This article looks at the history of dispossession, privatization and loss of the commons in the Hawaiian Kingdom, Britain, Canada and Chile in order to highlight the need to look beyond the simple dichotomy of socialism vs. capitalism—terms which in modern times are vaguely and variously defined—and look instead at present and past examples of how nations attempted to develop political economies suited to their specific contexts.
Updated on June 8, 2020
Enclosure and Privatization vs. the Political Economy of the Hawaiian Kingdom
Studies of the Hawaiian Kingdom during the 19th century have tended to view the kingdom as already dominated, colonized and defeated shortly after foreign traders and missionaries appeared. In this view the native monarchs and chiefs are seen as passive, complicit or helpless in the takeover of the islands by foreign powers and capitalist interests, as if they had been naively overwhelmed by forces they could not understand.
This way of seeing the Hawaiian Kingdom arose from viewing Hawaiians as indigenous North Americans who, notwithstanding the righteousness of their claims to sovereignty, never succeeded in gaining the status of fully independent nations in the 19th century as the Hawaiian Kingdom was able to do. Once the United States and Canada were established as independent nations, the indigenous first nations could obtain only nation-within-nation treaties. They had treaties only with the nation that enclosed their territories. The Sioux Nation of Indians, for example, has fought in US courts to recover its stolen lands and have its original treaties with the US honored.[1] It had to fight this battle in the 20th century because it never had treaties in the 19th century with other major powers, and it never entered into a protectorate arrangement with a foreign power that could have defended it from encroachment by settlers and the US government. In contrast, the Hawaiian monarchs in the early 19th century were very quick to grasp international relations and their own vulnerable position, after which they astutely gained status as a British protectorate while retaining the right of self-governance.
To make this comparison is not to impugn the wisdom of the Sioux Nation or any other indigenous nation on the American continent. Their historical circumstances were different. The British had no interest in granting self-governance and protectorate status to indigenous nations in North America, but this is precisely what it did with the Hawaiian Kingdom. British interests could be asserted by granting the protection of its navy to a relatively small territory in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, one which no other powers had an existing history with or claim to. Britain was under no pressure to colonize the kingdom as it was in New Zealand during the same era. There a large number of settlers and The New Zealand Company were pressuring Britain to claim sovereignty. The Maori were aware of the need to enter a protective arrangement in order to avoid aggression from France or other hostile powers, and they also wanted their civil rights and land rights settled, so they signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 by which they ceded sovereignty to Britain.[2] The Hawaiian monarchs were able to avoid the same fate, perhaps partly because Britain was too pre-occupied elsewhere, but also because there were not large numbers of settlers yet and no equivalent of the New Zealand Company, East India Company, or Hudson’s Bay Company. Because Hawai’i’s situation is so unique in the history of the 19th century, it is often viewed incorrectly through the familiar, reductionist narrative of European dominance and indigenous submission.
This chapter demonstrates that Hawaiians were not passive victims of history but rather actively engaged in governing themselves and managing relations with the outside world, and they could have continued this way if they had not been overthrown by force in the 1890s. Even though the government was a conservative monarchy, it consistently enacted progressive policies that were too socially progressive to be tolerated by the oligarchy that grew powerful in the late 19th century. Some historians view the adaptations of the Hawaiian Kingdom monarchs—the reliance on foreign advisors and their elevation to positions of power—as capitulations to foreign adversaries, but this view misses two crucial points: there really was no alternative, and some of those foreign advisors remained loyal to the Kingdom. At a time when the Edo government of Japan was being forced by threat of war to end three centuries of isolation, the Hawaiian monarchs knew they had to let foreigners and foreign ways into their government and their culture. This was done so that a Hawaiian leader could represent Hawaiian people and protect their interests. The oligarchs’ gunpoint constitutional reform in the 1870s, followed by their overthrow of the kingdom in 1893, were all based on eliminating the power of the monarchs and their troublesome tendency of trying to enfranchise Hawaiians and advance their social and economic rights.
