Milivoy S. Stanoyevich

“ Yes, money represents labor [19] , there is no doubt about that, but whose, labor of the owner of the money, or of the other people? In that rude stage of society, Tolstoy goes on, when people voluntarily bartered the fruits of their products, or exchanged them through the medium of money, substantially money represented their individual labor. That is incontestably true, and this was only so long as in society where this exchange took place, has not appeared the violence of one man over another in any form: war, slavery, of defence of one’s labor against others. ”

“ On the other hand, capital in the form of money is the most convenient vehicle of production and distribution of wealth. Tolstoy, as a medieval canonist, regards capital and wealth to be shameful and criminal things. He absolutely repudiates the theory that in all production only three factors take part: land, capital and labor. His disconcerting controversy in these matters contains nothing fundamentally new in political economy, but it is an odd manner in which he couches the notion of money in relation to production. ”

“ The author of a work has no right of property in the book he has made; he took the common stock and worked it over, and one man has just as good a right to it as another. If the author is allowed to be the owner of his works, the public are deprived of their rights. The immaterial property in writing is in the same degree a robbery as it is material.
Finally, literary labor does not belong to this question. According to Tolstoy’s interpretation, inventions, arts, literature, and science, are privileged only to the higher classes. ”

“ In the first place, any better political economy does not consider these objects at length, because nobody lays claims on them, as Tolstoy himself avowed this fact [41] . The gifts of nature cannot be appropriated by any one. They are inexhaustible and unlimited as compared with the wants of men. Therefore they never have a direct value to be taken as factors of productions [42] .
In modern industrial society the essential factors of production, among the others, are money and wealth. Wealth is usually regarded as the object of consumption, and as an agent of production [43] . ”

“ Tolstoy is nearer to those theorizers who teach that wealth is power, than to those who define it as commodity. Yet, we should err gravely if we assumed that between Tolstoy’s interpretation of wealth and that of other [Pg 9] economists exists any conformity. For instance Carey defines wealth as the power to command nature. Tolstoy defines it as the power to command other people who have neither wealth nor “the signs” of wealth. “Only in the Pentateuch, wealth is the highest good and reward” [45] . In everyday life wealth is evil, deception and cause of enslavement. ”

“ People regard it, if not as the only wealth, at any rate, as by far the most important form of wealth. They appear to measure the value of all other wealth by the quantity of money that can be obtained in exchange for it. Etre riche, c’est avoir soit de l’argent, soit les moyens de s’en procurer [44] .
Tolstoy of course has no clear distinction either of wealth, or of money. He also confuses these notions, as many authors before and after him. To define wealth exactly is verily a difficult task ”

“ The idea of wealth, however, is often confounded with the idea of money. John S. Mill has justly remarked that most people regard money as wealth, because by that means they provide almost all their necessities. In the same sense is the assertion of the French economist Charles Gide, when he noted that in all times and in all places except among savages, money has occupied an exceptional place in the thoughts and desires of men. ”

“ It seems strange, Tolstoy’s theory runs, that economists do not recognize the natural objects in production of wealth. The power of the sun, water, food, air, and social security, are the requisites of production as much as the land or capital. Education, knowledge, and ability to speak are certain [Pg 7] agents of production. I could fill a whole volume, says Tolstoy, with such omitted factors, and put them at the basis of science [38] . The division into three factors of production is not proper to men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The luxury, immorality and privileged wealth of clergy caused the Reformation, but the Reformation could not restrain the clergy from acquiring immense private possessions. Communism of the Middle Ages was then a pure utopia, as it is today.
In the philosophy of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries the institution of private property was justified by many jurisconsults, reformers, and philosophers who, based their teachings on human nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Assuming that our society may exist without positive laws it could also exist without money. The Russian reformer, Leo N. Tolstoy, is consistent with his doctrine of social reform [1] . According to him enacted law is violence, private property is evil, and subsequently “money as a centre around which economic science clusters” [2] cannot be anything else, but a medium of oppression [3] . Describing the economic nature and offices performed by money, he dissents widely from the politico-economists and disapproves of their teachings on the same subject-matter. ”

“ By its division of the factors of production, proceeds our author, science affirms that the natural condition of the laborer is that unnatural condition in which he is; just as in the ancient world they affirmed, in dividing people into citizens and slaves, that the unnatural condition of the slaves is a natural property of man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The medium of exchange includes money but its content is greater than that of money. All money can be a medium of exchange but all medium of exchange is not money [14] .
Second, at the other extreme is a set of definitions which would restrict money to what may be called commodity money. Those who hold this view insist that money is an article of direct utility with specific value based on its direct services for consumption. They hold that it must have value due to a demand for other than a monetary system. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They can only be unraveled by a most minute and careful study of historical records, interpreted by the aid of the best results of the thought of economists, sociologists, and politicians. And yet, in many ways, Tolstoy aided the solution of these problems. He helped to accelerate it by the example he set of earnestness, altruism, and intense devotion to ideals which he made the creed of future society. ”

“ Tolstoy is, indubitably, influenced by Rousseau, Proudhon, and anarcho-communistic writers of the nineteenth century. His teaching of property has many elements of chimerical schemes, sometimes confounded with mediaeval communism and Christian primitive utopias, sometimes with anarchistic principles which reject both private and social property. The labor question is solved by Tolstoy simply in the destruction of private ownership and in the distribution of land to the people who work manually. Mental labor and intellectual production are ignored and disdained. ”

“ To him it appears inevitable that money performes a social service equivalent to the instrument of extortion. He does not take into consideration those inumerable utilities which circulating medium renders to the community and particularly to the commercial world, facilitating the transfer as well as aggregation of capital. “Chremmatistics” teaches us that money is the most general form of capital, capital in the fluid state, so that it can be immediately turned to new enterprises and transfered for investment to distant places. ”

“ Facit dormire quia habet virtutem dormitiva. To simple people it is indubitable that the nearest cause of the enslavement of one class of men by another is money [39] . They know that it is possible to cause more trouble with a rouble than with a club; it is only political economy that does not want to know it [40] . ”

“ In Plato’s judgment, the state should be governed in the reverse way, Common property and private use. In Greek history we find a constant struggle about these questions of inequality among people and private dominion of land. But the ideas of communism and social possessions among ancient nations are prevalent. ”

“ These theories on money respecting production do not appear of such nature that they could be applied in the other countries besides Russia. The Russian enlightened feudalism of the nineteenth century gave Tolstoy excellent material and a good reason to attack it with all his strength, [Pg 8] and he was right. But his assault on political economy for its “omission” to treat the natural objects in production of wealth, are not justifiable, and could not be admitted. ”

“ 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? ”

“ In many books printed during Tolstoy’s life we find “no rights reserved”. Literary property, accordingly, is the common property of mankind. Ideas and facts are free to all men. There are no patents and copyrights of mental exertions cum privilegio. ”

“ 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 [Pg 13] 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. ”

“ This ethical principle may be true. But our theorist forgets that questions of what people ought to do, and questions of what it will profit men and nations to do, belong to different categories of sciences. ”

“ These tokens: legal tender, inconvertible paper, coin, bills, and other governmental fiats, are distributed among the people, in order that later they could be collected as direct, indirect, and land taxes [30] . The debts of the present monetary state grow from year to year in a terrifying progression. Even so grow the budgets [31] . A state which should not levy taxes, for a comparatively short time would go to bankruptcy. ”

“ 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. ”