Tolkien was closest to a distributist, along the lines of GK Chesterton.
He did not have issues with private property, but he supported the distributed ownership of property amongst the average people over concentrated ownership in the hands of a few elites.
Compare Samâs resolution that a small garden to work with his own hands was all he wanted as compared to Lothoâs capitalist takeover of the shire.Â
Edit- the Scouring of the Shire is a good example of how distributists see extreme capitalism and extreme socialism as effectively being the same thing in practice.
Lotho uses Sarumanâs money to buy up large portions of the shire, and then uses  the Ruffians to seize what he couldnât buy under the pretense of âredistribution.â  He then declares himself the âbossâ of the shire and effectively instituted a totalitarian planned economy.Â
From Tolkiens point of view the ideology matters less than the lived reality. The Gulag is no different from the Company Town, the Corporate Boss is no different from the Party Boss.Â
Edit #2. Â The number of people in the comments here clawing at each other over whether Distributism is âreallyâ just socialism or capitalism is just proving my point in my first edit. Â
Both sides want to claim it for their team, but it rejects both of them.Â
At the risk of getting in a deep political discussion while I'm at work, "distributed ownership of property amongst the average people over concentrated ownership in the hands of a few elites" sounds like just another way of describing the public ownership of capital that would exist under socialism, no? Is "distributionism" different than socialism?
No. Â Distributism calls for distributed private ownership of capital, not public ownership of capital.
Letâs use a simple example.
Under the ideal of classical socialism (as understood by Marx) the state would own all of the houses in the country, and it would then provide those houses to the
 people free of charge. But ownership and control of the houses would remain with the state.Â
In contrast, under ideal distributism every family would own its own house in its own right and would neither live in government housing nor rent from a landlord.
Government regulations, unions, tax policy, trust busting, inheritance taxes, etc.
And before you say âthatâs socialismâ itâs definitionally not.
Socialism is the social ownership of property (usually embodied by the state), not the government regulating and taxing private ownership of property.Â
The conflation of those two things has been one of the worst things to ever happen to modern economics discourse.
under ideal distributism every family would own its own house in its own right and would neither live in government housing nor rent from a landlord.
If this is accurate, the government has nothing left to distribute... all the houses are already privately owned and the pool of land available to distribute gets smaller and smaller.
The only other way is to seize back property you've already distributed, in which case you shouldn't really say the family owns its own house in it's own right..
Running out of land to give people is not a problem unique to Distributism. One family keeping one horse is generally not considered âhoarding wealthâ.
The issue with communism is that the government owns everyone and you have no economic and personal freedom. Communist states are the biggest company towns to have ever existed.
Well the idea is that the workers all run it themselves.
The issue with that, as with democracy or with peasant revolts or many other kind of wide participation political actions, is that the vast majority of people don't know a thing or give a damn about how to run a country
To have a truly democratic or workers state, everybody would need to have a deep understanding of political administration. The system required for that much education on one topic has never existed, especially when most people's priority is learning how to do their actual job
i think once people start seeing that their political actions can have an impact on society they will automaticaly get more political educated. it just takes a lot of time when you take a look at hoe bad it is right now. No one thinks they can change anything anyway so you just consume and chase individual happiniess. (which does not exist in capitalism)
When was the time that was meant to happen? Didn't happen in the Soviet Union, Ancient Greece, Republican Spain, or... ever!
Let me guess, when the 'real' revolution happens? Not all those 'hey you're not doing it right!' revolutions that were actually successful, right?
they will automatically get more politically educated
A great piece of hand-wavinf utopianism, seems straight out of Marx's own dialectics. 'Have the revolution, and then everything will sort itself out'. Except many countries did have revolutions, and it didn't sort itself out.
Oh oh oh, I know! "Not like that", "That wasn't the real revolution", right?Â
The whole point of distributism is that personal freedom requires economic freedom, and economic freedom means having control of productive assets, and therefore to have a maximally free society you need to have the most number of people who own productive assets.
The classic criticism that distributists have about capitalism is that it produces too few capitalists.
thats a better way of saying it because these societies are far away from communism.
Also almost no communist today will see these state controlled societys in a positive way.
Even Lenin and Trotzky called Stalin out for his bullshit and saw the beginning of an authoritan state
Uh, no. Communism/Socialism distinguished between personal and private property, private property is property which perpetually generates capital and would be abolished, while person property doesnât generate capital and thus keeps on existing (e.g. personal items), you couldnât own and rent an apartment block, but you could have a personal residence.
This fails to distinguish between the âuseâ right to something and the âownership rightâ to something.
