At 21:18 09/10/99 -0400, you wrote:
>
>On Sat, 09 Oct 1999 22:45:04 +0100 Chris Burford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
writes:
>>A tax on land, ideally full ground rent, would be the most progressive of
>>all. It would fall on the landed bourgeoisie, it would promote
>>economic efficiency in the use of this scarce resource, it would provide a
>>source of income for the state that would not fall on working people, it
would
>>weaken one wing of the bourgeoisie, without promoting the other wings to
come
>>to its rescue.
>
>It sounds like Chris has been reading Henry George. Whatever happened
>to that once favorite cause of Britsh radical - land nationalization? As
>I recall even J.S. Mill in the last century was sympathetic.
>
>Jim F
Yes, I have not been reading Henry George, but I know a man who has, and he
has influenced me considerably.
If others are interested, I am slightly more inclined to debate this on
marxism thaxis than on the more voluminous LBO-talk. We need a more
sophisticated understanding of an inter-relationship between a smaller
group whose members would wish to attempt at least to think in marxist
ways, and a wider grouping that is more broadly "left" in orientation.
Yes, if there is anything to the arguments to which I and Jim F have
referred, we have to explain a historical curiosity that they have been
neglected for almost 100 years.
Even though Lenin visited the garden city of Letchworth and such concepts
were current in the first decade of the Russian revolution.
I suppose the short answer is that the radical movement for land
nationalisation was swamped by what came to be seen as a "Stalinist" model
of state centralised socialism. It would, however, have fitted in well with
the mixed economy that Lenin seems to have anticipated for a generation in
his 1923 article "On Cooperation."
Chris Burford
London
BTW Jim, I think you may have sent your reply without wordwrap in place.
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