The Hawaiian Kingdom’s Political Economy
This section covers the history of dispossession, privatization and loss of the commons in Britain, Canada and Chile and contrasts this with what occurred in the Hawaiian Kingdom in the 19th century. This discussion highlights the need to look beyond the simple dichotomy of socialism vs. capitalism—terms which in modern times are vaguely and variously defined, positively and negatively—and look instead at present and past examples of how nations attempted to develop political economies suited to their specific contexts.[3]
| “Every market is structured and managed. Every economy is a planned economy. The question is: Who is going to do it? Right now, instead of the government planning the economy, you have Wall Street planning the economy, and that’s more centralized than government planning. That’s what people don’t realize.”
– Michael Hudson, president of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, Professor of Economics, University of Missouri, The Keiser Report, 07:35~, January 1, 2020 |
In Gavan Daws’ history of Hawai’i, Shoal of Time, the author describes the supposed process by which Native Hawaiians lost connection to their lands in the 19th century:
The old konohiki system, under which a chief appointed an agent or steward to manage his lands and collect his taxes, was replaced by a system under which each owner determined for himself the best use to which his land might be put, being free to cultivate, lease, or sell at will… For the foreigners, certainly, it was the beginning of a new era; but for the Hawaiian commoners it was the beginning of the end. In their first exercise of free choice they chose to uproot themselves. They were liberated at last from the burdensome tax payments to the chiefs that had kept them tied to the land, and most of them found more interesting things to do than grow taro, which required a long time and a lot of hard work. The idea of the kuleana, the small freehold lot cultivated as an independent family farm, never took hold. In the old days the taro patch and the family had flourished together; a single word, ohana, served to describe both a cluster of taro roots and a family group. The Great Mahele, the great division, cut the connection, because once the commoner was free to buy land he was also free to sell it, and that was a freedom he understood. So the great division became the great dispossession. By the end of the nineteenth century white men owned four acres of land for every one owned by a native, and this included chiefs’ lands. The commoners had had their moment, and it had passed by. They were left with not much more than a terrible sense of deprivation.[4]
The description above makes a general point about the process of dispossession that can occur when traditional tenants are given fee-simple title to their land, or if land reform is done recklessly without a plan for developing a political economy suited to local circumstances. However, Gavan Daws’ description of the Hawaiian Kingdom is far too simplistic and anecdotal. Some new land owners must have lost interest in farming and cashed out, but he provides no data on how many others held onto and developed their private property, or how much revenue from land development was put to good use. Gavan Daws’ interpretation downplays the active part played by the Hawaiian Kingdom government in preserving native rights to the land, and keeping large tracts of land out of private hands.
The land reforms in Hawai’i known as the Great Mahele were actually more sophisticated than a simple privatization scheme as the term is understood in the 21st century. Native Hawaiians and the Hawaiian Kingdom government were not passive victims in the process. By the 1840s, the kingdom had transformed itself into a constitutional monarchy and a fully independent state, and the government had many successes in protecting the native population from colonization and subjugation. Keanu Sai, an expert on the history of the Hawaiian Kingdom, describes the reforms in more detail, stressing that the Mahele was not a typical laissez-faire privatization. Until the overthrow of the kingdom in 1893, the rights of native tenants were maintained in lands that were set aside as crown land and government land:
In the Hawaiian Kingdom, the type of economy that existed was not American capitalism. In fact, it was a different kind of capitalism called cooperative capitalism, and that was called No Ke Kalaiaina. There was actually a book published in Lahaina in the 1840s called No Ke Kalaiaina, Elements of Political Economy. We now have that [translated into English]. When you look at that, you see that capitalism in this political economy is infused with values and morality. It’s not the laissez-faire Adam Smith version of capitalism. Every country has its own economy. Everybody thinks capitalism is America and it’s all over the world.[5]
No Ke Kalaiaina, written in Hawaiian in 1839 by a missionary named William Richards, may appear to the modern reader as a quaintly anachronistic outline of familiar concepts such as interest rates, supply and demand, capital, labor value and the efficiency of wholesale trading. Williams undertook this project as a trusted advisor of Kamehameha III. He went to the United States at the request of the king to recruit a specialist who could instruct the government in political economy. Having failed to recruit a qualified person, Williams took it upon himself to write a Hawaiian interpretation of Francis Wayland’s book Elements of Political Economy.[6]
Richard’s interpretation/translation makes repeated references to God and the model of “enlightened nations” to be followed. It extolls the importance of the work ethic and self-discipline in the creation of personal prosperity. In this sense it seems at first glance to be an ethnocentric celebration of libertarian capitalism. However, much of the book is devoted to prescriptions for improving general welfare and prosperity for all. Indeed, this objective stands as a priority above the goal of personal enrichment. It is far from the “greed is good” ethos that has prevailed in the United States since the late 20th century. It stands as a striking contrast with the neoliberalism of the modern era that has deliberately abolished so much of the public sector of the formerly “enlightened nations” that the Hawaiian Kingdom was trying to catch up to. It also stands in contrast to the regressive elements of the plantation oligarchy that in the 1870s began to oppose the achievements of the previous decades’ economic and educational reforms.
