In the previous posting on this subject, we noted — consistent with the Past Savings and the Sole Ownership assumptions combined with the Labor Theory of Value — most of “the rest of us” in the present day are constrained to wages and welfare for our subsistence. Government policy has thus been focused on (as one of the founders of the Center for Economic and Social Justice used to put it while mimicking playing a cello) “jawbs, jawbs, jawbs” . . . with no thought as to what was behind the, er, “jawbs.”
Government (so the myth goes) creates jobs by messing around with fiscal and monetary policy instead of tending to its own business, which is care of the common good, not minute control of every individual good. Under the influence of Lord Keynes, government has turned money from a tool to facilitate commerce, industry, and agriculture, into a policy weapon to be manipulated at will to achieve political goals, usually that of keeping the current power elite in power and the powerless (meaning propertyless) in a state of docile subjugation.
Consequently, the idea ordinary people might have the capacity to own the advancing technology taking away their jobs (or jawbs) has occurred to very few people in the modern age. This was not the case throughout most of history. The Luddite revolt, contrary to popular thought and legend, was not a rejection of technology. Neither was it — as Kirkpatrick Sale asserted — a rejection of western civilization (Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995).
Paradise
Instead, the Luddite Revolt was an attack on machinery they didn’t own and thus took away their income instead of enhancing it. Sale also wrote The Conquest of Paradise, in which the evil Europeans led by Columbus put a stop to human sacrifice and cannibalism of the peaceful native Americans, although continued the slavery and genocide.
With the rapid development of AI, matters haven’t really changed. They have simply accelerated to the point they look like matters have changed. This is common throughout history. When change is slow and people have time to adapt, they tend to think there has been no change at all. When change is rapid, people tend to think the End Is Near and everything new must be eliminated from society so that their lives can return to what they think is normal.
Although it might shock a great many people these days, the idea that most people can only gain income from wages and welfare is relatively new on the scene. Until the Industrial Revolution, virtually everyone who was anyone owned some form of capital or had access to it on more or less equitable terms. Large landowners had either to employ large numbers of people willing to work for low wages (unlikely) or buy slaves (expensive) if they wanted to work the land themselves. Otherwise (more often), they leased the land to tenants. Manufacturing tended to be small, artisan type production, with the technology being well within the reach of anyone willing and able to learn a trade. Society was divided into:
· The rich, who had pretty much the same thing as everyone else just more of it,
· The middle class, who had pretty much the same thing as everyone else, just less of it,
· The working poor, who owned only their labor and relied on their labor alone to obtain pretty much the same thing as everyone else, although even less of it, and
· The non-working poor, beggars, vagrants, and people between jobs.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the largest class (usually) was the middle class, at least in a well-structured economy with a modicum of justice. People as a rule did not work as today with capital owned by others, but with capital they owned or controlled, e.g., by taking a lease on land.
Most people prior to the rise of the proletariat were therefore far more insulated from social and economic change than people of today. With widespread economic dependency, what Aristotle called a form of “masterless slavery,” many people’s lives are affected day-to-day, sometimes minute-to-minute by the effects of decisions and actions of the rich and powerful. These spread much more rapidly through an economically dependent population than through a society in which a determinant number of people have economic — and thus political — control over their own lives.
It comes as no surprise, then, that the concept of social justice in an Aristotelian sense began developing with the rise of the industrial proletariat and the spread of powerlessness. With most people stripped of economic power, they began losing the basis to sustain political power, and thus social power. Despite having the vote, economically disenfranchised people became politically dependent on those who promised to deliver the material goods and services they required and craved, and increasingly did not care how they got them, so long as the benefits continued to flow. Redistribution from the wealthy to the needy came to be viewed as justice instead of charity, and language and philosophy changed to conform to the new mindset. Society became divided into:
· The rich, who increasingly had a virtual monopoly on the acquisition and possession of productive wealth, and thus access to money and credit (or vice versa; it doesn’t matter whether the cart comes before the horse in this case), and thus goods and services undreamed-of by the lower classes,
· The middle class, who shifted from being small owners into the managerial class (“white collar”) tending the productive wealth of the rich, and who increasingly became burdened with long-term debt to acquire goods and services enjoyed by the rich, or a reasonable (or unreasonable) facsimile thereof,
· The working poor (“blue collar”), who still owned only their labor and relied on their labor alone, and who also became increasingly became burdened with long-term debt to acquire goods and services enjoyed by the rich, or a reasonable (or unreasonable) facsimile thereof, and
· The non-working poor, welfare recipients and people unable to find work as well as the unemployable and vagrants.
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| Pope Gregory XVI |
This is not the place to go into a dissertation of the economic, political, and social changes wrought by the rei novae, or “New Things” as Pope Gregory XVI, head of the Catholic Church from 1831 to 1846 called them. Suffice to say that given Aristotelian philosophy as developed by Thomas Aquinas and revived beginning with Gregory XVI, changing fundamental truths of any kind, regardless of the perceived advantages or even necessity of doing so, was out of the question. Truth, as Aristotle pointed out and which Aquinas made the cornerstone of his philosophy, is a unity; the first principle of Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy is that which is true, is as true, and is true in the same way as everything else that is true, and nothing can both “be” and “not be” at the same time under the same conditions.
Having large numbers of people in a condition of utter dependency — “a yoke little better than that of slavery itself” (Rerum Novarum, § 3) — is extremely unstable, even (or especially) if the rich or the government start providing subsistence, even a modicum of luxuries as a matter of course rather than in extreme cases. Recipients begin considering what they receive as a fundamental right, while donors resent the rapidly increasing tax or entitlement burden.
The advanced technology of the Industrial Revolution kickstarted the process of widespread proletaritization, while developments during the nineteenth century accelerated it. Even without computers, the rate at which advancing productive technology began reducing the need for human labor instead of increasing it became evident by the 1890s, although the rate of economic growth in the private sector and implementation of social programs by governments hid the fact from many people. Keynesian economics with its dogma that new capital formation can only be financed out of past savings money — by definition a monopoly of the currently wealthy — made the situation in which “the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself” seem not merely normal, but ordained by God.
All this has accelerated with the rapid advances in artificial intelligence, AI. Society is becoming divided into:
· The rich, who still have a virtual monopoly on the acquisition and possession of productive wealth, and thus access to money and credit, and thus goods and services undreamed-of by the lower classes, but are also not directly affected by the growing influence of AI, except to make their wealth accumulation faster and more efficient because they own the AI or what AI is directing,
· The middle class, who are increasingly displaced from their jobs by more efficient and much less expensive AI,
· The working poor who are increasingly displaced from their jobs by more efficient and much less expensive AI, and
· The non-working poor, welfare recipients and people unable to find work as well as the unemployable and vagrants, and who ironically may be less affected by AI than any other group . . . so long as the government payments keep coming in.
The question, of course, is What is to be done? What, indeed, can be done?
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