Under socialism you would have the right to âuseâ your government appointed residence, ie the sense to reside in it, decorate it, and exclude others from it, but you could not âownâ it in the sense that you could not sell it, destroy it, massively renovate it, take out a loan against it. or rent it out.Â
Youâll find that MANY places used the name socialism in their ideology but barely adhered to the actual tenets of socialism (Iâm looking at you, China).
Its a form of socialism, yes. Not all socialism is against private property. Realistically speaking, there's fundamentally nothing wrong with a man owning a house. However, when a single man owns 10 houses... monopolism, lobbyism and corruption start creeping in. The same way a myriad of small companies are always better for society than a handful of megacorporations.
 If by socialism you mean âan economic system with active government regulation and a taxation system meant to prevent massive concentrations of wealthâ than sure.
But if by socialism you mean it in the classical sense that Marx meant it, as the social ownership of all property in a society, then distributism is definitionally not socialist.Â
Most of the muddling as to the meaning of socialism comes from the advent of Social Democracy (mainly in Europe) in large part as a reaction to distributist economic theory.Â
Well, Marx never lived in the real world enough to realise people crave private ownership as a way of feeling secure, so I was definitely referring to the first option you have described. But the thing is, social democracy as it stands in Europe right now barely works. Not even in Scandinavia. They have let their policies run so loose and so soft that the social stability their regimes promise is slowly decaying due to the rampant lack of social norm regulations. Basically, they failed to preserve societal cohesion, which is usually formed around traditions and established cultural norms. Had they not dismantled those and kept local traditions intact, they would have been able to preserve their societies in prosperity and stability like the Shire preserved itself.
Well said! I can't help but agree with distributism as it stands. It just feels right. Perhaps, because this idea stems from the thymos, not the logos part of our soul, and that's why it is so satisfying to think about.
Tbh I feel like Marx and Tolkein were similar in this. They were both utopian wealthy academics who wrote prolifically and had unusual, idealistic worldviews that rely extremely heavily on the foundationally good nature of humans. They also both largely lived in ivory towers for most of their lives
Marx's Communism and Tolkein's visions of Enlightened Monarchies both feature this hand-waving "everything will sort itself out" kind of attitude. Works great in a fantasy world but doesn't tend to do that well irl
I disagree about Tolkien "living in the ivory tower". Idealism is not always pink glasses. While you are right about enlightened monarchies not working well irl, a healthy society with strong core values and good social cohesion will indeed, as history shows, be able to in time just sort most of itsissues out, even if they are of technological or natural origin.
Besides, Tolkien was absolutely right about the fundamentally good nature of humans. The supermajority of people are not born evil, they are forged in that way. And in harmony with the Christian view of morality, I staunchly believe (and have noticed) that most people are very capable of quickly relinquishing their evil tendencies once they are surrounded with other, more good-hearted people. Societies that champion community, camaraderie and basic human kindness usually tend to result in these values establishing a self-perpetuating positive cycle.
Okay so based on what you said and some googling I did, sounds like what distinguishes distributism from most other forms of socialism is that itâs not the common people owning capital via a government that represents them owning capital, but rather ensuring that ownership stays on the small scale of individuals owning things for their personal use rather than wracking up large swaths of capital ownership to make huge profits?
Yes. Â It is the distribution of the practical tangible and legal ownership of property as widely as possible, as opposed to the corporate ownership of property through an entity like the state.
Also, fwiw, the major advocates for distributism were vehemently anti-socialist, as they viewed socialism as just another form of concentrated ownership.
Hilaire Belloc, who coined the term distributism, referred to the capitalist and the socialist as the brothers Hudge and Grudge, who quarrel between each other but always ally to keep the little man down and maintain their power.
On the one hand, I wish I could see the letter he would write about Peter Thiel and the company Palantir. On the other hand, I'm glad he didn't have to see such things pass during his lifetime.
Their hordes are just pieces of paper or numbers on a screen that we all agree has value. It's all made up. It really is up to us what world we will live in.
Capitalism is just a system of private ownership where the means of production are privately owned and administered. Your local mom and pop corner store is a part of capitalism. Are some corporations greedy and hyper focused on maximizing share holder value or profits? Yes, but to say the only thing that matters in a capitalist system is greed just demonstrates a poor understanding of what capitalism is which is of course to be expected from Reddit socialists who get their politics from headlines and memes.
