1969/11/01 by David M. Ricci · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Political Economy and Marxism #Economic Theory and Institutions #Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory
paper · doi:10.1086/385584
During the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in Britain, Fabians stood out among socialists as diverging from the Marxian view. Fabians rejected Karl Marx's analysis of surplus value, the most widely accepted and influential socialistic theory of capitalist exploitation. In its place the Fabian Society expounded an entirely distinct notion of exploitation, a radical theory of rent. That theory led to a program for the electoral overthrow of bourgeois liberal societies and the creation of democratic socialism. The Fabian theory of rent – an ethical touchstone for evaluating the wealth and income of every man – is the subject of this essay. When the theory is abstracted from Fabian writings and fully elaborated, it becomes a blueprint for building a socialist society. That such a society could be founded upon an understanding of rent should be noteworthy to scholars interested in the philosophical origins of Fabianism. Moreover, the point may also be generally significant since it demonstrates that a socialist society may have a non-Marxian genesis and a nonauthoritarian end, two propositions that require constant reiteration in an American political climate which, as Louis Hartz has pointed out, is predominantly liberal. I For reasons indicated below, this analysis of rent theory centers upon the years from 1887 to the 1920s. To begin with the term itself, in this period the word “rent” appeared often in Fabian and non-Fabian writings alike and carried two possible meanings. In everyday affairs rent was money received by an owner for the use of his land or goods; thus one paid rent for a farm, an apartment, a truck, or an adding machine.