by Kate McFarland | Jun 11, 2017 | Opinion
For me, a job-unconditional basic income guarantee was simply a part of the life to which I grew accustomed as a young adult. In this piece, I describe how this experience has influenced my hopes and expectations concerning the effects of basic income as a policy.
The Author (circa early Graduate School)
Entering college as a scholarship student, I moved directly into a life in which I received a monthly living stipend that was not conditional on holding or looking for paid employment. There were, of course, some other conditions on the funding; I was, for instance, required to take classes at the university and make “sufficient academic progress” by some measure.
However, my “salary” was not contingent on anything that felt like being employed: I didn’t need to keep 9-to-5 hours, work in an office, report to a boss, or dress professionally — and, most importantly, I didn’t have to plan any aspect of my life around the question “What will people pay me to do?” I just took classes that interested me, which I invariably selected without consideration of the potential “market value” of the knowledge and training.
After about six years of such a lifestyle, I entered the “paid workforce” as a graduate teaching associate, an arrangement in which monthly pay continued to feel more-or-less disconnected from work, despite the addition of some new obligations. Now in my 30s, I’ve never worked a full-time job or signed an employment contract for more than a year — and I’ve continued, for the most part, to keep my deliberation about how to lead my life at a remove from questions of how to make money.
Certainly, there are significant differences between university scholarships and fellowships and a true basic income. Moreover, I am but one person, and individual cases are sure to vary considerably. Nonetheless, I believe that I came to adopt a lifestyle and internalize a mode of thought similar to what might be encouraged by a basic income.
This present piece is not an argument for basic income. On the contrary, it functions in part as a disclaimer on my own support for the idea. Of course I support a basic income, one might conclude; a basic income would help to sustain a lifestyle like the one to which I’ve grown accustomed, and it is difficult to give up what one has known and enjoyed. It is also an partial explanation of why I came to certain specific views and conjectures about the potential merit and effects of a basic income.
The following are nine conjectures about basic income that I developed due to my own experience:
- It would be easy to take a basic income for granted.
- A basic income might prevent the conflating of work (and worth) with paid labor.
- A basic income can promote lower consumption in the long-term.
- A basic income would facilitate living without long-range plans.
- A basic income could allow precarious jobs to be the most appealing jobs.
- A basic income could enable social isolation.
- A basic income would not “cure” anxiety.
- A basic income could enable individuals to make no useful social contributions.
- A mere “personal basic income” can make one feel alien.
1. It would be easy to take a basic income for granted (no pun intended).
This, I believe, is the crucial lesson, and it lays essential groundwork for all that follows.
When basic income proponents ask “What would you do if your income were taken care of?” they want the audience to fantasize about the myriad benefits a basic income could confer upon their lives (and, ideally, to imagine the ways in which they could use their good fortune proactively).
But when a guaranteed basic income is all one has ever known, it doesn’t feel liberating. It doesn’t feel special. It doesn’t spur one to better oneself. It is simply part of the ordinary state of existence, a silent component of the background conditions for everyday life.
When I headed off to college, I didn’t think, “Hey, cool! I have free tuition, a living stipend, and I’m relieved of working in a job; I think I’ll really make something of myself and contribute to the world!” No, not at all. Instead I thought, “Hey, cool; I have a living stipend! Now I’ll continue taking classes, as always, but I’ll get to live alone in my own apartment!” Arguably, the main effect of my job-unconditional income was to enable me to retain the mentality of a studious high-schooler: I ?took for granted that my basic needs would be met, that my main purpose was to study and learn, and that a job would just be a burden.
Of course, by contrasting this experience with that of those who lacked such financial good fortune, I can come to see that a basic income (or full-ride scholarship) entails freedom from much stress and overwork, and, in principle, opens the door for great accomplishments. However, I never truly felt freedom or relief, for I never knew a “before time” when I lacked my income guarantee.
2. A basic income might prevent the conflating of work (and worth) with paid labor.
I am ceaselessly baffled by the contention that people need jobs in order to feel a sense of purpose and self-worth, as well as the frequent assumption that when individuals are not at work in a job, they are idling away their time in passive leisure.
None of this is natural. Indeed, it is not what we learned as children. As children, we did not hold jobs, and yet our time was not one homogeneous block of undifferentiated recreation. We did not work for pay, and yet this did not entail that all of our activities were worthless.
Gulf Coast Regional Science Olympiad
When we were children, we had our schoolwork, which we were generally supposed to prioritize. We might also have had some organized extra-curricular activities like sports, band, debate, drama, or Science Olympiad, or various clubs in our schools, churches, and communities. These organized activities were also generally encouraged by our elders, as long as we did not pursue them to the detriment of schoolwork. Finally, we had “free-time”–and, even then, certain recreational pursuits (e.g. reading novels) were told to us to be more worthwhile than others (e.g. playing the Nintendo).
