The Next 100 Years of
Progress and Poverty

Philip Finkelstein

[A paper delivered at the Centennary Celebration
of Henry George's Progress and Poverty, San Francisco, 1979]

One of the most frustrating arguments Georgists have to deal with is the one that goes, "If Henry George had such a great idea, how come no one has tried it anywhere?" The question is made even more pointed by our very own persistent activity. We are asked, and even ask ourselves, why after one hundred years since the publication of Progress and Poverty, the best-seller of its own time and never out of print since, the beneficiary of decades of devoted effort by disciples, millions of dollars of individual and organizational support, international recognition and countless meetingsa conferences, and campaigns, we have so little to show for ourselves and for Henry George.

I am neither historian nor prophet and so I will not explain the past or tell the future. As a Georgist of today, however, I would like to suggest that Progress and Poverty lives in a world of ideas, ideas that in its first century were antithetical to its fundamental vision and which may be more compatible in the future. George himself ventured that his ideas would find no easy acceptance and indeed that they would be fought for well beyond his own lifetime. The fighting is hardly over and in many instances has scarcely begun. Yet, it is in this next century of Progress and Poverty that the ideas of Henry George may come into their own.

The moving ideas of the world of Henry George were those of industrialism, ' nationalism, and science. The supremacy of these reigning concepts in the economic, political, and intellectual life of the times was so unchallenged that any serious attempt to present alternatives would have had a hard time being heard. It is a tribute to Henry George's masterpiece that it won both a hearing and a following in that infertile climate. The question is whether the climate has changed or is changing enough so that the next century will allow for real growth of the idea. Let us see.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the industrial enterprise had so captured the dominant position in economic life that it was viewed as the ultimate producer and distributor of wealth, practically replacing the formerly dominant position of natural resources. Land, the ultimate economic power of the Middle Ages, had given way to capital, and the accumulation of great fortunes was seen as the means to create new industrial enterprises. Land and natural resources became, in the popular conception, yet another form of wealth to be acquired by capital, like a real estate investment. The conflict, if any, was between capital and the labor for the economic prizes of industrial production. Land was relegated to the feudal past, a fitting subject for romance or even revolution, but not a serious contender for supremacy in the new industrial economic order.

As we enter the next century of Progress and Poverty, the relative positions of industry and natural resources have changed dramatically, and in fact, may have begun to reverse. Capital worldwide has begun to flow in the direction of natural resources, while industrial development slows or even declines. What could be more illustrative of this reversal when our vaunted superiority in producing autos and heavy machineries in our factories is superseded by our ability to produce corn and wheat from our abundant land. The social scientist, Daniel Bell, a decade ago, told us of the coming of the post-industrial society, as we move into an age when the products of the communications revolution overtake those of the industrial revolution. But none of the social prophets predicted the current era in which both modern technology and scientific management would bow before the stronger control of natural resources.

Powerful as the economics of natural resources has become, a far more powerful human concern is emerging regarding the use and conservation of those resources. There are those who would condemn the environmentalists as doomsayers in the way of progress, mindless people who would rather protect a tiny fish than provide electric power for a community; who would rather let rich folks maintain great, wooded estates than provide others with a decent place to live, who would, rather we shiver and sweat than burn natural fuels, or even make new ones. And there are those who are still saving the whales and the porpoises, whose home is the ocean, while boatloads of humans cast adrift on the sea command lesser concern. . Yet, for all the excesses and misplaced values of some elements of the environmentalist movement, I think it is safe to say the cause is growing.

The Club of Rome may have been dead wrong in predicting that population would outstrip resources within the century. Their thesis, a barely updated version of Malthus, is disproved already by a combination of lower population growth rates and more productive agriculture. Yet the evils of the maldistribution, which George pointed out in his own refutations of Malthus, still make hunger and lack of fundamental resources of living the most terrible indictment of mankind. What we are coming to recognize is not that resources are absolutely finite, although some, like petroleum, might well be, but that their unequal distribution and the exploitation of the many by the few in providing resources accelerates the scarcity. What the environmentalists are telling us is that we must manage our resources, not exploit them; live in our environment, not control it; accommodate ourselves to this planet or even universe-of which perhaps we may be the most complex, but by no means the only significant form of life.

