2011-07-10

Slavery In The 21st Century?

Karl Marx defined the proletariat as a class of capitalist society that does not have ownership of the means of production. All they have to sell is their labor for a wage or salary.

This is what our school systems do. Schools produce the proletarial class of a capitalist society. Schools do not teach people to be capitalists.

Due to a lack of financial education, even the highly educated workers have their wealth siphoned off by debt via the banking system, their retirement via the investment-banking system, their labor via taxes, and what is left via inflation. If they own shares of a company, they own common shares - common shares for common people.

The plantation system is alive and well, even in the Information Age.

The Workers Class

In Marxist theory, proletarians are wage-workers, trained - like Pavlov trained his dogs - to work for money. Our school system produces this class of capitalism, the proletariat class, a wage earner, a person who leaves school looking for a job.

Pavlov caused his dogs to salivate by ringing a bell. Our education system rings the school bell, chiming the promise of a high-paying job. All someone has to say is "high-paying job," and people start lining up.

Many will never own anything of value, and many will die with nothing, simply because our schools, while resenting the rich, produce the workers they claim the rich exploit.

A job is not an asset. You cannot own a job, you cannot pass your job on to your kids.
Money is not an asset. Today, money is debt and is rapidly being devalued with more national debt.
Your home is not an asset. You are the asset. Every month, homeowners send checks to the bank, tax department, insurance, and utility companies.
Your retirement plan is not an asset. It is an unfunded liability. Your retirement savings go to the rich who use your money to acquire their assets - real assets. (In other words, the worker's savings in their retirement plan is only a source of cash for true capitalists)

A Self-fulfilling Prophecy

One problem with the school system is the failure to focus on true capitalism. Hence, we have corrupted capitalism and corrupted governments running the world. In schools, there is a subtle socialist agenda, a subtle undercurrent implying "the rich are greedy."

Students who leave school, looking for a high-paying job, soon fly into the web of capitalism, not because capitalism is necessarily evil, but because the education system fails to prepare students for the real world.

Without financial education, students are trained to be the victim of capitalism. The school system's belief that "the rich are greedy" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Who Will Win?

Marx envisioned a war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class, since workers naturally wish their wages to be as high as possible, while the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, wish for wages to be as low as possible.

The capitalists win because it is easy to move production to lower-wage nations. Technology also reduces the number of workers needed to run a business.

Production goes up, labor costs go down, and capitalists win.

In the new economy, where money is no longer real money, the working class works for nothing. They have no assets.

The bourgeoisie isolate their world from the world of the working class via the education system. In other words, the educational system is being used as the primary agent of the so-called "greedy rich" whom educators despise.

This is why there is no true financial education in schools.

Most people go to school to learn how to earn money, but only for themselves and their family. Few people go to school to learn how to produce more and produce more for more people.

This is what happens when Employees and Self Employed do not know the difference between assets and liabilities: they spend their lives working to accumulate liabilities, believing they are assets.

They go to school to find a job without knowing that a job is not an asset.
They work for money, not knowing that money is no longer money.
They buy a house, not knowing that a house is not an asset.
They save for their retirement, not knowing that stocks and mutual funds are not really assets.
When their jobs are shipped overseas, they go back to school to be retrained for a new job.
And they advise their kids to do the same thing.

The plantation system is alive and well, even in the Information Age.

Related:

"True education was to be restricted to the son and daughters of the elite. For the rest, it would be better to produce skilled workers with no particular aspirations other than to enjoy life." G.Edward Griffin in The Creature from Jekyll Island, on Rockefeller's General Education Board, founded in 1903.

From the book: Unfair Advantage: The Power of Financial Education