Proletariats or Proprietors?
February 17, 2020
Factory automation with industrial robots for palletizing food products
PROLETARIATS OR PROPRIETORS?
By Charles Pinwill
The role of socialism these last two hundred years has been to represent the proletariat. There is nothing wrong per se with representing the proletariat. Socialists of all types, trade unionists, Fabians, Communists and Social Democrats have all seen this as their special role in political and economic life. Helping the economically disenfranchised, when it has been a motive of these groups, is in itself a commendable aspiration.
Unfortunately, this goal has usually entailed the conceptual limitation of viewing the proletarian status of most people as being, in the main, an unavoidable and eternal condition with little prospect of amendment. This has not been wholly so, for many have championed measures such as home ownership and superannuation for the working public.
Overall though, those who have represented the builders, butchers and bakers have seen the wage as the sole means of sustenance for most (notwithstanding the provision of social security in dire need).
The world, however, is changing and we are going to have to re-examine our premises. The ongoing technological revolution has made goods much less expensive to produce and lessened the need for human labor.
Technology is displacing employment and making it both more productive and efficient. Those who see the resulting unemployment as threatening are missing a major and world-changing consideration. Industrialized societies are becoming more profitable in a hitherto little observed way, a fact which has now been measured and demonstrated.¹
In the United States in 2014, the total aggregate income of all US citizens amounted to $10.1 trillion. This was the amount paid to Americans to induce them to produce and sell the sum total of consumer products of $12.5 trillion. The excess in value of consumer products given above was a total deficiency of consumer incomes of $2.4 trillion. This amount is surely a societal profit!
This profit of $2.4 trillion amounted to $7,500 per person over the whole population, or $30,000 per family of four.
Modern democracies practice universal suffrage (we all get one vote); this is in recognition that we all have a share in the ownership of our respective countries. If this is allowed, might we also have a just claim to a part of the societal profit?
Americans only got access to this societal profit in 2014 by increasing their total indebtedness to their banking system by $2.3 trillion. It doesn’t have to be done this way. Modern money is almost wholly in the form of digital IOUs created in cyberspace.
These IOUs (US dollars) are issued as claims upon the nation’s assets and products. They are liabilities which would be issued against the National Balance Sheet if nations did normal accounts. The aforementioned accounts are essential if we are ever to realize the prospect of our proletariat, even those with no investment capital, becoming and increasingly becoming proprietors sharing in the societal profit which would be issued to them as a National Dividend.
The mechanics of doing this would require the establishment of something in the nature of a National Credit Authority, appropriately empowered to calculate the national profit from our increasing technology, issue credit against our National Balance Sheet and distribute it in the form of a National Dividend payable to all.
The banking system would need to be constrained from issuing consumer credit to a like amount. Though politically difficult, especially in our current state of National Accounts which are wholly inadequate when viewed from the standpoint of common best practice by all corporations, it has social implications of the utmost importance.
With the increasing displacement of human labour from the economy, and an ever expanding debilitating debt in all sectors of society, the logic is inescapable and the ultimate unavoidability of having all share in a National Dividend to maintain the functionality of the economy, summonses the specter of inevitability.
Not the specter envisioned by Karl Marx of us all becoming proletariats, but rather of all becoming progressively, and increasingly, proprietors.
¹See the Prototype National Accounts posted here.
— Comments —
Helen writes:
How debt-slavery and misery are avoidable by taking back the control of money creation as a society from the privately owned looting operation known as the banking system is such a simple solution that it is almost beyond belief. Of course, to wrest from the banking system this control will not be a simple feat. It is not likely to give up its criminal racket anytime soon. Our Lord Himself chased the money changers out of the temple and within the week was crucified on the cross. Government leaders have been killed for trying to change the monetary system. Without such reforms what chance do people have to live in freedom? In time, none. More and more people are understanding this and yet the march towards total enslavement- to the proletarian life discussed in Mr. Pinwill’s essay surely is inexorable unless God Himself intervenes.
