THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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agrarian reform emerge. Henry George was the advocate of this, and in his influential book ‘Progress and Poverty’, 1879, he taught that the increase in mass poverty
and the industrial crises were primarily caused solely by the private ownership of landed property. Ground rent gives landowners the power to make life intolerably
more expensive; in order to establish a paradise for the poor, George demands the confiscation of this rent, and indeed ‘nationalization’ of the land, in the case of
uncontested profit from industrial and commercial capital. And since only land capital was fought in this way, and not productive capital, manufacturers were able to
join forces with the working classes on the basis of Henry George, particularly in England. The English proletariat, the majority of which had so little class consciousness
and Marxist training anyway, was thus further diverted from its direct exploiters. In 1887 the English Trades Union Congress adopted a resolution in favour of the
nationalization of the land; its effect was nothing more than a heavier taxation of ground rent. The following instructive sentence from John Stuart Mill stands at the head
of a chapter of George's book (it mocks itself without knowing it): ‘When the object is to raise the permanent condition of a people, small means do not merely
produce small effects; they produce no effect at all —’. This is in fact a motto against the whole of reformism and its utopia. But Anglo­Saxon socialism as a whole, in
the English and especially American economy, for so long the most progressive, managed only partially if at all even just to understand, let alone to implement, the
conclusions which Marx drew from this very economy. The taste for delay, compromise, and appeasement in English business life and its politics, the cunning
evolutionism with which the ruling class forestalled every revolutionary will, in so far as it existed at all, and defused it, this hesitation and Fabianism, together with the
Labour Party of the time, but above all the illusory existence of a workers' aristocracy, owing to colonial exploitation: all this preserved, in one and the same act,
capitalism and a pre­Marxist utopianizing, as if scientific socialism did not exist at all. These are the consequences when social utopia lags behind Marx, it then even lags
behind Owen, and behind Thomas More, it falls totally outside the socialist tradition. All the more so when the eternal waverers, posing as men of private means, or
when artificial stick­in­the­muds, posing as renegades, when these disappointed or kept lovers of a so­called ‘third force’, ‘against fascism and Bolshevism’, ‘against
every dictatorship, whether it comes from the right or the left’, fool themselves with a belated Lincoln utopia, or allowed themselves to be fooled in Atlantic terms for a
terribly long time, in order to stoke up