SOCIAL CREDIT AND THE LEISURE STATE - PART TWO

"The situation as the work moralist sees it."

PART TWO - WORK MORALITY AND THE COMMON CULTURAL INHERITANCE by Wilfred Price c.1990

In the old slave states and in the feudal system, work, especially manual work, was looked down on.  With the development of manufacturing and mercantilism, however, work become more dignified.  The child of this economic change, the Protestant Church, especially the extreme forms, the Calvinists and the Puritans, proclaimed the high morality of honest toil for six days in the week. Hard work was encouraged and much of the hostility in France against the Huguenots was due to the fact that they worked on most of the saints’ days while the Catholics did not.

This morality was very convenient when, in the Industrial Revolution, men had to switch from the creativity and independence of handicraft to the child labour and the workhouse.  Idleness was the great sin and vagrancy was severely dealt with.  This drudgery offered little improvement on the slavery of old; fear of destitution took the place of the whip.  It is claimed that any job that is imposed on one by fear of poverty, even if it were only one hour per week, is slavery – wage slavery. Being compelled to have a job means that you are tied to it, and can be controlled through it.

The Socialist Movement took over the Work Ethic and made it the central point in its platform.  The worker is the only person that matters; only he is entitled to the wealth that is produced by him alone.  The idle Rich is the villain of the piece and fit only for outer darkness.  Berbard Shaw wrote on more than one occasion of the “criminality of idleness”.

Karl Marx proclaimed this viewpoint in an extreme way.  All incomes not derived from direct labour, such as dividends, profit, interest, and rent, were declared to be surplus value and a robbing of the worker.  The banner of the class war was to be raised, the non-working capitalist class to be overthrown, all capital to be confiscated without compensation, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to be set up.  In measures for this in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, No, 8 says, “Equal liability for all to labour.  Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.”  The Work Ethic features also very strongly in Fascism and Nazism.

As would be expected, the trade unions are all for it.  Present circumstances force them into a Luddite attitude.  They have a vested interest in overmanning and the doing of unnecessary work to provide jobs.  An example of this attitude was shown some years ago.  It was required to get an electric cable under a wide road using a narrow culvert with a cord attached which could then be used to pull the cable through.  The workers concerned objected to this and, as a result, the road had to be dug up to lay the cable.

This attitude is wasteful and is as much sabotage as smashing property in a riot.  When the Left accuses Capitalism of causing unemployment and point to the apparent absence of it in the Soviet Union, it could not be more misleading. The effect of the present financial system on private enterprise is to produce an aggressive commercialism that makes for a large amount of socially unnecessary work in mass selling and advertising as well as the waste caused by built-in obsolescence.

In the late thirties at Hollesley Bay in Suffolk there was a camp to which long term unemployed men had to go and were given work by being made to dig holes and then fill them in again.  This is nothing when compared to the vast system of slave camps by which the Soviet Union solves its unemployment problem.  No automation in these.  It also adopts Hitler’s remedy by vast armament production and maintaining a large conscript army.  Nothing like the war game for making work!

Besides being a moral obligation, compulsory toil is hailed as an aid to well-being.  “Hard work never hurt anyone,” is a saying regardless of the fact that hard work has killed millions.  “The Devil finds mischief for idle hands to do” is another which is wrong.  It should be “bored” not “idle” hands that are mischievous.  Many people take to crime as an escape from drudgery.

The conditions in ancient Rome are used as an argument against full-time leisure.  Actually what was there apart from the large number of slaves was a populace that was destitute, living on hand-outs, and demoralised by brutality under the Bread and Circuses policy.  Contrast that with the happy and peaceful lives for hundreds of years enjoyed by the leisured Pacific Polynesian islanders until the white man came with his trade gin and made them work.

In his aforementioned article, Dr. Chris Evans deals with this point thus:- “If the objection is raised that people hardly know what to do with the leisure time they have at their disposal already, then the rejoinder should be that people must learn to enjoy leisure, sustained leisure, in the way that some people enjoy sustained work.  Man is an active, creative being, born to explore the universe around him and equipped with a fabulous brain to help him.  There is no hint of a suggestion that his genetic structure, his psychological needs and drives, or even his social heritage demand that he spends a vast chunk of his life poring over figures in a neon-lit office, driving a diesel engine through smoky streets, or watching a million bottles a day pass him by on a conveyor belt.  As we move towards the end of this century, therefore, expect to find men throwing off the shackles of compulsory mindless labour, and embracing the new intellectual riches which the computer will provide.”

In answer finally to the morality question and also to the notion, “You can’t have something for nothing”, it should be remembered that the rays of the Sun, the source of all life on this planet, come to us free of charge. From them we get wind and rain giving power and moisture; the green-of-the-leaf uses these rays to provide lant life which feeds the animal life including us, and fossil remains of plants and animals over millions of years are stored in the earth giving coal and oil.  Man, from the time when he used crude tools of stone, wood and bone, and kindled fires to enable him to get his food and protect himself, has over the ages acquired a vast reservoir of knowledge and skill to produce a high standard of living with less and less need for human labour.  This treasure house of science, technology, philosophy, and the arts, built up brick by brick by millions of people dead and gone, (including many who were of the idle rich or patronised by them) constitutes the Common Cultural Inheritance.  We, who are alive as descendants of the creators of this heritage, are entitled, each one of us, to a share in it by right of birth.  Surely then, if our industry can be fully automated, we are each entitled to a leisure income.

