قراءة كتاب Social Comptabilism, Cheque and Clearing Service & Proposed Law
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Social Comptabilism, Cheque and Clearing Service & Proposed Law
credit account-book will be made under the guarantee of the National Bank, but only in so far as they concur with the sum inscribed to the credit of that account-book.
6.—Every-one can obtain credit account-books, for a certain sum, either in mortgaging some corresponding property in favour of the Bank, or in offering to it the guarantee of a third party, who should have agreed to a similar mortgage, or ...
7.—An account-book out of use or obliterated, or of which the sum appearing to its credit is exhausted, will be returned to the accountant-general; should such returner of an account-book have a balance, then the accountant-general will open an account in the official books, and enter this balance to that account.
8.—Every individual whose account-book balance is to his credit will be able to obtain credit account-book for a maximum sum equivalent to this balance, if he offers a corresponding mortgage either as before stated, on an existing property, or on property he may acquire by means of the sum thus inscribed to the credit of his account-book.
What has preceded shows how simple, unobtrusive, passive is the part played by the accountant-general.
The books containing the figures signifying what transactions have been effected either to the credit or debit side, with the figures attached identifying those who have made the transactions, are remitted to him.
He adds up the credit and debit account and, if there is a balance, enters it to the account of the possessor of the account-book. That is all. If he comes across mistakes or errors, he rectifies them, notably if he discovers that the statements of the account-books do not agree with the corresponding statements of the account-books of those whose transactions appear there.
The accountant-general acts as a piece of machinery would act. He is a recorder of figures, a registrar of balances. If there are no balances to enter he does not even make a registration, and is then only a legal witness of transactional operations. No more is asked of him in order to arrive at the suppression, pure and simple of the monetary system.
But from the day in which the comptabilist system becomes legal to the exclusion of the monetary system, from the moment in which each individual has his personal account introduced into the registers of the accountant-general, his transactional life is henceforth, and for ever, represented on the one side by the mortgages and guarantees that he furnishes in order to obtain comptabilist unities, on the other hand by the balances of his account books that the accountant enters successively and indefinitely to his account. If the whole fortune of each person were treated in such a manner, and it is this we foresee must be the legal situation in the definitely social state (having for sole tax the succession duty, etc., etc.), it is plain that the true function of the accountant-general would be that of recorder of the state, of the shifting social position of each person, the determiner of the diagram of his active, relatively effective life. Each individual would thus have the stereotype of his effective social life cast; each social being would have his effective life formulated, if one may so speak, by relation, always by relations, nothing but by relations—to that of all the rest, but in figures, and yet again, in nothing but figures. And herein is seen clearly the fundamental error or profound confusion of those who believe there can be any other thing in the social problem which occupies us than what has just been stated; of those who imagine that capital or fortune must be able at every moment, and not eventually, in the sole end of utilising the metal for itself, to be represented by its equivalent in gold or silver; of those who persuade themselves that the words capital and fortune represent anything else than relative social power of action or enjoyment which it is sufficient to record, to make public, purely, simply and legally, as we propose, in order that it may be absolutely guaranteed to each person.
Ernest SOLVAY.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Annals of the Institute. No 1. June, 1894.
[B] If it is not admitted that the term dh/o exactly represents the account of the conditions of the supply and the demand, it could be represented in a more general way by a function F (dho) of the elements d, h, o, which are the only ones which ever can, according to our view, intervene in the fixing, for even admitting that things could be regulated to the last point, socialized if you will, these two elements of supply and demand would at least remain always existing and dominant.
[C] It is by design that we employ the expression transactional value in order to differentiate it from a value such as would result from a theory of the measure of value based on work stored up in transactional merchandise, a theory with which we have not here to occupy ourselves.
[D] Annales de l'Institut, 1896. Nos 1 and 4.
[E] Annales de l'Institut, 1896. No 5.
[F] We think we ought here to recall (see: Comptabilism et Proportionnalisme social) that every-one who makes transactions carries about with him not only his account book, but also a marker or stamp bearing representative figures or signs, identifying his personality and by aid of which he inscribes or obliterates the figures significant of the transactions in the account book of his correspondent.
It is needless to add, that instead of marking,—an operation we have always put forward the better to show that all account-keeping can be done by simple inscription or the registration of figures and without any «exchange» whatsoever, not even of bits of paper—a system could be adopted, for example, consisting of having on the credit and debit sides of the account-books, leaves of stamps more or less analogous to postage stamps, credit-stamps which the buyer would detach from his account-book, and which would be fastened into that of the seller, then the seller would detach from his account-book corresponding debit stamps to be fastened to the debit side of that of the buyer. These stamps would carry naturally besides their signification the same figures or representative signs of the