Hello Professor, I listened to your interview on Chapo Trap House and related to your experiences with university-taught economics. I am an economics major myself, about to graduate, and also dissatisfied with the limited scope of questions modern economics courses try to answer. My personal search for answers did not bring me to Marx, however. They brought me to Henry George and what I consider a better alternative to the status quo, geoism. To me, geoism lacks what I consider the inherent authoritarianism in Marxism. Those things not created by people, location and natural resources/forces, obviously belong to society as a whole. But the things that take individual motivation and effort to exist, "Capital", should belong to those that create it. Without the profit/wage motive, why should anyone put in the extra effort it takes to do the necessary but more skilled work of organizing production? The only other realistic mechanism I can think of to achieve this is a threat of violence by those who have monopolized power through other means than capitalism. This is why I feel that the only "successful" revolutionary socialist experiments have devolved into dictatorships that suppress political and individual rights. There are no other motivations for an individual to put in the extra effort of skilled labor/effort other than a sense of love and duty to society, which seems like a flimsy thing to hang a whole economic system on. The socialization of natural resources, natural forces, land, and location avoid this issue of motivation. They exist outside the effort of individuals and therefore should not be owned privately. Their value comes from society, and should therefore be returned to it. The private theft of socially created wealth that Henry George describes is a much more compelling theory of inequality and poverty than anything I have read from a Marxist perspective. I will admit I have not dived as deep into Marxism as I have Georgism, but I found it hard to explore Marx thoroughly without that question of authoritarianism constantly in the background of my mind. Do you have an explanation that could prove me wrong? Thank you
Why is Georgism, or geoism, not the correct alternative to modern capitalism?
February 19, 2018
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To “Henry George,” I would note that the problem with socialism/Marxism/communism is not that they are necessarily authoritarian, but that they are necessarily unjust and thus economically inefficient. Capitalism outperforms socialism in material prosperity for working people because when socialists steal factories, there are fewer factories available for production; but when capitalists steal land, the amount of land available for production stays exactly the same. Workers just have to pay the capitalists for permission to use it.
Socialists like Prof Wolff don’t understand that the only reason employers can exploit workers is that landowners first deprived the workers of their options, and thus their bargaining power. The emergence of capitalist exploitation had to await the Enclosures, which forced formerly economically independent working people off the land and into the cities, where they had to offer their labor to employers on whatever terms they could get, or starve to death. Socialist ideology misinterprets this fact of economic history as being caused by private ownership of the factory rather than the land. It thus consists in blaming the factory owner for what the landowner did to the worker — while capitalist ideology consists in blaming the worker for it.
I think the question does have an error, though. The author asks about the
> more skilled work of organizing production?
I think he is confusing what George calls interest with what George calls “wages of superintendence.”
Interest is the reward for allowing others to use their capital.
The wage of superintendence is the reward for allocating that capital well.