Labor

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) —Chapter 5: Land, Labor and Learning

§ 2. In Egypt, the Israelites had suffered the bitterness of unremitting and hopeless toil. "The Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigor: and they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field: all their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigor." Moses sought to teach them the needful lesson that work and rest, each in its own time and in due proportion, were both sacred; good alike for master and servant, for man and beast. There was a danger, on the one hand, that long experience of grinding slavery might have reduced the Israelites to the wretched condition in which slum-children have sometimes been found in schools in London and New York of "not knowing how to play;" a danger, on the other hand, of a violent reaction against regular work, on the ground that all work was a form of slavery. Hence the obligation to observe the Sabbath as a weekly rest-day. It was at once a holy-day and a holiday. On it, agricultural labor and trading were specifically forbidden. But it was a feast, and not a fast; and, like all the national festivals, a time of "rejoicing" for all the members of the Hebrew household, a "delight," a day of "mirth." Its observance was secured by the strongest possible sanctions. Its benefits were extended alike to native and to foreign settler, to master and to slave, to man and to beast. The sabbatical law appealed to the religious sentiment, by connecting the weekly rest-day with the rest of God the Creator; to humanitarian sympathy; and to the traditions of the race. For here, as is so often the case in the Law, the remembrance of the deliverance from slavery is appealed to as the ground of right-doing. "Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched-out arm; therefore the Lord thy God commandeth thee to keep the Sabbath day." So important to the general welfare was the observance of this law considered, that the punishment for its infraction was death.

§ 3. Modern Sabbatarians, who, forgetting that "the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath," seek to apply these Jewish enactments to the first day of the week, are apt to overlook the fact that the Fourth Commandment is as much a labor law as a rest law. Its opening words are, "Six days shalt thou labor." Seven days' idleness involves a much more frequent infraction of the command than seventh-day work does. "God's covenant with us" said Rahbi Akiba, "included work; for the command, 'Six days shalt thou work, and the seventh shalt thou rest,' made the 'rest' conditional upon the 'work'." "The principles of a true Sabbatarianism would necessitate the abolition alike of overwork and of idleness, the extinction of all the idle classes — of those who are idle (and rich) because they "need not work," as well as of those who are idle (and poor) because they cannot get work to do. The Church of England Catechism paraphrases the Fourth Commandment in very general terms: "To serve Him truly all the days of my life." St. Paul annotates it, from the Christian standpoint, in a very remarkable passage —

"Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us. … For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat. For we hear that there art some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies. Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work and eat their own bread … and if any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man, and have no company with him, that he may be ashamed" (2 Thess. iii. 6, 10-14.)

§ 4. The securing to all Englishmen of opportunity both for work and leisure depends, not upon the literal application of part of the letter of the Fourth Commandment to one day of the week, but upon the observance of the spirit of the Hebrew land laws with which all the sabbatical institutions were originally so closely connected. The language of the Law shows this connection quite clearly—

"When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a sabbath unto the Lord. Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; but in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field nor prune thy vineyard.

"That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed: for it is a year of rest unto the land" (Lev. 25:1-7, 18-22).

The connection between Sabbath day and sabbath year is even more briefly and forcibly expressed in the parallel phrases of Ex. 23:10-12 [R.V.]

* Six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather in the increase thereof;
* Six days thou shalt do thy work,
* but the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie fallow;
* and on the seventh day thou shalt rest:
* that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beast of the field shall eat.
* that thine ox and thine ass may have rest, and the son of thy handmaid, and the stranger, may be refreshed.
* In like manner thou shalt deal with thy vineyard, and with thy olive-yard. ...

§ 6. To the average Englishman, who no longer keeps Saints' days, and who feverishly rushes through long railway journeys on four "Bank holidays" in the year, the idea of one year's rest in every seven from his ordinary occupations must seem an impossibly comic suggestion. And, besides, he will probably ask, what was the use of it? Let us see.

(a). The original division of the land secured to every Hebrew family the equal right of access to land. The Year of Jubilee was intended as one of the means for conserving that equal right from generation to generation. So far as it went, the Jubilee Law secured to each family in each generation the right of access, for labor use, to an approximately equal share of land.

