by Kate McFarland | Jan 11, 2017 | News
Christo Aivalis, Adjunct Professor of Canadian Political and Labour History at Queen’s University (in Kingston, Ontario), provides a socialist perspective on basic income in an article for Canadian Dimension.
Aivalis presents an overview of the reasons for which various Canadian political parties have supported a basic income, noting that, for those on the right, interest in the policy is largely driven by interest in bureaucratic efficiency. In contrast, the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) has historically differed from right-of-center parties in seeing basic income as a matter of providing an adequate standard of living as a universal human right.
Aivalis argues that contemporary progressive thought about basic income should follow the NDP in renewing the focus on human rights — as well as additionally addressing the “broader questions of who owns societal means of production and distribution.” He worries that, taken alone, basic income would “fail to engender economic democracy in Canada, and may even weaken it.” At the same time, he believes that, if conceived as part of a “general drive to democratize the economy,” a basic income could pave the way to a “post-capitalist Canadian future.”
Canadian Dimension is Canada’s longest-running periodical to specialize in left-wing political discussion. Notably, its summer 2016 edition was devoted to the topic of basic income.
National Context:
Basic income has recently generated serious consideration throughout much of Canada. The provincial government of Ontario, currently governed by the Liberal Party, is currently preparing a pilot of a basic income guarantee, with an anticipated launch date of April 2017. Prince Edward Island has also decided to pursue a partnership with the federal government in running a pilot. Other provinces have also shown active interest. For example, the Liberal Party of Quebec (Parti libéral du Québec) has been actively promoting discussion of basic income, as has the Green Party of British Columbia, and the policy has seen interest among officials in Alberta.
Some provincial sections of the NDP have recently advocated for a basic income, such as those of Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. Overall, though, most of interest throughout Canada is not driven by the NDP, as Aivalis would seem to prefer.
Read More:
Christo Aivalis, “Basic income: libertarian wedge or a plank towards a socialist future?,” Canadian Dimension, November 7, 2016.
Photo (taken in Toronto, Ontario, Canada) CC BY-NC 2.0 Kat Northern Lights Man
by Kate McFarland | Jan 7, 2017 | News
A major news outlet in India has claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi intends to introduce a universal basic income, inaccurately attributing the claim to an interview with BIEN cofounder Guy Standing (SOAS, University of London). In a statement to Basic Income News, Standing clarifies that he never made such an assertion.
On January 3, Business Insider published an article (“The Indian government is about to endorse giving all its citizens free money”) in which the journalist claims that the government of India is “set to endorse universal basic income”. The journalist based this assertion on portions of an interview with Guy Standing about India’s Economic Survey, quoting Standing as saying, “the Indian government is coming out with a big report in January. As you can imagine that makes me very excited. It will basically say this is the way forward.” (Adding later: “I don’t expect them to go the full way, because it’s such a dramatic conversion.”)
Other media outlets picked up on this report, including The Independent in the UK, fueling rumors that the Modi government plans to introduce a universal basic income. Significantly, on January 6, the popular Indian newspaper MoneyBhaskar.com published an embellished version of the story (in Hindi) asserting that the government would roll out a UBI. The article, which went viral, claimed its source as Business Insider‘s interview with Standing.
In comments to Basic Income News, Standing makes clear that these radical claims about the plans of the Indian government are false embellishments of his actual remarks:
“I never said Modi is going to introduce a basic income, and never said that I knew that. What I said to the Business Insider journalist who interviewed me for about half an hour on the phone, mainly on other matters, was that the pilots taking place in Finland and elsewhere were helping to legitimise basic income, that our pilots in India had helped legitimise the topic in India, that the Indian Government was contemplating introducing basic income and was issuing a chapter in its forthcoming Economic Report to be tabled in Parliament at the time of the budget. I am hopeful, I told him, but we will have to wait to see.”
Narendra Modi photo CC BY-SA 4.0 Jasveer10
Post reviewed and edited by Guy Standing
by Kate McFarland | Jan 6, 2017 | News
Cashrelief.org, a non-profit organization based in New Delhi, India, plans to launch a two-year cash transfer program in a poor village in India by April 1, 2017. Like a basic income, the transfers will be unconditional and available to all residents of the village.
Pilot Design
Cashrelief’s planned two-year pilot study will examine the effects of unconditional cash transfers in a poor village in India. The cash transfers will be set at an amount just above India’s poverty level of 972 rupees (about 14 USD) per month for an individual, and will be distributed to households. For a household of four, this amounts to 96,000 rupees (about 1,413 USD) over the course of the pilot.
The organization will select a village with a high percentage of ultra-poor residents, and will distribute the unconditional cash transfers to every household in that village (although households may voluntarily opt out). At present, it has identified three possible villages: Bihar, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh (which was, notably, the site of a previous basic income pilot led by economist Guy Standing and India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association in 2011). In total, about 50 to 70 families will receive the two-year benefits.