In this new concern for the earth and its resources, there may be a greater acceptance of the notion of natural law, so central to the thesis of Henry George, than in the more anthropocentric views of his own time. This is not to suggest that all Georgists will be automatically reborn as environmentalist or that all the eco-freaks will blossom buttons and bumperstickers and T-shirt to banish poverty or un-tax houses, or-even just free the land. What is being suggested is rather that the new concern for resources can shift the economic, social, and moral debate away from the traditional left and right -- labor and capital, workers against bosses, class against class. The debate should not be between proponents of a planned economy and the untrammeled market, neither of which really exists in that form. The issue facing this next century is squarely in control of the resources of the world - distribution, access, and utilization. There are only two classes: those who earn their living by their labors, and those who claim exclusive control, a monopoly, of something which neither they nor anyone else ever created.

The concern for planet earth as a human environment has broad political implications as well. The national government, the modern state that is the political expression of the industrial revolution, remains the fundamental form of governance on the planet. So pervasive is the nationalism of this century that even the one universal organization created to transcend it serves as one of its main purposes as a forum, perhaps the only one, in which those countries newly certified as independent can strut their nationhood. Yet while every barren archipelago or tenuous tribal truce seeks admission to the club of nations, those who have long been members are flirting with other forms of governance. The European Economic Community is already a more significant entity economically than any of its national members, including the printers of the most stable currencies on that continent. The development of a European Parliament is a logical and probably natural step in matching the political reality to the economic. In the Middle East it is the OPEC and its ministers, and not the individual member states who set the policy for the region and, Lord help us, the oil-consuming world as well. Throughout the world -- in the East, in. the Americas, the authority of the central national government is being seriously questioned. In the two most recent revolutions against a central authority, it has been not political nationalism that was the moving force, but a religious fundamentalism in Iran and economic discontent in Nicaragua.

Nationalism may not yet be fully replaced by supranational or regional organizations, but the nation-state may go the way of the city-state. Already, it is the multinational corporation with worldwide interests that increasingly influences our material lives. The international flow of commodities, capital, and to an extent, labor and resources, rises despite all efforts of national government intervention and regulation. The market, whether for spot oil in Rotterdam or for harvest labor across the Rio Grande, -or cocaine from Colombia, or in the swap shops and flea markets all over the country, is as real and often as significant as the official governmental efforts to regulate, control, or even prohibit them. The irony is that while national governments occupy a larger and larger role in their respective economies, the nation itself has become less of an economic unit and perforce a less significant one as well.

The revulsion against the big, growing, opportunistic nation-state is evidenced by the near total comdemnation of imperialism as an international expression. Domestically, there is an equal distaste for the big and powerful central government. The disciples of "small is beautiful" proclaim the virtues of decentralization, appropriate rather than powerful technology; limited authority and modest public goals. I happen to think that small is small and beautiful is beautiful and that the easy equation of the two is a dangerous distortion of values, as well as a diminuation of the human spirit. If there is good, than more good is better, as well as bigger; and if there is evil, confining it to a small size may concentrate rather than reduce its virulence.

But despite my own misgivings about the decentralist approach, we should recognize it can serve as a welcome antidote to what is often monopoly authority by central, national governments that wield unchallenged political supremacy. It was this force of nationalism, as its zenith in the first century of Progress and Poverty, which hindered the acceptance of its thesis.

For while millions of people throughout the world read and understood the truth of Henry George, national governments recognized the threat of universal freedom to their unrivalled power. While Communist revolutions succeeded in part by seizing and then enlarging the central power of the national state, the truly radical ideas of Henry George were taken up by occasional reformers and idealists, who like Henry George himself, wanted only to better the lives of the people and not take power themselves. Monopoly is as much an enemy of George as he was of it. Big government, big business, even big unions were not so much his concern as the exclusive powers each may wield over human life.

