1Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) is one of those historical figures whose importance and relevance seem always to be in dispute. Recognized as the coiner of the term, “Anarchist” as a label for a political philosophy, he is much less cited by professed anarchists than either Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76) or Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). Though both Russians radicalized Proudhon’s ideas and took them in far more violent directions than he ever advocated, they both took inspiration from him. Bakunin met Proudhon in Paris in 1844 and they talked into the night over a period of several weeks.¹ Proudhon and Karl Marx also met during that same sojourn in Paris, but they were later to become bitter rivals. Kropotkin was converted to socialism and anarchism by reading Proudhon’s Système des contradictions économiques (Woodcock [1990] 57-8)—though they never met.

2The foundational text for Proudhonian anarchism is What is Property? The title question is answered in the very first paragraph, where we are told, “property is theft!”(Proudhon [1840] 11). Much later in the same work, he declares himself an anarchist as opposed to a democrat, a constitutionalist, or royalist—“socialist” is not in the list of rejected options (Proudhon [1840] 272). Unlike Marx, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, Proudhon advocated neither the abolition of private property, nor the violent overthrow of kings and governments. His notion of an anarchic regime was an order determined by reason rather than by force or custom:

just as the right of force and the right of artifice retreat before the steady advance of justice, and must finally be extinguished in equality, so the sovereignty of the will yields to the sovereignty of the reason, and must at last be lost in scientific socialism. Property and royalty have been crumbling to pieces ever since the world began. As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.² (Proudhon [1840] 277)

3Because of his faith in reason, Proudhon did not accept Marx’s belief that reform could be achieved only by violent revolution. He expressed that disagreement in a letter to Marx of May 17, 1846:

I believe we have no need of it [revolution] in order to succeed; and that consequently we should not put forward revolutionary action as a means of social reform,… I myself put the problem in this way:… to turn the theory of Property against Property in such a way as to engender what you German socialists call community and what I will limit myself for the moment to calling liberty or equality… I would therefore prefer to burn Property by a slow fire, rather than give it new strength by making a St Bartholomew’s night of the proprietors. (17 May, 1846. Correspondence, http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/​anarchistarchives/​proudhon)

4But despite Proudhon’s commitment to gradualism, his preservation of private property, and his belief in order, the Anarchist movement has a -reputation as committed to violence, political chaos, and the destruction of property—perhaps sufficient grounds for Pound’s indifference an even hostility towards it.

5However, there is another political movement that looks to Proudhon as its foundational theorist, and Pound was attracted to it. This strain derives from Georges Sorel, whose Reflections on Violence invokes Proudhon frequently. Within France, this strain is commonly seen as proto-Fascist. The cooperation of the Sorelians—with the lukewarm participation of Sorel—with Charles Maurras and his Action Française to form the Cercle Proudhon in 1911 lends support to such a view.Though I have not found any mention by Pound of the Cercle Proudhon, he did review the 1935 reissue of Vers un ordre social chrétien: jalons de route: 1882-1907 (Paris 1907) by one of its founders, Le Marquis de la Tour du Pin La Charce.

6La Tour du Pin co-founded the Œuvre des Cercles Catholiques d’Ouvriers with the Comte Albert de Mun in 1871. As the name suggests, it was intended to “to promote the union of capital and labour in Christian guilds under the patronage of the Church and the upper classes.” When the organization foundered. De Mun joined the conservative republican camp, and in 1905 La Tour du Pin joined the Action française.³ Jalons de route is an account of that ideological journey.

7Though Pound’s reaction to the marquis’s politics is somewhat ambivalent, it is favourable on the whole. He even credits him with anticipating Mussolini’s corporate state:

Tour du Pin is, I believe, no end of great sheiks among French Royalists. If you consider him a registering gelatine, he indubitably, from 1882 till 1907, registered ideas which have gone into effect.

If he didn’t foresee he at least fore-argued the corporate state. He also blamed a lot of things on the Jews and in so doing foreshadowed the Nazis.

8At this date, “foreshadowing the Nazis” was not a virtue in Pound’s mind, but‑he did find common ground in du Pin’s antipathy for the capitalist financial system, which both men call “usury”: “Tour du Pin curses usury. He baptises the 19^th century the ‘Age of Usury.’ He says several good things in so doing.”

9Pound found the Marquis’s Catholicism less attractive and mocks his anti-Semitism:

His extensive ergotisation bringeth sleep as a sapphire. He has, finally, a good reason, that is a lot of very reasoned reasoning, to show that Ma Church was right.