For example, managers of the Kohala and Pahala plantations, George C. Watt and James Campsie, complained about the second generation of plantation workers becoming too educated to accept farm work. They wrote, “Every penny we spend educating these kids beyond the sixth grade is wasted.” (Watt) “Public education beyond the fourth grade is not only a waste, it’s a menace.” (Campsie).[7]
This reactionary thinking always existed against progressive programs, as it does today in the eternal debate in every “enlightened nation” over public education and social programs. Richards was writing as a Christian with a moral concern for the greater good that would now be recognized as somewhat socialist in its concerns. He wrote nine years before Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto, so such concern for common welfare had not yet been demonized by a century of anti-communist reaction.
Richards was perhaps naïve to not see the forces that would come to rule the system of free enterprise that he saw as so virtuous. As the great satirists of our age, George Carlin, described the purpose of education: “[Governments] want obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept it.”[8] The same idea was expressed in the complaint of the plantation managers mentioned above.
In fact, Richards seems to have been unaware of critiques of American capitalism that preceded him. Like many even today, he failed to see the true nature of the system that was established after the American War of Independence. Noam Chomsky referred to the disillusionment expressed by James Madison even before the 19th century began:
The principles of the Founding Fathers were rather nicely expressed by John Jay, the head of the Constitutional Convention and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His favorite maxim was, “The people who own the country ought to govern it”—that’s the principle on which the United States was founded. The major framer of the Constitution, James Madison, emphasized very clearly in the debates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that the whole system must be designed, as he put it, “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority” … Now, Madison had kind of a theory behind that, which was that the “minority of the opulent” would be elevated Enlightenment gentlemen, who would… use their opulence to benefit everybody in the country. But he himself quickly recognized that that was a serious delusion, and within about ten years he was bitterly denouncing what he called the “daring depravity of the times” … In fact, still in the eighteenth century, Madison made some insightful comments about the interactions between state power and private power. He said we’ve designed a system in which the “stock-jobbers” (what we would today call investors) are simply using state power for their own ends—we thought we were going to create a system which would put enlightened gentlemen in control so that they would protect everyone from the tyranny of the majority, but instead what we’ve got is gangsters in control using state power for their own benefit.[9]
Other common critiques of the foundation of the United States note that the Second Amendment ensured citizens and militias would be armed and able to enforce slavery and carry out westward expansion by warring on indigenous people. Richards was seemingly unaware of these critiques and believed capitalism could be a force of good. He advised that the kingdom should fund public education for all, including females. Everyone should learn to read, but until that goal is achieved, only the literate should be allowed to vote. The economy should be planned with tax incentives and import duties targeted at developmental priorities. There should be a consensus about which wealth “belongs to the king” (meaning a fair rate of taxation needed for collective welfare) and there should be higher tax rates for the wealthy. Trade should be managed to further the enlightenment and well-being of the people lest the nation fall into a decline in which even the wealthy would be impoverished.
