#Collective farms free

The Clan Mothers' Council also reserved certain areas of land to be worked by the women of all the different clans. Land property was really only the concern of the women, since it was the women's job to cultivate food and not the men's. Those clans that abused their allocated land or otherwise did not take care of it would be warned and eventually punished by the Clan Mothers' Council by having the land redistributed to another clan. The land would be redistributed among the households every few years, and a clan could request a redistribution of tracts when the Clan Mothers' Council gathered. The tribe owned all lands but gave out tracts to the different clans for further distribution among households for cultivation. The Iroquois had a similar communal system of land distribution. While the Huron did seem to have lands designated for the individual, the significance of this possession may be of little relevance the placement of corn storage vessels in the longhouses, which contained multiple families in one kinship group, suggests the occupants of a given longhouse held all production in common. Once he abandoned the land, it reverted to communal ownership, and anyone could take it up for themselves. He maintained possession of the land as long as he continued to actively cultivate and tend the fields.

#Collective farms free

Any Huron was free to clear the land and farm on the basis of usufruct. The Huron had 'as much land as they need.' As a result, the Huron could give families their own land and still have a large amount of excess land owned communally. The French Catholic missionary Gabriel Sagard described the fundamentals. The Huron had an essentially communal system of land ownership. Latter-day Iroquois longhouse housing several hundred people

When the Spanish conquered Mexico they replaced this with a system of estates granted by the Spanish crown to Spanish colonists, as well as the encomienda, a feudal-like right of overlordship colonists were given in particular villages, and the repartimiento or system of indigenous forced labor.įollowing the Mexican Revolution, a new constitution in 1917 abolished any remnant of feudal-like rights hacienda owners had over common lands and offered the development of ejidos: communal farms formed on land purchased from the large estates by the Mexican government. Each calpulli owned the land and granted the individual families the right to farm parts of it each day. A calpulli consisted of a number of large extended families with a presumed common ancestor, themselves each composed of a number of nuclear families. Under the Aztec Empire, central Mexico was divided into small territories called calpulli, which were units of local administration concerned with farming as well as education and religion. By contrast, capitalist thinkers posit that by the homestead principle whoever is first to work on the land is the rightful owner. Karl Marx believed that the system he called primitive communism (joint ownership) was unjustly ended by exploitative means he called primitive accumulation. The process by which Western Europe's communal land and other property became private is a fundamental question behind views of property. Private ownership came to predominate in much of the Western world and is therefore better studied. Having co-existed and competed with more individualistic forms of ownership (as well as organized state ownership) since the beginnings of agriculture. Main articles: Communal land, Property, and CommonsĪ small group of farming or herding families living together on a jointly managed piece of land is one of the most common living arrangements in all of human history.