(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . ANTI-CAPITALIST MEET-UP: Henry George [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-09-08 "Progress and Poverty" by Henry George is the most interesting and best-written book on political economy I have ever read. I had never heard of him until Amazon suggested the book, which is astonishing as he was extremely popular in the nineteenth century. He was born in 1839 to a lower-middle-class family and went to sea at age 15. During his early married life he was so poor that on occasion he was forced to beg in the streets to keep his family from starving. Eventually he was able to earn a living as a journalist. He write several books and numerous articles on politics and economics. "Progress and Poverty" was wildly popular and sold millions of copies. So he enjoyed a comfortable middle age. He became a politician as well as a newspaper publisher and editor. He promoted the the secret ballot, free trade, and tax reform. He died of a stroke in 1897 while running for mayor of New York city as a candidatefor the United Labor Party. Over 100,000 people went to attend his laying-in-state and at least that many more waited outside. His funeral had the largest crowds ever seen in New York for a funeral. Here are a few selections from Part One of "Progress and Poverty" concerning the relationship between wages, capital, land and wealth. "The proposition I shall endeavor to prove, is: That wages, instead of being drawn from capital, are in reality drawn from the product of the labor for which they are paid." "For, as political economists explain, the three agents or factors in production are land, labor, and capital, and that part of the produce which goes to the second of these factors is by them styled wages. Thus the term labor includes all human exertion in the production of wealth, and wages, being that part of the produce which goes to labor, includes all reward for such exertion." "The man who cultivates the soil for himself receives his wages in its produce, just as, if he uses his own capital and owns his own land, he may also receive interest and rent; the hunter’s wages are the game he kills; the fisherman’s wages are the fish he takes. The gold washed out by the self-employing gold-digger is as much his wages as the money paid to the hired coal miner by the purchaser of his labor, and, as Adam Smith shows, the high profits of retail storekeepers are in large part wages, being the recompense of their labor and not of their capital. In short, whatever is received as the result or reward of exertion is "wages."" "In fact, most people understand well enough what capital is until they begin to define it, and I think their works will show that the economic writers who differ so widely in their definitions use the term in this commonly understood sense in all cases except in their definitions and the reasoning based on them. This common sense of the term is that of wealth devoted to procuring more wealth." "The term land embraces, in short, all natural materials, forces, and opportunities, and, therefore, nothing that is freely supplied by nature can be properly classed as capital. A fertile field, a rich vein of ore, a falling stream which supplies power, may give to the possessor advantages equivalent to the possession of capital, but to class such things as capital would be to put an end to the distinction between land and capital, and, so far as they relate to each other, to make the two terms meaningless." "Thus we must exclude from the category of capital everything that may be included either as land or labor. Doing so, there remain only things which are neither land nor labor, but which have resulted from the union of these two original factors of production. Nothing can be properly capital that does not consist of these—that is to say, nothing can be capital that is not wealth." "As commonly used the word “wealth” is applied to anything having an exchange value. But when used as a term of political economy it must be limited to a much more definite meaning, because many things are commonly spoken of as wealth which in taking account of collective or general wealth cannot be considered as wealth at all. Such things have an exchange value, and are commonly spoken of as wealth, insomuch as they represent as between individuals, or between sets of individuals, the power of obtaining wealth; but they are not truly wealth, inasmuch as their increase or decrease does not affect the sum of wealth. Such are bonds, mortgages, promissory notes, bank bills, or other stipulations for the transfer of wealth. Such are slaves, whose value represents merely the power of one class to appropriate the earnings of another class. Such are lands, or other natural opportunities, the value of which is but the result of the acknowledgment in favor of certain persons of an exclusive right to their use, and which represents merely the power thus given to the owners to demand a share of the wealth produced by those who use them." "Thus wealth, as alone the term can be used in political economy, consists of natural products that have been secured, moved, combined, separated, or in other ways modified by human exertion, so as to fit them for the gratification of human desires. It is, in other words, labor impressed upon matter in such a way as to store up, as the heat of the sun is stored up in coal, the power of human labor to minister to human desires." "Production is always the mother of wages. Without production, wages would not and could not be. It is from the produce of labor, not from the advances of capital that wages come." "And as the employer generally makes a profit, the payment of wages is, so far as he is concerned, but the return to the laborer of a portion of the capital he has received from the labor. So far as the employee is concerned, it is but the receipt of a portion of the capital his labor has previously produced." "Capital, as we have seen, consists of wealth used for the procurement of more wealth, as distinguished from wealth used for the direct satisfaction of desire; or, as I think it may be defined, of wealth in the course of exchange. Capital, therefore, increases the power of labor to produce wealth: (1) By enabling labor to apply itself in more effective ways, as by digging up clams with a spade instead of the hand, or moving a vessel by shoveling coal into a furnace, instead of tugging at an oar. (2) By enabling labor to avail itself of the reproductive forces of nature, as to obtain corn by sowing it, or animals by breeding them. (3) By permitting the division of labor, and thus, on the one hand, increasing the efficiency of the human factor of wealth, by the utilization of special capabilities, the acquisition of skill, and the reduction of waste; and, on the other, calling in the powers of the natural factor at their highest, by taking advantage of the diversities of soil, climate and situation, so as to obtain each particular species of wealth where nature is most favorable to its production." "Capital does not supply the materials which labor works up into wealth, as is erroneously taught; the materials of wealth are supplied by nature. But such materials partially worked up and in the course of exchange are capital. Capital does not supply or advance wages, as is erroneously taught. Wages are that part of the produce of his labor obtained by the laborer. Capital does not maintain laborers during the progress of their work, as is erroneously taught. Laborers are maintained by their labor, the man who produces, in whole or in part, anything that will exchange for articles of maintenance, virtually producing that maintenance. Capital, therefore, does not limit industry, as is erroneously taught, the only limit to industry being the access to natural material. But capital may limit the form of industry and the productiveness of industry, by limiting the use of tools and the division of labor." In his book Mr. George spends a great deal of time dissecting faulty arguments on the part of earlier economists. He also provides examples at great length. I have left out these discussions. I urge everyone who is interested in economics to buy this books and read it. (Amazon, 99 cents) The biography of Henry George, from which I drew extensively, can be found in Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2024/9/8/2248191/-ANTI-CAPITALIST-MEET-UP-Henry-George Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/