Richards also notes, significantly, the drastic decline of the native population due to the diseases that spread after contact with foreigners, and he considers this a matter in need of urgent attention by the government.[10] Thus one can see in Richards, in spite of his assumptions about the superiority of the Christian religion and “enlightened nations,” a loyalty to the kingdom, and a sincere interest in educating Hawaiians and securing their future survival as a people. Such foreigners were not rare. After the overthrow of the kingdom in 1893, there were many loyal royalists who were of mixed Hawaiian ancestry, foreign nationals or naturalized Hawaiians involved in a short-lived armed rebellion against the usurpers.[11]
Elaborating on the Mahele, Keanu Sai stated in a blog post:
A common misunderstanding is that the Great Mahele endeavored to divide all the rights of the three classes [nobility, government, native tenants] in the lands. The Great Mahele only divided the vested rights of the Chiefly class from the Government class in the lands. These divided rights over specific lands called ahupua’a and ili’aina, and these remained subject to the rights of Native Tenants, who by application to the Minister of the Interior, who managed government lands, or to a particular Chief or Konohiki who managed lands that were separated from the government, could acquire a fee-simple title to their house lot and cultivating lands… Under Hawaiian law, all revenues derived from the lands of the Hawaiian Islands; whether by the Government through taxation, rent or sale, or from the Chiefs or Konohikis, through rent or sale, continue to have the vested rights of native tenants. This is… why the Queen’s Hospital provided health care without charge to native Hawaiians in the nineteenth century. Queen’s Hospital acquired monies from the Government and from Queen Emma as a Chiefess who acquired lands from Mahele grantees, and after her death through the Queen Emma Trust. This is not to be confused with socialism, but rather management of the vested rights of Native Tenants that remained and continue to remain in all the lands of the Hawaiian Islands.[12]
In addition to this assessment made in 2019, there is a report on the Mahele written in 1872 by W.D. Alexander, surveyor general for the kingdom, which makes no mention of a great catastrophe of dispossession.[13] It is full of praise for the wisdom of the monarchy and its concerns for the welfare of the commoners. It appears that the narrative of the great dispossession took form after the overthrow of the kingdom because it suited the needs of the new government to portray the former government’s policy as a failure. There is evidence that dispossession came not because of the Mahele but because of the Hawaiian Kingdom becoming a US-occupied territory (via local insurrection in 1893, then US annexation in 1898). In his MA dissertation on the Mahele, Donovan Preza found that the greatest factor in the dispossession was the Land Act of 1895—after the overthrow of the kingdom—which seized the large tracts of crown lands that were later purchased by non-Hawaiians. He found no evidence of a significant number of land transfers before that time that would indicate the former tenants (who became small land owners) had become a new class of dispossessed citizens.[14] It is important to stress too that under the Mahele, crown lands were retained as the monarch’s private property for the express purpose of preventing them from being transferred to settlers in the event of a foreign invasion. Under the international law of the time, conquerors were obliged to maintain existing private land titles. This law and international norm was not observed after the annexation of Hawai’i.
In the citation above, Keanu Sai put the words “continue to remain” in the present tense because, as he has demonstrated in his other work, the Hawaiian Kingdom was never ceded in a treaty and should be considered, under international law, as an occupied nation. When the US occupation ends, on some day when the US decides to abide by the “rules-based international order” that it imposes on others, the laws and land policies of the Hawaiian Kingdom will still be in effect as they were at the time of the insurrection in January 1893. In order to allow a smooth transition from a state of occupation, laws enacted since 1893 could be adopted under the law of necessity.[15]
If one follows Daws’ account of 19th century Hawai’i, one might reflect with pity on what happened to the poor natives, those innocent indigenous people who could not have known what kind of damage modernity would inflict on their ancient way of life. There is a tendency to think of a clear dichotomy between the ways of the white man and the ways of the dark-skinned hunter-gatherers whose culture was destined to be replaced by that of the former. However, pre-contact Hawai’i was far from being the classic hunter-gatherer culture described in anthropology textbooks. The land was so fertile that it led to the growth of a feudal culture that would have been perfectly understood by any European of the 15th century.
This similarity may be the reason that the rulers of the Hawaiian Kingdom were astute enough, firstly, to keep foreign visitors from planting their flags and applying the Doctrine of Discovery and, secondly, to assert their sovereignty on the world stage. They were keen to learn about the outside world from the American and British missionaries who came in the early 19th century, and it is likely that they learned from them how and why the French monarchs had lost their heads to the guillotine during the French Revolution. They would have understood that the French monarchy’s downfall came from its failure to reform the feudal land system and their inability to accept a new role for themselves in a constitutional monarchy. Land reform was the central issue in preserving Hawaiian sovereignty during the transition from feudalism to industrial-age capitalism.
