Gustav Gross on Otto Effertz’s Arbeit und Boden (1890)

Gustav Gross’s 1890 review, [Rezension zu] Otto Effertz: Arbeit und Boden. Kritik der theoretischen politischen Oekonomik, examines Effertz’s 1889 attempt to reconstruct political economy around labor and land. Following the book’s treatment of society in general, bourgeois society, and socialist society, Gross tests its definitions and explanatory claims. He recognizes the value of restoring land to an analysis dominated by labor, but argues that Effertz’s conceptual foundations cannot sustain his system.

The review begins with Effertz’s distinction between theoretical analysis and practical evaluation:

Er bezeichnet die Theorie als die Operation mit Begriffen, die Praxis hingegen als die Diskussion von Ideen, wobei er unter Ideen jene Begriffe versteht, denen das Merkmal des Guten beigelegt wird.

English translation: He designates theory as the operation with concepts, practice, on the other hand, as the discussion of ideas, whereby by ideas he understands those concepts to which the attribute of the good is ascribed.

Gross questions this distinction but provisionally accepts it as a basis for assessing the argument:

Obgleich dieser Unterschied sowohl nach seiner Berechtigung als nach seiner Formulierung vielfach anfechtbar wäre, wollen wir ihn doch annehmen, da wir nur so zu einer gemeinsamen Basis gelangen können.

English translation: Although this distinction would in many respects be open to challenge, both as to its justification and as to its formulation, we shall nevertheless accept it, since only thus can we arrive at a common basis.

This concession establishes an immanent method of criticism: Gross initially judges Effertz by his own separation of conceptual reasoning from judgments of economic good and evil. The deeper difficulty lies within the concepts themselves. Effertz defines a good through value, labor, and land without adequately explaining what it means for a good to contain these heterogeneous elements. Gross questions whether their relations to goods are comparable enough to support the deductions built upon them.

The classification of goods makes this objection concrete:

Die Güter teilt er ein in zwei große Klassen, Nahrungsmittel und Kulturmittel, von welchen die letzteren mehr Arbeitswert, die ersteren mehr Bodenwert „enthalten“ oder einen größeren „Bodenarbeitsquotienten“ haben.

English translation: He divides goods into two great classes, foodstuffs and means of culture (Kulturmittel), of which the latter "contain" more labour value, the former more land value, or have a greater "land-labour quotient."

Gross finds the boundaries between foodstuffs and cultural goods too uncertain to ground mathematical proofs. Formal deduction cannot repair inadequate definitions. Effertz’s population law, in Gross’s account, consequently offers little beyond the proposition that both underpopulation and overpopulation can cause shortages of food, while cultural goods remain scarce under the former condition and abundant under the latter.

In the treatment of bourgeois society, characterized by free exchange, Gross finds these problems recurring in the analysis of commodities, money value, and the purported elements of exchange value. He questions how income can be measured interchangeably through money, labor, or land. Effertz’s laws imply that wages tend toward subsistence and capital income rises, yet leave the distribution of capital income unexplained. Their explanatory force is further weakened by the acknowledgment that omitted factors prevent them from corresponding to actual bourgeois society. Gross’s objection concerns the adequacy of the abstraction, not simply its conclusions.

The discussion of socialist society, organized through centralized production and distribution, introduces further difficulties. The search for an optimal working day partly abandons the promised suspension of evaluative judgment. Gross also challenges equations connecting labor income, domination, and subjection to the duration of work: political relations cannot simply be expressed in units of working time. Effertz predicts that population growth will push food income toward subsistence even under socialism, leaving improvement chiefly to cultural goods. Gross rejects the narrow observational basis for the accompanying assurance that workers are already adequately nourished.

Despite these criticisms, Gross credits Effertz’s “pono-physiocratic” project with ingenuity and a legitimate corrective purpose: emphasizing land against a one-sided socialist emphasis on labor. Yet this corrective does not establish a successful theory. Gross also rejects the rigid opposition between bourgeois and socialist society, since collective organization already exists within the former and private economic activity would retain some place within the latter.

The closing criticisms return to conceptual precision and responsible controversy. Gross considers Effertz’s definitions of goods and value fundamentally defective and finds the critical discussions concluding the chapters especially weak. They attack doctrines never held or already abandoned, while unnamed bourgeois economists become targets of inadequately specified accusations. A final complaint concerns pervasive printing errors. Throughout, Gross demands clear categories, defensible abstractions, adequate evidence, and identifiable opponents: mathematical form and systematic ambition cannot substitute for these conditions of theoretical explanation.