Progress and Poverty: Walter Rodney's Legacy

The conventional view of human progress states that the more humanity makes progress, the less poverty is entrenched. But, global development is currently characterized by a persistent combination of economic progress and growing relative poverty. This endemic inequality has puzzled economists for years. Henry George developed one of the most important explanations of this paradox, suggesting that progress and poverty arise in tandem from the private appropriation of socially created value. But, he failed to consider race as a variable in the formation of the paradox. This article considers three questions related to this missing piece of the puzzle. First, what is the relationship between racialized property in labor and racialized property in land in the historical process of development? Second, how is socially produced value privately appropriated by an in‐group, those who control the instruments of power? Third, why are existing remedies inadequate? Dr. Walter Rodney demonstrated that the creation of property in labor during slavery was reproduced after emancipation in the production of landed property relations. Not only were Black people deprived of the value produced by their labor, socially created value was also appropriated by non‐Black in‐groups (White and East Indian) who controlled land, the key instrument of power. This power was handed down intergenerationally within the in‐group, leading to present unjust conditions. Neither socialism nor a Georgist single tax can remedy the situation. With the recent ruling by the International Court of Justice that states are obliged to pay reparations for internationally wrongful acts attributed to them, an effective remedy for George's paradox can be found by combining Georgist taxation with a reparations program derived from the legacy of Walter Rodney under a new understanding of human progress.