Since President Javier Milei’s administration proposed modifying the Rural Land Law through a new legislative package known as the “Inviolability of Private Property” bill, it is perhaps useful to reflect on the question of land itself.

We usually speak of land as if it were a possession: a parcel, an estate, a commodity, a line on a map. But land, in the sense that matters here, is something more basic and more unsettling. It is nature as the field of all that human beings do not create: the earth, location, water, minerals, forests, air, sunlight, the radio spectrum, and all the given universe. I use italics to mark that broader category and to distinguish land from land understood narrowly as property.

In a previous newsletter [1], I explored a related distinction among economy, capital, and capitalism. Economy named the broader organization of material life: the ways people produce, distribute, exchange, care, and sustain one another. Capital named accumulated human creation used in production. Capitalism named a historical system in which capital becomes dominant, organizing labor, value, property, and social life around accumulation.

This essay turns to the prior and often obscured question of land: the natural and social ground on which economy, capital, and capitalism all depend. If the earlier essay asked how capital comes to dominate the economy, this one ask what becomes visible when we look beneath capital to the ground it presupposes.

That distinction matters because capital often steals the stage. Labor names human exertion, intelligence, will, cooperation, and invention. Capital names what labor produces by working upon land and nature: tools, machines, buildings, institutions, infrastructures, and other accumulated forms of human creation. These three terms—land, labor, and capital—are not interchangeable. When land is treated as capital, or when human beings themselves are folded into capital, the basic logic of production, appropriation, and justice becomes blurred.

This distinction emerged in conversations with Alejo Alasia, who first introduced me many years ago to the theories of Henry George. George’s central insight was that poverty persists amid progress because the value created by growing communities is captured by those who control access to land.

Quijano, from another vocabulary and another historical location, helps us see how that control is also woven into coloniality: into the seizure of territory, the organization of labor, the production of hierarchy, and the long afterlife of colonial power. What follows is an attempt to bring these two lines of thought together without reducing one to the other.

The question that runs through this newsletter is simple, but not small: what becomes visible when land is treated not as the background of social life, but as one of its decisive organizing principles? Recast as an essay rather than a dialogue, the conversation between Alejo and Walter opens parallel between Henry George and Aníbal Quijano, while also clarifying why land cannot be reduced to just one economic factor among many.

The central claim that emerged from our oral and written exchanges is this: land is not merely the background on which history unfolds. It is a material, social, political, and historical relation. Through its fertility, scarcity, abundance, location, minerals, waters, routes, climates, and other natural powers, land attracts, limits, nourishes, concentrates, and redirects human activity.

It is the condition of life, the basis of production, the site of settlement and displacement, and an active force in the making of wealth, hierarchy, movement, and conflict. To read George and Quijano together is to see how two thinkers, writing from different historical and political locations, confronted the same underlying fact: control over land structures human life.

A good entry point into the discussion is George’s book, Progress and Poverty (1879). George’s provocation was that economic progress does not automatically reduce poverty. In fact, development can deepen inequality when rising social productivity is captured through rising land values and rents. As population, infrastructure, trade, and public life increase the value of location, those gains flow disproportionately to owners of land rather than to the workers and communities that make that value possible.

That pairing of progress and poverty immediately resonates with Quijano’s critique of modernity. “Progress,” in this reading, is not innocent. It belongs to the rhetoric by which European modernity described itself as advanced, developmental, and universally exemplary. Poverty, then, is not simply what progress leaves behind. It is one of the outcomes that this idea of progress has often helped justify and produce. This is where Quijano’s language of coloniality becomes crucial: it shows how domination can persist beyond formal colonial rule, and how the struggle to command land, nature, labor, and subjectivity belongs to one historical order.

Alejo’s responses in the exchange sharpen this point. Land must be understood as the full natural spectrum, not merely as owned ground or bounded property. As a category, it includes natural powers and resources beyond human creation: soil, water, minerals, wind, rain, sunlight, radio spectrum, location, climate, and the wider material conditions within which life takes place.

Human beings can move soil to build artificial islands, irrigate fields, generate light, or modify local environments. But they do not create land in this broader sense. They do not create matter from nothing, nor do they create the natural conditions that make life and production possible.

