Markets Without Workers: From Rentier Capitalism to Community Issuance
For most of modern history, capitalism and socialism operated under the same assumption: employers needed human employees. Wages were the channel through which productivity gains flowed into society. Whether you sold your time on the market or had it allocated by the state, work was the anchor.
But that world is fading. Automation, offshoring, and financialization have unmoored the link between labor and livelihood. To understand why our economies feel so distorted, we need to examine how the shareholder and derivative classes rose to dominance—and how their rentier extraction hollowed out the system.
Whales Move Markets, Not Smallholders
The myth taught in economics 101 is that prices are the outcome of countless buyers and sellers meeting in a marketplace. But in practice, it is the whales who set direction:
- Stocks: Institutional players—pension funds, hedge funds, giant asset managers—decide when markets rise or fall. The “average shareholder” does not determine Apple’s or Tesla’s valuation. Retail investors are ballast, not rudders.
- Bitcoin and crypto: Volatility makes good headlines, but real directional moves occur when large desks place bulk orders. Retail chatter adds noise, but big funds make the weather.
- Gold historically: Monarchs and empires hoarded and mobilized gold in bulk. Its value to subjects derived not from personal use, but from the fact that royalty and governments anchored their power in it.
Ordinary participants give legitimacy. Whales give price. That dynamic has only intensified under financial capitalism.
The Rise of the Rentier Shareholder Class
Shares were originally a way to fund enterprise: capital pooled to build ships, railroads, factories. Early shareholders assumed risk, and dividends reflected real production.
But by the mid-to-late 20th century, something shifted:
- Perpetual claims: Shares stopped expiring. A family could hold stock indefinitely, collecting dividends generation after generation. Risk-taking was replaced by rent-seeking.
- Financial engineering: Buybacks and leveraged mergers turned corporations into machines for enriching shareholders, often at the expense of workers, customers, and long-term investment.
- Short-termism: CEOs tied to stock price incentives prioritized quarterly performance over resilience. “Shareholder value” became the mantra—even when it hollowed out the business itself.
The result is enshittification: products and services degrade, prices rise, and user experience suffers, because corporations are optimized not for communities or customers but for extracting rent to shareholders.
Derivatives: The Zero-Sum Casino
If shares at least originated in enterprise, derivatives are even further removed:
- Hedging tools turned speculative weapons. Options and futures once helped farmers or shippers manage risk. Today, trillions slosh through swaps, synthetic CDOs, and exotic derivatives where profit comes purely at another’s loss.
- Leverage on leverage. Speculators build castles of contracts atop thin underlying assets. A ripple in reality becomes a tidal wave in finance.
- Systemic rent extraction. Banks and funds profit from volatility itself. Ordinary participants—pension funds, municipalities—are the counterparties who lose.
Together, shares and derivatives created a rentier class that extracts endlessly without building. Wealth compounds automatically, held by those who already own. Meanwhile, workers and communities face stagnating wages, rising costs, and enshittified services.
Banking: Socialism for the Few
The irony is that most money is already “socialized.” Roughly 95% of circulating money is created by private banks issuing loans. This is not a free market; it is a state-licensed oligopoly. Banks profit from the privilege of creating money as debt, and their survival is guaranteed by government bailouts.
The system only works because of gradual monetary inflation: without it, debts plus interest could never be repaid. Monetary inflation continually expands the money pool, but the first recipients are always the well-capitalized borrowers. This is “socialism for banks, capitalism for everyone else.”
UBI as Market Preservation, Not Socialism
Against this backdrop, UBI is often miscast as socialism. In truth, it’s the opposite: UBI preserves markets in a world where employment no longer guarantees livelihoods.
- Issuance first. Communities print their own currency, distributing it directly to people rather than through banks.
- Pigovian sinks. Taxes on polluting or antisocial goods remove excess currency, steering behavior while preventing runaway inflation.
- Market intact. Prices still form by supply and demand. Entrepreneurs still compete. The only shift is who receives the new money at creation.
Far from destroying capitalism, UBI rescues it by ensuring broad purchasing power even as machines replace workers.