He then without documents or much detail, blames the Jews for Aryan inability to think clearly. This runs back into retrospect, the Templars,‑etc. He blames the Jews equally for Calvin and for Voltaire. Taking it impartially as a transpontine Confucian, I fail to see why the Jews should commit race suicide merely because Aryans can’t think clearly. And I still more emphatically fail to see why any Jew should be expected to think so.⁴

10But he regarded du Pin as a discovery, and mentioned him a year later in an Esquire article, where he also linked the Marquis with Proudhon and Mussolini: “The corporate state grows out of Proudhon and was predicted by Le Marquis La Tour du Pin”‑⁵

11In the review of Jalons de route he complains that the marquis’s good sense has been, and continues to be ignored:

The things Tour du Pin was thinking in the late 1880’s seem now to be thinkable by the mutts who control almost all governments. The Edens, Duff-Coopers, Ezekials and other government frontages seem to be able to mumble about the topics the French were discussing while you and I were learning cricket and base-ball.

Does this mean 50 years more of official imbecility about money? Or have still obscurer continentals been thinking it out unreported by the press? Naturally unreported in England where the aborigines never read foreign letterpress, or in New York where the official obscurantists never hear of anything till London hacks have proclaimed it.

12Despite his broad endorsement of du Pin’s political posture, Pound closes the review with strongly negative remarks on the Action Française—the movement in which du Pin found his final home—for its failure to “think about money.” Du Pin himself is credited with foreshadowing Fascism and Nazi anti-Semitism—apparently perceived by Pound as contrary political movements in 1935:

Has the “Action Française” any ideas about money? Has it ever heard of the subject? Is any Englishman capable of telling us what, or even if, “L’Action Française” thinks about money at all (its nature, its mode of issue, the relation of the whole people’s purchasing power to the whole people’s available produce)?

Not as statement but as subject for undergraduate debate, one might almost ask: Did Le Marquis de La-Tour-du-Pin register and foreshadow the main trends or drifts of Europe as follows:—

Corporate State, Italy;

Anti-Semitism, Germany

Ergotizing muscle, La Douce France, now lowest, most corrupt, most confused of all the once civilised nations.

???

This stands as the week’s “American Notes,” because no one will ever understand America until they try to compute how much of American thought and thought-Ersatz is just European sediment, delayed and decanted.

13This brief look at Pound’s assessment of L’Action française and Proudhon leaves us pretty much up in the air—a common result when examining Pound’s political opinions. Despite having spent a good many years attempting to disentangle Pound them, I have never been confident that I understand his motivation at any given point—or even just where he comes down on a given issue. From what we know about his right-wing radicalism, he ought to have been attracted to Proudhon, Sorel, Maurras, and the French right generally, but he was not.⁶

14But if he knew nothing of Proudhon and Sorel during his London years, he was aware of the Mussolini-Sorel-Proudhon connection by 1933, for he remarks upon it in a letter to Arthur Kitson in which he drew Kitson’s attention to Action nouvelle a new journal of political opinion issuing from the French Caribbean island of Martinique: “Those ‘Action Nouvelle’ people think they are descended from Proudhon. Mussolini has mentioned him [i.e. Proudhon] with respect. One of the few economists whom I happen to have seen cited by M.” Later in the letter, he tries to get Kitson to pick up with the Action nouvelle folks: “What about these french Proudhonists?? Did I ask whether you are in touch with ‘em? Sending copy/Action Nouvelle sep. cov/[?]”

15Had he ever seen it, Pound would have found much to agree with in the 1911 manifesto of the Cercle Proudhon:

The founders—republicans, federalists, integral nationalists, and syndicalists—having resolved the political problem or dismissed it from their minds, are all enthusiastically in favour of an organization of French society in accordance with principles taken from the French tradition which they find in Proudhon’s works and in the contemporary syndicalist movement, and they are all com-pletely in agreement on the following points:

Democracy is the greatest error of the past century. If one wishes to live, of one wishes to work, of one wishes in social life to possess the greatest human guarantees for production and culture, if one wishes to preserve and increase the moral, intellectual and material capital of civilization, it is absolutely neces-sary to destroy democratic institutions.⁷

