Concerning John Huer’s Sept. 5 column “All men are created socialist” and David Graves’ letter in response [“All men are not created socialist“], I find it an interesting exercise to speculate about how founding parents might view socialism had they lived longer. Yet reading over the Declaration of Independence, I see nothing I recognize as socialist. The grievances have to do with who has power over the colony’s governance not with who has economic equality or control of the means of production.
If I had to pick the Founding Father closest to socialist thought, I’d choose Thomas Paine. In particular, I’d cite his pamphlet “Agrarian Justice.” I wouldn’t call it socialist, but there are some parallels.
First of all, Paine was highly critical of the status quo, feeling that the misery of the poor and the degree of inequality were an indictment of his civilization. Then, somewhat paralleling Karl Marx’s historical dialectic, but with that time’s state of nature framing, he states that no person should be worse off in the agrarian system of the day than they would have been in a hypothetical state of nature. This reminds me of the view that 19th century capitalism left some more miserable than they might have been as serfs in the Middle Ages.
From there, he has a bit of a go at property. He separates the idea of property being your due from cultivation, the work you do on the land, from the land itself, which is a natural part of the world that, in his view, has universal, common ownership. His view is that cultivators should rightly own their efforts but that the necessary correspondence in space of the products of cultivation and the land itself creates an injustice to those deprived of land they might themselves use to make a living. This he takes as a jumping-off point for recommending a kind of guaranteed income funded by an inheritance tax. His hopeful outcome: “with this aid they could buy a cow, and implements to cultivate a few acres of land; and instead of becoming burdens upon society, which is always the case, where children are produced faster than they can be fed, would be put in the way of becoming useful and profitable citizens.”
I’d parallel this idea that land is needed to thrive with Marx’s idea that the proletariat needs control of the means of production to escape their chains and do so. But did Paine get all the way there? More relevant than the words communism or socialism not existing then (but what did the Shakers call their common ownership?) is the fact that 19th century industrialism hadn’t really arrived to revolutionary America. So Paine does write, “in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence.” But note the words “working hand.” This is very much Sturbridge Village territory, not Lawrence Textile Mill territory.
We could speculate how Paine might have reacted if he’d seen the same factory conditions that Friedrich Engels did. But we haven’t that luxury, only his own words, and those I think come up short from reaching Marxists’ desire to eradicate the concept of private property entirely. Remember, in Agrarian Justice he does give the cultivator the right of property to his or her improvements. His estate tax to fund the universal income is only a fraction of the inheritance, not a complete seizing of the passed-on wealth.
In reading Paine I like to imagine him as an adherent to the other major branch of modern socialism, the one I’m more curious about myself. Did he abhor hierarchy and authority? Would a facet of his desired equality be that we always interact with each other as equals rather than, for example, as boss and employee or customer and server?
Lastly, this is an interesting thought exercise, but it’s harmful to our reason to support our views with appeals to past authority. And more harmful still, as past red scares have demonstrated, is to judge which ideas Americans are allowed to entertain.
Michael Small lives in Greenfield.