Cashrelief decided to make the cash transfers universal within the chosen village (rather than, for example, distributing them only to a random sample of households) in order to examine the social effects of a universal policy, as well as to avoid social conflicts that might result when only a subset of residents receive money.
Throughout the pilot, researchers will study how the households use their unconditional cash transfers. In particular, they plan to measure four parameters–income, assets, health-related spending, and education spending–at the start, midpoint, and end of the experiment. To assist in this undertaking, Cashrelief plans to involve an experienced, institutionally-affiliated principal investigator.
Despite its research element, Cashrelief states on its website that its “main motivation” for the pilot is simply to “reignite hope into people leading lives of quiet desperation in extreme poverty.”
Background and Influences
Cashrelief originated in mid-2016, when entrepreneur Vivek Joshi and veteran non-profit worker Rahul Nainwal developed the idea of running their own study of the effects of direct cash transfers as aid. Joshi and Nainwal were inspired by the work of the US-based non-profit GiveDirectly–which has been distributing aid in the form of unconditional cash transfers since 2009 and has recently initiated a long-term study of basic income in villages in Kenya–and anthropologist James Ferguson’s 2015 book Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution, which argues in favor of non-labor-based transfers as “rightful shares” of collective resources.
Nainwal also states that he was influenced by his personal experience in the non-profit sector, where he observed many inefficiencies in the way in which aid is distributed.
Describing his personal support for basic income in remarks to Basic Income News, Nainwal says that he sees the policy as a way to “level the playing field,” stressing that “it’s not people’s own fault that they’re poor.” He adds that it is not the role of the distributing aid to tell recipients what they need but that, instead, we “might as well give them the money and let them decide what to do with it.”
Article reviewed by Danny Pearlberg
Cover Photo CC BY-NC 2.0 lapidim
by BIEN | Dec 31, 2016 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
Jan Otto Andersson (Åbo Akademi University)
Several texts were momentous at the start of my BI journey, even though they did not always fit a strict definition of an unconditional basic income.
The first text was a pamphlet written by my acquaintance Gunnar Adler-Karlsson. In Danish it was called “No to Full Employment”, but it was not published in Swedish until renamed as “Thoughts on Full Employment”. Adler-Karlsson set out a vision of a three-layered society: the necessity economy, the capitalistic economy and the free economy. The vision included a “life income” or “citizen’s wage”, but everybody was supposed to take part in the necessity economy. The year was 1977.
Another text was a visionary collective work “Norden år 2030” (Nordic 2030). The booklet was illustrated with futuristic graphics and fictional interviews with people who had experienced revolutionary changes and now inhabited a United Nordic region. In one interview, “samlön” and “samtjänst” are introduced. The terms are difficult to translate, but maybe “co-wage” and “co-service” would do. The co-wage is a minimum given to all, but all have to take part in the service production. The booklet was the work of a designer and a photographer.
I already was an admirer of André Gorz, when the book “The Roads to Paradise” appeared in 1983. Gorz discussed heteronomous and autonomous work, and how society should be transformed from being dominated by capitalist wage-labour towards more real freedom. One important means was to introduce a BI called “social wage”, “social dividend” or “social income”.
In 1986 I took part in the international congress on Basic Income in Louvain-la-Neuve. My contribution was called “Basic Income in Three Social Visions”: a Red-Blue mixed society, a Blue-Green dual society and a Red-Green combined society. I concluded that a BI could hardly be included in a Red-Blue fordist version; that it could be part of a blue-green anarcho-capitalist, rather dystopian project; but would be a central feature of a Red-Green vision.
At the conference I got acquainted with a piece by Philippe Van Parijs and Robert van der Veen that enthralled me: “A Capitalist Road to Communism”. Back in Finland I told a “night tale” at one of the last party assemblies of the Finnish Communist Party. In the story, two wise men visited Finland. They pondered our problems and persuaded us to introduce a basic income. The eventual consequences were astounding. People gradually found that they were living in a new society. To find a fitting term for it they consulted old books, and the best they could find was “communism”.
In a book “Vänsterframtid. Nationalekonomiska studier av fordismnes kris och morgondagens alternative” (“Left Future: Economic studies of the fordist crisis and alternatives for tomorrow”), I deepened my thoughts on how a Citizen’s Income could be a crucial step towards a red-green society in the Nordic context.
The Left Alliance, a new party encompassing the old radical left fractions, was founded in 1990. The programme of the party included a “Citizen’s Income”. The CI was seen as a central feature of the “Third Left”. The Third Left would combine the best elements from the First republican/liberal Left and the Second social democratic/communist Left.