16Pound was not interested in political and economic action in 1911, and almost certainly knew nothing about Le Cercle Proudhon. When he left London for Paris in 1921, he was committed to Social Credit, and tried to introduce it to a French audience in an article in Les Écrits nouveaux. Having complained of the conspir-acy of silence in Britain over Major Douglas and Social Credit, he dismissed both the French left (Marx) and the French right (Sorel):

Qu’est-ce qu’il y a là-dedans pour créer un tel silence? On babille bolschevisme, Marx, Sorel, dans tous les pseudo-salons littéraire-politiques; dans tous les journaux contrôlés par Vickers et consorts; et les livres du Major Douglas sont si petits!‑⁸

17On this evidence it would seem appropriate to conclude that Pound’s -radicalism of the right owed nothing to Proudhon, Sorel or the French right.

18But Pound was exposed to still another, and entirely distinct, strain of Proud-honianism when he made contact with Hugo Fack in 1934. Fack was an enthusiastic follower of Silvio Gesell, a German economic reformer and disciple of Proudhon. Fack was also German, an expatriate living in San Antonio, Texas. The masthead of his journal, The Way Out declared that it was “Devoted to showing the nation the basic causes of our economic problems and their adequate correction, and to furthering the realization of our national and humanitarian ideals.” The “basic causes” were those identified by Proudhon as interpreted by Silvio Gesell.

19Pound, who had long been a proponent of C.H. Douglas’s Social Credit program of economic reform, wrote to Fack (Sept. 26, 1934) to complain of E.S. Woodward’s critique of Social Credit in The Way Out. Pound called it an “IGNORANT attack on C.H. Douglas.”‑⁹ E.S. Woodward (not to be confused with W.E. Woodward, the American historian with whom Pound also corresponded) was a young Canadian Gesellite from British Columbia, and an indefatigable critic of the burgeoning Social Credit movement in Western Canada, where a Social Credit government was elected in the following year—in Alberta in September, 1935. Pound’s indelicately expressed assessment was that “E.S. W.’s account of Douglas is simple bull shit…”

20Despite the apparent disagreement, Pound hoped to recruit Fack and Wood-ward as allies in his program of economic and political reform. He was particularly upset because he had praised Woodward in a letter to The Morning Post published five days before (Sept. 21), and had thought he could recruit these Gesellites as allies in his program of economic reform—though at this point he knew next to nothing of Gesellite economics. His interest in Gesell was prompted by the application of Gesellite stamp scrip in the Austrian -industrial town of Wörgl that was mentioned in Woodward’s April article.¹⁰

21The mayor of Wörgl (Herr Unterguggenbürger) issued “demurrage money,” or “stamp scrip”—a currency that carried “negative interest”—as a solution to the town’s depressed economy. It was a model case of a Gesellite solution to the problem of insufficient purchasing power—although the Wörgl stamps applied negative interest of 1% a month—more than double the rate Gesell recommended. The Wörgl experience prompted Pound to review Irving Fisher’s Stamp Scrip, a survey of the application of Gesell’s demurrage money in Europe and the USA—including Wörgl. Fisher judged it to have been a complete success (Fisher 22-9), and Pound invokes Wörgl repeatedly in the follow-ing years—to the exclusion of dozens of other similar experiments mentioned by Fisher, many of them in the USA. Pound laboured mightily to persuade his Social Credit audience that Gesell and Douglas were compatible in his review of Stamp Scrip (New English Weekly IV [26 Oct. 1933] 31-2)

22Unfortunately, the Gesellite and social Credit schemes are diametrically opposed to one another, a detail that continued to give Pound difficulty. Though aware of the problem, he thought it should be ignored in the interest of -solidarity among economic reformers. A long letter in Eliot’s Criterion (XIV 55 [Jan. 1935] 297-34) attempts to deal with the difficulty. Pound subsequently printed part of the letter as a preface to Jefferson and/or Mussolini, buthe left out most of the discussion of Gesell. In the full letter he acknowledges—rather opaquely—the incompatibility of his three enthusiasms—Fascism, Social Credit, and Gesell:

Any ass can see the contradictions between the three living theories: the Corporate State, Douglas, Gesell. Or between these and the technocrats.

Superficial imbeciles can see the contradiction between these systems and those of Marx or Henry George…¹¹

23The Technocrats, Henry George, and Marx represent alternative economic remedies with which Pound was flirting in 1933, but which he later dropped. Gesell is retained.