Consequently, no person can claim an absolute moral title to land in the same way one might claim title to something produced by human effort. Labor refers not only to physical work but also to thought, will, desire, knowledge, cooperation, music, values, institutions, networks, and the many forms of human exertion through which social worlds are made.

Capital refers to the products, instruments, and accumulated structures generated by labor working upon land: tools, buildings, machines, books, infrastructure, universities, communication systems, organizations, and other durable or semi-durable forms of human creation. By contrast, land is the given condition that precedes labor and makes both labor and capital possible.

Once this distinction is clear, George’s critique of modern inequality becomes direct. The worker or maker may claim the fruit of labor because labor produces something. The landlord who captures rising land values, by contrast, captures value generated by the life, density, cooperation, and development of the community.

In George’s famous formulation, the scandal is that some become rich “in their sleep,” by monopolizing access to land, which everyone else needs to live and work. Difficult cases remain, especially where extraction economies combine capital investment with colonial control. But the principle is clear: community-created land value belongs to the community, just as individually produced things belong to their makers.

The exchange also avoids a false hierarchy between George’s political economy and Quijano’s critique of coloniality. George’s account is not merely naturalistic or simplistic. It is a systemic analysis of how land organizes wealth, power, and dependence. Its starkness is part of its force.

When access to land is monopolized—whether by legal title, military power, narrative authority, or economic pressure—the value created by society can be appropriated by those who control the conditions of life. Quijano does not replace this insight with a more sophisticated one. He extends it into the history of colonial domination, where control over land, labor, classification, and subjectivity become mutually reinforcing forms of power.

Physically, land is irreducible. Socially, it is organized in radically different ways. It can be held communally, enclosed and monopolized, taxed for public use, treated as a speculative asset, or seized through conquest and administered through colonial rule.

George’s point, Alejo explained, is not that every society must organize land in the same way. It is that any just arrangement must begin from a moral and political principle: the value of land belongs to the community because the community creates the social value captured by that city, that region, that location.

Extraction makes this principle harder, but not weaker. An oil company may invest capital, labor, technology, and infrastructure to bring a resource to market, but it does not create the oil, the field, the geological formation, or the community’s prior claim to the conditions of life. Quijano becomes necessary here because the dispute is never only technical or economic.

It is also a struggle over administration, consent, narrative, and the political organization of people who are told that dispossession is the price of progress.

A crucial moment in the exchange comes when Walter introduced Marx as a point of comparison. Marx, writing from industrial Europe, also recognized that land was not simply another commodity and that it occupied a peculiar place in political economy. Alejo’s emphasis, however, is that George’s disagreement with Marx turns on a sharp distinction between what human beings make and what they do not make. Machines, tools, and manufactured goods are products of labor; land is not.

For George, this is not a technical aside, Alejo insisted. It is the hinge of justice. To confuse land with capital is to blur the moral difference between productive activity and rent extraction. A person who builds something useful and earns from that work contributes to the community. A landlord who “grows rich in his sleep” by charging others for access to location captures a socially created value while adding nothing equivalent in return. George’s analysis is anti-mystifying: it strips away the language that makes simple forms of appropriation appear natural, deserved, or inevitable.

When the exchange turns explicitly to Quijano, the scope widens from political economy to the long history of colonial domination. In Quijano’s account, land is never merely an economic factor, territory, or property. It is one of the central stakes through which the colonial matrix of power is established and reproduced.

Colonial regimes did not create private property in land from nothing; they transformed existing relations to land through conquest, law, violence, administration, and racial classification. Control over land made conquest materially possible. It enabled extraction, plantation economies, mineral exploitation, the displacement of Indigenous populations, and the imposition of new legal and racial orders.

Yet land itself is not the agent. Human beings, states, companies, and colonial institutions use control over land to organize authority, labor, hierarchy, subjectivity, and social status. Access to land, and the denial of access to it, become ways of ranking populations and naturalizing those rankings over time.

Quijano is important here because he clarifies that coloniality outlives colonial administration. Even after formal empire recedes, the structures built through dispossession continue to shape who belongs, who governs, who labors, and who benefits from the earth’s resources.

This is also where José Carlos Mariátegui belongs in the argument. In Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, 19284), especially in his reflections on “The Problem of Land,” Mariátegui makes clear that the problem of land in Latin America cannot be understood as a merely technical problem of property, productivity, or legal reform.

