Dear Unknown Friends:

It is an honor to serialize, beginning with this issue, the lecture Once More, the World, by Eli Siegel. He gave it in December 1970. That was seven months after he first explained that something huge, irrevocable, and, deeply, ever so good had happened in world economics. He explained that economics based on contempt—on the using of human beings as instruments for somebody else’s personal profit—was no longer able to succeed. While the management of earth, jobs, human lives by means of the profit motive might go on for years longer, it would go on with increasing difficulty. He wrote:

There will be no economic recovery in the world until economics itself, the making of money, the having of jobs, becomes ethical; is based on good will rather than on the ill will which has been predominant for centuries.

Why this was so, and how it was showing itself, he documented in the weeks and months that followed, in his Goodbye Profit System lectures.

The sentence I just quoted describes what Americans are acutely in the midst of, as a presidential election approaches. So does the lecture we begin to serialize.

In it Mr. Siegel explains that the two big matters in economics are 1) the land, the earth, with all its wealth, and 2) human beings.

Two Questions about the American Land & People

Aesthetic Realism is ethical, not political. And I am not speaking about candidates or parties. But I say this: The great, underlying question for Americans now is the question Mr. Siegel has said is the most important for humanity: “What does a person deserve by being a person?” And a crucial aspect of that question is: To whom should the land of America, with its wealth, belong—to all Americans, or to a few? These are the biggest questions. These are the questions Americans may not be able to articulate but are turbulent about, even furious about, when they know that they are in the richest country of the world yet cannot pay the balance on their credit card and may soon lose their home.

The tricks and lies that bombard Americans during this election are attempts to get them away from their deep feeling that America has to be owned more justly. Millions of American jobs, for example, would not have been shipped overseas, to be done by “cheap labor” abroad, if the basis of these jobs had been usefulness to people, not profits for a few individuals.

America with her mountains, her wheat, her plains, her cities—beautiful, abundant America: whose should it be? Should it belong to a little girl in Detroit whose family is very poor and who, therefore, won’t have lunch today? Should it belong to a mother in Missouri who works two jobs but couldn’t make her mortgage payments and is trying to figure out where on earth she and her children can now live? Should it belong to a young man from New Jersey who couldn’t afford college, couldn’t find a good job, and therefore enlisted in the army and was sent to Iraq where he lost both legs fighting in an unnecessary war based on fabrications? Or should America principally belong, as it does now, to a small number of very wealthy people? That is the real question of this election. And those who want this nation owned for the profit of a few are working hard to deceive, to appeal to Americans’ contempt, to stop Americans from thinking accurately and deeply.

The Basis of Economics

In Once More, the World, Mr. Siegel describes what the very basis of economics is. Using a standard economics textbook that he has quoted from in other lectures—Principles and Problems of Economics, by Otho C. Ault and Ernest J. Eberling (NY, 1936)—he speaks about what have been called “the elements of production.” These are generally presented by economists as three: land, labor, and capital; sometimes others are added. Mr. Siegel is passionate about the fact that there are only two: land and labor. Throughout the lecture, he presents, with what I see as unassailable and great logic, the reason that is so.

By way of introduction, I’ll quote him from an earlier lecture in the series. In What Is Working Now?, June 12, 1970, he gave this now much cited description, ringing and exact:

The most important thing in industry is the person who does the industry, which is the worker. That is still true. It never can change. Labor is the only source of wealth. There is no other source, except land, the raw material. The other sources are decorations. I said this ever so many years ago, and it’s still true. Every bit of capital that exists was made by labor, just as everything that is consumed is.

Land and labor, earth and humanity, are opposites, and they are one at the basis of economics. This fact is in keeping with a central principle of Aesthetic Realism: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” To present capital as elemental in production is making something that is secondary primary, and is a means of rooking that “only source of wealth” which is human beings.

Early in Once More, the World, Mr. Siegel speaks about the other element in production: land, the material world. And again, as introduction, I quote him dealing with the subject elsewhere. This is Eli Siegel at age 20, in the Modern Quarterly, March 1923:

From the land come violets, automobiles, books, watches, silk, and foods of all kinds. Taking the watch. The watch, with all its delicate contrivances, is part of some dirty and ungainly piece of iron. And the book comes mostly from the paper coming from trees, and the type coming from the same dirty piece of iron….Now if nobody made the land, it is evident, to a really normal human, that everybody living has a right to own it and should own it. And the land is what everything comes from—the one means of industry.