24Even Douglas seems unaware of the profound harmony between his economics and fascism. I am not talking about the surface of his politics. Pound’s point seems to be that imbeciles and asses can see the contradictions, but more profound thinkers can see the harmony. He never gets past this bullying mode of reconciliation.

25Pound had lots of opportunity to come to an understanding of Gesell and his Proudhonian roots. He was in correspondence with Fack, with the maligned E.S. Woodward, and with Arthur Kitson, an English businessman 25 years Pound’s senior. All three of these men drew their economic ideas from Proudhon—Fack and Woodward by way of Silvio Gesell—though none of them called themselves “Anarchists.”

26Fack mailed a copy of William Pye’s translation of Gesell’s The Natural Eco-nomic Order (only vol. I) to Pound on September 3. He had re-published himself in 1934. Apparently Pound did not receive it, so a second copy was sent on December 15. That one must have arrived promptly, for Pound wrote to Fack—on Christmas day!—that he had “done a longish article on Gesell” for Orage’s New English Weekly.¹²

27Pye’s translation was first published in 1919, and the original German -edition of Part I was published in 1906 (in Geneva). That article rehashes defences he had already mounted in correspondence against the criticisms that Woodward and Fack had levelled against Douglas’s National Dividend scheme:

Gesell was born in 1862, his refutation of Marx is a bore to us Douglasites, it is heavier in method than Douglas’s. Marx stands as historian… But when Gesell wrote the Natural Economic Order, Douglas’s view wasn’t available. The technocrats were not all over the place… Economics may have got to the stage where one worker will look upon another rather as an aid and concurrent. We might, rather, say Gesell’s rectification of Marx and of Proudhon.¹³

28The affectation of boredom with Gesell’s “refutation of Marx” is an odd posture for Pound to adopt because a little lower down—and in virtually every subsequent mention of Gesell—he praises Gesell’s remark, “‘Marx finds nothing to criticise in money.’ (New Economic Order 371), as ‘a beautiful sentence.’”

29However, in this review Pound takes another tack, and criticizes Proudhon’s terminological imprecision: “Very important that the econ/vocab/should be decently articulated. Proudhon a MESS in this respect.”‑¹⁴ And in a letter of December 25, 1934 he reassured Douglas that he was not abandoning Social Credit for Proudhon, and offered a very Poundian reason, “Reading Gesell, one sees Proudhon’s mess due to failure (to have read Ta Hio)/no sense of ROOT and BRANCH.” I think that the two remarks are equivalent in Pound’s mind. It is difficult to make out from his remarks what Pound understood about Proudhon’s ideas—or what he found lacking in them. All we can say for sure, is that at this early exposure he rejected Proudhon.

30Pound was troubled by the disjunction between the policy prescriptions of Gesell and Douglas. Both believed that the cause of the business cycle was a structural shortage of purchasing power traceable to the banking system. But their remedies were incompatible. Douglas’s remedy was the “National Divi-dend,” a sum of money paid directly to every citizen so as to correct the perceived shortfall in purchasing power. Gesell’s idea was to replace standard cur- rency with “demurrage money,” a currency which bore “carrying costs” in the form of stamps. The holder of a bill was obliged to purchase and affix a stamp to each bill in his possession each week. Gesell recommended an annual rate of depreciation of 5.2%, levied by the weekly attachment of 52 10¢ stamps to a $100 bill, or 1¢ stamps to a $10 bill. Proudhon’s remedy was different again. His plan was to establish “commodity banks” where farmers, manufacturers and merchants could exchange goods without the intervention of currency or bank credit—using bills of sale, promissory notes and the like.

31The Gesell and Douglas schemes would appear to be diametrically opposed in their effect on the total money supply. Douglas’s National Dividend would increase the total money supply by the amount of the dividend. Indeed, that was its purpose, for Douglas’s A +‑B theorem maintained that there was a structural shortage of purchasing power in modern industrial economies. Demur-rage money, on the other hand would automatically shrink the money supply by 5.2% per annum of the issued stamp scrip. Indeed, Gesell called it Schwund-geld or “shrinking money.” However, the opposition is not as stark as it might appear. Gesell’s Proudhonian analysis held that it was not the total money supply that determined economic activity so much as the “velocity” of money—that is, the rate of circulation. Demurrage money was designed to discourage hoarding—a practice which causes a reduction in the total available -purchasing power.¹⁵

32Pound was never able to reconcile these contradictions, but tried to bull his way through them. When he proposed that the National Dividend be paid with demurrage money, the Social Crediters were unpersuaded. He complained to Fack (Oct. 30, 1934):

I am at it hammer and tongs with Doug/and Orage, to get ‘em to see SS [Stamp Scrip] as the proper medium in which to pay the div/and also to see that it does PART of what Doug/aims at with his compensated price.

