Social Dividend History

There are many forms of basic income that you can talk about for hours on vocal about, but the version I am talking about actually has its roots in socialist thought. There is a form of basic income that can be referred to as a social dividend that is based on publicly owned enterprises. According to Wikipedia, a social dividend is "the return on the capital assets and natural resources owned by society in a socialist economy. ". How a social dividend differs from traditional basic income is that social dividend directly implies and relates to social ownership of productive assets. It also implies these socially owned assets are to be the source of the income while other forms of basic income may get funding from other sources. This idea of a social dividend is considered by many to be in line with Karl Marx's critique of capitalism. One of the biggest problems Karl Marx had with capitalism is that the surplus value earned by society is usually only distributed among a small elite - usually a small number of capitalists and private shareholders that get all of the benefit from the extra money in society. According to Marx, surplus generated by social means of production should be appropriated by all members of society. As described by James Yunker in 1977 in the journal Annals of Public and Cooperate Economics: "It is abundantly clear from the writings of the founder of scientific socialism, Karl Marx, that he viewed the distribution of property income under capitalism as morally reprehensible. To Marx, property return must be identified with 'surplus labor value', namely the excess of total labor value over the total wage bill under conditions of a subsistence individual wage. This surplus value is distributed over a small minority of owning capitalists. Although the value is created by labor and is therefore the legitimate property of labor, the capitalists are able to extort it from the proletariat by virtue of their ownership of the capital instruments of production...Nevertheless, while Marx employed the surplus labor value theory to undermine the moral foundations of capitalism, it was, in his view, neither to be the instrumentality of capitalist collapse, nor was it the primary reason for the desirability of the abrogation of capitalism...Surplus value was seen as providing the fuel for the cyclical engine and therefore as the fundamental cause of the impending dissolution of capitalism."

While Marx and other socialist thinkers created the foundation of the social dividend, the term was first used by British economist George Douglas Howard Cole in his 1935 book titled In Principles of Economic Planning to refer to the distribution of the net social product in the form of income to meet everyone's basic needs for a socialist economy. As Cole puts it in his model of redistributing the surplus created by society: "...each citizen's claim as a consumer to share in the common heritage of productive power". The aim would be to make a social dividend large enough to cover the basic needs of every worker in the socialist society. In 1936, American economist and socialist James Yunker mentioned a social dividend in his essay ‘On the Economic Theory of Socialism’. Most of the things described as part of the social dividend are mostly theoretical and have not been practiced by many nations, even many supposed 'socialist republics' that claim to be following the ideas of Karl Marx. However, the People's Republic of China have tried experiments like this on regional levels throughout its history as a nation with urban villages like Huaidi providing a social dividend from excess funds created by collectively owned land development rights.