It is bound to the “The Problem of. the Indians:” dispossession and appropriations of land, dismembering communal forms of life, and introducing colonial organizations of labor and authority. In this sense, Mariátegui helps mediate between George and Quijano: like George, he sees the ownership and control of land as central to inequality; like Quijano, he understands that the meaning of land in Latin America is inseparable from colonial history and the unfinished struggle over Indigenous life, labor, and collective existence.

This is also the point at which parallels we traced in the conversation matters. We are not treating George and Quijano as if they belonged to the same archive, discipline, or political project. They belong to a different geopolitical spectrum, and different centuries.

Rather, we are reading them beside one another to make visible a shared problem that each illuminates differently: the organization of life through access to land. In this sense, the conversation and the newsletter aim to be interpretive and creative; we use the encounter between two parallel horizons to clarify what neither vocabulary fully exhausts on its own.

Alejo’s explanation of urban land as location or social position was one of the most useful parts of the conversation. In cities, the issue is not the fertility of soil or the intrinsic properties of the ground itself. Land becomes valuable because of relative position within a social field: proximity to markets, institutions, monuments, transit, customers, prestige, and concentrated forms of life.

Alejo used examples such as sites near the Hagia Sophia—we were in Istanbul during this part of the conversation—or central districts like Broadway in NYC, to show that what is being purchased is not simply dirt or soil, but access to markets and social centrality. A café or shop in a dense and symbolically charged location can earn more because the community, through its collective life, has generated that location’s value.

This is why, in the Georgist frame, land rent is social value privatized. It is also why land ownership so easily becomes a mechanism of hierarchy: control over the center allows some to draw advantages from a form of value they did not individually create. In this respect, urban land already anticipates Quijano’s insight that land is inseparable from social ordering and the unequal distribution of life chances.

Seen together, Henry George (USA, 1839-1897) and Aníbal Quijano (Perú, 1928-2018) do not collapse into one another, but they do illuminate each other. George shows how private property in land allows socially produced value to be captured by owners, concentrating wealth and deepening inequality within capitalist societies. Quijano shows how control over land has also been foundational to colonial domination, racial classification, and the organization of the modern world-system. George’s emphasis falls on rent, speculation, and the privatization of community-created value. Quijano’s falls on dispossession, extraction, and the colonial structuring of power.

The comparison matters because each perspective sharpens the other. George explains the economic mechanism by which land ownership converts social cooperation into private gain. Quijano explains the larger historical order in which the seizure, ordering, and administration of land became constitutive of modernity.

The force of bringing George and Quijano into conversation lies in their shared insistence that land is not a secondary topic. It is the underlying question of freedom. Human beings require land to live, dwell, move, cultivate, build, and reproduce social life. To control land is to control the terms under which life is possible. This is why the conversation returned, again and again, to the claim that land is the key to both enslavement and emancipation.

Once the frontier disappears—once there is not outside, no margin beyond formal systems of property and governance—every person must negotiate life through institutions that regulate access to land. At that point, the problem of land can no longer be treated as merely economic. It becomes existential and political in the fullest sense.

The earlier distinction among economy, capital, and capitalism therefore returns with greater force: before capital can accumulate, before capitalism can organize social life around accumulation, and before any economy can distribute the conditions of survival, there must be access to the ground on which life is lived. That is why the lesson is simple and demanding: land is not just a thing people own or use.

It is a social relation, a historical wound, a structure of value, and a condition of collective life. Any serious reflection on inequality, coloniality, capitalism, or democracy must therefore ask, sooner or later: who controls land, how is that control justified, and what forms of shared life might become possible if land were understood first as the common ground of existence rather than as a commodity to be monopolized?

Notes

1. LodeWalter. Newsletter. “Reorienting Capital,” April 29, 2026. [https://buttondown.com/lodewalter/archive/reorienting-capital/]

2. Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (1879). https://earthbound.report/2018/07/12/book-review-progress-and-poverty-by-henry-george/.]

3. Aníbal Quijano, Foundational Texts on the Coloniality of Power (2024). [https://eialonline.org/index.php/eial/article/view/1882/2003]

4. José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, 1928). [https://centroderecursos.cultura.pe/sites/default/files/rb/pdf/mariategui_7_ensayos.pdf]