Those who interpret George as anti-labor, anti-government, or anti-bigness, per say, are probably missing his point, which was, simply, freedom, not from regulation or organization or collective action, but to provide for human betterment through the reward of productivity. All factors in such productivity would have their appropriate role at the expense of the disproportionate benefits claimed by those who themselves produce nothing at all. To the extent that monopolists of natural resources have influenced big government, big business, and big labor, that influence must be fought, but we must never forget that the enemy is exclusive control and not size, and the goal is freedom for all and not the domination of one by another.

In. the new climate, there may be a better chance for freedom to emerge, but not if we subscribe to a new tyranny replacing the old nationalism, whether it is the tyranny of ethnicity, religion, tradition, or any other claim to legitimacy over exclusive access to national resources. The community, whether it is a collective farm in Israel, an exclusionary suburb here, or a commune of returnees to the land, may be just as monopolistic of its natural resources in its own small way as the nation states we may deplore. Rather more so, since communities are far more likely to be homogeneous than countries, and therefore feel justified in keeping out people who are unlike themselves. Japan, a community as well as a nation, has so far built a society exclusively for the Japanese, finding it impossible to accept, let alone, integrate, fellow Asians in need. Is it because Japan is a nation or the Japanese are a people that their society seems so cohesive and their economy a success? In either case, size alone is no indicator of virtue or lack of it among nations or communities, peoples or businesses.

Beyond the supremacy of industrialism and nationalism the first century of Henry George was overwhelmed by the achievements of science. History tells us that Darwin's exposition of his natural law so captured the enlightened imagination of the nineteenth century that even social reformers with little or no training in the sciences sought biological evidence to bolster their respective arguments for human betterment. George himself makes ample references to enormous strides in human productivity as a result of scientific exploration and discovery. The very exposition of his masterpiece is a reverential recreation of a scientific inquiry. The early chapters in which the economic factors are defined and postulated, and the classic theories are dutifully reported and analyzed, could probably be submitted as a treatise in partial fulfillment of the requirements of an advanced degree even today. But when the moral passion of the social pamphleteer and reformer bursts out of this cloak of objective inquiry, the work takes flight and carries us with it. There is something indeed apologetic about the willingness of George to subdue his own fervor in favor of strict scientific inquiry. Only scientific truth was truth, Q.E.D. The rule of reason, the life of the mind, the prodigious victories won by human thought, made the scientists and scientific method the absolute, and the only profession and process of knowing. George was not much different than most of the thinking men of his age, and indeed of ours, in his respect for, and obeisance to, science.

In our attempts to teach Progress and Poverty over the years, Henry George Schools have made that same genuflection, setting theory upon theory, definition upon definition logical order, offering our course as if it were a specific, objective presentation of physics, geology or logic. It was felt that treating the material as a science would make us respectable, we hoped, and perhaps even more acceptable to those who presumably set the intellectual standards. Al just as George himself never was granted academic respectability, either he at Berkeley or anywhere else, the teaching of his works has likewise been relegated largely to the academic underground, while Keynes, Marx, the classic economists, and the Austrians are all duly recognized in the curricula of higher learning. Much as we may rail at the slight -- and it's by no means a universal one - there is a certain justice involved. For science was not the long suit of Henry George. His strength and the abiding power of Progress and Poverty lie in the moral passion and fervent commitment that imbued his vision. These are qualities not often shared by practitioners of the dismal science, or indeed of any science at all. Cool reason, object logic, dispassionate inquiry, perhaps a trace of scholarly irony at most, these are the traits that commend themselves to faculty committees and editors of learned journals. Strong beliefs, deeply held and expressed wit singular devotion - these are the hallmarks of the prophet, often the artist sometimes even a preacher, but never a pendant. In the attempt to legitimize our teachings by aping the schools and the universities, by claiming for Henry George the validity of science, we have stripped his message of the beauty of art and the profundity of wisdom. For the simple truth - that the individual is entitled to everything he creates, but that which is not made by man belongs to all - is at once accessible and innately understood by anyone who will hear. Laws, definitions, and theorems of rent or marginality, of labor or capital, can never be a compelling or persuasive as the fundamental message itself.

