Review of the Book

Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings Of Frank Chodorov,
edited, with an Introduction by Charles H. Hamilton

Mark A. Sullivan

[Reprinted from Land & Liberty, March-April, 1984]

THIS BOOK brings together over 45 essays by one of the "founders" of the post-World War II "liberation movement" in the United States.

Calling himself an individualist and a radical (he objected to be being labelled a conservative), Chodorov's first and major source of inspiration was Henry George, the American social economist who advocated a single tax on land values.

As editor Charles H. Hamilton points out, George's Progress and Poverty was to give him a Weltanschauung that influenced all his writings."

In addition to serving as director of the Henry George School of Social Science in New York from 1937 to 1942, Chodorov had earlier been involved with the political wing of the Georgist movement, the Single Tax Party. The failure of political action, and the influence of Albert Jay Nock who "believed in the single tax but didn't advocate it", led Chodorov to embrace education as the way to change society. "There cannot be a 'good' society until there are 'good' men."

Running throughout Fugitive Essays, which are culled mainly from his post-W.W. II writings for Human Events and his own journal Analysis, is the classical economic analysis of Henry George; that labour employs capital on land to produce wealth; and that when land is monopolised, labourers cannot employ themselves and must accept low wages.

Coupled with this is the anti-State position of Nock who was in turn inspired by The State by the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer.

According to Oppenheimer. there are only two ways of acquiring wealth: to produce and exchange it with other producers -- or to steal it from those who do produce it.

• The first, the "economic means", is the way of free people with access to land and a free market.
  
• The second, the "political means", is the way of the State, which has its origins in conquest and is the organisation of privileged classes to maintain and extend this exploitation of the producers of wealth.
  

Protecting the monopolisation of land (natural resources and valuable sites) is the chief business of the State, along with upholding subsidiary monopolies in other areas such as trade and finance. This, and not the free play of a genuine free market (which has yet to be tried), is the cause of what is often referred to as the capitalist exploitation of labour, according to Chodorov.

FOR CHODOROV & Co., however, this analysis was no call to violent revolution, nor ever to reform within the existing political structure. If the State is the prime evil, as he argues in nearly every one of his Fugitive Essays, the solution lies in abolishing the State -- not in using it to correct maladies it has itself generated.

Thus Chodorov advocated education and non-participation (especially not voting) in government. Eventually, he hoped, people would come to know their rights as natural and innate, not granted by the State, and would refuse to support it by refusing to pay taxes.

Taxation is the root of all evil. Chodorov argued, because it robs producers who have a natural right to keep what they produce, and because it is used to support a system of State-granted privileges which also rob producers.

Trace an injustice to its cause and you will find another injustice. The burgeoning community which necessitates batter streets, a sanitation department, traffic policemen, a park for the children, and so on, brings about an economic betterment which, peculiarly enough, does not accrue to the population as a whole ... Competition between bankers and storekeepers for the use of . . . sites has greatly enhanced their value. This value arises not from the services rendered by these entrepreneurs but from the presence of the population they serve.

It would seem logical that this value - which we call land rent -should go to defray the expenses of these common services. However, under our prevailing land-tenure system, this economic increment accrues to the erstwhile farmer who holds title to the sites, or maybe to the banker who holds a mortgage on them. The economic betterment which the community as a whole creates is diverted to individuals who return nothing for it to the general fund of wealth. This is the injustice which fosters the injustice of taxation. When we examine privileges, we find that they are economic advantages granted by the political power. and political power is born in and thrives on taxation- If taxation were abolished . . . the cost of maintaining the necessary social services of a community would fall on rent. . , and the privilege of collecting rent would vanish.

Along with the privilege of pocketing land rent, which "is income for which no service to society is rendered, and is collectible only because the State makes it possible", all other monopoly privileges which exploit and discourage production would fall with the abolition of taxation which feeds the privilege-granting apparatus of the State.

For Chodorov, the solution to all political and economic problems, including fundamental ones of war and peace, lies with society and not the State.

Echoing fellow radical Randolph Bourne, who wrote "War is the health of the State". Chodorov's solution to the problem of war is the same as his solution to that of the Stale: abolish all taxes and special privileges, allow genuine free trade to flourish and bring societies closer together.

CHODOROV'S staunch anti-war stance led him into not a few conflicts during his career, as Hamilton points out in his biographical Introduction. He alienated many fellow Georgists for his isolationist position during the Second World War, and later conservative associates whose anti-communism began to take precedence over their claimed anti-Statism.

Convinced that the anti-communism hysteria of the '50s would lead to a militarisation, bureaucratisation and, ironically, "communisation" of America, Chodorov always argued in defence of the communisls's "right to be wrong." He opposed, in several essays, military conscription and the deploying of U.S. troops to sundry parts of the world to suppress Marxism. Bad ideas could be fought only with better ideas and he added, according to Hamilton, that "in advocating interventionism against international communisim. one was advocating killing people. That usually meant conquest and imperialism."

Needless to say, Chodorov's influence upon the rising conservative movement in the U.S. was negligible, as can be seen by the performance of the current conservative government in power in Washington. While administration policy-makers always tend to view their function to be to keep the system working, they beg the question: working for whom?

In the 400-plus pages that comprise Fugitive Essays, Frank Chodorov repeatedly asks: Should our economic system work for the benefit of those who produce the wealth, or should the wealth be siphoned off via taxation, rent, and other monopoly exactions upheld in the final analysis by the force of the State, causing gross inequalities, poverty, and eventually war?

The relevance of this question to the problems of the so-called Third World are apparent. That the players in world politics have not got beyond their pro- or anti-communism, to see the real problems involved and the possible solutions, as Frank Chodorov was able to, may be the ultimate tragedy of our time.

One can also suspect that ideological warfare masks real vested interests of power-brokers and privileged monopolists, similar to the ones Frank Chodorov so well took to task in Fugitive Essays.