But the Hebrew system of cultivation was very primitive. The plough was merely a big crooked stick attached to a wooden frame (I Kings 19:21), shod with a triangular piece of iron (1 Sam. 13:19-21; Isa. 2:4; Joel 3:10; Mic. 4:3). It was usually drawn by oxen, sometimes by asses, yoked together, the ploughman guiding the plough with one hand (Luke 9:62), and using the goad — an instrument like a spear and capable at need of being used as one (Judg. 3:31) — with the other.

The ploughing with such a light instrument was necessary shallow. There are but feeble traces of the systematic use of manure. The rotation of crops was almost certainly unknown. Had the Hebrew cultivator been allowed to keep on growing the same crop from year to year on the same land, without an intermission, there would always be a danger of exhausting even the fertile soil of Canaan, and of handing on to later generations a possession undiminished, indeed, in area, but of steadily decreasing productiveness. The Law therefore safeguarded the equal rights of future generations by enacting a periodical fallow. During one year in every seven, the soil, left to the influences of sun and frost, wind and rain, was to be allowed to "re-create" itself after six years' cropping, exactly as the tiller of the soil renewed his strength, after six days' work, by his Sabbath day's rest. "The seventh year thou shalt let the land rest and lie fallow." "It is a year of rest to the land." ...

§ 8. To say that, in the seventh year, the Israelites attended a Bible class conducted by their clergy would be to use one of those dangerous phrases which completely misrepresent the facts of the case under the appearance of stating the bare, literal truth about them. It is true, of course, that the rolls of the "Laws of Moses" now form part of what we now call the Bible — the collection of ancient writings from which extracts are read in church services. The peculiar position so long assigned to these Hebrew writings in our own religion has prevented most Englishmen from realising what they meant to the Hebrews.

They were at once "sacred" and "secular." They assumed in every paragraph the existence of God; but He was a God who stood in direct, constant, and immediate relation to the life of the Nation "the God of thy fathers," "the Lord thy God which brought thee out of the house of bondage," the God who dwelt in the midst of Israel. Yet — not in spite of this, but because of it — the Hebrew writers hold, as strongly as any modern secularist, that "the affairs of this life and of this world demand, and will repay, our utmost care and attention." So completely free from any trace of "other-worldliness" is the Hebrew Torah, that a good bishop once deduced an argument in favor of the inspiration of the Pentateuch from the fact that it contains no reference to a life after death. The future life to which the Law points as the result and the reward of rightdoing is the ideal life of a free and industrious Commonwealth, in which every citizen, secure in the enjoyment of the produce of his labor, surrounded by stalwart sons and comely daughters, sits under his own vine and his own fig tree, none daring to make him afraid "in the land which the Lord thy God hath given thee."

The Law contained not only the elaborate ritual of the sacrifices and the liturgy of the Jewish religion, but the biographies of their national heroes, and the history of the Nation itself. The primitive science of the infant Commonwealth lay in it side by side with the laws of their minstrels and an outline of civil and criminal law. The same collection of documents which told them how the voice of God called upon Moses from the burning bush to organise a general strike against the Egyptian taskmasters, claimed also that the skill of the handicraftsman, no less than the wisdom of the legislator, was due to Divine inspiration. If the Law regulated with minute care the vestments of the high-priests, it was no less careful of the foods of the people. It prescribed in detail the lavish ornaments of the Tabernacle, the outward symbol of national unity, but it also told the citizen how to keep his person, his clothing, and his house clean and healthy. It insisted upon man's duty to God, but no less upon man's duty to his fellows. With a magnificent impartiality it denounced a curse upon the idolater, who rebelled against the majesty of the Most High, and upon the remover of the landmark, who invaded the equal right of his neighbor. The "statutes and judgments of Moses" were the Acts of the Parliament and the case-law of the Hebrew Commonwealth. Whole chapters in Numbers and Joshua are filled with dry lists of names, which were once full of the same kind of interest and significance to the Hebrew reader as Doomsday Book or the Census returns or Mr. Lloyd-George's Land Valuation have to students of English social history.