The Green Party had been established in 1987 in Finland and from the start it supported a basic income. Interest for the idea was also expressed by people in other parties, and a dozen activists from several parties joined to discuss how to advance Basic Income in Finland. The result was a booklet “Perustulo, kansalaisen palkka” (“Basic Income, the citizen’s wage”). It appeared in 1992, but so did the great “lama”, the worst economic crisis in an OECD-country since the war. There was little room for bold new ideas in a country beset with acute financial and social problems.
I attended the BIEN congresses in Antwerp 1988 and Florence 1990. During my stay in London as guest professor in 1989-1990, I became involved with the Citizen’s Income group. I received the TaxMod micro-simulation model developed by Hermione Parker, visited Anne Miller in Edinburgh, and befriended Tony Walter, whom I later invited to my university (Åbo Akademi) to give a course on basic income.
At BIEN’s 1998 congress in Amsterdam, I presented a paper called “The History of an Idea: Why did Basic Income Thrill the Finns, but not the Swedes?” It was published in the book Basic Income on the Agenda.
Olli Kangas and I made an opinion poll of whether and why people in Sweden and Finland supported a BI or not. We found astonishingly more support in Finland. Even the Finnish conservatives were more in favour of the different BI ideas we asked about than the Swedish greens! In the Geneva congress in 2002, I presented our article “Popular support for basic income in Sweden and Finland”.
Since I had become active as an ecological economist, and developed what I have called my “Global ethical trilemma” between affluence, global justice and ecological sustainability, I became absorbed with the relation between ecological limits and BI. In BIEN’s 2012 congress in Munich, I presented the paper “Degrowth with basic income – the radical combination”. A related article “Basic Income from an ecological perspective” was published in Basic Income Studies.
Gradually the interest for basic income has been revived in Finland. A Finnish branch of BIEN has been formed. Olli Kangas has been assigned the delicate task to conduct the pilot study ordered by the government. The task has been made almost impossible for different reasons, but at least basic income is now on the political agenda. Even the Social Democrats are forced to reconsider it seriously.
I was invited as a key speaker to the 2016 BIEN congress in Seoul on the theme “Does Basic Income fit the Nordic Welfare State?” I also acted as a commentator on the planned Youth Dividend experiment in the city of Seongnam.
Andersson (in white) in Seongnam
In Seoul it was decided that the BIEN 2018 congress will be held in Tampere, Finland. I wish you all welcome!
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
by BIEN | Dec 31, 2016 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
Julio Linares – “My Short Journey in BIEN”
I first heard about BIEN at a conference in Switzerland about the future of work and basic income. I went to that conference because of a hunch. I had finished reading Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and was in the midst of a brainstorm, thinking about how to change the system we find ourselves in. It came to me that if in the past humans commodified fictitious commodities (Land, Labor and Money), then we can also decommodify at least one of them. The question was how. When the basic income idea came to my head, I thought I had discovered the wheel.
I couldn’t sleep. I felt like I needed to tell somebody. My wife didn’t quite get my crazy mumbling at 2 A.M. and told me to go to sleep. I quickly found that others had already thought of this long before me and had developed the idea further. I couldn’t be happier. I checked social media the next day and found out about the Swiss referendum and the event that was happening before it, gathering academics, entrepreneurs and others interested in basic income. Not looking back, I bought the cheapest ticket I could find and went.
At the conference I had the opportunity of meeting Guy Standing and many other inspiring people involved in the network. I knew I had made the right choice in going. I met young scholars there, who told me about the congress happening in Korea in July 2016. Originally from Guatemala, I had been living in Taiwan for 5 years. Living so close to Korea, I thought I should go as well. Applications were long past the deadline but I still sent an email asking if I could present a paper. When I got accepted I went without glimpse of doubt, this time accompanied by my wife. She and I met in Taiwan while having a full scholarship so we can empirically attest to the transformative benefits of a basic income.
My paper was about alternative ways of funding a basic income. Specifically, I thought of creating financial funds that could make a basic income scheme sustainable in the long run. In this way, I theorized, it could be possible not only to provide a basic income to people but at the same time start changing the greedy ways that finance is used in our time. I received a lot of constructive feedback from the people who attended the talk and learned a lot from the experience.
At the BIEN congress I met Anja and other life members of the BIEN network. Inspired by their clarity of vision and positive attitude I decided to join on the spot. I am proud member number 252. Right now I find myself in the process of setting up a network in Guatemala, looking for funding in order to do a pilot project. So far we have contacted one of the municipal mayors of Guatemala. He and his team were very interested in the idea and have agreed to cooperate with us.
Although I just joined the network, I hope to help as much as I can in spreading the word about the importance of basic income and getting other people involved in my own country. I believe basic income can help in reducing poverty and increasing the livelihood of people in Guatemala and the rest of the world. The movement is only beginning!
Photo: Participants at 2016 BIEN Congress in Seoul, South Korea.
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