We were paid for none of this, of course, ?and yet we did not conclude that our activities were thereby equally valuable (or, perhaps better put, equally valueless).
Moreover, when we did grow old enough to take jobs, unpaid schoolwork (mark that: “school-work“) was usually still considered more important than paid job-work. We were subject to censure by teachers and parents if our paid work compromised our performance in our unpaid work.
At some point, apparently, many unlearn these truths that still seem obvious to me–that paid work and passive leisure are not exhaustive categories, that unpaid activities can be valuable, that unpaid activities can be work, and identify and self-worth can be found outside of the labor force–though, to be sure, I don’t know precisely when, why, and how this unlearning occurs. If the necessity of finding paid work is a contributing influence, however, then it might be said that a job-independent guaranteed income helped to prevent my unlearning of these truths.
As I said above, I was able to continue to live with (roughly) the mentality of a high-schooler, taking for granted that my basic needs would be met, that a job would just be a burden, and that my main purpose was to study. That said, there were occasions when I’d find myself with extra time, feel uninspired to make any productive use of it, and think to myself, “Well, I might as well take up a part-time job…” In these times, however, paid employment always felt like a path of last resort, a last-ditch effort to mask a transient but troublesome feeling of unproductivity or worthlessness. I could (and did) justify job-hunting by telling myself, for example, “I will earn money to save so that I can ‘buy more freedom’ for myself in the future, once my inspiration has returned.” Nonetheless, I would continue to feel somewhat ashamed of my failure to find my own intellectual or creative activities to which to devote my time; a job always seemed like something of a cop-out.
3. A basic income might promote lower consumption in the long-term.
My personal experience is the main reason that I have become interested in the supposition that a basic income could encourage degrowth. Because I entered adulthood with something like a basic income, I grew accustomed both to minimal consumer spending (since my stipends afforded only a basic “no frills” lifestyle) and to substantial freedom and flexibility in structuring my time.
Yes, the thought more money and greater purchasing power was (and is) often alluring; however, I never found it sufficiently attractive to tempt me to pursue a lucrative career. Instead, since I have always had the option of greater freedom, I have almost invariably chosen it–even though this has required me to content myself with significantly less consumption than a well-paying job (or even a modestly paying one) would have allowed. And this, importantly, has never felt like a sacrifice. I truly believe there is no salary high enough to motivate me to work a 40-hour job for the next 30 years–as long, that is, as it remains possible for me to afford my basic needs while spending little or no time in standard structures of employment. Having grown to know and cherish it, I feel my freedom has no price.
Tiny Home, CC BY-NC 2.0 Todd Lappin
It is significant here, though, that this “basic income lifestyle” is simply the life to which I adapted; it is, in essence, all I’ve known. I doubt that many individuals who earn, say, $40k per year in full-time jobs (an amount well beyond my highest annual earnings, yet slightly below the US median individual income) — let alone those with higher earnings — would want to leave their jobs to live on the much more modest amount of an unconditional basic income. For many, working a full-time job has become a natural part of life, and so has the lifestyle that their salary can afford.
It is difficult to give up the pleasant aspects of a lifestyle to which one has grown acquainted — whether this is freedom and flexibility, as in my case, or more lavish consumption, as in the case (presumably) of many individuals with full-time jobs in successful careers. Meanwhile, it is fairly easy to persist in something that has come to feel like second nature, even if mildly unpleasant, whether frugality in consumer spending (as in my case) or the confines of standard employment (as for many others).
A lifelong basic income has the potential to transform that to which individuals become habituated. It is on this basis that I conjecture that a basic income has the potential promote lower levels of consumption and economic growth.
This is also, incidentally, one reason for which I am skeptical about the ability of basic income pilots to reveal anything interesting regarding the long-term effects of an income guarantee on labor and consumption. If a person begins to receive a basic income after having already grown habituated to full-time employment and the lifestyle of earning-to-consume, then it might be highly unlikely that she would choose to leave the paid workforce and subsist on her comparatively meager basic income payments. But the situation could be much different in a society in which youth begin to receive a basic income before they have experience as either full-time laborers or high-volume consumers.
4. A basic income would facilitate living without long-range plans.
It is sometimes argued that a basic income would better enable individuals to plan for the long term, given its ability to mitigate the scarcity mindset and survivalist thinking engendered by poverty or economic insecurity (see, e.g., Louise Haagh’s article “Basic Income’s Radical Role” in Social Europe).
