by Kate McFarland | May 3, 2016 | News
Philippe Van Parijs
In a recent article for Social Europe, Philippe van Parijs — philosopher, social scientist, and co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network — urges social democrats to (re-)introduce the basic income as part of their agenda.
Along the way, he addresses several popular misunderstandings that have tended to make those on the left wary of the idea of providing all adults with cash benefits, irrespective of income and employment status:
“Is it not absurd to pay a basic income to the rich?” Van Parijs explains why it is not.
“It is acceptable to replace the right to a job by a right to an income?” Van Parijs explains that, in fact, a basic income functions like a “flexible, intelligent form of job sharing,” not undermining the job culture but improving it.
“Does a basic income threaten the existence of the welfare state?” Again, van Parijs argues that a basic income does nothing of the sort.
In his conclusion, van Parijs enjoins social democrats to recognize that the “bulk of our real income is not the fruit of the efforts of today’s workers…but a gift from nature increasingly combined with capital accumulation, technological innovation and institutional improvements inherited from the past. … In a truly ‘socialist’ perspective, those entitled to this gift are all members of society equally, male and female, irrespective of the extent of their participation in well-protected full-time employment.”
Indeed, despite the recent explosion of interest in basic income, many on the left continue to ignore or dismiss the idea — devoting much more attention to raising wages or creating more jobs. In these regions of politics, van Parijs’s short but compelling article demands careful attention.
Philippe van Parijs, 11 April 2016, “Basic Income And Social Democracy,” Social Europe.
by Stanislas Jourdan | Apr 4, 2016 | News
In a recent interview with ‘The Economist’, Yanis Varoufakis says basic income is an ‘absolutely essential’ approach for the future of social democracy.
This is a major endorsement from a rising star of the European left. Varoufakis is a Greek economist who served as Finance Minister of Greece under the first Syriza government installed in January 2015. He recently launched ‘Democracy in Europe Movement 2025’ (DiEM25), with the aim of transforming the European Union from an elitist technocracy into a transparent and democratic institution that serves people’s interests.
In the interview, Varoufakis links the case for a basic income to the future of social democracy:
Today we are facing a serious danger of large masses of people who have low economic value. This is a powder keg in the foundations of society. Making sure that the great wealth-creation which capital is capable of does not light this dynamite — the basic income approach— is absolutely essential, but it is not part of the social democratic tradition. Think about it. The post-war consensus was all about national insurance, it was not about basic income. Now, either we are going to have a basic income that regulates this new society of ours, or we are going to have very substantial social conflicts that get far worse with xenophobia and refugees and migration and so forth.
Further on, he adds:
So what do we need to do to capture hope? That is the issue. In the 50s and 60s the dream of shared prosperity was that which gave hope. (…) So I think the basic income approach is capable of doing this as long as (…) you can explain to them where the money will come from, that it will not be simply debt, that we are going to generate a lot more income and a chunk of it is going to fund this. But we, the Left, must not be fearful.
Surfers should be fed
Varoufakis also mentions the famous controversy initiated by Philippe van Parijs and John Rawls about whether ‘surfers should be fed’. Varoufakis stands with van Parijs:
I gave a talk some time ago in the United States and said: yes, surfers in California must be fed by the rest of us. We may not like that, we may feel they are bums, but they deserve a basic income too.
OK, they don’t “deserve”, but they should have a basic income, because this is the way to stabilise society. But you need politicians that are capable of going out there and saying: You see that lazy bum over there that you hate? We should feed him. And we should make sure he has a house. Because if he does not have a house and he gets sick and so on, he is a greater burden for all of us.
It is the first time Varoufakis has explicitly endorsed basic income, but he has made allusions to it in in the past.
Back in 2010, he co-authored with Stuart Holland a report called ‘The Modest Proposal’ in which he elaborated four proposals to fix the structural crisis of the European monetary union. Under his 4th proposal, the Emergency Social Solidarity Programme (ESSP), Varoufakis developed the idea of implementing an EU-wide food stamp-style scheme as an emergency measure to reduce poverty, to unify Europe and to redistribute across all European states the trade surplus accumulated by countries like Germany. Such a scheme could even be financed by the European Central Bank:
CC picture: EU Council Eurozone
by Josh Martin | Mar 7, 2016 | News
In early February, members of Unconditional Basic Income Europe (UBIE) attended the launch of a new European movement for democracy named “DiEM25” and key speakers like Katja Kipping from the German Left Party and Caroline Lucas from the UK Greens called for a basic income to be one of the key demands for the new movement. Many of those in attendance agreed that UBIE and DiEM25 shared many of the same goals and a basic income could go a long way toward securing social citizenship and a life of dignity for every European.
Read the full press release here.
by Karl Widerquist | Oct 13, 2015 | Research
David Casassas
Abstract:
Europe is experiencing rapidly accelerating poverty and social exclusion, following half a decade of financial crisis and austerity politics. The key problem behind Europe’s malaise, in our view, is the economic disenfranchisement of large parts of its population in the winner-takes-all-society. This article proposes that we examine the contribution of republican political theory as a distinctive approach that provides us with the conceptual and normative resources to reclaim what we call the political economy of democracy, the constellation of political and economic institutions aimed at promoting broad economic sovereignty and individuals’ capacities to govern their own lives. This article identifies three key ideas that together constitute a distinctively republican approach to political economy: (1) establish an economic floor; (2) impose an economic ceiling to counter excess economic inequality; and (3) democratize the governance and regulation of the main economic institutions.
David Casassas and Jurgen De Wispelaere “Republicanism and the political economy of democracy.” European Journal of Social Theory Volume 18, no. 4, 2015
Jurgen De Wispelaere
by Toru Yamamori | Aug 18, 2015 | Research
Sascha Liebermann (2015) Aus dem Geist der Demokratie: Bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen [In the Spirit of Democracy: Unconditional Basic Income],
Publisher: Humanities Online, Frankfurt, Germany 2015
This book addresses a wide audience of people interested in basic income and tries to shed light on the “revolving effect” a UBI would have on all aspects of our lives. The chapters are based on blog posts which the author has published in the last seven years on www.freiheitstattvollbeschaeftigung.de. These posts have been completely revised, updated and adapted to the book format. The chapters deal with democracy, socialization, early childhood, education (from crèche via kindergarten to school and university), family, demography, economics, automatization, social work, welfare state as well as other topics.