The Mahele in Hawai’i might best be seen in contrast to the horrible consequences of the termination of the English commons, known as the Enclosures, which accelerated in the 17th century and forced English commoners off rural lands and into the factories of the industrial age, or onto ships that took them to the New World—a move which turned them into accessories in the dispossession of the native inhabitants there.[16] Perhaps the Hawaiian monarchs drew lessons from this precedent as well. With the Mahele the Hawaiian monarchy attempted to preserve land-use rights of the commoners while also accommodating foreign concepts of land title that were needed for modernizing and trading with foreign nations.
In addition to the comparison with the Enclosures, one could consider how, from 1857-1870, Britain arranged the transfer of a vast territory called Rupert’s Land (all lands that drained into Hudson’s Bay) to the newly formed Dominion of Canada in order to make the lands available for non-indigenous settlement. The property rights, land-use rights, and sovereignty of people already there were ignored because, under the assumption of the Doctrine of Discovery, the British had never felt a need to take them into consideration.[17]
20th Century Dispossession Within Formerly Colonizing Nations
It is an error to think dispossession occurs only to the indigenous other, or only in the distant past. Europeans and North Americans must also pity their own ancestors for the loss of their indigenous heritage that occurred not so long ago during the Enclosures. In fact, they must also pity themselves in the present age because attempts in the 20th century to regain the commons (known by demonized term “socialism”) have also been reversed with devastating effects. In every generation people get sold and bought again and relearn the same painful lesson. Anthropologist David Harvey explained the modern dispossession in an interview held in 2018:
The main argument about accumulation by dispossession rests on the idea that when people run out of the capacity to make things or provide services, then they set up a system which extracts wealth from other people, and that extraction then becomes the center of their activities. And one of the ways in which that extraction can occur is by creating new commodity markets where there were none before. For example, when I was younger, higher education in Europe was essentially a public good. Increasingly, it has become a private activity. Health service is another. So many of these areas which you would consider not to be commodities in the ordinary sense become commodities. Housing for the lower income populations was often seen as a social obligation, but now increasingly it has to be provided through the market… So you impose a market logic on areas in which you really shouldn’t.
It’s all about having entrepreneurialism in oneself, and then what happens is that people start to speculate on what they can get out of somebody else. You have some assets that I want and I lend you some money, and then I suddenly say, “I want all my money back tomorrow.” You can’t pay it, and I say “OK, give me your assets.” So I take away your land. I take away your house… a large percentage of the British population was housed in social housing [before the 1980s]. In some cities it was as high as 80 percent and she [Margaret Thatcher] basically privatized it, and she turned it over to people, and said, “OK, you can become the private owner of this if you want.” So you become a private owner. Now poor people often get into difficulty. They get into debt. They can’t pay their debts, and so somebody comes along and says, “Well, you’ve got a very nice [former] social housing house there. Why don’t you trade it to me? So after a bit, suddenly all of that social housing where poor people were living becomes a sort of a living space for the very ultra-rich, and you get gentrification. You get all those kinds of things driving out populations from neighborhoods, and pushing up prices. So again, one of the ways in which you start to extract value from people is by speculating in land values and speculating in housing, and then people have to pay more and more for their housing, and more and more for their health care, more and more for the education of the children, more and more for the services that they get. So in the end, people are just paying and paying and paying.
[There is also] depletion of the global environmental commons: land, air, water and proliferating habitat degradation that precludes anything but capital intensive modes of agricultural production. These have likewise resulted from the wholesale commodification of nature in all its forms.
When I was a kid, water in Britain was provided as a public good, and then, of course, it got privatized, and so the private companies come in and you start to pay water charges and water pricing… They privatize transportation… right now in Britain… the Labour Party says we’re going to take all of that back into public ownership because this privatization is totally insane and has insane consequences, and it’s not working. And I think the majority the population now agrees with that. We’re always told the private sector is far more efficient than the state sector, but actually a lot of evidence is the other way around.