33Having no luck with the Social Crediters, he detailed the “points of concord between Douglas and Gesell in a letter to Fack.” He had no greater luck there. Fack left Pound in no doubt that he considered the two schemes to be completely incompatible:

When I read in the N[ational] D[ividend] that the great flaw in the money system, the flaw that makes it impossible to distribute the goods[,] has nothing to do with the velocity of its circulation, I look at this depression [the Great Depres-sion of 1929-39], at all depressions and laugh. S[ocial] C[redit] must be said to be right, by all means, while the ending of every inflation with plenty of money out proves it is wrong. Money will be saved, hoarded in S[ocial] C[redit] just as now. No control of what is to happen. “Dividend” is a capitalistic term. It has no use in an order where each gets his share. S[ocial] C[redit] is fundamentally wrong—where did you get your information after having been in touch with me and Cordian¹⁶ only, as far as I know, that Gesell’s teaching is in the hands of ignorants? In central Europe we have more historical background than people anywhere, it seems to me (typed postcard postmarked Dec. 15, 1934).

34But Pound was not to be discouraged, and persisted in his delusion that Social Credit, Gesell’s Proudhonian prescriptions, and Italian Fascism were compatible and mutually supportive. Six months later, he is still linking his three enthusiasms:

Orage grew out of Guild Socialism.¹⁷ The Duce grew out of Guild Socialism, and refers now and again to Proudhon. A representative body wherein each kind of worker is represented by a man of his own trade cannot fall into the same kind of servility.¹⁸

35Another six months on (in the 1936 Esquire article cited above), he repeats the same assessment, now stressing the compatibility of all three with private property:

Both Douglas and Gesell show how to conserve individual initiative. Neither of ‘em in any way ham-strings it…

Douglas and Gesell were from their starts ALIKE in being basic attacks on usury IN NO WAY implying an attack on SHARE HOLDING or deriving dividends from the material profits of united action (195-6).

36Pound is correct on the last point—neither Proudhon, Gesell, Douglas or Mussolini advocated the abolition of private property, but they agreed on -little else. That crucial agreement is one he shared with Proudhon, Sorel and the French right as well, but it was not enough to draw him toward the French radicals. Instead he threw in his lot with the English extreme right, with Mussolini, and to some extent with the Gesellites. Though it is not part of this story, he was also attracted to the American right—in particular to Huey Long and Father Coughlin.

37Pound was unable to move the Gesellites toward the Social Crediters or the Social Crediters toward the Gesellites.¹⁹ Pound had written to Douglas in January of 1931—his first contact since leaving London a decade earlier—in hopes of recruiting him as a Mussolini supporter. Douglas was uniterested. By the summer of 1933 Pound was pushing Gesell and Mussolini on Douglas—still to no avail. In the fall of that year (Oct. 13, 1933) he wrote in praise of the Gesellites’ political savvy in contrast to the ineffectiveness of Social Credit:

The damn trouble IZ that ought [sic] gang (new Age) 1919 hadn’t tuppence worf of POLITICAL ability in the lot. Having a better article to put forrard we are still a pale inefficient group of foetid intellexshuls, the perfect cartridge and no cannon to fire it.

Gesell and Untreguggie [Unterguggenberger] have got as far in 2 years as we have in 15… that aint vurry flatterin to Orage and the undersigned… but shucks… I come in from the EEEEstheetic side of the pyper…

38Perhaps unsurprisingly, Douglas’s was unimpressed—and extremely impolite:

I am surprised that a man of your moderate intelligence should make such an elementary mistake. Your arguments merely prove that your local Works Foreman [Mussolini] is successfully carrying out a number of Five Year Plans better than his Russian Opposite number [Stalin].

If you have not realised that the problem is not to carry out Five Year Plans, then all I can say is that your proper place is at the “better, bigger, and brighter business” meeting of the Rotary Club at Oshkosh, Indiana!” (letter of Oct. 16, 1933)

39Though Pound was completely unable to reconcile Social Credit and Gesell, he continued to attempt it, relying on bluster and analogy instead of reasoned argument:

My position re/Mussolini, Douglas, AND Unterguggenberger (as exponent of Gesell) can be judged by men sufficiently evolved to understand that:

The existence of an electric automobile does not invalidate the existence of automobiles using petrol.