To the Hebrew, therefore, the study of "all the words of this Law," enjoined in every seventh year, and made possible by the just land system which the sabbatical institutions safeguarded, was, for his time and place, a liberal education. To place within the reach of the English worker, once in every seven years, a year's course at a university in science and law and literature and theology, would be something like the modern equivalent for one of the advantages which the sabbath year offered to the ancient Hebrew. Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — Appendix

D. The Coming Reign of Justice

With equal rights to land restored —

"Ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be My people, and I will be your God" (Ezek. 36:28).

— men shall enjoy the produce of their labor.

"Then shall they dwell in their land that I have given to My servant Jacob. And they shall dwell safely therein, and shall build houses, and plant vineyards" (Ezek. 28:25, 26).

"The Lord hath sworn by His right hand, and by the arm of His strength, Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies; and strangers shall not drink thy wine, for the which thou hast labored: but they that have garnered it shall eat it, and praise the Lord; and they that have gathered it shall drink it in the courts of My sanctuary" (Isa. 62: 8, 9 [R.V.]).

"And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree shall be the days of My people, and My chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain, nor bring forth for calamity" (Isa. 65: 21-23 [RV.]). ... Read the whole appendix, including footnotes

8. Power in the Wasteland: Understanding Essential Relationships

Many liberation theologists ignore the role of land ownership and do not even include land in the indexes of their books. Yet none would deny that land hoarding and land access are fundamental issues of justice and economic development.

The following two passages by Henry George, the economist who made the most definitive statements on land's role in political economy, illustrate the fundamental characteristics of land that are missed or ignored by modern economic analysts of the left and the right:

Does the passenger who enters a railroad car obtain the right to scatter his baggage over all the seats and compel the passengers who come in after him to stand up? ... We arrive and we depart... passengers from station to station, on an orb that whirls through space — our rights to take and possess cannot be exclusive; they must be bounded everywhere by the equal rights of others. Just as the passenger in a railroad car may spread himself and his baggage over as many seats as he pleases, until other passengers come in, so may a settler take as much land as he chooses, until it is needed by others — a fact which is shown by the land acquiring a value....

On the land we are born, from it we live, to it we return again — children of the soil as truly as is the blade of grass or the flower of the field. Take away from man all that belongs to the land, and he is but a disembodied spirit. Material progress cannot rid us of our dependence upon land.

Beneath all ideologies, there are basic factors and relationships that underlie economic behavior. To understand the (otherwise inexplicable) omission of attention to land's economic importance, it is useful to go back to these basics.

• The term "Land" refers to the whole material universe, exclusive of people and their products. Not the creation of human labor, yet essential to labor, it is the raw material from which all wealth is fashioned. It includes not only soil and minerals, but water, air, natural vegetation and wildlife, and all natural opportunities — even those yet to be discovered. It is a passive factor of production, yielding wealth only when labor is applied to it.
• Labor includes all human powers, mental and physical, used directly or indirectly to produce goods or to render service in exchange. Labor is often thought of as work that is done for hire, at fixed wages, mainly excluded from the risk-taking and decision-making that is normally classed under the heading of "entrepreneurship". Yet labor, properly understood, includes all human exertion in production — including mental exertion. The payment to labor is called Wages. And it is important to remember that the payment, or return, to labor does not include any returns that are the result of monopoly.
• Capital is the economic term that is most profoundly misunderstood and confused. For the term to make sense in any systematic analysis of wealth distribution, we must define capital in its classical sense as "wealth which is used to aid in further production, instead of being directly consumed." Since production is not completed until the product is in the hands of the consumer, products on their way to market, or "wealth in the course of exchange," are also considered capital.

Now, the objective of all economic behavior is the satisfaction of human desires. Human beings always seek to satisfy their desires with the least exertion: this self-evident proposition lies at the heart of our concepts of economic value and exchange. The primary thing needed for satisfaction is, of course, the tangible things, made from natural resources, that satisfy human desires and have exchange value. Things that meet these four fundamental criteria are termed "wealth". But money, bonds, and mortgages are but claims upon and measures of this value; they are not the wealth they symbolize.

