Part 18 (1/2)

The Socialists are not entirely agreed as to the way by which the abolition of private owners.h.i.+p in land should be effected, but some interesting proposals will be found in Chapter X., ”Socialist Views and Proposals regarding Taxation and the National Budget.” The purely agricultural aspect of the land question is treated in Chapter XVIII., ”Socialism and Agriculture,” and in Chapter XXI., ”Some Socialist Views on Free Trade and Protection.”

FOOTNOTES:

[411] Page 81.

[412] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 61.

[413] _Ibid._ p. 60.

[414] Was.h.i.+ngton, _A Corner in Flesh and Blood_, p. 60.

[415] _Clarion Song Book_, p. 6.

[416] Keir Hardie, _From Serfdom to Socialism_, p. 11.

[417] Davidson, _Book of Lords_, p. 25.

[418] Blatchford, _Land Nationalisation_, p. 9.

[419] Sidney Webb, _Socialism, True and False_, p. 19.

[420] _Socialism and the Single Tax_, p. 7.

[421] Ward, _Are All Men Brothers?_ pp. 14, 15.

[422] Hall, _Land, Labour, and Liberty_, p. 12.

[423] Blatchford, _Some Tory Socialisms_, p. 6.

[424] Headlam, _Christian Socialism_, p. 14.

[425] _Forward_, October 12, 1907.

[426] _Independent Labour Party Report, Annual Conference, 1907_, p.

59.

[427] _Times_, October 12, 1907.

[428] Headlam, _Christian Socialism_, p. 7.

[429] Blatchford, _Some Tory Socialisms_, p. 3.

CHAPTER IX

SOCIALIST VIEWS AND PROPOSALS REGARDING CAPITAL AND THE CAPITALISTS

We have seen in Chapter VIII. that Socialists claim that ”Man has a right to nothing but that which he has himself made,” that therefore, ”No man can have a right to the land, for no man made it.” May, then, owners of property keep at least that part of their property which is not invested in land?

The reply is, of course, in the negative. ”As land must in future be a national possession, so must the other means of producing and distributing wealth.”[430] ”Supposing we a.s.sume it true that land is not the product of labour and that capital is; it is not by any means true that the rent of land is not the product of labour and that the interest on capital is. Since private owners.h.i.+p, whether of land or capital, simply means the right to draw and dispose of a revenue from the property, why should the landowner be forbidden to do that which is allowed to the capitalist, in a society in which land and capital are commercially equivalent? Yet land nationalisers seem to be prepared to treat as sacred the landlords' claim to private property in capital acquired by thefts of this kind, although they will not hear of their claim to property in land. Capital serves as an instrument for robbing in a precisely identical manner. In England industrial capital is mainly created by wage workers--who get nothing for it but permission to create in addition enough subsistence to keep each other alive in a poor way. Its immediate appropriation by idle proprietors and shareholders, whose economic relation to the workers is exactly the same in principle as that of the landlords, goes on every day under our eyes. The landlord compels the worker to convert his land into a railway, his fen into a drained level, his barren seaside waste into a fas.h.i.+onable watering-place, his mountain into a tunnel, his manor park into a suburb full of houses let on repairing leases; and lo! he has escaped the land nationalisers; his land is now become capital and is sacred. The position is so glaringly absurd and the proposed attempt to discriminate between the capital value and the land value of estates is so futile, that it seems almost certain that the land nationalisers will go as far as the Socialists.

Whatever the origin of land and capital, the source of the revenues drawn from them is contemporary labour.”[431]