Georgism as a Historical Framework Part III
Final Part
The Current Haze of Georgist Materialism
A Georgist system of political economic determinism would be founded on the fact that there are, in the final analysis, only two finite primary "means of production"—labor, which is rightfully the property of the individual, and Land, a collective inheritance that's been stolen from almost everyone. The fact is that what other schools of economics term capital is merely some combination of Land, labor, and the functionally infinite provisions of nature. Therefore, the structure of the political economy depends first on the control of people and land.
Marxists contend that societal structures are dictated by the organization of production. A Georgist theory will counter by saying: tell me who controls the land, and how they do so, then tell me what the rights of the people who live on it are, and I can tell you what sort of production is possible upon it. Coming before material production on a hierarchy of needs is secure existence in a particular place. Where can you live and work and what secures that right? The method for the provision of secure physical existence determines the modes of production that are possible, not the other way around; and thus, security is more fundamental to history than mere economics. Therefore, rather than being a form of economic determinism, a Georgist theory of history must necessarily be much more nakedly political. In other words, it is the form of the solution to the Hobbesian dilemma which determines the possibilities of the methods of production. However, since the method of production is what provides for the maintenance of the sovereign, the historical materialist view is not entirely without merit; just as sovereignty constrains production, production constrains sovereignty. Therefore, wars, revolutions, societal upheavals will often boil down to contests for Land or struggles over the contract over the circumstances of access to it. Even the capital-driven tussles are mere offshoots of the foundational dynamics concerning land and its people.
Hudson does allude to this in his mention of the conflict over the land question in antiquity. Rightly so; one couldn’t make up a better allegory of Georgist theory than the decline of the Roman Republic. The role of the land question in the fall of the Western Empire is a bit more muddled. That said, the monopolization of land and labor (thus depriving the army of manpower) certainly was a factor. There are also interesting insights to be drawn from the various ways in which the Greek city-states attempted to address the issue, earlier.1
Nonetheless, the march of countries through industrialization means it is incumbent on a Georgist historical theory to focus on more modern examples. For the briefest outline of an illustration: colonial and imperial expansions, often painted by Marxists as quests for markets and resources, can be viewed through a different lens as mere machinations to control land and populace. After all, conquest, colonization, and imperialism are difficult, expensive, and risky affairs; so one has to wonder why a nation would go to the considerable effort of using those means to secure markets and resources that could be secured by through trade.
The answer is to consider what no nation would trade away, that is, the objective of colonialism and imperialism is to secure the means to take the land rents of another nation and people. To illustrate, let’s start with a counterexample, in the 1980s Japan dominated the import of automobiles into the United States so much so that the US asked Japan to impose a voluntary export quota and eventually offshore a lot of production to the United States. At the same time, Japan, with limited natural resources, also obtained a good quantity of raw materials from the United States.
Again, a classic, Marxist, take on colonialism is that it represents a nation exploiting military superiority to capture markets and raw materials in a quasi-mercantilist race to secure commercial prosperity for the Metropole. However, here Japanese companies managed to secure the markets and resources (and eventually labor) of the United States while under the thumb of the US security apparatus after the failure of their own imperial enterprise in the 1940s. This was accomplished without Japan engaging in war, subversion, or any sort of political pressure (other than the exploitation of the fact that a stable and prosperous Japan was helpful to US Cold War strategy). Rather than colonialism, Japan managed to develop by engaging in a successful round of land reform combined with rigorous application of the industrial insights of W. Edwards Demming.
Colonialism, therefore, in a Georgist view, is simply the attempt by one entire nation to leverage an advantage in military technology to steal the ground-rents and hence the labor of another nation as a shortcut to prosperity and stability. To a rentier elite of a colonizer country, this choice has certain attractions in contrast to the meticulous, difficult, and socially disruptive work of developing a national economic model that produces desirable exports and allows for the development of a sizable internal market. In short, it allows for economic development without developing any sort of solution to the land question. Although obviously much more work needs to be done to develop the theory, the implications for a rentier class are rather straightforward. The possibly dangerous consequences of inequality and stagnation can be avoided through colonialism even while the Metropole is in the suffocating grip of rentierism.
However, this is probably a one-trick pony. There are vast fortunes to be made during the initial plunderous and murderous phases of colonialism that can be invested profitably and productively back in the home country. This can temporarily cure the effects of rentierism on capital formation, substituting foreign plunder for the lack of home-grown capital. (If the prospects for profitable Imperialism don’t seem promising at any given moment, piracy can also be useful in this regard). However, even with plundered wealth, the opportunities for investment are eventually exhausted in a rentier-stifled economy. As the profits from industrialization can find no productive and profitable return in the Metropole, reinvestment will be instead directed to either the colonial outposts themselves, or to foreign destinations, or worse, into buying real estate so the newly rich can enter the rentier class. An illustration might be found in the stagnant inability of Britain in the late 19th Century, where a landed aristocracy held a dominant political position, to leverage the plundered riches of its empire to maintain an economically dominant position. As industrialists bought country estates and married their way into the landed gentry, the City of London exported capital abroad all precisely as the industries at home needed investment to upgrade in the face of new rivals like Germany and the United States.