Perhaps in this next century of Progress and Poverty the supremacy of science, logic and reasoning will give way to other forms of cognition. Feeling, sensing, turning inward may all be possible precursors of the war against scientific knowledge. The fear of new technology tells of the distrust of application of science and even its ultimate usefulness. The shift in foe from objective reality to subjective concerns, popularly termed "the Me generation", where knowing a lot is a form of nasty elitism, but if it fee good do it - all suggest a retreat from past beliefs in progress through increased scientific knowledge.

Even science itself has blurred the sharp edge of its former certainty, looking to the mystical big "M" of Einstein, rather than the inevitably falling apple of Newton. A new conciliation between science and religion was the subject of a major conference at M.I.T. this summer. A century ago such an exchange might have found theologians attempting to explain Biblical miracles in scientific terms, like how the Ten Plagues were various natural disasters, how a solar eclipse and not Josuah made the sun stand still, an how the Lord's seven days of creation were really eons of uncalendared time in which biological evolution could have indeed taken place. But today science is more concerned with its neglect of the ineffable than religion is with its disdain of the rationally explainable. We have come to accept the likelihood that knowledge and faith can and do coexist without one having to bow to the other.

Perhaps in such a climate we might begin to let Henry George out of the closet, letting him all hang out with his trembling passion, bare of the embellishments of reason and the trappings of science. I am not suggesting that Henry George be reincarnated as a guru for yet another sect of transcendentalists or meditators; indeed; my own background and training makes me personally uncomfortable with the overt retreat from reality and relegating of reason to an inferior role. Law, logic, and learning were all very much at the core of the Jewish tradition in which I was educated. Even the non-rational aspects of that tradition, the joyous frenzy of Hasidism and the abstruse, numerical mysteries of the Kabala, were kind of given their own place, one for song and dance at festivals and weddings, the other an esoteric pastime for one's old age. Yet it is the fearful demons and mystical romances of Isaac Singer that won the most recent and only Nobel Prize for a writer of that tradition.

If this then be the age of feeling and fancy, George has much to say, at least as much as he did in his own and our own earlier times. The vision of a world in tune with its own natural law, the possibility of genuine freedom for all, a planet enriched by its natural increase and not impoverished by greater need - all can appeal as much to inchoate feelings as they should and have to forceful minds. Henry George and our teaching of his major work should do well in this coming century. Even George hinted at this in his last chapter, when he spoke in terms of a significant, new revelation at once personal and subjective, a theme to which he, alas, never returned. Perhaps the next century will take us to where he was going.

We have noted the passing of a century of industrialism, nationalism and science, and the possibility of greater acceptance of George with that passing But history does not stride evenly across the globe. There are pre-industrial societies, communities that are well below subsistence, for whom the advent of enterprise of any kind would be the greatest imaginable boon. There are areas in which family, tribal, and ethnic conflicts could be reasonably solved by a new nationalism; and while imperialism is no longer fashionable, it still exists, with much of the world's population subject to economic if not political domination from afar. And while scientific progress is no longer an incontrovertible article of secular faith, thank goodness not everyone is laid back. The possibility of increasing human satisfactions through knowledge, application and demonstration remains one of the more hopeful traits of our curious species. All of which means that we must continue to do whatever we can in the economic, political and intellectual arena; in which we live. Research and communication as well as literary and artistic recognition; philosophical discourse and spiritual understanding; traditional and non-traditional approaches to teaching will have to be employed. There is room for just about every kind of Georgist in this next century of Progress and Poverty.