A lot of noise is currently devoted to the question of reparations. Most of the talk is about reparations to American blacks, with the remainder to homosexuals or mental health patients. However, as this essay will examine, there’s one group of people whose claim to deserve reparations is stronger than that of anyone else: working-class people.
The working class has effectively been enslaved for millennia – and still is. In, fact, the entire societal infrastructure upon which all wealth rests has been built on the backs of the working class, and continues to be maintained by the working class. Without the efforts of people in this class, no-one else would live any higher than barbarians.
The entire essence of being a working-class person is that you don’t own land, and therefore cannot earn a living or an income from your own property. That means that you have to labour on someone else’s property, and that means you’re forced to accept whatever terms they lay down. As there are no commons to hunt anymore, the alternative is starvation.
Our entire economic system is built on the idea that the owners of the land also own all the productivity that takes place on it. Those who do the producing have no say, because the landowners employ police and security services who will use force to destroy the workers if they try to keep their productivity. The end consequence of all this: the workers are dependent on those owners for a wage.
This wage is the only difference between the worker and a slave. In theory, the worker gets enough of a wage so that, if they save diligently, they too can become a landowner one day. A slave, by contrast, is incapable of improving his position. In practice, the modern Western worker cannot improve his position either, as his wage only covers tax, rent/mortgage, food and a few other necessities.
So even though the worker is given a wage in lieu of being left to starve, his savings are so low that there’s little practical difference between him and a slave. The three lions of profits, taxes and rents take away the vast majority of his productivity, leaving him with only just enough money to keep him alive.
Even worse than the loss of productivity has been centuries of anti-working class prejudice that has seen countless people driven to the wall.
This prejudice continues today. In Britain, some 19,000 girls are raped every year by foreign grooming gangs. But because the vast majority of those girls are working-class, their suffering is ignored by the authorities. In Rotherham, official contempt for the suffering of the working class was so great that the Police covered up grooming gang rapes of working-class girls so as to keep racial tensions down.
This transparently unjust state of affairs has existed for centuries already, in some form or other. Because slavery is more profitable than paying a fair wage, the landowners have always sought to reduce the working class to a state as close to slavery as possible. And they’ve always succeeded to some extent. The working class has never, at any point in history, got a fair deal.
Perhaps the worst deal the working class ever got was to be forced wholesale into the slaughterpits of World War I and World War II. Working-class men comprised the vast majority of the soldiery in both wars, suffering most of the trauma, both physical and mental. The intergenerational consequences of this trauma persists today in a higher-than-baseline level of most mental illnesses among working-class people.
All this historical exploitation explains why landowners are so wealthy today, and workers so poor.
This reduction to penury has only been possible because of power differentials. As mentioned above, owning land makes it possible to own an enforcer class, which can then be used to take all the productivity away from the working class. If the working class tries to get a better deal through e.g. strike action, the enforcer class will break the strike up. Effectively, then, the working class has been robbed of most of its productivity for centuries.
If anyone deserves reparations, it’s the people who have had most of their productivity taken off them under threat of starvation for hundreds of years. The same group who has performed most of the hard labour but which has the least of the wealth.
The majority of the world’s wealth has either been produced by, or made possible by, the labours of the working classes. Despite that fact, the working classes of the West continue to languish in poverty. The average Western working-class person today, not having middle-class parents to inherit from, has almost no chance of gaining enough money on his wage to buy a home and raise a family.
If reparations are to be handed out, it should not be on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation but on the basis of need. This means that reparations ought to target working-class people.
The ideal reparations would come in the form of a universal basic income funded by a land tax. The land tax would hardly impact the working class, who can’t afford property on their wages anyway, while the univeral basic income would make it possible to both heal intergenerational trauma and to negotiate wages from a fair position.
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