A clear understanding of these basic definitions points immediately to the primacy of land as an economic factor. Human beings have inescapable material needs of food, clothing and shelter. Regardless of how long a chain of exchanges they may pass through in a modern economy, these things ultimately have their source in the land; they can come from nowhere else. Human beings need land in order to live. But if we must pay rent to a private land "owner" for access to the gifts of nature, it amounts to being charged a fee for our very right to live.

Land's value goes up when population increases and technological and economic development make labor more productive. Those who "own" land often withhold it from use, expecting to capture its increased value in the future — thus, the possession of land enables people to take an income that they did nothing to produce.

Speculative withholding of land has disastrous consequences. Peasants who seek land on which to survive are pushed out to poorer and poorer lands. These "sub-marginal" lands become their alternative place for self-employment. With such a poor alternative, they have no choice but to accept very low wages. Rent — the payment to landowners — absorbs more of the wealth produced on all sites.

Land speculation also prevents development near the center of cities, pushing it to the outskirts while the center decays from neglect and slums increase. The "sprawl" engulfs farms and forests, even as it raises the price of land, making use and development more costly.

Rapid destruction of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil dramatizes how the unnatural phenomenon of sprawl has an ominous worldwide impact on the environment. In Brazil, ten per cent of the landowners own 80 percent of the land, while one million peasants are forced off the land each year. And a mere one per cent controls 48 percent of the cultivable land. The only place in Brazil where there is land for the taking is in the Amazon rain forest. The destruction of the rain forest is caused by a system that perpetuates artificial land shortages. Nearly four-fifths of Brazil's arable land is covered by sprawling latifundios, most of which are held by speculators who produce nothing.

Here is the root cause of poverty. When laborers are faced with the choice of either bare subsistence wages or land that can barely maintain life, labor itself is marginalized and cannot effectively bargain on its own behalf. Wages, generally, on all land, are driven down toward the point of bare subsistence. Returns to capital are also depressed for the same reason, deterring investment. When this is carried to an extreme — when people can no longer afford the goods being produced and when there is little profit in applying capital — the economy collapses. The inflated land market, on which the speculative frenzy has fed, collapses too.

Since the Great Depression, such total ruin has been minimized in more developed nations through Keynesian measures: monetary expansion, massive public works and welfare programs. In Third World countries, such Keynesian expedients, which support high speculative rent levels, work only if demand for exports is strong. When that demand weakens, the weight of external debt becomes so crushing as to defy redemption.

The Third World debt crisis is taken by many as the clearest sign of the correctness of dependency theory. It is asserted that Western moneylenders have extended loans to corrupt regimes, knowing that the nations' peoples would have to sacrifice to bear ever-increasing burdens. But when we recognize the land problem as the basic cause of the kind of economic collapse that has led to the "foreign debt crisis", it becomes clear that Western financial interests did not create those maladies but rather exploited the hapless economic policies of developing nations for their own gain.

Some defenders of the status quo admit that all land titles may be traced either to acts of force or fraud (or to the more respectable-sounding "priority of occupation"). But, they add, we cannot start over; society has for centuries given legal sanction to private landed property. Innumerable contracts have been executed on the basis of this sanction, and these include the good faith purchase of land. For society to withdraw this sanction, they claim, would be a breach of trust.

The passage of time, however, cannot turn a wrong into a right. Kings and popes and governments never had the moral right to vest in perpetual ownership what God intended for the benefit of all. If the acquisition of a benefit under the law were to establish such a vested right, no law could ever be amended, since it would invariably work to someone's disadvantage.

Obviously, change that further rends the fabric of society is usually self-defeating. And the vast majority of beneficiaries of unjust structures — the beleaguered middle classes — are not intentional wrongdoers but passive recipients of unearned wealth from a flawed system they did not create. The dismantling of these structures, therefore, should, whenever possible, be done in ways that avoid excessive hardship for them. But it must be done.

... Read the whole synopsis