It has been my experience, however, that work-independent financial security can also produce the opposite effect: if one is guaranteed long-term economic security, then one is thereby relieved of the need to plan job and career goals oriented towards minimizing the chances of future economic hardship. Indeed, if one knows that one has long-term financial security, then one needn’t plan for the future at all, economically speaking, as long as one is able to live within one’s “basic” means. In other words, a stable and reliable work-unconditional income can permit individuals who might otherwise plan and act upon long-term career goals to think only in shorter terms, pursuing present interests with little or no concern for how these present tasks might promote employment or career advancement in the future. This is, at least, how I have always lived, continue to live, and desire to live.
The idea that basic income can enable risk-tasking is nothing new or unfamiliar. Notably, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently recommended consideration of the policy for precisely this purpose. Most commonly, however, this idea is raises in arguing that basic income can promote entrepreneurial activities, in which the risk is assumed for the sake of pursuing a specific long-range project or goal. But deliberately and intentionally living without a plan — choosing to remain open and adaptable to unplanned opportunities and the ever-changing natural flow of life — is itself a type of “risky” lifestyle.
Those with conventional “careerist” values might read the above passage as admission that the feeling of financial security provided by a basic income can be mentally and morally degrading. It seems that many consider it a mark of good character to plan for the future and devote oneself to long-term career ambitions–and a character flaw not to do so.
I can only ask, then, that we critically reexamine the moral importance we place on career-oriented thinking. I have personally embraced my relative economic security as way to eschew careerism — to live and work in a way that is maximally flexible and adaptive to my evolving interests, abilities, social networks, external demands, and whatever unanticipated possibilities may arise. For me, this may be the single most liberating thing about my lifestyle — as well as the key source of my excitement and fascination with life — and I am hard-pressed to see it as wrong.
5. A basic income could allow precarious jobs to be the most appealing jobs.
As I mentioned near the outset of this piece, I have never worked a full-time job or signed an employment contract longer than a year. And this is no dismal fate but, rather, my ingrained preference and my incredible luck. It is one of my greatest hopes to maintain this lifestyle for as long as possible, primarily due to the flexibility that it allows, and its ability to sustain the “anti-careerism” described in the above section.
Having grown used to a stable but basic income, I have acquired a taste for jobs that can be picked up when in want of extra spending money and abandoned as quickly as possible after the desired sum of money has been obtained. I often found it desirable to earn a little more than my basic living stipend; at the same time, as discussed above, I could never imagine relinquishing freedom and flexibility for a full-time and permanent job, even a well-paying one.
“Gig Economy Graphic” CC BY 2.0 Mark Warner
Traditional full-time permanent positions seldom permit employees to work just enough to gain a desired sum of income — much to the frustration of those of us who identify with Max Weber’s classic description of the pre-industrial piece-rate worker: “A man does not ‘by nature’ wish to cam more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose.”
In contrast, “gig work” makes it easier to adjust the amount of one’s work to one’s desired income level, avoiding excessively confining commitments to jobs.
Proponents often speak of basic income as an “exit option” from employment, as if an independent source of financial security is enough to allow individuals to quit their jobs. But this strictly economic picture of employment obligations seems almost to fetishize money-making and downplay social norms in a manner reflective of the very status quo values that (in my view) a basic income should help us to overcome. The economic view of “exit” neglects the ethical importance of loyalty and trustworthiness: when I sign a contract, or otherwise give my word that I will follow through on certain tasks and duties, I consider myself bound to complete the work I have promised — irrespective of whether I am paid for that work, and irrespective of whether I can make a living for myself apart from that work. If one is under a long-term contract, the option of “exit” can pose ethical and psychological conflict even if one has the financial wherewithal to leave a job (and, we might add, even if one believes that one’s personal interest would be bettered by leaving the position).
That is, I have found that job flexibility is most easily attained not only by having access to a financial safety net but also by adopting more short-term and easily abandoned forms of employment. If a basic income enables individuals more easily to exit jobs, this is not merely due to its provision of a safety net but also due to the fact that this safety net allow individuals to avoid long-term contractual agreements in the first place (though I will admit that I myself am somewhat conflicted over the ethicality of this recommendation to avoid long-term commitment to employers).
6. A basic income could enable social isolation.
“The lonely woman” CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Johan
In the spring of 2016, I managed the Facebook page of the US Basic Income Guarantee network. I recall sharing an article entitled “Will the Universal Basic Income make us lonely?“ (written by Oxford fellow Max Harris) and feeling rather disillusioned by the comments, which, I felt, often failed to engage sympathetically with Harris’s concerns.