Financialization takes the debt economy and starts to import it. If wages start to be curbed, then people need money, so they have credit cards… then the credit card companies start to put charges on… Education should be a public service, not a commodity, and it’s a commodity right now. And of course when people get heavily indebted they become less and less politically active… When mortgage housing was introduced [that meant] homeowners don’t go on strike, and so this is a social control mechanism. They [government planners] were very well aware of it. There was a great poster once which called the building societies [the privatizing institutions] “the first defense against Bolshevism.” So this was going to stop any kind of left-wing politics because people were going to say they want to keep their houses…
This was really done by deregulation to allow the financial system to become one of the main centers of redistributive activity, through speculation, predation, fraud and thievery, stock promotions, Ponzi schemes, structured asset destruction, through inflation asset stripping, through mergers and acquisitions, the promotion of levels of debt incumbency that reduced whole populations, even in the advanced capitalist countries, to debt peonage—to say nothing of corporate fraud, dispossession of assets, the raiding of pension funds and their decimation by stock and corporate collapses, by credit and stock manipulations. All of these became central features of the capitalist financial system.
…think for a moment about what Donald Trump has done since he came in… He’s allowed drilling on the federal lands. He’s passed a tax bill which is giving all kinds of goodies to the bondholders and the rich and the corporations. So the deregulation and the privatization that has gone on under Trump has been absolutely astonishing. You see right in front of you an economic program that is a classic neoliberal program, and it’s happened over the last two years of the Trump administration.[18]
One more example makes the point and illustrates how the process of dispossession is cyclical. After citizens are dispossessed of their common property, privatization then strips all value from that property. Finally, the citizens, after paying the costs of this asset stripping and the resulting social devastation, win back control of the commons to some extent—only for the process to be repeated again. Noam Chomsky described how the process unfolded in South America in the late 20th century and is being repeated again now with the rise to power of the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro:
Guedes [Bolsonaro’s chief economic adviser] is an ultra-right-wing Chicago economist. He spent time in Pinochet’s Chile. He’s been very frank and open in interviews in the Brazilian press about his plans. It’s very simple: As he puts it, privatize everything—infrastructure, anything you can think of. The reason, the motive, is to pay off the debt which is owned by the predatory financial institutions that have been robbing the country blind. This will give away the resources of the country for the future… one part of it is Bolsonaro’s favorite program of opening the Amazon to agribusiness. So, he’s exactly the kind of person who succeeded in driving Chile’s economy to utter disaster within only a few years.
It’s rarely remembered that when the Chicago boys took over the Pinochet economy, they had every conceivable advantage. There couldn’t be any dissent. The torture chambers took care of that. They had the advice of the top stars of [University of] Chicago economics, the right-wing economics system. They were clever enough not to privatize one of the major bases of the Chilean economy, the highly efficient, nationalized copper corporation, the biggest in the world, Codelco… Within about five years, they had created such an economic disaster that the state had to take over the economy. People, as a joke, used to call it “the Chicago road to socialism.” They have left a residue which is pretty bitter.[19]
This selection of quotations may convince readers that the process of dispossession under capitalism unfolds in a common fashion, unless a nation is very determined to create and defend a political economy that it designs for its own purposes. There is no reason for the descendants of settlers in North America to look at the descendants of the original inhabitants and feel secure, to feel that “what happened to them could not happen to us.” It has happened and it is happening again. Anyone can be relocated to a figurative or literal reservation at the margins of society.
This leads to an additional point about some seemingly progressive political discourse being a distraction from the root of the problem. The Canadian university student Lindsay Shepherd explained it well when she spoke out against the misguided policy of “self-congratulatory” Indigenous Land Acknowledgments that many Canadian institutions now require before holding official events.[20] She notes that they are recreating condescending “counter-productive stereotypes which are a re-packaging of the noble savage stereotype.”
The acknowledgments involve no obligation on the part of the speaker or the institution to stand up for a radical change in the economic system, and this contradiction became starkly apparent in February 2020 when First Nation protest shut down Canadian transportation routes in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en people’s blockade of a pipeline construction across their lands. The federal government’s recent earnest words about reconciliation and acknowledgment could not be reconciled with the government support of the fossil fuel industry. Thus the land acknowledgments become virtue signals and soothing balm for the conscience of the descendants of settlers.
