Tolstoy's interpretation of money and property

by Milivoy S. Stanoyevich

I

When two Greek law-givers, Lycurgus and Solon, imposed their laws upon the Greek nation, they both had the same purpose—to establish the equal right of all men to the use of land and other properties. Plutarch, speaking of Lycurgus, observes that at that time “some were so poor that they had no inch of land, and others, of whom there were but few, so wealthy that they possessed all”. Lycurgus persuaded the citizens to restore the land to common use, and they did so. Solon had no other end in giving laws to the Athenians but to set up justice among all his fellow-citizens. He says that ambition of the rich knows no bounds, that they respect neither sacred property nor public treasure, plundering all in defiance of the holy laws of justice. “I had commanded the wealthiest and most powerful to refrain from harming the weak,” says he further, “I had protected great and humble with a double buckler, equally strong both sides, without giving more to one than to the other. My advice has been disdained. Today they are punished for it”[50].

Taken as a whole this doctrine of Lycurgus and Solon is not in accordance with Tolstoy’s teaching on laws and property. But nevertheless it shows clearly that law and property are two indivisible civil institutions which can not exist separately[51]. Tolstoy is in opposition to both of them, law and property, because they offend against humanity, especially against the commandment not to resist evil by force.

Under the term of property here must be understood private or individual property. The notion of property, however, is not clear either in ancient or modern writers. In the course of human evolution property has many times changed its form and its substance, its meaning and its scope. In the societies that preceded ours, property embodied itself in a form of oppression which has been definitely abolished once for all. As it is known slavery was one of the forms of private property[52]. In Greece and Rome there were public slaves, i.e. slaves of the city, and slaves of the state; but most of the slaves were simply a part of the patrimony of the citizens. Masters had the right to use them for cultivation of land, or to give them away as presents, or to sell them, or to leave them to their heirs. They had the legal right of imprisoning and fettering the slaves, or separating them from their wives, or forbidding them to marry. The slaves were part of the master’s private ownership, and he disposed of them as he pleased. In the Roman laws, and also in the laws of Athens, we find that a father could sell his son. This was because the father might dispose of all the property of the family, and the son might be looked upon as property, since his labor was a source of income[53]. The best Greek and Roman philosophers saw nothing unlawful in that. Their conceptions of the respective rights and duties of masters and slaves would not clash in the least with the ideas even now in equatorial Africa, and some other European colonies elsewhere.

Between these old institutions of slavery and modern capitalistic systems, Tolstoy was not able to find any great differences. To him the institution of slavery existed even in his time only in other form than it was in Greece, India, and Rome. And the reason why this slavery existed lies in the institution of private property. If it be true, Tolstoy suggests, that property has its origin only in labor, why so many combats, revolutions, and wars? Why so many luxuries, robberies, and debaucheries? Are these vices not originated in personal or private property? Is it true that property and money represent labor? By no means, answers our philosopher. Property may be represented by money, and vice versa, but money has in our time completely lost that desirable significance as a representative of labor; such a significance it has only exceptionally, for as a general rule it has become a right or a possibility for exploiting the labor of others. Money is a new form of slavery, which differs from the old only in being impersonal, and in freeing people from the human relations of the slave[54].

In a revolutionary article, To the Working People, written in 1902, three years before the Russian Revolution, Tolstoy attempted to open the eyes of the people stating that they were deprived of the land which they formerly possessed and were forced to come to the cities, as wage-workers, or practically, as slaves. The working people in manufacturing cities are in complete slavish dependence on their masters. These slaves may be liberated from the chains in which they are fettered in no way, except by the abolition of private and capitalistic property, that is, giving the land to the people who work, and not to the people who live by the unearned increment. He adds that rural laborers have nothing to do with socialistic doctrinaires who propose the diminution of hours of work and raising of wages, by strikes, unions, and childish processions with flags on the first of May. They need not send into parliaments the representatives who fight there “about words, with words, and for words”, as sometimes Lassalle reproached the “bourgeois” representatives. The working men who leave the land and live by factory labor must find some other means to rid themselves of the slavery. They should ask and demand of their masters and rulers the right to settle on the land, and to work there. In demanding this, they will not be demanding something not their own, not belonging to them, but the restitution of their most unquestionable and inalienable right, which is inherent in every living being, to live on the land and get their sustenance from it, without asking permission from anyone else to do so. To be sure, masters and rulers will not give the people the land which they demand. Governments are in power to prevent this claim. But governments have no power without police and army, and who are the constituents of this army and police? People, workingmen. When these laborers refuse to serve the unchristian and brutal commands of the governments, then people can divide and take as much land as they need for cultivation and their living.

Should it not be robbery to take the possessions of people who accumulated them for hundreds and thousands of years? Yes, but how did these upper classes accumulate their property and riches? Tolstoy replies on this question together with his teacher Proudhon: They heaped up their properties by theft from other people. La propriété c’est le vol, said Proudhon[55]. Sobstvenost est koren zla (Property is the root of evil), continues his disciple, by the same axiomatic language as the master[56].

Is this statement categorical? From the standpoint of Proudhon and Tolstoy it is, but from the point of view of economists this doctrine is at fault. The Russian iconoclast, Tolstoy, like the American advocate of Single Tax, George, maintains that the land question may be solved simply by restoration of the land to the people who work on it. This is, undoubtedly, the best, the easiest, and quickest way to make private property common and equitable, but what do history and economics say of this quaestio vexata.