Americans, election time 2008, feel more than ever that the American earth should be theirs. This feeling is in keeping with the very foundation of our country. Look at the great opening phrase of our Constitution: “We the People of the United States.” It is a oneness of the people of America and the American land.

And there is a document that stands for American expression at its truest—which also means its most thoughtful: the Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln. He, like the Bible, has often been quoted by tricky people for their own selfish purposes, not as a means of seeing what is so. Nevertheless, we have the phrase, which Lincoln wrote with feeling and sincerity, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” For our economy now to work, Mr. Siegel showed, it has to be in keeping with that phrase: it has to be really of the people, by the people, and, at last, for the people.

In recent weeks we’ve seen what the press is calling a “financial meltdown.” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were rescued by the government from collapse. That most seemingly solid investment firm, 158-year-old Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy. And now it appears there will be an unprecedented mass bailout of Wall Street firms, with 700 billion taxpayer dollars. Whatever else is done, the one real solution to the “meltdown” is a United States authentically owned by all her citizens.

That is what Americans are looking for, in autumn 2008—intensely, tumultuously, perhaps unclearly yet desperately. Despite all the attempts to distract us from it, this desire is true patriotism. It is for the only thing practical and kind.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Once More, the World

By Eli Siegel

The book that I’ve been using—Principles and Problems of Economics, by Ault and Eberling—deals with the fundamental things in economics. These often are obscured by a good deal of technicality, all of which is important, and I don’t intend to leave out any of it. But it happens that the most important statements concerning economics are in the chapter we’ve come to, “Distribution of the Social Income, and Rent.” One may not expect it, but they’re there, and do go along with the title I’ve given this talk: “Once More, the World.”

We’ll take the world, for a while, as consisting of something in the way of physiography, which is a word containing geology and geography and economic geography: the world—geographically speaking, physiographically speaking, geologically speaking—as wealth, as possibility. We should remember that as we walk on a lane, let alone on a pavement, we are just as geological as if we were in the Tertiary Period. The earth, anywhere you see it, is geology. What’s under the sofa can be geology. So you don’t have to get Precambrian. Geology is the study of the material of this rotund and revolving globe. And it does have material, anything from gold to mud. The Grand Canyon is geology, but a lane in Rockland County is also geology. And the Palisades are, even if they have remnants of past picnics; geology is still there.

The world, in one way, can be seen as reality given a spherical form, and also everything that can be seen from this sphere, which includes the other planets and space.

The world is that from which all companies come. That’s the first thing to see. All packages come from it, and also all the shining dimes that Mr. Rockefeller is supposed to have given to people in 1910. This matter is a principal thing, in fact, the principal thing, in economics. The writers of this economics book deal with it.

What Is Paid For?

On page 265, we have an important sentence:

Rent, wages, interest, and profits represent the payments made by society for the use of land and capital, the services of labor, and the management of business, and the risk incident to the carrying on of the industrial enterprise.

This means that if you get money, you get it for something. The money a person gets if he’s a landlord looks like money that a person could have got in another way—even found. Rent, then, which the writers mention first, is one way of getting money. It is a very big thing and has a long history. In ancient times it wasn’t as fully developed as it is now, and, like every other thing in economics, it has ever so many complications, varieties, aspects, possibilities.

There used to be a feeling that all you could rent was land. It’s still the chief thing—land, house and lot—but we know now that you can rent anything, including a car. You can rent a typewriter. You can rent a computer. And people, even before the present time, used to rent evening clothes for the holidays. Anything that you can pay, not for the ownership of but for the use of, is in the field of rent. So rent is one way of getting money.

Next, the authors mention “wages.” All wages are money, though the word has been used metaphorically: “The wages of sin is death.” But wages are money, and this money looks like the money you get from rent. A landlord gets a hundred dollars and a person who works in a mine gets a hundred dollars, and if you just toss the bills around you won’t know which is which.

