Benjamin Lucraft - Basle Congress 1869

Basle Congress 1869

At the Basle Congress of the First International in 1869 Lucraft not only advocated land nationalisation (along with Robert Applegarth) but he further argued for the large-scale cultivation of the land by the state on behalf of the people, as against peasant proprietorship.

He explained that as he had travelled by train through France he saw the fragmentation of the land into tiny plots that had followed the French Revolution; a fragmentation which made profitability for the people so difficult. He recommended that land should be owned by the state on behalf of the people so that the French problems with fragmentation should not be repeated in England. Rather, large farms operated by the state with the full consent and labour of the people should be developed. The proposals sound uncannily like the later soviet collectives and would surely have suffered the same consequences had they been implemented.

These opinions, when reported in the British press, were described as "scandalous".