Nobody Owns Land is a project by Queer and nationally oppressed Workers seeking to create a quarterly, principally physical publication where our local reporting, our ideas, and our art can flourish on our terms.
In the spirit of the Maoist guerilla intellectual, we publish art and writing which reflects the revolutionary struggles of oppressed nations and workers here and abroad.
Why “Nobody Owns Land”? People do own land!
“Throughout the continent, none of the successful independence movements denied the basic validity of the boundaries created a few decades ago by imperialism. To have done so would have been to issue a challenge so profound as to rule out the preservation of the petty bourgeois interests in a compromise ‘independence’ worked out in conjunction with international capital.”
— Walter Rodney
We are very aware that within our current society, people can and do own land. Our whole economic system is premised on the private ownership, trade, and conquest of land by a global minority of business owners, landlords, and speculators. Large swathes of (mostly white) workers in the “first world” have additionally gained the opportunity to own smaller plots thanks in part to white imperialism confiscating it from others, inducting them into petty bourgeois class relations with the rest of the world. We can go on and on about how the world is now, but the point is to change it. The name “Nobody Owns Land” reflects a commitment to answer the call of Rodney and others to issue a challenge to capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, queerphobia, etc. so profound it rules out co-optation and compromise. It’s simple: if we are to have socialism and communism, if racism and sexism are to be permanently ended, if New Afrika, , First Nations, etc. are to be free from imperialism, then nobody owns land. You will not get to be a business owner (big or small) or settle on a cottage after the revolution. Nobody owns land.