Social Credit means that all will get the fruits of the Cultural Inheritance.

GREEN SWIPE WIND-UP

Next time: Part three - Human nature and the Origin of War

SOCIAL CREDIT AND THE LEISURE STATE - PART ONE

 

Horrible right-wing politicians and their media lackeys have started to denigrate the Social Credit economic system.  They say it’s what China’s got.  I don’t know about that.  We will explain it properly.  We are publishing posthumously in serial form, Wilfred Price’s “Social Credit and the Leisure State”, 3^rd Edition circa 1990.

PART ONE - THE SILICON CHIP AND AUTOMATION

N.B. For literary convenience masculine pronouns are used in this treatise.  However, it should be understood that both sexes are represented equally.

One of the most dramatic pieces of technology to hit the headlines in recent times must be that of the Silicon Chip.

The latter half of the 20^th Century could be described as the period of the Electronic Revolution, something which may prove as far reaching in its effect on human living as the Industrial Revolution.  Now, as a result of computers, not only can vast amounts of information be housed ready on demand, and the most complicated of mathematical problems be solved in the twinkling of an eye, but also can be stored instructional programmes for a whole series of intricate mechanical operations.  Even in the early stages this meant a switch from human to mechanical direction.

In the “Horizon” television series the film “Now the Chips are Down” described the impact of the Silicon Chip micro-processing technique on the making of computers.  The film showed that a system of computers which 25 years ago would have occupied an area the size of Greater London, and presumably, averaging six feet in height, can now by means of micro-circuits on assemblies of Silicon Chips, be contained in a volume the size of a human brain.  The film went on to indicate that Britain was well supplied with “Software” specialists, i.e.: people who can adapt these electronic “brains” to the direction of industrial processes.  Two years ago, Dr. Chris Evans, the scientific broadcaster, in an article, “Computers and Artificial Intelligence?” (Science Fact, edited by Professor Frank George – Topaz Books) states, “The horrendous fact that many prized skills are rather surprisingly easy to simulate by quite simple computers will not penetrate human consciousness overnight, but once it does there are likely to be fireworks.”

When also it is to be realised that, besides factories, such automation can enter offices, surgeries, transport, and, in fact any professional activity, an acute problem will certainly arise in a community conditioned to the idea that employment is the sole (or the only rightful) means of getting buying power.  As the new computers will not only be incredibly small, but also can be produced very cheaply, it is obvious that millions of people will no longer be required in industry. This is a view that is held by a large number of scientific experts who make it clear that far more jobs will be destroyed than ever could be created no matter how much output is increased.  Even if any government were to try and hold back this technical development, its country would suffer as a result of world competition.  It is this that forced our government to invest well over £100,000,000 in the Silicon Chip in 1978.

Professor Tom Stonier, of the School of Science and Society, Bradford University, has pointed out that 200 years ago people would not have believed that the agriculture of Britin could be carried out by 3% of the adult population and that today people find it hard to believe that our industry could be carried out by a similarly small proportion.

It has been contended that, though Japan is the leader in the use of Micro-Chip directed robots, there is still a low level of unemployment there.  However, the use is still on a small scale and the installation of the robots is labour intensive.  The picture will change in a few years’ time.  There is an assumption that there will be a repetition of the situation as in the early days of the Industrial Revolution when the then new technology made for more human labour than it displaced because of the great expansion of production.  Toay, however, the situation is different; if such an expansion happened, the increased demand for raw materials and for clearings for more factories and roads would impose a great strain on our country’s ecology.  The Japanese are beginning to find this out.

The idea that the diminishing work-load can be shared equally is a myth. The more automation is used the more industry is dependent on highly trained people to operate the new technology.  Let us take a case in point: coal-mining is a dangerous and unhealthy occupation; therefore it would be a good thing if it were completely automated, which it could easily be.  But miners are not “software” specialists and so would not be required at all in running the mines.  We must face the fact that, when the microchip technology begins to bite, the great majority of workers will not be required at all in industry.

Of course, with anything new we have to adjust; problems are created which have to be solved.  One is that when automation destroys jobs it destroys wages and salaries.  Consequently there will arise a glut of goods for which there will be no buying power.  Is it therefore beyond the power and imagination of men to devise a method of distributing this glut in a way that is independent of employment?  Can we not give ourselves a leisure income and thus proceed towards a Leisure State in which no one is compelled by necessity to seek a job, and is free to develop his own culture in his own way, while all can enjoy the fruits of a fully automated economy?

The objective of the Social Credit policy is such a Leisure State.

GREENSWIPE WIND-UP

The Horizon film “Now the Chips are Down”, with extended studio discussion, was first transmitted in 1978 but is currently available to view in the U.K. on BBC iPlayer.

Next time: “PART TWO of Social Credit and Leisure State - Work Morality and the Common Cultural Inheritance”