Then “interest.” The money you get as interest looks like the money got from rent or wages. Then “profits”: they also are the same money. So money is that which is in common among the means of getting it.

This sentence is a crucial sentence, and if the authors, who are pretty likable, are right in the way they deal with what is in it, I’m wrong in what I’m saying is happening to the world.

Labor Is Made a Commodity

Another sentence is about the entrepreneur, who, these writers say, takes the risk “incident to the carrying on of the industrial enterprise” and expects to get the profits:

Naturally the entrepreneur will endeavor to get the factors of production as cheaply as possible, while, in turn, the owner of these factors will attempt to secure the highest price possible for them.

So the entrepreneur is interested in getting capital as cheaply as possible; he’s interested in getting the use of real estate as cheaply as possible; and then, labor also as cheaply as possible. What really occurs is that labor is, despite all the objections to the contrary, seen as a commodity, taking its place with rent and capital, and the entrepreneur needs all three in order to make his profit. That’s what it comes to, and, apparently, that is the way the world is now.

The price paid for any of the factors of production…is determined by the law of demand and supply. If the demand for labor is great and the supply is limited, wages will be high, and the laborer will get a large share of the social income. If there is a large supply of labor and the demand for it is relatively small, wages will be low, and the laborer’s share of the social income will tend to be small. The same holds true with each of the other factors of production.

That’s why there used to be demonstrations in Union Square : Go to Margaret Sanger’s clinic and don’t create wage slaves! This used to be said, because it was felt that the more children, the more there were persons to work at the machines to have money made from them. If you really had the spirit of 1913 around Union Square, you could talk that way.

Ault and Eberling seem to go along with this idea. They say that if there’s a large supply of manpower and there isn’t so much of a demand, wages will be small—just as with rent and capital; there’s no difference.

A question is whether, in the world as such, the relation of supply and demand as to all these things, and the branches of them, has changed. The answer is definitely yes, in a way that hasn’t been seen yet, and I hope to make it more visible.

Only Two Elements in Production

The first objection I have to make to this passage is that which I have stated before: There have always been only two factors in production—land and labor. There never will be more than two. And any person who grants more than two is unfair to humanity.

I can talk about rent and capital and interest and management and all, but in the meantime there clearly are no more—there never have been more—than two elements in production. Capital is not an element in production. If it is an element in production, I’m completely wrong and this whole series ought to stop. These writers are likable, but they go along with that horrible view.

I’ll try to make clear what I mean as we continue, because making capital an element of production is the neatest trick in order not to see what is going on. As I said years ago, this making three or four elements in production is the greatest trick of the cruel schmoozers of the world. It’s not a matter of opinion, as it’s called; it’s a matter of simply looking.

It happens that the left has gone along sometimes with that false way of seeing production. Certain left classics have confused the matter and in doing so have worked not for the deepest interests of man.

If there are only two elements in production, this is what it comes to: Land doesn’t need any pecuniary reward. No field in New England, no cotton field in Georgia, no mine has asked to be rewarded. It’s somehow there, and whether evolution or God made a copper mine, or a wheat field in Nebraska, or a cotton field in Alabama, it’s there, the land is there, and doesn’t ask to be rewarded. Land never dunned anybody yet and said, “I want my share.” That goes for every aspect of land, everywhere. A coffee field in Brazil has never said, “I want my cut.” It just waits to be used. So if there are two elements in production, then the only one that should be rewarded is a person, or labor. That’s why the seeing of this is necessary. Because as soon as we say there are three or four elements, we get to another kind of reward which, it has to be said, is made up.

This Is Labor

Everything that human beings do can be seen as labor. The rest of it is not human beings. Production consists simply of two things: what is human and what is not human. There is no more thorough dogma. And as soon as three or four elements and sometimes five are got into production, the purpose is to obscure ethics.

These writers, as I say, are likable and say many good things, some of which I’ve quoted and will quote as I go on, but they get away from the simple thing. All of the dividends, debentures, all of the prospectuses cannot change the fact that every instance of production in the history of the world has consisted of only two things: something not human, waiting, and something human. And what the human has done can be seen as labor. This has to be seen simply. It is something that I said in May 1922 for the journal Horizons of Johns Hopkins and later in the Modern Quarterly.