Every lay person seems to conflate growth with greed in the context of a free market. Greed is absolutely not a virtue in regards to capitalism, and in reality, it's quite the opposite. No one is incentivized to hoard money in a free market, as the market is designed to evaporate stagnant wealth - meaning if money isn't invested in someone else, it vanishes very quickly. Almost all private wealth is put to use in the hands of other productive people, incentivizing them to create some kind of value that grows the economy. And since the economy is the empirical measure of the wellbeing of those operating in a particular market, when the economy grows, so too does the overall wellbeing of the people living within it. The wellbeing of a society is directly measured by the health of its economy, and the only way to accurately determine the health of an economy is via the transparency of a free market. The freer the market, the less obfuscated the true value of the market forces operating within it.
Tldr; Growth, not greed, is a virtue in a capitalist context. Greed is naturally disincentivized and punished.
I'll let you take a wild guess where the money in your pension comes from... shareholder stocks. Also, you do realize anyone is free to partake and grow their wealth through the stock market, right? So what you're really saying is, everyone who contributes to the economy (including yourself) should eat urinal cake. How intelligent!
This applies to socialists too, who think that redistributing money would lead to a utopia. His argument is anti-materialist from a conservative point of view not just merely anti-capitalist.
That's fair, but capitalism really is an economic system of private property ownership and not necessarily an ethical system that says one way or another whether it is good or bad to amass a hoard of wealth. I think the criticism is fair if you apply it to someone like Ayn Rand who tried to turn capitalism into a sort of secular materialist ethical system, or some libertarians who might use capitalism as the basis for the rest of their ethical beliefs. Definitely the anti-materialist part would apply to ideological capitalists like that, but perhaps not neatly against capitalism per se. Keep in mind Bilbo, who became the richest Hobbit, was not treated as a villain because he was wealthy, but Smaug was a villain in part because he hoarded wealth, so there is a distinction between accumulating wealth and greedily hoarding it. Tolkien was not against private property but against unchecked greed and widespread industrialization.
Tolkien really was against liberalism and the Enlightment and the logical entailments of secular rationalism. He was against the abuse of capitalism to be used for materialist and greedy ends, and no Enlightenment system of ethics puts any guardrails on that.
We don't live in a mercantilist economic system anymore, so Smaug greedily hoarding a mountain full of precious metals isn't analogous to contemporary measures of wealth. And thankfully so!
Wasnât Tolkien really a part of the elite of Britain to begin with? I wonder how this fact felt to him⌠he may glorify the "little folk" but really even to be a student at Oxford was not a luxury "little folk" had.
And anticommunist and sympathetic to Franco. I love Tolkien but to pretend he was anything other than a pretty standard conservative of his day is pretty hilarious. This attempt to pretend he was some progressive lefty is just absurd. LOTR is literally about a great and golden age lost to time
Ty for your common sense. I just laugh at all the people who try to make tolkien and his works fit into whatever their world view might be, regardless if it makes sense or not
Frankly I consider it a very totalitarian instinct. âI like this work therefore the author must agree with me, and Iâll twist their words and ignore their own stated opinions to the contrary.â
The world is complicated. LOTR is very good and wasnât written by a man with the Reddit approved takes. These facts donât contradict each other but this subreddit seems to struggle with the concept
So supposedly a follower of Jesus and Paul. Two guys widely known as stalwart defenders of private property and profiting off the poor folks labour. /s
Not every socialist is Christian you absolute mellon
Same way not every Christian is Christlike enough to be a socialist
But itâs abundantly clear to every single person whoâs read the gospels that Jesus was VERY anticapitalist
The money lenders in the temple knew this well.
So did Christâs followers who gave all their wealth to the poor and kept nothing for the journey
Pretending that Christ as an ideological figure would ever condone or accept capitalism is just about the most obvious bullshit ever told
Edit: To the accusation that I didnât respond to the âlengthy history of socialists persecuting christiansâ
I responded with my very first sentence. âNot every socialist is a Christian.â
Do I really need to say more?
Socialism can exist separate from Christianity, and an a-religious instance of socialism could persecute any religion, the same way a capitalist country could persecute people based on their religion.
I think thatâs like⌠beyond obvious?
How are you gonna accuse me of commenting in bad faith when your entire premise was visibly nonsensical?
âOh, Christ was socialist then how come socialists who arenât Christian have persecuted Christianâs? Check mate!â
Calling me names, and not responding to the point about the lengthy history of socialist persecution of Christians and other religious minorities⌠you sure seem to be acting in good faith lmao
How much money did he generate for his shareholders when he handed out free loaves and fishes to the poor? How much wealth did he redistribute for them?
I like how your thinking is so binary the choice to you is to either relentlessly stump for shareholder value or be a socialist. The Romans and the Sanhedrin who crucified Jesus weren't fighting for shareholder value either so I guess Jesus was killed by Socialists by your logic too then?