Of course, Georgism has always included a strain of anti-imperialism. Beginning with George’s 1881 pamphlet The Irish Land Question, the question of economic progress has been viewed as inextricable from the question of self-determination. This is further illustrated in a few passages of Christopher England’s Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism. England points to the League of Small and Subject Nationalities, lead by the committed Georgist and prominent Republican Frederic C. Howe. Describing the events of the Congress, the journal The Public explained, “Oppression is a land problem soluble by sufficient degree of local autonomy to break the tyranny of feudal estates.”
Georgist thought on imperialism has often, and understandably, focused on the effects of the exploitative practices on the colony. However, the subsequent experience of countries that have risen from the ashes of the Second World War to wealth and technological sophistication without being able to practice any form of imperialism such as Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Germany, gives rise to new questions. For example, if widespread economic prosperity can be achieved without forcing other peoples to shoulder the costs, then what is the precise purpose of imperialism in terms of the social relations and the land question of an industrializing imperialist country? What factors will militate towards an imperial solution rather than a program of internal reform; is it merely external constraint or do internal factors (such as the existing dynamics of land distribution) play a role?
In any case, in addition to examining colonialism, an updated Georgist theory must similarly grapple with the totality of the historical experience of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The influence of the land question on not only industrialization, but also deindustrialization, urban planning, agricultural developments, residential patterns, international relations etc. must be fully articulated. In many respects, the 20th Century was not a good one for humanity. Starting in 1914 hundreds of millions of people were obliterated in wars that most combatants would not have entered had they known the cost they would pay, half the world toiled for decades fruitlessly and under oppressive circumstances on the fool’s errand of state-communism, industrialized and systematic genocide made its horrific debut, decolonization was often an unnecessarily bloody affair, and the natural environment of our planet suffered possibly irreparable tremendous damage. Could Georgist practices and theories, if brought to full fruition, have avoided some of these disasters? Was the demise of Georgism as a mass ideology and the rise of totalitarian ideologies like Marxist-Leninsm and fascism a mere coincidence, or was the absence of the former a factor that caused the latter? Can the same be said about the degradation of our political system into lobbyist-ruled oligarchy? These questions represent the desperate urgency of the Georgist project as the 21st Century isn’t exactly inspiring confidence at the moment either.
A Basis for Georgist Politics
In a teleological sense, the endpoint of such a Georgist theory of history ought to emphasize be that the historical process of conflict, oppression, and periodic recessions, political, and overall civilizational collapse can only be arrested or mitigated by a return to the axioms that were in practice prior to civilization, the natural freedom of people and the natural rights of those people to land. These cycles of peace and violence, freedom and tyranny, prosperity and destitution can be ended only when people are no longer required to fight each other for a rightful share of their common inheritance. Just as Georgist economics would arrest the boom-bust business cycle and replace it with steady economic growth, Georgist history and politics would arrest the cycles of development and collapse, liberty and tyranny, humanity and barbarity that haunt our nightmares. In their place would be a stable civilization steadily advancing and retaining both the resources and political capacity to solve the issues that its progress produced. This wouldn’t be the end of history by any means, but rather the beginning of the history of humanity as such. Though theories of such large scope have fallen out of fashion, one can’t proclaim that the results of this intellectual diffidence have been so beneficial as to vindicate such a timorous approach to social critique.
Unlike Marxism, however, Georgism cannot predict its own final victory (though I’d be delighted to be wrong about this). Therefore, a Georgist historical theory should serve as the foundation of an urgent call to action. The cause of human freedom has advanced in recent centuries and given some of us a measure of prosperity and stability. However, these gains are stalled and in peril of being reversed if humanity doesn’t take the next step and recover its birthright. Control over land and nature, if not given over to the use of the people, will be used to end their liberty and prosperity, such as it is. We are, at this point rapidly entering the state of affairs of George’s proverbial island,
Place one hundred men on an island from which there is no escape, and whether you make one of these men the absolute owner of the other ninety-nine, or the absolute owner of the soil of the island, will make no difference either to him or to them. In the one case, as the other, the one will be the absolute master of the ninety-nine—his power extending even to life and death, for simply to refuse them permission to live upon the island would be to force them into the sea. (Progress and Poverty: Book VII, Chapter 2)
As George put it, “Liberty will have no half service. She must be trusted fully or she will not stay.” The absolute urgency of Georgism as a political project requires that the political theory must be fully worked out with all speed possible. What is true as a matter of history and politics is true as an intellectual matter, the current mini-renaissance of Georgist thought may be ended if not carried to its full conclusion.
A comprehensive treatise on the dynamics of landholding and debt and their implications for the (in)stability of ancient societies can be found in Hudson’s two books, ...and forgive them their debts and The Collapse of Antiquity.