The helicopter plane does NOT cancel either Wright brothers, Col. Lindbergh or Count Zeppelin.

All of these inventions are one (or more) in the eye for the drivveling [sic] idiots who think the horseless carriage impossible and who believe it impossible to travel by air.²⁰

40This bluster was in response to Andrew Cordian’s letter to the editor of the American Social Credit journal New Democracy alleging—as Fack and Wood-ward were telling him in private letters—that Pound did not understand Gesellite economics. Cordian was not persuaded by Pound’s defence:

In his letter publ. 1. 15. inst., Ezra Pound gives another proof of his ignorance of Gesell’s Natural Economic Order by confounding Professor Irving Fisher’s “stamped scrip” with Gesell’s free-money. This scrip has as little to do with free-money as Douglas’s ideas have with the demonstration of Wörgl; at best, stamped scrip is but a caricature of free-money.²¹

41But Pound was not to be discouraged. He did not change his opinion, or alter his arguments, but simply ratcheted his rhetoric up a notch, calling those who disagree with him “asses.”

42The most extended of his attempts to weave the various threads of economic radicalism into a sound fabric is “The Individual in His Milieu” (Criterion VI [Oct. 1935] 317-26).²² He begins by listing the various threads he must weave together—though leaving some unidentified:

Gesell was right in thanking his destiny that he had begun his study of money unclogged by university training. But as focus in 1935? What other possible -subject could bring together the Pope of Rome, a Scotch engineer in the orient [Douglas], the English Church Assembly, a German business man in the Argentine [Silvio Gesell], a physicist [Frederick Soddy], a biologist [Mark Alfred Carleton], a medical journalist [Paul de Kruif], an orthologist and historian of philosophy [C.K. Ogden], and the present practitioner of versification?

43This creation of a coterie by force majeure is typical of Pound’s political manoeuvring. Of course, neither the Pope nor the Anglican Church endorsed Social Credit or Gesell—though both were on record as deploring the economic mismanagement of Western democracies in the thirties. Frederick Soddy was a economic heretic who rejected Douglas’s ideas,²³ as did both Fack and Wood-ward—followers of Gesell. Carleton, a plant geneticist who developed a hardy strain of wheat, died in 1925 and recorded no views on economics. Paul de Kruif, from whom he learned of Carleton (in Hunger Fighters) was a Douglasite. C.K. Ogden, whose Debabelization Pound reviewed favourably, had nothing in common with the others except Pound’s approval.²⁴

44Having conscripted his army of economic reformers, Pound proceeds to hector the Gesellites and Social Creditors in hopes of reconciling their differences:

So long as Douglasites refuse to consider (if they any of them really do so refuse) the unjust privileges of money above any other product, so long as the Gesellites refuse to consider the cultural heritage (the increment of association, and the possibilities inherent in a right proportion in the issue of fixed money and Schwundgeld, monnaie fondante, stamp scrip) for just so long will both groups sabotage each other and delay economic light.

A membership ticket in neither party exempts its holder from the natural human frailty of being bored at the thought of changing a painfully acquired set of ideas.

No Douglasite can improve on Gesell’s criteria for money.

No Gesellite will bite deeper than Douglas’s fountain of values.

45In the earlier piece on Gesell (“Leaving out Economics”) he had represented Gesell as a precursor of Douglas:

I cannot feel that we “on paper” need in the least worry about Douglasite sheep getting lost, and led astray by other wicked economists… Gesell, and if I remember rightly, Proudhon, were among economists whom Douglas found worth attention.

46He soon learned that this tactic would not work. In response to Pound’s championing of Gesell in letters to him, Douglas responded negatively (letter to Pound, Dec. 3, 1934): “Gesell’s practical proposals seem to me merely a continuous and heavy tax. Any validity that they have rests on the assumption that the plant of civilisation does not belong to the consumer.” Douglas thought taxes were unnecessary, believing that governments could meet their obligations by issuing currency.