The Post-Labor Transition
Capitalism and socialism were systems for labor-scarce economies. Automation creates labor abundance—yet our financial system remains built for scarcity, rewarding owners and punishing everyone else.
The transition we face is not from capitalism to socialism, but from rentier capitalism to community issuance:
- From shares and derivatives, which compound rent for the few…
- To utility tokens, which circulate as purchasing power for the many.
- From enshittified corporations optimized for shareholder value…
- To communities optimized for human well-being, funded by their own money loops.
Markets Without Workers Can Still Work
The point is not to kill markets, but to reclaim them. Prices should reflect what people need, not just what whales and rentiers demand. Communities issuing their own currencies—spending first, taxing later—can make that possible.
Automation promised to free humans from drudgery. Instead, it built empires of passive rent extraction. But the tools exist to reset the cycle. Markets without workers can still work—if the money that drives them starts with people, not shareholders.
How Intercoin Can Make It Work
The key challenge isn’t just diagnosing late-stage capitalism—it’s building a viable alternative that communities can actually run. This is where Intercoin comes in.
We don’t need wait for federal governments to get their act together. Their one-size-fits-all monetary and fiscal policies, and the federal banking system, were all that we had. But just like the Web allowed anyone to become a publisher and distribute their content, now blockchain technology (and more broadly, decentralized smart contract technology) allows any community to issue their own currency.
- Community Currencies as Default: Intercoin provides the infrastructure for towns, cities, universities, co-ops, and even online communities to issue their own money. These aren’t debt instruments or speculative tokens. They are spending power, distributed directly as UBI.
- Pigovian Pricing Built In: Unlike fiat systems, Intercoin tokens can be programmed so that harmful activities (pollution, waste, unhealthy products) are automatically taxed at higher rates, while sustainable choices stay affordable. The tax revenue isn’t needed to “fund” the system—it simply serves as a sink, keeping circulation healthy and incentives aligned.
- No Banks, No Derivatives: With Intercoin, there’s no reliance on banks to create money through loans, and no casino layers of derivatives siphoning value away. Communities issue first, spend first, and recycle through taxation.
- Global Interoperability: Communities don’t operate in isolation. Intercoin connects them through a wider network, enabling local currencies to be exchanged when needed, while preserving local autonomy. This mirrors the internet itself—local servers running global protocols.
- Automation Dividend for All: As robots and algorithms displace labor, Intercoin lets communities distribute that productivity dividend directly to residents. Instead of compounding into shareholder portfolios, it flows as utility tokens into the hands of citizens who spend it on real needs.
From Central Banks to Community Levers
In the current system, the Federal Reserve and other central banks manage the economy with a single blunt lever: interest rates. Raise them to cool inflation, lower them to stimulate growth. The effects are indirect, slow, and often benefit the financial sector first while leaving ordinary people to deal with side effects like unemployment or higher borrowing costs.
With Intercoin, communities gain two democratic levers of their own:
- Issuance (UBI): Community producers — including corporations, co-ops, and even AI-powered enterprises — can vote on how much new money to distribute to residents. As automation raises productivity, this lever ensures that the gains translate into higher universal incomes, not just shareholder profits.
- Taxation (Pigovian): Citizens can vote on what to tax back out of circulation. Instead of taxing wages, the community can tax harmful or wasteful activities — pollution, unhealthy products, speculation — steering behavior while keeping the system balanced.
This dual-lever system replaces monetary policy as “weather manipulation” with something more precise and participatory. Communities don’t wait for a distant central bank to guess the right rate — they directly manage prosperity, health, and sustainability. AI and automation no longer threaten livelihoods; they become fuel for a more abundant, democratic economy.
The Result
Intercoin doesn’t abolish markets—it rescues them.
- Markets still allocate goods and services.
- Entrepreneurs still innovate.
- People still choose freely.
But the starting point shifts: new money reaches ordinary citizens first, not rentiers, shareholders, or derivative speculators. Communities gain the power to shape their own economies in ways that sustain dignity, stability, and freedom.
Automation and financialization don’t have to spell collapse. With Intercoin, they can mark the beginning of a post-labor economy where abundance finally belongs to everyone.
Here is how we plan to get there, town by town, community by community: