Functional socialism

88 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

country, are paced and subjected to ever diminishing returns by the automatic machine, which should be one of their tools, but is, in fact, the instrument of finance to keep down wages and increase profits. Major Douglas in The Monopoly of Credit remarks that:

More and more the position of labour, using the word of course in its widest possible sense, tends to becoming the catalyst in an operation impossible without its presence, but carried on with a decreasing direct contribution from labour itself.

His idea is to transform the workers into shareholders in “Great Britain, Ltd.” and subsequently the “British Empire, Ltd.” The transition to be “without shock and without any alteration in the existing administration of industry”. In such a vital issue it is better to be frank. This ‘s not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense. Shareholders! How the financial jargon persists! He pictures a financial hegemony “without any alteration in the existing administration of industry”.

The functional conception looks ina very different direction. It is not a register of shareholders it wants, but a register of cultured citizens, whose needs are supplied, not “‘without any alteration in the existing administration of industry”, but by a sweeping change in our financial governance to that democratic control of every industrial process, without which there can be no functional freedom.

Moreover, as the standard of life rises as function