Many commenters reacted as though the very suggestion that basic income could cause loneliness was utterly ridiculous. Some pointed out that (no doubt accurately) a basic income would permit many individuals to have a enjoy richer social life that they can currently manage. None replied that a basic income could indeed facilitate a potentially harmful reduction of social activity for some people. Although just a fledgling basic income writer at the time, I was inspired to write my own reply to Harris’s article, attempting a more charitable and nuanced treatment of the loneliness worry.
There was a reason that I took the loneliness worry as seriously as I did (and do): my own job-independent income helped to enable me to lead a life of fairly extreme social isolation. There’s little doubt that any sort of on-site job would have forced me to have more social interaction than I voluntarily chose during my college years. My nearly unconditional stipends permitted me to follow my natural tendency to seclude myself and work in solitude; a job, on the other hand, would have compelled me to act against it. To be sure, being very much an introvert by nature, I didn’t want additional social interaction. I didn’t feel lonely. Indeed, I would have objected vociferously if I had been required to relinquish my substantial alone-time, especially when busy with solitary work or other activities I found enjoyable. Its naturalness, however, doesn’t imply that my high degree of social isolation was healthy, and I later came to recognize that it was not.
We should admit that, in some cases, a basic income could facilitate unhealthy behaviors that a forced regime of paid employment could counter. Social isolation is one such behavior: some of us are disinclined to engage in social interaction when it’s not forced upon us; when it becomes voluntary, we naturally tend to abstain. With a basic income, then, we must force ourselves to do what, in other circumstances, the demand to earn a living might have forced upon us. We need to take it upon ourselves to ensure that we receive a healthy dose of social interaction — and sometimes, when it’s easier and seemingly “more natural” not to do so, we won’t.
Now, this is no more a reason to oppose basic income than “Some people won’t exercise if they aren’t forced to work in the fields” would have been a reason to oppose the mechanization of agricultural. But it is a possible outcome that does merit consideration.
7. A basic income would not “cure” anxiety.
In May 2017, basic income social media witnessed a viral spread of stories claiming that Finland’s basic income experiment was already showing a reduction in stress and anxiety. Although these particular stories apparently had their source in sensationalistic reporting of a single anecdote, the supposition that a basic income would reduce stress and anxiety is nothing new — and for good reason: economic hardship and income instability are major sources of stress and anxiety for many people (as is, on the side of the spectrum, overwork).
At the same time, however, many cases of stress and anxiety are not attributable to financial insecurity, poverty, or overwork. I know this firsthand: I have never experienced great economic difficulty, nor overwork (other than that brought on by my own perfectionism), and yet I have been affected by generalized anxiety disorder. Anxiety is an adaptable tormentor; it can find innumerable other potential sources of anxiety — as trivial as they might seem to others — to which to affix.
I often grimace, then, when I read particularly roseate predictions of the ability of basic income to alleviate anxiety — or, for that matter, any mental illness. Quite likely, a basic income would present significant advantages to sufferers of mental illness, especially those whose conditions prevent them from working (or from working steadily in full-time jobs), when compared to current systems of conditional welfare benefits. It would allow people security in their lives, and give them the time needed to help them grow more stable. But a basic income is no panacea.
8. A basic income could enable individuals to make no useful social contributions.
I have spent most of my adult life as a professional student, receiving stipends to study, and choosing my courses of study with no regard for either employability or ability to contribute to society. And, to show for it, I have indeed made no great social contributions.
Certainly, I’ve never been the stereotype of the lazy person content to live on her basic income payments; I’ve never been one to spend my days smoking weed and playing video games. On the contrary, I have a natural desire to feel productive, including (perhaps especially) during weekends and holidays, and it must have taken years for me years to overcome workaholic tendencies that made it difficult to enjoy leisure activities from socializing with friends to simply gazing at a beautiful sunset.
But what it is to have the natural drive to “feel productive”? Well, for one, it can be a drive to further one’s own learning and development — irrespective of whether one uses one’s skills and knowledge in any way whatsoever for the betterment of others or society. By divorcing the means to a living from the demands of the marketplace, a basic income could better enable individuals to pursue art for the sake of art, science for the sake of science, and so on. For me, this has long been integral to the appeal of the idea — even before a “basic income” of sorts came to feel like an established part of my life. It must be admitted, however, that one consequence is that artists, scientists, and other self-motivated individuals would also be free not to publish or promote their work in any way, burying any potential social contributions. (And this is not to mention that a world of self-directed artists and scientists would still have a need for those who will tend to individuals’ medical needs, repair roads and bridges, clean sewers and collect garbage, and so forth. But that is another essay, for another time.)
