The Advent Of Voluntary Servitude

On Wednesday 30th October, the UK Budget of His Majesty’s Government (the budget of the United Kingdom), has been delivered by Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer (head of the treasury) and a member of the Labour Party (left).

Among the 4 billion pounds worth of tax hikes were measures such as an increase of employers’ national insurance contributions (tax on earnings and self-employed profits) while also reducing the threshold at which employers start paying the tax, an increase in stamp duty (tax on property purchases) on second homes and a 20% inheritance tax on agricultural assets worth more than £1m (which between machinery and lands is a rather low threshold). Other significant measures include the rise of the national living wage, minimum wage, and benefit payment.

In short, while the entrepreneurs (small enterprises, artisans, farmers) are taxed until death, the masses are kept under control with welfare subsidies. Besides, the weight of the imposition will only accelerate the removal of the means of production from the hands of the family-size businesses to offer a monopoly on them to big capitalist companies and the government.

You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.

With this budget, the left opened the door for a postmodern fascism based on the financial dependence of individuals toward the state to survive, letting capitalist companies and the government control the production of wealth, i.e. control human life.

This will only be a return to a form of voluntary servitude of the masses, forced to work on command, to avoid extreme poverty. The medieval corporatist system had overturned pagan societies founded on slavery (Greek and Roman) by offering to each individual the possibility of becoming the owner of his means of production.

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I have already explained in an article how the corporation was a cooperative community in which all those who participated owned the capital, a self-managed society designed to control competition among its members. Workers first started as apprentices but in time would become masters. In addition, those independent corporations of small proprietors regulated production, and the poverty and insecurity of the proletariat were unknown.

The British Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789, under the guise of freedom from religious obscurantism and the absolute power of the monarchy, have advanced economic liberalism (i.e. capitalism) and the capture of the means of production by the large landowners and bourgeois class.

This predatory class progressively devoured the small independent proprietors and ended up owning gigantic estates. They became so powerful that they took control of institutions such as the parliament passing acts such as the enclosure (1604), i.e. the appropriation of common land, depriving commoners of their rights of access and privilege by enclosing it.

The large landowners and bourgeois Parliamentarians advocated for the abolition of the monarchy and strived to reverse a system in which property was distributed among the masses (e.g. The English Civil War [1642–1651] opposing Royalists and Parliamentarians).

And so, with those bourgeois revolutions, already the English as well as many Europeans have been dispossessed of their capital and their land, while a small wealthy class took ownership of the means of production. With the enclosure acts for instance, the masses have been ousted from the tools of production in order to ultimately be better exploited.

Ownership of the means of production is the basis of freedom. Those who own them are free, the others are condemned to a precarious way of life in which they have to sell their labor power to survive, in which they are sentenced to become modern slaves.

And that is the issue with the Labour Party budget and similar socialist policies. They play into the hands of capitalism, the exploitation of the masses by the abolition of private property, and the establishment of the management of the means of production by the political leaders of the community rather than the citizens.

In fine, the monopoly of the means of production will be held by a hyper class and the masses will be forced to work for this minority but will enjoy the security offered by the state (in the form of benefits). And so, the government ensures with welfare policies that the proletarian masses are kept alive, providing slaves for capitalism instead of promoting freedom by guaranteeing that everyone has the possibility to own the means of production.

Therefore, socialists are the useful idiots for capitalism. Yet, in the end, both the capitalists and the state will hold full authority over the precarious masses as the hand that gives is always above the hand that receives.

The definitive loss of property is, for the masses, the condemnation to their status as proletarians. Ultimately, in a world where family businesses, craftsmen, and small producers … have disappeared in favor of generalized salaried employment, the only goal for the worker is to increase income, security, and purchasing power, rather than to own the means of production … exactly what offers the measures in the budget of the United Kingdom.

The mere thought of ceasing to be a salaried subordinate one day becomes unreal in the end…

This is the advent of voluntary servitude.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.