[PEN-L:2922] Re: selling Manhattan

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Indigenous people didn't have no concept of property. They had no PRIVATE property. Private property is not the only form of property. Property is a social relation of production, a relationship between people regarding things. Indigenous peoples had production and relations of production. The latter organized their relationship to each other with respect to "the land", productive sources in nature or their genome. Early communism doesn't mean there was no sense of "our genome".

The solution is to put the land back into communist relations of production, abolish private property in the basic means of production , including the land.

Charles Brown

>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx> 02/05 1:49 PM >>>
michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

>Barkley know better.  The Dutch did not BUY Manhattan since the indigenous
>people had no conception private proerty.  They gave beads and the people
>let them stay there and use the land.  Only later did they declare it to
>be private property.
>
>Sorting out rights and wrongs after a theft is difficult.  I think the
>real value of the ongoing dialogue is the ongoing theft from indigenous
>people -- whether taking of their plant genome, their land, or their
>genes.

How'd we go from "no conception of private property" to "their plant
genome"? Whose genome is it anyway?

Doug