I believe I’ve done well for myself: my life doesn’t lack for happiness, meaning, or identity, despite (or perhaps because of) my persistent low income and lack of anything resembling a stable career. Nonetheless, there is little doubt that I could have done better for the world. I was, for one, a pretty decent STEM student; it’s possible, I suppose, that I could already have contributed to great advances in technology to improve the lives of millions. Instead, having the means, I chose to spend years engaged in pursuits such as (for example) the study of a narrow sub-sub-field in contemporary analytic philosophy of language. Moreover, because I chose such activities merely for the personal intellectual challenge, I never bothered even to try to publish or distribute my work.
All that being said, I should mention that a basic income is not unique in permitting individuals to survive without contributing to society. Perhaps most obviously, we might imagine the “idle rich” living from inheritance, trust funds, and interest earnings. Moreover, and more importantly, the fact that an activity is profitable does not imply that the activity is socially beneficial (think of those who make a living in the “manufacture of demand” — getting people to buy things they otherwise wouldn’t even want — or, say, patent sharks). This does not imply, however, that tu quoque is an adequate response to the common concern that a basic income would permit free-riding on the societal contributions of others — for, simply put, a basic income would permit free-riding on the societal contributions of others.
9. A mere “personal basic income” can make one feel alien.
I have spent much of my adult life feeling like an outsider to much of my own culture — largely due to my rejection of career culture and other attitudes that I believe to have been engendered by the “BI-like” aspects of my early adult life.
I recall that, by the time I reached 20 years of age, I was already tired of living in a world in which success was equated with personal ambition or, more specifically, personal ambition as played out in a career in paid employment. There were those who wanted to advise me on how to achieve “success” and yet insisted upon projecting their own definition of that notion onto me. It felt, in those days, like there was no one with both the knowledge to offer good guidance and the open-mindedness to hear me out on my own interpretation of “success” and the good life. I embraced anti-careerism as part of my values and identity. I saw nothing inherently wrong with myself. I saw my situation as a case of organism-environment mismatch, and I was happy with the organism, just not the environment. Sometimes, when I felt particularly at odds with the job- and career-focused culture that surrounded me (but powerless to change it), the prospect of never contributing to society actually felt good — itself an act of rebellion.
Would my young adult years have been different ?if I had been born into a society with basic income already in place? Would I have been more eager to contribute my talents in a socially productive way if I had felt a less pronounced sense of “organism-environment mismatch”? I can’t say. Perhaps, even in utopia, all youth must go through their stage of rebellion and angst.
Still, I think, there’s an important point that transcends the rebellion and restlessness of youth: having a “personal basic income” in our present culture –? obsessed as it is with jobs, careers, consumption, and economic growth — ?is likely much different from having the same in a culture in which GDP is not the measure of societal success, income is not the measure of personal success, and education is encouraged for its own sake, not merely as a means to attain a good job. And, quite likely, it would take a universal basic income, or something like it, to pave the way for these latter large-scale cultural shifts.
What a financially self-sufficient individual would do in a society of financially self-sufficient individuals is different — potentially much different — than what the same financially self-sufficient individual would do in a society like ours, in which nearly all other people continue to rely on full-time employment as a means to earn a living.
In May 2016, campaigners for Switzerland’s basic income referendum presented the world with the “world’s biggest question“: “What would you do if your income were taken care of?” Having lived with a job-unconditional income guarantee, however, I realize that there is a much bigger question: “What would you do if everyone’s income were taken care of?”
Reviewed by Tyler Prochazka.
Cover Photo: CC BY 2.0 Generation Grundeinkommen
by Guest Contributor | Jun 9, 2017 | Opinion
“(…) mental health cannot be defined in terms of the “adjustment” of the individual to his society, but, on the contrary, that it must be defined in terms of the adjustment of society to the needs of man,[highlighted in original version] of its role in furthering and hindering the development of mental health. Whether or not the individual is healthy, is primarily not an individual matter, but depends on the structure of his society. A healthy society furthers man’s capacity to love his fellow men, to work creatively, to develop reason and objectivity, to have a sense of self which is based on the experience of his own productive powers. (…) Society can have both functions; it can further man’s healthy development, and it can hinder it; in fact most societies do both, and the question is only to what degree and in what directions their positive and negative influence is exercised.” Erich Fromm (1956/1959)
This is the third and last part of a series of articles published on BI News, in which I call for accompanying a UBI with reforms in the domain of public interest services (please see the first and second parts). The analysis will help one to imagine how the work experience could be transformed to contribute to happiness in a UBI society.
In the current employment system, work organizations are rarely adjusted to human needs, such as self-fulfillment and meaning. In the article on Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber (2013) observes that the more a job is useful for society and able to provide a sense of meaning, the less it is rewarded in monetary terms. Furthermore, employment is an exclusive form of work organization. UBI could help transform work if accompanied by initiatives to create frameworks for useful and meaningful contributions. This paper draws on empirical research of a cooking collective known as People’s Potato. There are similar initiatives where work is distributed among volunteer – for example, the global movement, Food Not Bombs, Les Petites Cantines, which are participative restaurants in poor neighborhoods of Lyon, or the Brooklyn-based food cooperative, Park Slope Food Coop, with about sixteen thousand member-peers.