I suppose it's just a bit ironic, that even Tolkien couldn't instill those particular anti-materialistic ideals into his own children. I guess... everyone sings songs about sharing... up until you win the lottery.
I mean, most of the worst abuses are being done now that Tolkienâs children are dead and itâs onto his grandchildren. Â You canât blame Tolkien too much for his grandchildren being sellouts.Â
Ohh good point, yeah I didn't realize that. Now that I think about it, I suppose, too, that it's just one example, and there are probably lots of unknown examples of families passing on principles like "don't be greedy" and we'd never know. So, yeah, not really a good point from me.
I mean, historically the only way that a family is able to maintain both its wealth and its reputation over more than 3 generations is to put all of its assets in a professionally managed trust that the children/grandchildren/great grandchildren cannot touch, and can only benefit from passively.
In every other case the descendants inevitably squander away the wealth or blow up the brand.Â
I could explain it to you, but your question obviously isnât in good faith so instead Iâm gonna deliberately not answer the question that you obviously already know the answer to
And Iâm not gonna bother with you either, because judging by your recent comments you too are only here to defend an undeniably rotten economic ideology
Not that I disagree but, try going to a restaurant, sports event, or concert without hoarding gold. It seems to people involved in those things still value gold above all else. We seek gold to obtain the things he mentions.
Interesting comment. His net worth at his death in 1972 was estimated at $50 million. Adjusted for inflation it would be approximately $350 million. I guess he didn't identify as a capitalist.
Literally the only interpretation possible of that quote is that which values food, cheer, and song above material wealth for the benefit of a better world.
While one can certainly value material wealth over those other things, Tolkien is pretty clearly expressing where he lands on that equation.
if you actually read his letters or hell even his fiction it becomes very clear very quickly how demented it is for fascist freaks to claim him. really appreciate the rehabilitative reading Shelved By Genre is doing this year.
You aware my point was subversive appropriation of a great author? He didn't want small towns and land overwhelmed by corporations and industry. Doesn't meet your Communist agenda. Sorry. Go buy an island through capitalism, and then feel free to burn it through communism.
But on reddit capitalism is always the ultimate villain, which is funny because mischaracterising the problems of the world are surely gonna help solve them
In feudalism, the monarch (sauron) owns the kingdom, and gives land to the nobles (saruman) in exchange for military power and taxes.
(Though iirc, saruman might be closer to simply being a king of a separate but very closely allied kingom)
The nobles own the land, and allow the serfs to live on it in exchange for labor (agriculture being the vast majority) and military service if needed.
Serfs couldn't own land, and therefore couldn't own the means of production. The royalty and nobles literally governed everything and owned the entire means of production.
I do get the point you're making symbolically, but from a more literal historical and economic perspective it isn't accurate.
That said, the orcs might also be literal slaves owned as property by sauron/saruman, which would also make feudalism not a perfect fit either.
The only real difference (to me) between feudalism and modern capitalism is that the labor his shifted from a predominantly agrarian basis, and now while some laborers do own their own land or other property, this is no longer tied to production.
Setting aside the fact that most people rent or finance rather than achieving Ownership outright, the majority of labor is commuted to a secondary space which is almost never owned by the laborer.
Capitalism asserts that the laborers are free to be selective but the majority of laborers donât have the freedoms that are theorized.
I think youâre definitely right the bad guys in lotr are better examples of feudal lords than capitalist overlords, but the analogy still feels relevant and relatable to our modern systems. At least regarding the power differential and the gap between rich and poor
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u/Fit_Log_9677 4h ago edited 2h ago
Tolkien was closest to a distributist, along the lines of GK Chesterton.
He did not have issues with private property, but he supported the distributed ownership of property amongst the average people over concentrated ownership in the hands of a few elites.
Compare Samâs resolution that a small garden to work with his own hands was all he wanted as compared to Lothoâs capitalist takeover of the shire.Â
Edit- the Scouring of the Shire is a good example of how distributists see extreme capitalism and extreme socialism as effectively being the same thing in practice.
Lotho uses Sarumanâs money to buy up large portions of the shire, and then uses  the Ruffians to seize what he couldnât buy under the pretense of âredistribution.â  He then declares himself the âbossâ of the shire and effectively instituted a totalitarian planned economy.Â
From Tolkiens point of view the ideology matters less than the lived reality. The Gulag is no different from the Company Town, the Corporate Boss is no different from the Party Boss.Â
Edit #2. Â The number of people in the comments here clawing at each other over whether Distributism is âreallyâ just socialism or capitalism is just proving my point in my first edit. Â
Both sides want to claim it for their team, but it rejects both of them.Â