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Henry George and Europe: Hungary began a promising venture in Georgist tax reform but revolutionary turmoil and inflation ended it
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 1994 by Michael Silagi, Susan N. Faulkner
I
The Plight of the Hungarian Landless
AT THE END Of the 19th century, Hungary--then a Kingdom united with Austria within the Habsburg Empire--was burdened with an unsolved land problem.(1) The situation was similar to that of Ireland, although stemming from entirely different historical antecendents. In Hungary, serfdom had not been abolished until 1848, and even after that, archaic conditions of land tenure persisted in the country's agricultural sector. More than half of the arable land belonged (incidentally until after World War II, 1945) to huge estates, so-called latifundia.(2) The management of these estates was, in most instances, outdated; technology and administrative procedure were backward; mismanagement often reigned.
1848 was a year of revolution in Europe. In Hungary, the turmoil lasted until 1849. The Magyars rebelled against the Habsburgs but were defeated. The next 18 years were marked by oppression and hostility. But in 1867, an inter-state agreement, called Compromise, brought about reconciliation between Austria and Hungary. This was followed by a decade of economic prosperity, and the condition of the poor smallholders and of the landless agricultural laborers also became more bearable. Moreover, growing industrialization created new urban jobs and many farm laborers migrated to the cities to escape from rural penury.
Yet soon, during the great European agricultural crisis of the 1880s, want and misery again engulfed the small farmers and the landless agrarian proletariat, and an enormous wave of overseas migration from Hungary developed.(3) But not only the very poor--many owners of medium sized and even of larger farms got into trouble.
The landless poor, including dependents, were estimated to number 6 million, that is, about one third of the total population of the country.(4) As the crisis worsened, there was widespread unrest among these masses.(5) In the 1890s, disquiet often erupted into open uproar. It was in these days that for the first time embryonic land reform aspirations surfaced in the Kingdom: a politically articulate tiny minority among Hungary's poor peasant millions was desparately looking for a way out, for some goal that could be communicated to the untutored masses. The first pioneers found what they needed in the program of the Social-Democratic Party of Hungary.(6)
In actual fact, the Hungarian Social Democrats did not have an elaborate plan for a land reform; but in firm adherence to Marx's teachings and unlike the 1875 Gotha program of the German Social-Democracy,(7) their program included the thesis that "landed property and all means of production should be placed under public ownership."(8) The first known spokesman for the aroused propertyless rural population, the agricultural laborer Janos Szanto-Kovacs, adopted this item on the program as his slogan. He was arrested in 1895 and sentenced to 5 years in jail for incitement.(9) He declared himself to be a Social-Democrat and to be striving for the nationalization of the large estates. But he emphatically (and truthfully) denied having agitated for the carving up of the latifundia among those without land.
It might appear incomprehensible, if only at first glance, that the rural proletariat--in contrast to Parnell and the majority of dissatisfied tenant farmers in Ireland--did not seek farm ownership, but instead wanted to be employed at government-owned estates. But these people, like their fathers before them, had never had land of their own. They had rather always sought to find work at large estates. Moreover, the situation of the small landowners did not arouse their envy, for these small farmers did not have it much easier. They carried the additional burden of worries about over-mortgaging their property, and with it the terrible fear (one shown by statistics, not to be unjustified(9a)) of losing it. The unpropertied farmhands of Szanto-Kovacs' kind had to perform their labors for starvation wages, but were glad even to find a job. Thus it is understandable that when they dreamed, it was not of owning their "own soil," but of getting fair wages and secure employment, a dream which the program of nationalization of the large estates promised to fulfill.(10)
At first, when the dissatisfaction of the small and medium-sized farmers began to take concrete form, the desire for breaking up large estates into small parcels became a political demand--as in the program written by the farmer Andras Achim,(11) who founded the first substantial Hungarian farmers' party.(12) According to Achim's program the tremendous estate entails, the vast church lands, and all other estates above 10,000 "hold" |1 "hold" = 0.57 hectares = 1.4 acres~ were to be nationalized and then parcelled out into small rentable plots; later on, Achim reduced the upper limit of the properties to be left untouched to 1,000 "hold".(13)
Actually, since the end of the eighties, some owners of latifundia and medium-sized estates had been giving consideration to the elimination of the manifold social ills. Yet even while their proposals were later to be represented as, inter alia, a first step toward a land reform movement,(14) more likely these were proposals which, with few exceptions, could never be realized. They were proposals which were designed to improve the existing order through a far-reaching lease system(15) or through dividing up state and community property into parcels,(16) and thereby to secure the existing order against crises. Another intention, at times stated explicitly, was to arrest the "racial loss" which Hungary had sustained by the already mentioned emigrations, by establishing Magyar settlements in the territories of the national minorities.(17)
