Josef Popper-Lynkeus - Social System

Social System

Popper-Lynkeus designed his own social system, which ensures that all individuals are provided with goods of primary necessity, and explains it in a series of works beginning from The Right to Live and the Duty to Die (1878) and ending with The Universal Civil Service as a Solution of a Social Problem (1912).

According to Popper-Lynkeus, society has a duty to provide its members with goods of prime necessity – food, clothes, and housing - and also with the services of prime necessity – public health care, upbringing, and education. However, every healthy society member in the framework of labor service would participate in activities that do not require higher or secondary special education and that are related to the creation of material foundations of national economy (e.g. mining, forest exploitation, farm work, construction work). He or she would also be engaged in the manufacturing of goods and providing basic services.

In Popper-Lynkeus's opinion, a just human society would arise not as a result of a violent social upheaval, but as an outcome of the process of persuasion and common consensus. In this society, every individual in the course of his or her life would go through four social-age stages (the third stage out of them may be omitted): 1) educational (up to age 18); 2) natural-economic (men up to 30 years, women up to 25); 3) financial-economic; 4) pension. Every society member would define the boundary between the last two stages at his or her own discretion.

During the second of these stages, all healthy society members take part in labor service and on this ground become entitled to obtain basic necessities in the course of their entire life free of charge.

At the third stage, those society members who wish to work may be involved in the financial and economic activity in one of the state or private sectors (in the latter case either as hired employees or as free entrepreneurs). They receive payment for their labor, and this enables them to purchase goods and get access to non-basic services.

During the last two of the aforementioned social-age stages, any individual is free. This cannot be said of the first two stages, when people earn their freedom and grow up to become fully aware of it. As Popper-Lynkeus remarked, with scientific and technological advancement, the duration of the second stage would gradually decrease. Simultaneously, the scope of the concept goods and services of primary necessity would expand.

Among the conditions for creating a social system, according to Popper-Lynkeus, is the necessity to foster in the rising generation on the first social-age stage such traits as love and respect to other people, love to work and aversion to false needs, and habits of rational use of leisure time.