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Title: George and Tucker Author: Kevin Carson Date: May 20, 2005 Language: en Topics: Georgism, Benjamin Tucker, libertarianism Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/05/george-and-tucker.html
An amazing article by Geolibertarian Mark Sullivan: “Why the Georgist
movement has not succeeded.” Sullivan, President of the Council of
Georgist Organizations, has venerable Geoist credentials; he traces his
doctrine (in the Georgist version of apostolic succession) back to Ralph
Borsodi (via Mildred Loomis) and thence to the Old Man himself.
Of course, the question of Georgism’s “success” can be met with the
counter-question “compared to what?” As Sullivan points out, the
“success” of Marxism in the state socialist countries has been decried
as a corruption by many Marxist ideologues. And he makes quick work of
the too-frequent claims of free market libertarianism’s increased
influence in the ‘80s.
The so-called triumph of libertarianism in the 1980s and 1990s was, of
course, no such thing. Swollen military budgets, the vicious war on
drugs, the propping up of dictatorships and oil monopolists--these
dominant features of the late 20^(th) century had little to do with real
libertarianism (which has always been antiwar, not just pro-market). But
in order to finance such government excess, real public services and the
social safety net were deviously attacked (by Reaganites and
Thatcherites) using sound bites of libertarian rhetoric. The resultant
and current New World Disorder or “globalization” can hardly be called a
ringing victory for any coherent academic paradigm or political
movement. Rather, it is an ugly grafting of libertarian theories of
privatization onto the realities of imperial militarism. Our brave new
world is perhaps a victory and a success for oil monopolists, global
polluters, phony free traders, and other multinational financial
interests--but it is an ever-worsening defeat and failure for billions
of ordinary people around the world, as well as for other species,
ecosystems, and Mother Earth as a whole.
Nevertleless, the question is a natural one to ask, given Georgism’s
wild popularity in the late 19^(th) and early 20^(th) centuries.
Sullivan takes a long detour from his central question, devoting most of
the middle part of his article to an attempted fusion between Henry
George and Benjamin Tucker. Both George and Tucker, he writes, aimed at
a fusion of radical economic analysis with free market principles,
advocating a laissez-faire road to socialism.
George’s contemporary and anarchist rival, Benjamin R. Tucker
(1854–1939) of Boston and New York, editor of the journal Liberty from
1881 to 1908, had a somewhat similar vision of the free and fair
society--the abolition of all monopolies and of the state as an
oppressive power. Tucker was a self-proclaimed disciple of Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, the great French anarchist and socialist rival of Karl Marx.
Following up Proudhon’s declaration “Property is theft,” Tucker declared
that “there are at bottom but two classes,--the Socialists and the
Thieves. Socialism, practically, is war upon usury in all its forms, the
great Anti-Theft Movement of the nineteenth century” (Liberty May 17,
1884; Instead of a Book 1893:362). Tucker took Proudhon’s mutualist
anarchism, including his Bank of the People, into a characteristically
American direction, synthesizing European socialism with frontier-style
individual sovereignty. Similarly, George prefaced Progress and Poverty
with his own mission of synthesis: “... to unite the truth perceived by
the school of Smith and Ricardo to the truth perceived by the schools of
Proudhon and Lasalle; to show that laissez faire (in its full true
meaning) opens the way to a realization of the noble dreams of
socialism.” (p. xxx). In this, Tucker and George, the Anarchist and the
Single Taxer, were in agreement--their respective positions can be seen
as variations of libertarian socialism or, to borrow a label from Peter
Valentyne and Hillel Steiner, Left-Libertarianism.
But despite their similarities, Tucker devoted a disproportionate amount
of his energy to combating George. That was unfortunate, because the two
complemented each other in some important ways. For example, although
Tucker and George both objected to the economic power of absentee
landlords, George had a blind spot when it came to money and interest.
In Progress and Poverty, he argued a “natural productivity” theory of
interest that was almost totally nonsensical. Sullivan considers the
thought of Tucker and Greene on the money monopoly to be an important
complement to George’s theory of land rent. The two could be fused, he
speculates, in a unified theory of artificial scarcity in both land and
credit as the result of state-enforced monopolies.
As I see it, while taking a more radical political path, Tucker’s
attention to the problem of exploitation of labor by “usury,” especially
interest on capital, as well as his critique of the state itself,
complements George’s analysis of economic rent and land monopoly. It was
Mildred Loomis who brought this to my attention, and introduced me to
Tucker’s last direct “disciple,” Laurance Labadie, before he died in
1975. Let me suggest, as Loomis did, such a synthesis of Tucker and
George.
Real wealth deteriorates and (with the exception of “collectibles”)
depreciates over time. In the face of this fact, and in the absence of
state-supported monopoly claims (to landed property, information and
laws of nature, absentee corporate ownership, and the creation of money)
that otherwise would offset it, there would be economic pressure to loan
wealth at low or no interest. If the value of real wealth and services
could be monetized by the labor that creates them, via socially
responsible “Mutual Banks,” and if land belonged to the community, with
land tenure based on the payment of the economic rent (George) or
conditional upon personal occupancy-and-use (Proudhon and Tucker), then
the accumulation of vast amounts of surplus wealth would be discouraged
by its own maintenance costs and therefore sold off or loaned at cost
(not interest)--capital would be redistributed back to labor, in effect,
via free and fair market transactions. In the absence of monopoly
privileges, the role of time in the production of wealth is offset,
balanced, or canceled out by the role of time in the deterioration of
wealth, which eventually returns all wealth back to the land. Like rent,
interest is the offspring of state-supported monopoly privilege, not of
liberty or community.