The acknowledgments also often pay tribute to indigenous people as the “designated caretakers of the land,” a status which implies all indigenous people feel, or must feel, this obligation and that other races have no such responsibility. Indigenous people may have better insights into the problem because their experience as victims of a slow genocide has left them with no illusions about Western civilization (the descendants of Europeans still have a bit of work to do in this regard), but this does not mean that they have the power to save the world. Far from it. They are among the most dis-empowered and are unlikely to succeed without help from the majority of the population.
The economic and social devastation described in the cases above continues unopposed partly because people have been trained to think every social problem is rooted in identity politics and can be addressed by such gestures as land acknowledgments. As Martin Luther King noted near the end of his life, the struggle for racial equality had to shift to a broad concern with fighting against poverty, war and the nuclear arms race.[21] Real solutions involve recognizing our shared humanity and interests in restoring the commons, or undertaking a Great Mahele in various settings throughout the world. Without resorting to a simplistic dichotomy that pits preconceived notions of capitalism against preconceived notions of socialism, we could think like the Hawaiian monarchs did when they endeavored to create the political economy that was the most just and appropriate for their circumstances and embedded in the spiritual, cultural, and political concept of aloha ’ āina—a concept universally understood by all those who have been awakened to humanity’s connection to the natural elements, the earth and all forms of life upon it.[22]
Notes
[1] Mark R. Scherer, “United States vs. the Sioux Nation of Indians,” Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, 2011.
[2] The Treaty of Waitangi, Waitangi Tribunal, Ministry of Justice, New Zealand. https://www.waitangitribunal.govt.nz/treaty-of-waitangi/.
[3] Political economy: a branch of social science that studies the relationships between individuals and society and between markets and the state, using a diverse set of tools and methods drawn largely from economics, political science, and sociology. The term political economy is derived from the Greek polis, meaning “city” or “state,” and oikonomos, meaning “one who manages a household or estate.” Political economy thus can be understood as the study of how a country—the public’s household—is managed or governed, taking into account both political and economic factors. (From Brittanica.com).
[4] Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (University of Hawai’i Press, 1968), p. 128. In spite of all the research done on the Mahele, it seems like it has not been possible to quantify how many of the tenant class sold their properties and subsequently fell into poverty. It is likely that many did, but it is difficult to confirm that the Mahele was the cause of the disastrous dispossession that came in the 20th century. It is argued here that in spite of what its eventual effects may have been, its intent and design was to be of benefit to all citizens. It did not begin as a deliberate dispossession as was common in settler governments’ dealings with indigenous people in North America.
[5] “Dr. Keanu Sai Q and A with Maui County Council 8-21-19“ (34:40~), Integrative Media Group, August 30, 2019.
[6] Francis Wayland, Elements of Political Economy (New York: Leavitt, Lord and Company, 1837).
[7] Lawrence H. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono: A Social History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961), 263. Quoted in Cecil K. Dotts & Mildred Sikkema, Challenging the Status Quo: Public Education in Hawaii 1840-1980 (Honolulu: Hawaii Education Association, 1994), 45.
[8] George Carlin, Life is Worth Losing, George Carlin Official YouTube Channel, Home Box Office, 2005, 09:18~.
[9] Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (New York: The New Press, 2002), 132-133.
[10] William Richards, No Ke Kalaiaina, a Hawaiian Mission Houses Research Project, trans. Awaiaulu (Honolulu: Hawaiian Mission Houses Digital Archive, 2018, originally published in Hawaiian in 1839), 95, 123-124, 144, 162, 211-212, 216. https://hmha.missionhouses.org/items/show/12204.
[11] Gavan Daws, 280-285.
[12] Keanu Sai, “Under Hawaiian Law Native Hawaiians Receive Health Care at No Charge,” Hawaiian Kingdom Blog, April 25, 2016.
[13] William De Witt Alexander (Superintendent of Government Survey), “A Brief History of Land Titles in the Hawaiian Kingdom, Interior Department Appendix 1 to Surveyor General’s Report,” Honolulu PC Advertisers Co. Steam Print, 1882. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miun.aba2967.0001.001&view=1up&seq=3. Digitized by the University of Michigan, July 3, 2019. Some excerpts from this document that elaborate on the nature of the Mahele:
After long and patient investigation it was finally settled that there were but three classes of persons having vested rights in the land; 1st the King, 2nd the chiefs, and 3rd the tenants. The Land Commission decided that if the King should allow to the landlords one third, to the tenants one third, and retain one-third himself, “he would injure no one unless himself.” (page 9)
His Majesty… shall in accordance with the Constitution and Laws of the Land, retain all his private lands, as his own individual property, subject only to the rights of the Tenants, to have and to hold to Him, His heirs and successors forever. (page 13)
On the 7th of the following June, 1848, the Legislative Council passed the “Act relating to the lands of His Majesty the King and of the Government,” … and designates the several Crown Lands and Government Lands by name.