Example of People’s Potato as a project of regaining work and producing commons
People’s Potato distributes vegan lunches for free at Concordia University in Montréal. It is managed by a workers’ cooperative. However, much of the work is done by volunteers, who can come and go without notice and choose from available tasks. Three other publications provide more details (Gajewska 30 June 2014, Gajewska 2014, Gajewska 10 April 2017). In September 2014, I interviewed several students and non-students helping out in the kitchen. In this article, I will analyze the elements that attract volunteers to People’s Potato to illustrate the potential of advancing human happiness by creating spaces of spontaneous work contribution in the domain of services of general interest.
Work as source of meaning and belonging
Gerald Hüther (2015) defines work as a system of relationships (Beziehungsgefüge) that integrates an individual into society. In order to develop, our brain needs experiences created with other people, a shared undertaking and it is structured by these experiences. Many people simply are deprived of the opportunity to contribute work that has meaning with tangible results, that might enrich the lives of other people. Gallup data shows that only 13 percent of people are emotionally invested in their work. 63 percent are “not engaged”—in other words, simply unmotivated and unlikely to exert extra effort. The remaining 24 percent are “actively disengaged,” or truly unhappy and unproductive. The United States and Canada actually have the highest engagement rate in the world. 29 percent of respondents from these countries reported that they are invested in their work, whereas only 14 percent of Western Europeans are (MacGregor 2013).
Volunteers that I interviewed indicated that doing something useful was an important reason to join People’s Potato. One woman mentioned that giving out food for free generates a spiritual satisfaction in her. Many participants stressed that they contribute because they believe in the cause. For one, the integration of handicapped volunteers, working with the other volunteers in the kitchen, was especially important.
The importance of having fun
How can work be organized so that no coercion is needed? Despite all the developments in the domain of technology and entertainment, Western societies seem to have lost the capacity and the conditions to play. In my view, this lack is one of the fundamental obstacles for changing the economic system. Therefore, it should become the subject of political debate and in-depth research to determine how to create a society based on play, not as a form of consumption but as a joy of engagement. Bob Black describes play in the following way: “Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it’s forced. (…) Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share the aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that’s why he plays.” (Bob Black 1996: 239).
Organizing work processes so that volunteers have fun is an important element of People’s Potato’s philosophy. For example, people often perform tasks in groups, close to each other, so that talking is possible. Once when we chopped the same vegetables for quite a while, the coordinator asked: “Are you guys still having fun?”
One participant in People’s Potato mentioned that he would continue to contribute at the cooking collective only if it retains its current non-hierarchical structure. Another volunteer said that she would not participate if the involvement felt like her regular job in a commercial gastronomy where she worked part time at the time of the interview.
Alternative work spaces for a healthier society
Loneliness is a health issue. Therefore, government should also think about policies that might limit the extent of isolation in our modern atomized society instead of subsidizing pharmacology and conventional medicine as the only solutions for health problems. Being a critic of modern civilization, Helena Norberg-Hodge demonstrates in her book “Ancient Futures” how the different organization of work in indigenous Ladakh society includes (or used to include) older people. Since there is no pressure, people can contribute at their pace and be part of a joyful community. She observed that, in this society, typical old-age diseases were rare and elders were well-integrated in this society, throughout their lives.
People’s Potato also creates conditions for different types of people to contribute and enjoy a community. Meeting people and interacting with folks outside of one’s studies were important reasons to come and help out. A Brazilian woman had been coming to the kitchen to integrate in Montreal, her new home, at the beginning of her stay. Eventually busy with new friends and activities, she came less often. For her son, an artist suffering from depression, volunteering at the People’s Potato gives structure to his days. Two women in their early twenties told me that they feel more at ease to meet and interact with people by joining collective work rather than going to a party. A young woman said that one of the reasons why she keeps coming to the People’s Potato is that they know her and she can keep in touch with people through helping out.
Bringing people together around useful tasks does not, however, automatically translate into deeper ties, even if they are crucial for health. Longitudinal research has shown that the quality of relationships does determine possible health advantages. One of the interviewees, an aged unemployed man, comes to volunteer to be part of a community. Yet, during eight years of volunteering, he has not managed to build stronger ties with other participants of the project. He wishes that people would notice him and be interested in keeping in touch outside of the kitchen. Unfortunately this did not happen.
