Friday, March 6, 2015

Sean Monahan — Reading Paine from the Left

Weekend reading.
When Thomas Paine passed away at his small farm in New Rochelle, NY, in 1809, he was impoverished and largely reviled. 
In the United States, then undergoing a dramatic religious revival, he was slandered as an “infidel” and a “drunk” for his attacks on Christianity and his rumored personal moral depravity. This, on top of his tirades against George Washington, the Federalists, andslavery, had decimated his reputation in the country he helped found. 
Across the Atlantic, Paine was condemned as a traitor to the Crown and a dangerous rabble-rouser for his passionate defense of the French Revolution in The Rights of Man, convicted in absentia for seditious libel, and burned in effigy throughout Britain. No single person was seen as a greater threat to the political establishments of his day than Paine, both in the monarchies of Europe and in his own American Republic. 
As a cult of personality around the “Founding Fathers” grew over the course of US history, the author of Common Sense was notably excluded. For about two hundred years, Paine’s image in mainstream American circles was utterly tarnished: Teddy Roosevelt’s view of him as a “filthy little atheist” sums up the prevailing sentiment. It’s no surprise that decades earlier Abraham Lincoln kept his admiration of Paine quiet. 
Nonetheless, interest in Paine spiked during periods of crisis and democratic upheaval in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, and things changed when Ronald Reagan, in his 1980 acceptance speech for the Republican Party’s nomination for president, quoted the great revolutionary’s inspiring promise, “We have it our power to begin the world over again.” Since then, Paine has been readmitted into the lineup of US founders, and has recently been made the unlikely poster boy of the reactionary right, most notably by media personality Glenn Beck. 
Unlikely, because Paine was a consistent advocate of a strong federal government and also a sharp critic of economic inequality and poverty who designed the world’s first fully fleshed-out scheme of social welfare provision. Beyond that, he introduced millions to a radical critique of private property and class society, and pointed to democratic politics as the solution....
Thomas Paine not only conceived of the welfare state in some detail, he also provided for a universal job guarantee.
Perhaps most shockingly, this [welfare] scheme would provided for a network of public work houses in which anyone would be admitted for public employment with full room and board “without inquiring who or what they are,” where anyone is free to “stay as long, or as short time, or come as often as he choose.”
Paine viewed socio-economic problems as fundamentally distributive.
In Rights of Man Part II, Paine shows that society — specifically, “aristocratical” society — creates poverty: “One extreme produces the other: to make one rich many must be made poor; neither can the system be supported by other means.”
The solution was political.
For Paine, the cause of political democracy is inseparable from the economic demands of the poor, and the solution is democratic government: the poor can escape their wretched condition only through politics.
Paine also argued for a tax on land rent to be universally distributed.
He goes on to argue, like John Locke had, that in the state of nature the earth and all its bounties were “the common property of the human race.” But unlike Locke, Paine insists that this right is not forfeited when land is claimed as private property for the sake of cultivation — “it is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property.” 
He explains that such private property is justified because cultivation so greatly increases the productivity of the soil, but that in “all those who have been thrown out of their natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property” are owed compensation for that loss by right. 
“Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated land, owes to the community a ground-rent . . . for the land which he holds,” the funds from which would go towards a new scheme of social security. Again, Paine insists, “it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for.” 
The money raised by this ground rent would be distributed out as an equal payment to “every person, rich or poor” on turning twenty-one, guaranteeing to each citizen a modest inheritance, “means to prevent their becoming poor.” This proposal has often been interpreted as the first suggestion for a universal basic income, but that doesn’t seem to be exactly what Paine had in mind.
Much more in the article, but you get the idea.
The American revolutionary’s formula was groundbreaking: exploitation and inequality are the disease, and democratic politics is the remedy.
Jacobin
Reading Paine from the Left
Sean Monahan

1 comment:

Dan Lynch said...

Re: land tax. In those days America's economy was predominantly agricultural, and the wealthiest Americans, like George Washington, were generally large landowners. At the time, a land tax could have taken a big dent out of the 1%.

Today, land as a form of wealth takes a back seat to intellectual property, financial assets, and business equity.

I have a hard time getting that across to George-ists.

But agree with the author that Paine was ahead of his time and does not get nearly enough credit.

The well-to-do founding fathers allied with progressives like Paine to garner popular support for the rebel cause. Then once the war was over, Paine and his progressive notions were cast aside. There is a lesson there.