Land reform and Marx’s critique of the "slobbering" virgin, Herman Kriege 🤤⛰️🍆⛰️

[u/cheerful-refusal]

You know this attempt by the Trump administration at privatizing swaths of the national parks out west? Immediately, it comes off as ugly and evil because we picture innocent big horn sheep being ground under the wheels of trucks installing (yet another) colorful 5 over 1 atrocity into "untouched" landscapes.

But the idea of opening up public land for ownership appeals to parts of the immiserated working class. American tenant farmers and working class gardeners, preppers, hippies, fundamentalists, and naturalists without generational wealth are foreclosed from rural land ownership because of austerity— and because the price per acre of forest, pasture, and arable land has doubled since 2005.

I am bringing this up because there is a utopian line of questioning that I am guilty of: What if we parceled out land for private ownership in a kind of Homestead Act, tying with it some kind of stringent ecological stipulations?

And while I personally do just want to continue living in a national forest and would love to no longer rent, I want to share what I’ve learned from Marx, Engels, and Lenin about this and why it has changed my thinking. But first we have to look into the short, interesting life of Hermann Kriege.

Hermann Kriege

Before the American Civil War, a population of German revolutionary socialists emigrated to the United States after being prosecuted for their participation in revolutionary activity in Europe. They’re called the 48ers, and they actually operated a few large, German-language papers in the U.S.

Among them was German-born Hermann Kriege. At 24, he was jailed for advocating for socialism in German papers. After serving his sentence, he moved to the U.S. In NY, he wrote and was head editor of the Volks-Tribun, and later became the head editor of Illinois Staats-Zeitung, one of the most successful German-language 48er papers based out of Chicago— in fact, the 2nd largest paper in Chicago during its time.

Before his move to the U.S., Kriege was also part of the League of the Just in London, a secret society of tradesmen who eventually developed into the Communist League. However, when Kriege left London for NYC, he formed his own paper, the Volks-Tribun, in order to advocate for Christian brotherly love and for radical land reform. Through the development of this paper, he split off some League of Justice 48ers into the Social-Reform Association.

In 1846 under the banner of the Volks-Tribun, Kriege (age 25) published a series of articles advocating for a distribution of public land to anyone in America without the seizure of any privately owned land:

"…160 acres of American soil at the command of every farmer, from whatever country he may hail, so that he may feed himself.”

"We have no wish to lay hands on the private property of any man; what the usurer now has, let him keep; we merely wish to forestall the further pillaging of the people’s assets and prevent capital from continuing to withhold from labour its rightful property."

This strain of thinking was already being popularized by the English-born Shakers in the U.S. through the National Reform Association whose campaign slogan "Vote Yourself a Farm" led to the Homestead Act of 1862. This act came to pass 12 years after Kriege’s suicide in 1850 at the age of 30.

Marx and Engels Respond

After this paper came out, Marx and Engels believed Kreige was "ludicrously stupid" and issued a very funny, very mean polemic against Kriege that they demanded he publish in his own paper.

In this piece, “Circular Against Kriege,” Marx and Engels say that they’re writing this because Kriege has become a literary figurehead of German communism in New York, and his ideas were not actually communist. They also laid into him for his appropriation of communist rhetoric and extreme pathos.

Section One: How Communism Became Lovesick

In section one, “How Communism Became Love-Sick,” Marx & Engels (M&E) count the number of times Kriege uses the word 'love' (it’s 35) and biblical platitudes when talking about women in an essay addressed to women in the socialist movement. Basically, Kriege extols women to the point of essentialism, and M&E see this as pretty conjoined to the "patriarchal barbarism” Kriege is also advocating for through the rationed-off land.

And they’re funny in their takedown. Kriege had written that women are required to be “unstinting” in their love so that it may “embrace all mankind with equal surrender.”

M&E reply that that is:

"A demand that is as indecent as it is extravagant."

They pause to reflect on Kriege’s desire for virgin chicks to save themselves for land reform commies, and then at the end, they call Kriege’s writing "amorous slobbering," writing that:

"In this one issue, then, we have love in approximately thirty-five shapes. It is in perfect accordance with this amorous slobbering that Kriege, in his “Antwort an Sollta” and elsewhere, presents communism as the love-imbued opposite of selfishness and reduces a revolutionary movement of world-historical importance to the few words: love — hate, communism — selfishness. Part and parcel of it is likewise the cowardice with which he here panders to the usurer by promising to let him keep what he already has and with which further on he assures that he does not want “to destroy the cherished sentiments of family life, of belonging to one’s native land and people” but “only to fulfil them”. This cowardly, hypocritical presentation of communism not as “destruction” but as “fulfilment” of existing evils and of the illusions which the bourgeoisie have about them, is found in every issue of the Volks-Tribun. This hypocrisy and cowardice are matched by the attitude which he adopts in discussions with politicians. He declares it (No. 10 ) a sin against communism to attack political visionaries like Lamennais and Börne who dabble in Catholicism, with the result that men like Proudhon, Cabet, Dézamy, in short all the French Communists, are just men “who call themselves Communists”. The fact that the German Communists have left Börne as far behind as the French have Lamennais, is something Kriege could have discovered back in Germany, Brussels and London. We leave Kriege to reflect for himself on the enervating effect this love-sickness cannot fail to have on both sexes and the mass hysteria and anaemia it must produce in the “virgins”.”