Experimenting with work organization to prepare the ground for a UBI
People’s Potato’s alternative work organization exemplifies how a post-capitalist system of production could look and feel. In order to change the perception of and feelings about work shaped by the employment system, neurobiologist, Gerald Hüther (2015), proposes to re-condition the brain by creating positive work experiences. This is what People’s Potato’s team does. New forms of work organization can rewire society to manifest new ways of approaching work. These could be considered as laboratories of inner transformation to induce those attitudes and behaviors necessary to build a new kind of society. This new understanding of work could foster the ideological and mental foundation needed for an unconditional basic income society. In the interview published on basicincome.org (Gajewska 2016), I argue that a transformation of work and social relations to prevent substance addictions is a crucial element to prepare the ground for a UBI. We can convince opponents by prefiguring the well being that we strive for.
Black, Bob (1985): The Abolition of Work, “The Abolition of Work and Other Essays”, published by Loompanics Unlimited,
Fromm, Erich (1956/1959) : The Sane Society. London : Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.
Gajewska, Katarzyna (10 April 2017): UBI needs peers (PT 2): Re-imagine work organization, basicincome.org,
Gajewska, Katarzyna interviewed by Tyler Prochazka (January 2016) : Beyond temptation: Scholar discusses addiction and basic income – an interview
Gajewska, Katarzyna (30 June 2014): There is such a thing as a free lunch: Montreal Students Commoning and Peering food services. P2P Foundation Blog,
Gajewska, Katarzyna (2014): Peer Production and Prosumerism as a Model for the Future Organization of General Interest Services Provision in Developed Countries Examples of Food Services Collectives. World Future Review 6(1): 29-39.
Greaber, David (2013): On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, Strike!https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
Hirnforscher Gerald Hüther im Gespräch „Erst die Arbeit macht uns zu Menschen“https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/wirtschaftswissen/interview-mit-hirnforscher-gerald-huether-erst-die-arbeit-macht-uns-zu-menschen-13963189.html 31 December 2015
MacGregor, Jena (2013): Only 13 percent of people worldwide actually like going to work. October 10, 2013,
Norberg-Hodge, Helena (1991): Ancient Futures: Lessons from Ladakh for a Globalizing World. Sierra Club Books.
Photo from People’s Potato.
About the Author
Katarzyna Gajewska is an independent scholar and a writer. She has a PhD in Political Science and has published on alternative economy and innovating the work organization since 2013. You can find her non-academic writing on such platforms as Occupy.com, P2P Foundation Blog, Basic Income UK, Bronislaw Magazine and LeftEast. For updates on her publications, you can check her Facebook page or send her an e-mail: k.gajewska_commATzoho.com. If you would like to support her independent writing, please make a donation to the PayPal account at the same address!
by Karl Widerquist | May 21, 2017 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
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Indepentarianism is the political ideology associated with the political theory called “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord” (JPA). I (Karl Widerquist) defined JPA and outlined its theory of freedom in my 2013 book, Independence, Propertyless, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No. It argues that the promotion of freedom in a society with private property requires, among other things, an unconditional basic income in part, on grounds that it is wrong to put conditions on anyone else’s access to the resources they need to survive. A worker needs the power to say no—not just to any one job, but to all jobs—to enter the market place as a free person and not as a forced laborer. Although this theory is drawn from principles stressing freedom in the most negative sense of the term, it is not associated with theories that use freedom to justify economic inequality. It is committed to the idea that economic and politically disadvantaged people in every society are the least free and that the promotion of freedom in the most meaningful sense requires far greater equality of income, wealth, and political power; greater respect for political dissenters, better stewardship of the environment, and other policies. I am planning to layout the JPA theory of property rights more fully in a future book entitled, Justice as the Pursuit of Accord.
The name, “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord,” comes from the belief that most prevailing theories of justice in political philosophy today are utopian in the sense that they ignore the problem of reasonable disagreement about the basic principles of justice. Social contract theory imagines all the reasonable, rational people in the world agreeing to a hypothetical social contract outlining what justice is. Anyone who doesn’t agree in practice can be dismissed as irrational or unreasonable. Natural rights theorists do not believe that justice comes from any hypothetical agreement. It is just whether anyone agrees or not, but they believe that any rational, reasonable person can discover the true principles of justice by observation and contemplation and anyone who doesn’t agree can be dismissed is irrational or unreasonable. Even the best philosophers are not good at recognizing the difference between reasonable and unreasonable dissent.
These utopian aspects of the leading theories have produced dystopian consequences. Philosophers have misled people into the belief that everyone shares in the benefits of modern society. No matter how disadvantage a person maybe, we are told to believe that they are better off because the government and the property rights system exist. The truth, as Grant S. McCall and I argue in our 2017 book, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, is that our institutions harm people. Many disadvantaged people are probably worse off than their ancestors were 20,000 years ago.
