Thomas Paine had many fans among the rah-rah capitalism crowd, so I thought it would be worth considering one of his later works, Agrarian Justice, to see what that tells us about our current situation. https://twitter.com/_chriszzzz/status/1247967843842490368

Paine published Agrarian Justice in 1797, though he held off publication for more than a year because he was afraid it was too radical. In it, he elaborates on a key accusation against the crown he made earlier in “Common Sense”: “engrossing the commons.”

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“Engrossing” was the Medieval English crime of monopolizing a commodity and driving up prices, that it, collecting monopoly rents. (Engrossing, along with forestalling and regrating, were collectively known as Badger Laws and were typically associated with food sales.)

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The commons were, of course, the lands which were effectively owned by the public, open to use by anyone at the cost only of their labor. While they were formally owned by feudal landlords, the public owned use or “usufruct” rights.

4/ https://twitter.com/andyindc1/status/1319743912974704646

Paine’s critique, then, was of the Enclosure movement which was still ongoing, though winding down, at the time of his writing. Enclosing land entailed the forcible privatization of the commons by the state—the expulsion of its inhabitants and its sale to private owners.

5/ https://twitter.com/andyindc1/status/1314717517747826688

Paine was not a revolutionary; his ideal was not a social revolution, an erasure of the class system. But Paine did recognize that the class system was the product of arbitrary relations to the means of production, not a divinely imposed order.

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Here’s the meat of his argument: land was not a commodity, but rather the natural, shared inheritance of every person:

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https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html

To Paine, the privatization of land was an injustice that warped society and the economy, and he proposed a system of taxing the wealthy to fund a universal basic income to compensate people for the loss of their natural rights:

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Paine did not challenge Enclosure; he recognized that ship had sailed. But he did seek to reverse those effects by taxing the few who had benefited from Enclosure to compensate the many who had lost. Most of the pamphlet is given over to specifically calculating the payments.

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If you can’t return to people their direct land rights, the argument goes, then you can indirectly return to them their *usufruct* rights through annual, freehold payments. In this, Paine anticipated modern UBI arguments.

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Paine was hardly alone in this understanding of the effects of Enclosure. His contemporary, Adam Smith, devoted chapter 11 of Wealth of Nations to the same concept, that the privatization of land inevitably drove inefficient monopoly rents.

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That is, if you privatize something people need to live, then the price will naturally reflect the maximum people can afford to pay before they start dying, not an efficient equilibrium point.

12/ https://twitter.com/andyindc1/status/1293032025952325633

Yet to the extent that we consider these men in common discourse, it’s to remember Paine as the author of Common Sense, an intellectual father of American independence and libertarian ideals, and Adam Smith as the intellectual father of capitalism. Why is that?

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The easy explanation is that these facets of their work have simply been memory-holed by our ideological state apparatuses, a selective editing of history to preserve a dominant ideology. That is, our society just ignores the parts that don’t fit what we want to believe.

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But I think it’s both deeper and subtler than that—I think the Enclosure movement and the reaction to it have been so successfully erased from our collective memory that these discussions simply don’t register to most modern readers.

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For example, in Nancy Isenberg‘s otherwise brilliant history of class in America, “White Trash,” she interprets Paine’s “engrossing the commons” solely in the context of the monarchy infringing on the rights of the House of Commons, with no mention of its other meaning.

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For the intellectuals of the time like Paine and Smith, enclosing land was as controversial as privatizing the air we breathe would be today. Remember the pushback when Bush II tried to privatize social security? It was like that.

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But we’ve collectively lost any sense of that context, of the salience of that issue, and so we struggle to understand what we’re reading. For many, it simply does not compute.

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It reminds me of Michael Hudson’s description of the difficulty modern scholars have in understanding ancient Mesopotamian texts. Hudson identified regular debt forgiveness as a central pillar of Mesopotamian economies and societies...

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...but modern scholars tended to reject this at first, because they’re so embedded in the ideology of capitalism that regular debt erasures simply did not compute. They refused to believe what they were reading actually meant what the authors wrote.

20/ https://michael-hudson.com/2017/01/the-land-belongs-to-god/

The Enclosure Movement and the privatization of common land was a radical departure from everything that came before it, a revolution of the rich against the poor in the last days of feudalism, which ultimately birthed modern capitalism.

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Writers like Paine genuinely struggled with how to manage the effects of this revolution, what Polanyi called the Great Transformation. But we lack the context for this, which is how we end up with exchanges like this:

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Paine might not have been a socialist, but he certainly argued for policies to address the worst effects of capitalism that he’d be considered a communist—if people could actually read and contextualize his work.

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CC: @TalentlessJoe @JohnRad15 @landrights4all