Leo Tolstoy on The Land Question

Ethel Wedgwood

[Reprinted from the Preface to the booklet, Tolstoy on Land and Slavery, published by the Land Values Publication Department, London, 1909]

Tolstoy deals with the Taxation of Land Values chiefly with regard to Agricultural land, and this for two reasons: --

In the first place, he is most immediately concerned with the Russian population, the majority of whom have never lost their direct connection with the soil as a means of livelihood. Living in a great wheat and grass-growing country, where imports are only of secondary necessity, it is literally possible for each individual to feed himself and his family by what his own labour raises from the soil. And this way of life Tolstoy regards as the most moral, sane, and healthy.

Secondly, regarding town life and labour as largely vicious, he will not discuss the means of making it more comfortable, and therefore; more attractive. The life of factory hands, shop-workers, and most of the employment which is created by town habits, he views as a slavery, not only evil under its present conditions, but in its essence harmful, being spent chiefly in "unproductive" labour, of which the results only go to increase the luxury of the wealthy, and which has a depraving effect both on worker and consumer. In his opinion any attempt to make this slavery pleasanter only increases its harmfulness.

Therefore, of that side of Henry George's scheme of which we hear so much amongst English land-taxers: the opening up of mineral land and town sites, and the vast indirect economic consequences in the cheapening of capital and the raising of wages, -- of all this there is practically nothing in the following collection; and it is only a hint here and there amongst his writings which shows that Tolstoy perceives, but deliberately ignores, this side of the question.

Tolstoy regards access to the land, not so much as the means of improving the material well-being of the people, -- (to him a state of comparative poverty is the preferable one), -- but as the only way of securing their physical and moral liberty, -- the only escape from industrial slavery, -- a slavery all the more noxious when accompanied by the luxury of the parasite.

It is at once obvious that Tolstoy is not merely a "Land-taxer," but a very thorough "Single-taxer." Indeed, as an anarchist he is fundamentally opposed to "taxation" in any form, and would regard the "land-tax" simply as rent paid by the present holders of land to the community on the implicit assumption that the community naturally own the whole land of the country; and the injustice of levying forced contributions on the fruits of any man's labour is no less apparent to him than the injustice of paying to individuals rent which is due to all for the use of what is the property of all.

Finally, it is in a voluntary "return to the land" that Tolstoy hopes as the surest and only method of destroying money-slavery.

Thus he emphasises in various places each of the three cardinal aims of the pure single-taxer --

1. The restoration to the people of the land by which alone they live and whose value their presence and labour create.

2. The freeing of all industry and improvements, so that every worker may enjoy the full value of his work.

3. The destruction of the power of capitalists, economically, by providing an opportunity for free labour as an alternative to labour for wages, -- and morally, by gradually restoring the taste for wholesome, unartificial life.

The first of these aims will appeal most to Socialists.

The second to individualists.

The third to philanthropists.

The genuine single-taxer alone will find himself in equal accord with all three.