JPA makes no statement whether there might be a theory of justice to which all rational, reasonable people should or would agree, but it is based on the belief that we are far from the point of discovering such a theory. A true accord exists only if all people are fully autonomous and all literally agree to the social contract or some other basic structure such as a set of natural rights. The essential political problem in the world today is severe disagreement between reasonable people about the most basic principles of justice. We must always pursue that accord, but we should be aware we are unlikely to reach it. Therefore, whoever makes the rules always forces them onto reasonable dissenters. The ruling coalition’s right to make the rules stems both from the agreement of the majority and from their effort to create the minimum negative interference with dissenters. This constraint, of course, requires the governments of the world to treat the disadvantaged and disaffected people of the world much better than they do now—including a payment by those who are most advantage under the existing structure to compensate those who are most disadvantaged under it.
The name, “indepentarianism,” stresses the central role that freedom as independence plays in JPA. The book, Independence, Propertyless, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, argues that an individual’s status as a free person is best understood as “Effective Control Self-Ownership” (ECSO freedom, pronounced “exo-freedom” as in external-freedom). In essence: status freedom is the power to say no. An independent person is free from all direct and indirect force to actively serve the interests of others. You can tell a person: go do what you want over there, but if you make it impossible for them to do live as they want without serving some other group of people, you have taken away their status as a free person.
In this sense, most working people in the world are not fully free. If they had direct access to resources, they could hunt, gather, fish, farm, invest, or start a business or start some manufacturing venture by themselves or with whoever wanted to work with them. Instead, the rules of property create “propertylessness,” which in turn indirectly forces the vast majority of people to ask for a job from someone who controls enough resources to give them one. That is, it forces one group of people into become a subordinate of at least one member of another group of people—because we have robbed them of the power to say no to whatever jobs are on offer.
There’s nothing wrong with employment—as long as you choose it freely. Just like there’s nothing wrong with sex—as long as it’s not rape. A choice of bosses without the freedom to say no to all of them is not freedom from forced labor just as a choice of sexual partners without the power to say no to all of them is not freedom from rape.
One of the main reasons I defined indepentarianism as a new ideology is the lack of attention that most of the prevailing political ideologies pay to the injustice of indirectly forced subordination.
The book argues that Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the best way to support ECSO freedom in the modern economy. But UBI support is not synonymous with indepentarianism. Someone could conceivably support indepentarian principles without believing they are best upheld by UBI or a similar policy. Although I hope all UBI supporters will have some interest in indepentarianism, I expect that most of them are not indepentarians. For example, one of the architects of the UBI movement, Philippe Van Parijs, argues for UBI on the theory of justice and/or the ideology he calls “Real Libertarianism,” which is based on very different principles than JPA.
JPA also differs from other political theories in its treatment of property rights in external assets: that is, assets external to the human body including natural resources and the things humans make out of them. Egalitarians tend to assume external assets are naturally collective property. Left-libertarians tend to assume that external assets should naturally owned individually in equal shares. So-called “libertarians” tend to assume external assets are natural unowned, but ownable by the first person to “appropriate” them by some procedure that tends to lead to highly unequal ownership. JPA assumes resources are “naturally” unowned and unownable. The only way to create a truly justice property rights system would be through a property rights accord, which is probably impossible. In the absence of that accord, the ruling coalition is always forcing a system of property onto reasonable dissenters. Therefore, they have to minimize the negative interference that their system of rights imposes on dissenters and future generations. This, responsibility, I argue motivates both a strongly egalitarian and environmentalist property rights system.
I plan to layout JPA property theory more fully in a future book, entitled, Justice as the Pursuit of Accord. It will argue that this responsibility for an egalitarian property rights system requires a UBI high enough not only to maintain ECSO freedom but a UBI set at the highest sustainable level. However, I suspect that not everyone who agrees with the basic principles of indepentarianism will agree with this part of the argument.
I’m very interested in what people think—for and against indepentarianism. I’m especially interested to know whether there are other indepentarians out there. You don’t have to agree with all I’ve said here to call yourself an indepentarian. If you’re in agreement with enough of it to use the term, please say so in a comment. If you’d like to know more about it, please contact me at karl@widerquist.com. I am not interested in creating an echo chamber. I’m interested in respectful dialogue with people taking these ideas in their own directions. I’m also greatly interested in people who criticize any aspect of valetudinarianism.
All posts from my blog, the Indepentarian
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-Karl Widerquist, Begun in New Orleans, completed at Cru Coffee House, Beaufort, North Carolina, May 21, 2017
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