Yesterday, I began working on the Second Edition of The Work-Standard. The new Book Cover was added alongside a Table of Contents for easier navigation. I completed proofreading several Entries from “Section One: Key Terminology under the Work-Standard.” The most important inclusion separating the Second Edition from the First Edition is a new Preface. Below is the entire transcript of the Preface, just to show that I am still working on the revisions as of this writing.
October 2021 marked the end of a decade-long quest to investigate and eventually formulate what later became known as the Work-Standard. Hyphened in reference to its German origins as the term “Arbeitsstandard,” the Work-Standard signals a Revolution in Financial Affairs that dares to conceptualize an authentically Socialist Finance with its own Conception of Currency distinct from the Liberal Capitalist versions. What began as morbid curiosity over why this Author’s Catholic parochial school had issued “Lunch Tickets” and an “Exchange Rate” gradually became a quest to investigate alternative economic and financial systems, evaluating their feasibility and overall capabilities. A vast body of research, gathered throughout much of the 2010s and 2020, were gradually pieced together between May and October of 2021 on a personal Blog, The Fourth Estate (https://fourthestatepolicy.com/), as the “Socialist Monetary Policy (SMP) Compendium.”
Everything was later collated into a lengthy treatise entitled, The Work-Standard: The Complete Socialist Monetary Policy Compendium on Socialist Economics, Finance, and Fintech Applications. What was released on The Fourth Estate in late 2021 is the First Edition of The Work-Standard. It will always be available for download in its original form because its goal was to disseminate the SMP Compendium in a .PDF format. The Author wanted to provide any interested parties with a document that outlined everything in its entirety, rather than a disparate series of individual blog posts. However, I must confess that the First Edition was still riddled with lots of typos and even a visible lack of coherence across certain “Entries.”
One of the problems of compelling readers to visit The Fourth Estate and read the SMP Compendium there is the fact that a lot of my Blog posts after October 2021 started becoming increasingly random, spontaneous and incoherent at times. While there are other factors that led to this predicament, this Author tends to write whatever immediately comes to mind on the Blog. Another problem was the voluminous variety of seemingly contradictory sources and works consulted over the years to properly articulate the Work-Standard.
This new Second Edition builds upon the First Edition by incorporating the necessary revisions to make The Work-Standard a more readable, straightforward experience. Every effort has been made to ensure that the Second Edition retains the original ideas and concepts, is more presentable, and can be easily read without having to consult The Fourth Estate for anything. Important quality of life improvements such as a table of contents, diagrams, charts, a rewritten “By Way of Introduction” and two new Sections were included specifically for the Second Edition.
Originally, The Work-Standard was split into ten Sections in the First Edition, eight of which are related to the specifications of the Work-Standard, the remaining two being the “By Way of Introduction” and “Conclusion: The Greater America Amendment.” The former was meant to provide a basic technical description of the Work-Standard, whereas the latter describes its operational capabilities in an American context and all questions related to its constitutionality. As a .PDF document or physical printout, both cannot be understood without having to actually visit The Fourth Estate and find the relevant Blog posts where I had to address why the final Entries had to be written in an American context.
Finally, the Second Edition’s “By Way of Introduction” differs by having an important discussion about the significance of Pure Socialism in America. It outlines the American people’s historical encounters with Pure Socialism, why Pure Socialism continues to be treated as being too foreign, and why Pure Socialism is in fact a return to the American Essence. Only with the American Essence is it possible for this Author to argue in favor of Socialism, in addition to explaining why there has been an ongoing aversion to it. The two new Sections are entitled “What is the American Essence?” and “At the Gates of Tomorrow’s Yesterday.” The first one is a discussion about “Hamiltonian Federalist Socialism,” its general principles derived from the American Essence itself, while the other serves as a revamped description of the Work-Standard. As for everything else, they should be familiar to anyone who has previously read the First Edition.
Whenever I am finished with the those two aforementioned Sections, I will post also them in the future Revision Blog Posts.
Categories: Blog Post
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