47In the later article, instead of crediting Gesell with anticipating Douglas, Pound rather fantastically claims to have anticipated Gesell himself!:

For what it may be worth my ABC, written in ignorance of Gesell, left a place for Schwundgeld. This ought to have a confirmative value, just as a table of known chemical elements, with certain lacunae, serves to validate the existence, or be ready to welcome a newly discovered chemical element. (Criterion 322)

48Declaring that Gesell has made a signal contribution to economic wisdom, he neglects to make clear just what that contribution was:

Once discovered I don’t see how Gesell’s idea can disappear. It will not crawl back again into its box. We find honest economists sporadically coming on it independently as soon as they begin to think of modern conditions.

49He also needs to reconcile Gesell with Fascism, but daren’t go so far as to claim that Mussolini was following Gesell. Instead he excuses Gesell for not having anticipated Mussolini’s wise economic policies—again without specifying what they are:

Gesell’s limitation in regard to the corporate state, lay perhaps only in space, time and energy. He was born long before Mussolini, he had not the Duce’s organizing capacity or his knowledge of men.

50Having reconciled Gesell with himself and with Mussolini to his own satisfaction, Pound turns to the thornier problem of Douglas:

In respect to C.H. Douglas, Gesell as business man, having discovered a most marvellous mechanism for unshackling commerce, for liberating all trade and consumption from the manacles of the money monopoly, having invented an unhoardable money, a money that cries to be spent within a given period of time, went on only toward consideration of land.

51That is to say, Gesell failed to take the next step—Douglas’s “increment of association:”

Nevertheless, faced with Douglas, Gesell neither saw nor demanded to know more about the generation of value.

He saw (to his eternal glory) that Marx did not question money.

Douglas saw the limitation of Marx’s value theory. He saw that if value arises from work, a vast deal of that work has already been done by men who can no longer eat its fruit, namely by the dead, by Edison, Carleton, and ten thousand others, who have rendered it needless to get up water from wells with buckets, to put oil into individual lamps, to dig and burn coal in order to cook and run railway trains,‑etc.‑etc.‑etc., ad infinitum.

52Here Pound is invoking Douglas’s “increment of association,” that is the -public good of past technological innovations which he claims orthodox economists fail to factor into their models, and that the Gesellites also fail to appreciate:

When Dr. Fack and the noble Gesellites consider this perfectly justifiable exten-sion of justice which in no way invalidates Silvio Gesell, they will be ready for a scientific economy, as distinct from a sectarian.

Gesell, fighting usury, did not specifically confuse it with the increment of associations.

But if he consciously noted their difference, he failed to spend any great verbal energy in sorting out one from the other.

53The increment of association from the “cultural heritage” was a sore point between Pound and the Gesellites and one they never resolved. Fack, for example, told Pound:

A price does not consist of wage and cultural heritage, but of wage and interest plus rent plus profit. Douglas took this terminology in, either because he did not know better or because he wanted to fool the people. His remedy is adequate to his proposal. He distributes presents. Cultural heritage. Gesell eliminates the interest and realizes the full proceeds of labour so that all the cultural heritage becomes the heritage of the worker and of the worker only who creates the entire cultural heritage. (Jan. 5, 1936)

54Fack’s scorn for Douglas had no more effect on Pound’s enthusiasm than did Douglas’s scorn for Gesell and his followers. Nonetheless it could not help but cause some “cognitive dissonance” in his understanding of economics. Of all the individuals and groups that Pound attempted to recruit to his program of economic reform, it was only the Proudhonians—Silvio Gesell, E.S. Wood-ward, Arthur Kitson, and Frederick Soddy—who fundamentally altered his notion of what should be done to repair the damage of economic ignorance. Although he flirted with Marxists, Technocrats, and was in bed with Fascists, none of those alternative prescriptions impacted much on his settled economic views.

55The story I have told reveals Pound as a cheerleader for economic reform. He thought he knew when to cheer and when to boo, whose triumphs he should celebrated and whose he should bemoan. Gesell and his followers fatally confused him on that score, and he found himself cheering with Gesellites when Social Creditors booed, and booing with Social Creditors when Gesellites cheered.

56Unhappily, the one thing upon which Gesellites, Social Creditors, and Fascists agreed wholeheartedly was that the Jews were behind most of the world’s economic difficulties. That agreement proved to be fatally attractive for a cheerleader like Pound. He eventually gave up attempting to persuade Douglasites and Gesellites to agree on economics in favour of denouncing Jews, where he could be confident of agreement from Douglas, Fack and Kitson. More importantly, it relieved him of the burden of attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable—though at a terrible cost.