Land and liberty (slogan)

Land and Liberty (Spanish: "Tierra y Libertad", Russian: Zemlya i Volya) is an anarchist black slogan. It was originally used as a name of the Russian revolutionary organization Zemlya i Volya in 1878, then by the revolutionary leaders of the Mexican Revolution; the revolution was fought over land rights, and the leaders such as Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa were fighting to give the land back to the natives from whom it was expropriated either by force or by some dubious manner. Without land, the peasants were at the mercy of landowners for subsistence.

Similarly, during the Russian Revolution, the main concern of the peasants was to free themselves from subservience to landowners, to get a plot of land if they had none, or to expand on their land holdings. Consequently, the Russian peasants welcomed the Russian Revolution under the banner "Zemlya i Volya": "Land and Liberty".

The slogan of "Tierra y Libertad" was also used during the Spanish Revolution (1936–1939). In 1995, a film covering the Spanish Civil War was released with the title Land and Freedom.

In a narrow sense, the possession of land meant freedom from the landowner. And this may have been the main concern of both the Mexican and Russian peasants.

In a broader sense, the slogan can be interpreted to mean that the necessary (though not the sufficient) condition of liberty is something like possession or access to subsistence land. If possession or access to land is a necessary condition of liberty, then its deprivation results in some form of slavery: tenancy, sharecropping, wage-slavery. Access to land is only a necessary condition because even with access, the government may impose taxes to such an extent that one is not free. For example, in the Soviet Union in 1932–1933, the government was removing from the peasants their agricultural products to the extant that it produced an artificial famine which directly or indirectly killed roughly 2.582 million people only in Ukraine. (See Soviet famine of 1932–1933.) So, the possession of or access to subsistence land is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for liberty.

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