority group he can treat as badly as he likes and use as a bogey man when he wants to go after, well, anyone. Just as "the Jews" were, in the parlance of the Nazis, the string pullers behind every ill that ailed Germany, the whites are behind all Mugabe's political enemies. And it appears most of his (black) neighbours are reacting to this in the way Europeans reacted to Hitler's attitude to the Jews.
• I just now noticed that Mugabe is a fan of the Hitler mustache. Hmmmm.
• What would it take to make Mugabe Turkmen-fun, Turkmen-fresh?
• rodgerd, I only meant that was the supposed justification of his actions - although I sometimes believe that he's so disconnected with reality and so strongly believes his own propaganda, that he really thinks that is what he's doing. I think it's possible that somewhere inside there, he really has deluded himself into thinking that it is actually good for "his people" and that they love him for it. But of course, there is also a strong element of using the white landowners as a scapegoat - that's how he was able to get in power in the first place. But to address pyrrthon1's actual question - I personally believe that personal property is crucial to a productive society. People don't really take care of something unless they have a personal stake in it. Housing projects are great examples - the people that live there don't own their apartments, they never could. But, as soon as people become home owners, they take personal pride in their lawns, their houses. Yes, there are plenty of examples where this isn't true, but on the whole leasing people land doesn't help them financially and doesn't give them a reason to invest in it (especially if the gov. can just take it away if they feel like it), helping people to buy their own land helps them tremendously - they can build credit and equity and they have a great reason to invest work into it.
• Mugabe has syphilis.
• Just like Idi "V.D." Amin. Ah.
• What would it take to make Mugabe Turkmen-fun, Turkmen-fresh? Well, if you've noticed, The Turkmenbashi tends to favor edicts that, while totalitarian and opressive, tend towards the ridiculous. Nationalizing all property and constantly scapegoating the few whites still living in Zimbabwe is a far cry from naming days of the weeks after your mother and proclaiming a national melon day. Perhaps Mugabe could proclaim a national "get syphilis day" then take a page from S. Africa and have a "really, just use some garlic and lemon juice and that will clear right up" day. Back to property, If the USSR or China are any example then the abolition of private propety is merely a quicker way to starve the nation. But they tried communal farming, Mugabe seems to just be declaring all the land his. The comparison to a fuedal state is apt. This seems like an excuse for Mugabe to snatch the land of his opponents and distribute it among his cronies who will probably being grabbing land and distributing it to their cronies. Does anyone know if he has a crusade planned in the future? Constantiople hasn't been sacked in ages.
• Zimbabwe has more press freedom than Sweden. Via The Head Heeb, your one-stop shop for the politics of distant places. The Head Heeb on Zimbabwe.
• I'm sorry I'm coming on this a bit late, but the private versus common property debate is something I have done a lot of thinking/studying about (thus the earlier comment). Not speaking about Zimbabwe (which is it's own kettle of rather messed up fish), the claim that enclosed or private property is more productive than common just doesn't seem to hold with what we know from history. It is easier to push innovation - new crops, etc - because you don't have to get as many to agree, but a professor of mine had found that English yeomen farming open fields (which were actually privately owned, but collectively managed, so they could graze on them collectively in the fallow year) were just as likely to be innovative as those in enclosed villages. What enclosure meant to the agricultural revolution in Britain over the 17th-19th centuries we just don't really understand, because there were so many new factors (New World crops, new rotation, new fertilisers, even new land) that teasing out the causitive is very difficult. But the same professor did think that enclosure was one of the primary reasons that Britain doesn't have as strong of a family farming sector as France (which was more "advanced" than Britain in farming until the 17-18th century). But was is definate is that there is no basis for the claim that common property is more likely to be neglected than private. It is private land, after all, that people happily clear cut and strip mine with no thought to the future; the Dust Bowl happened in a system of privately owned farms. Whereas throughout early modern Europe, common lands (always only a partion of land, generally wastes, forests and marshes, and the fields when fallow) were more regulated than private - and the more the population pressure on the land, the more intensive the control and regulation of its use. So only a little regulation in Sweden's large forests, very strict regulation in the arable areas of northern France and southern England. Other common resource management regimes, like the hispanic acequia irrigation system also traditionally have committees and elected officials to direct the community maintenence, and worked for hundreds of years, though now they are coming into conflict with private property owners who don't wish to care for the land as well. What I think makes the difference in the way people invest in property is not the private/public distinction, but in the the way they see it in relationship to their future. I think nicola is spot on about the way people react to rented housing versus owned - the rented is only temporary, and so doesn't rate the same kind of investment (though the people also tend to be poorer, and so lack the money/time to do the kind of work house owners often take for granted). But in common land management, villages often have a great deal invested in the fields - they think in terms of generations. Similarly, families with land that they expect to hold for generations treat it very differently to people who expect to sell it up in a few years. I really believe that productivity is linked to management, not the nature of the ownership, though of course, profit from that productivity will go to the owners, whether the community, or the landlord.
• Zimbabwe, however, is a very difficult case. The land was stolen within the past century and a bit from the native Africans to give to the colonists. This process crested problems and racial disparity between native and settler farmers all across Eastern and Southern Africa. However, the farmers being chased off now are not the colonists, but people who have lived and worked the land for a couple of generations, and Mugabe is a racist thug. The lands he expropriates are not going to those in need, but to his buddies, while the people who worked the land - both white farmers and their black employees - are chased off or worse. The sheer disruption and chaos of it all is what has killed productivity. If he had gone about slow and non-violent land redistribution - perhaps through government buying schemes or estate taxes or something - perhaps it would have worked. They could have eased the extreme disparity, without loosing all of the skill and productivity of the white-owned farms. Sorry for such a long comment - but my last thought was that I was wondering how public this was going to be. 99 year leases are not exactly communal property - in fact, isn't half of London owned by a couple of nobles who let it out on 99 year lease? Also, I have heard that legally all land in Britain and some of the commonwealth countries (like Canada) is owned by the Queen, but then people buy rights to the land.
• You're thinking of the Duke of Westminster, I think jb, so far as London goes. I believe it is true that his vast wealth comes largely from the freehold ownership of a large slice of London, though I think the leaseholds are typically longer than 99 years. So far as the Queen owning everything is concerned, that was true up to a point under the feudal system. I could have got this slightly garbled, but I think that under that system the monarch gave out rights to land for a period (or indefinitely) but retained the ultimate reversion. In England rights were granted on to others and on again until it became impossible to untangle the threads, and in the ?eighteenth century the feudal system was formally abolished, so that the final ownership now rests with whoever happens to own the freehold. Those people who buy 'Lordships of the manor' incidentally, are buying the ghostly legal remnant of the feudal reversion to a certain piece of land, though it no longer has any legal rights attached to it - certainly not the right to call yourself 'Lord so-and so'. The Scots never got round to abolishing feudalism, however, so it still applies up there. Surely not in Canada? Er... sorry, do go on discussing Zimbabwe.
• Plegmund: I wouldn't be surpriused if, yes, Canada. I'm fairly sure I don't own my land in New Zealand, I just own a title to it granted by the crown. While it in all ways acts like I own it forever and ever, I suppose the queen could, in theory, start revoking titles. Of course, if she tried, she wouldn't be Queen of New Zealand for much longer.
• Yes, I think that's how it works, rodgerd. For instance, there is a lot of "Crown Land" in Canada, which is essentially public and administered by the government, but officially owned by the Queen. I think the idea that all land is held from the Queen in freehold is what gives governments rights to expropriate to build roads or highways, etc. And the Duke of Westminster must be one damn rich man.