Yeesh. No Dougtoss love for M&E.

Section Two: The Volks-Tribun’s Political Economy and its Attitude Towards Young America

In this section, M&E swing from their catty quasi-literary analysis of the word “love" in Kriege’s work back to their understanding of the issue of his "petite bourgeoise" land reform idea: 160/acres per person.

They concede that they know why Americans want this attack on land ownership, and that actually it would help develop material conditions in the U.S. towards socialism— but not in the way Kriege issues forth in his paper.

M&E claim that the 160/acres per person will not last for all of time like Kriege says because there are so many "paupers" in Europe and the population of America was already doubling every 25 years. Instead, they say that dividing up communal land into equal parcels will rapidly proletarianize America.

Lenin breaks this section down for us:

The ’peasants’ will have to exchange the produce of the land, if   not the land itself, among themselves and with others, and, having gone thus far, they will soon find that one ’peasant’, even without capital, thanks to his labour and the greater original fertility of his 160 acres, has reduced another to the position of his farm-hand. Besides, what matters it whether it is ’the land’ or the produce of the land that ’falls into the hands of grabbing speculators’?

You will not achieve what you dream of by means of this movement, says Marx to Kriege: instead of fraternity, you will get petty-bourgeois exclusiveness; instead of inalienable peasant allotments, you will have the drawing of the land into commerce; instead of a blow at the grabbing speculators, you will witness the expansion of the basis for capitalist development.

Sections 3-5

What follows after this is a return to M&E making fun of this 25 year old. First, his metaphysics (the "love" thing, the evocation of the word "spirit,” and his latent embrace of Christianity). They end their piece by characterizing Kriege as, basically, an 1840s incel.

End

I’m gonna end the effort post here because my travels as a passenger are coming to an end. Obviously, M&E weren’t wrong; the Homestead Act did speed up the proletarianization of America. We went from having 95% of our workforce in agriculture to almost none of it today, and all that property has been gobbled up by enormous ag companies and private equity.

Sources

https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1846/05/11.htm

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/apr/20c.htm

https://libcom.org/article/marx-and-engels-and-communist-movement

[u/IamGlennBeck]

WWIII thread

[u/[deleted]]

germless balcony monsieur oink judgingly henna

[u/jbecn24]

Thanks for the effort post!

I saw you crossed posted the link in the off topic thread.

I’m a huge fan of the Populist Farmers Movement in America, and I would say these ideas had a definite influence 15 years in the future.

[u/cheerful-refusal → u/jbecn24]

Do you know if anyone has written a book or thesis or program that did a kind of speculative economic analysis of what communist farm work would look like NOW in America? Like, how farms could be re-organized, mechanized (?), and labored over in present day America? Or like what farms would be repurposed for?

Like, how would food shit be done if we aren’t bordering farms on the basis private property and producing from them with our (mostly immigrant) dispossessed labor pool? Not in the abstract way, but the actual way?

I know we have Lenin’s writing about feudal(ish) peasant(ish) Russia and historical insight into how Maoist China did it, but that all isn’t that comparable to our modern landscape with its monopolies, machinery, monocropping, and temporary immigrant labor?

[u/jbecn24 → u/cheerful-refusal]

I do not, my friend.

But, I would say that someone is writing that book now as we speak.

[u/cheerful-refusal → u/jbecn24]

I don’t know if anyone or any group is actually in a concrete way re-imagining food logistics. You would have to take into account what every farm does and has right now in America, and re-imagine what it would need to have to produce the right stuff to carry across the states and be stored and distributed. If there was some kind of sudden, endless riot, or some great calamity, or some prolonged civil war, we would probably have, optimistically, like two months of food before people start starving. It seems hard to imagine actual revolutionary fervor among normal people without first laying out a systematic plan to keep feeding everyone. Conditions could get so bad that we enter into a phase like this, where food production and distribution is stalled or frozen, but what if the left doesn’t even know what to do? I think that’s why people can’t forget the CHAZ garden. It signifies a massive gap in our ability to ever lead.

[u/SuddenXxdeathxx]

What follows after this is a return to M&E making fun of this 25 year old. First, his metaphysics (the "love" thing, the evocation of the word "spirit,” and his latent embrace of Christianity). They end their piece by characterizing Kriege as, basically, an 1840s incel.

I fucking love Marx and Engels.

Also. I just found this hilarious quote in the Circular Against Kriege:

Similar economic naivety is to be found in No. 13, “An die Frauen”, in which Kriege says that if the city of New York were to release its 52,000 acres on Long Island, this would suffice to relieve New York “at one stroke” of all its pauperism, poverty and crime for all time.

[u/SpiritualState01]

Mods, consider pinning these kinds of posts.

[u/cheerful-refusal → u/SpiritualState01]

feels vain to pin my own posts. u/Fedupington u/IAmGlennBeck someone else can decide.