By this great Act of Kamehameha III, he showed his deep sympathy with the wants of his people, and set an illustrious example of liberality and public spirit. It remained for his chiefs to follow his example.
The second Division of lands took place during the summer of 1850, when most of the chiefs ceded a third of their lands to the Government, in order to obtain allodial title for the remainder.
The whole transaction was a severe test of their patriotism, and reflects great credit on that Hawaiian aristocracy which thus peacefully gave up a portion of its hereditary rights and privileges for the good of the nation. (pages 16-17)
… the Act of August 6th, 1850 confirmed and amended the rights of Tenants are expressly reserved… protects the common people in the enjoyment of the right to take wood, thatch, ki leaf etc. from the lands on which they live, for their own private use, but not to sell for profit. They are so guaranteed the right to water and the right of way, but not the right of pasturage on the land of the Konohiki [the chiefs’ land agents]. These rights are embodied in Section 1477 of the Civil Code.
The same Act of August 6th, 1850, confirms the resolutions passed by the Privy Council on the 21st of December, 1849, granting fee simple titles, free of all commutation to all native tenants, for their cultivated lands and house lots, except in the towns of Honolulu, Lahaina and Hilo. (page 17)
Author’s note: The king was motivated to retain large private holdings for himself as an individual—still “subject only to the rights of the tenants”—and not as government land because he rightly feared that under the international norms of the time a foreign conquest of Hawai’i could lead to the loss of government property to the conqueror. In contrast, conquerors were obliged by law to respect private property and pay compensation if they seized it. This situation did not change until the Kellogg–Briand Pact (General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy) of 1928 made armed conquest illegal under international law. This is still a point of contention because no compensation for property was paid after US annexation. A separate topic not covered in this paper is the many post-annexation legal and political struggles of Native Hawaiians to reclaim land or receive compensation.
[14] Donovan C. Preza, The Emperical Writes Back: Re-examining Hawaiian Dispossession Resulting from the Māhele of 1848, MA Diss., University of Hawai’i, 2010, 157-165.
[15] Keanu Sai, “Hawaiian Royal Commission of Inquiry,” Hawaiian Kingdom Blog, October 17, 2019.
[16] Jay Walljasper, “A Brief History of How We Lost the Commons,” On the Commons, March 9, 2013.
[17] Benjamin Doolittle U.E., “Great Britain’s Claims of Ownership Of Native Peoples Lands,” Fourtybee.com, January 10, 2020.
[18] Chris Hedges (interviewer), “On Contact: Interview with David Harvey—Part 2,” Russia Today, November 17, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jVflZWGrQk&feature=youtu.be. The interview is a discussion of David Harvey’s book A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2007). Parts of this citation are excerpts from the book read aloud during the interview.
[19] Amy Goodman (interviewer), “After Visiting Brazil’s Lula in Prison, Noam Chomsky Warns Against ‘Disaster’ Under Jair Bolsonaro,” Democracy Now, November 22, 2018. https://www.democracynow.org/2018/11/22/after_visiting_brazils_lula_in_prison.
[20] Lindsay Shepherd, “Why I Reject Indigenous Land Acknowledgments,” October 15, 2018. https://youtu.be/M8AJytIpCq4.
[21] Vincent Intondi, “W. E. B. Du Bois to Malcolm X: The Untold History of the Movement to Ban the Bomb,” Zinn Education Project, July 30, 2015. https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/web-dubois-coretta-scott-king-ban-the-bomb/.
[22] Jon Osorio, “The Meaning of Aloha ’Āina with Professor Jon Osorio,” interview by Julia Steele, Hawai’i Public Radio, February 5, 2016. https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/post/episode-2-meaning-aloha-ina-professor-jon-osorio#stream/0.
Lit by Imagination 