I would add that Tucker came closer to such a unified theory of
exploitation than did George: although Tucker had an anti-landlord
theory of his own, in his occupancy-and-use theory of land, George
almost completely neglected the role of the state in enforcing the money
monopoly. In fairness, though, both Tucker and George took a negative
view of patents and tariffs.
Although Tucker objected to George’s single tax as a statist measure,
and George himself was no anarchist, George at least laid a foundation
that could be built on by self-proclaimed “anarcho-Georgists.” As
Sullivan indicates, George in many ways anticipated Nock’s distinction
between the state and the government.
George wanted to use democratic means to simplify and purify government
of all oppressive features, making it “merely the agency by which the
common property was administered for the common benefit’....
George’s land theory is by no means incompatible with free market
anarchism. Although George used the term “tax” what Georgists call “land
value taxation” can be consistently viewed, instead, as community
collection of rent in a stateless society.
Sullivan also tries to make Georgism more amenable to its Tuckerite
rivals, as well as various traditional forms of land tenure. George was
wrong, he says, to consider the Lockean pattern of absentee land titles
as “normal,” and to be accepted as a matter of course so long as
community land rent was paid. Georgism, rather, should incorporate other
ways of establishing ownership in the first place--like occupancy and
use.
Georgists, in my opinion, need to see beyond George’s 19^(th)-century
categories and terminology. We need to see that economic systems do not
exist outside of larger sociopolitical systems. Can we really say that
rent is “natural”? There are societies in which the practice of sharing
access to land was the custom, and rent did not exist. Rent is a
relationship, not an essence or a thing. Rent relationships arise when
societies create and observe certain customs and laws regarding
exclusive land tenure.
In answer to the title question, Sullivan attributes Georgism’s anemic
accomplishments in the twentieth century to the catastrophic effect of
WWI.
World War I stopped the land-value tax legislation that had been put
before the British parliament. The war enabled Lenin to take possession
of the new Russian republic, derailing Karensky’s intentions to
institute single-tax-style reform as once championed by Leo Tolstoy, and
leading ultimately to the rise of Stalin. The political reaction to the
triumph of Marxist-Leninism derailed Sun Yat-Sen, who had been in favor
of Single Tax and other democratic reforms in China. It unleashed a new
Red Scare in the United States, in which the government persecuted and
deported many radicals while it intimidated the ranks of moderate
socialists and reformers that included many Single Taxers. And it led to
the rise of fascism on the one hand, and totalitarian communism on the
other, in Asia as well as Europe, setting the stage for World War II.
The War Hysteria and Red Scare, especially, by marginalizing economic
radicalism as “un-American,” sounded the death knell of the native
American radical tradition in the heartland. Such petty bourgeois
radicalism was either eclipsed by the imported collectivism of Lenin and
Trotsky, or coopted by the state capitalism of the New Deal.
Since WWII, Geolibertarianism has moved in a more radical direction, and
been enriched by such innovations as the citizen’s dividend, “Green
taxes” on pollution and other externalities, and regulation of the radio
spectrum and other “social commons” in a manner analogous to land.
The revamped version of Geolibertarianism Sullivan advocates, based on a
“unified field theory” of exploitation, might (he argues) become the
basis for anti-globalist resistance:
The ultimate implications of globalization-which is nothing but the
final privatization of the planetary commons-is that we can no longer
afford to treat land (including the water supply, the gene pool, the
electromagnetic spectrum) as a commodity. The land belongs equally to
all, even if not especially to those without financial power who cannot
afford to pay a rent or a tax for it. The socialization of land values
must be complemented by the socialization of the land itself. Indeed,
“We must make land common property.” Some land must be held off the
market for ecological reasons. Other species must be protected in their
occupancy and use of their habitats. Ultimately, we must see the planet
as Mother Earth once more. We must return to humanity’s ancient wisdom
before it was overshadowed by those patriarchal institutions: the
military state, land privatization, and debt servitude. Our Mother is
not for sale, nor is she for hire. Inspite of our abuse she gives of
herself unstintingly. In the future--if we have a future--the payment of
land rent for the private use of the Earth would be seen as an
indemnification paid to the community in recognition of the damage and
violation done to the Mother of all.
For example, the Putin government in Russia has at least toyed with
Georgist principles, such as partly undoing the kleptocratic looting
(aka “privatization”) of natural resources via special rents or
royalties.
But any Third World government that makes serious attempts at
implementing such radical principles, Sullivan speculates, is likely to
become a pariah state.
The current war of terrorism is to make the world safe for oil
monopolists--some of whom occupy high political office and even royal
estate--as well as finance monopolists, represented by the WTO, World
Bank, and IMF. Indeed, it is a Georgist issue that could well be
addressed as such by Georgists. But it may take some courage. Should any
country resist its global corporate interests and listen to Georgists
enough to implement a Georgist system, it would be threatened with
ostracism by the global finance and corporate interests, as occurred in
Russia. If that were to fail, perhaps the U.S. government would label
the country a rogue state that harbors terrorists and then drop bombs,
send in death squads, and/or declare economic sanctions that slowly
murder the population until such time as it could install a puppet
regime.