The Prehistory of Private Property: A video introduction to the new book by Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall

by Karl Widerquist | Jun 17, 2020 | Opinion, The Indepentarian

This short video introduces the new book, The Prehistory of Private Property, by Grant McCall and me. The book examines the origin and development of the private property rights system and the experiences of peoples who have lived in other systems to debunk three false claims commonly accepted by contemporary political theorists. These false claims are: (1) Inequality is natural and inevitable, or egalitarianism is unsustainable without a significant loss in freedom. (2) Capitalism is more consistent with negative freedom than any other conceivable economic system. (3) Private property is somehow “natural,” meaning that when free from interference people tend to appropriate and transfer property in ways that lead to a capitalist system with strong, individualistic, and unequal private property rights.

The book presents a great deal of anthropological and historical evidence that show that all three of these claims are false: (1) Many societies known to anthropology have maintained egalitarianism and freedom. (2) The least free people under capitalism are significantly less free than people in societies with common access to resources. (3) The first people to “appropriate” property tend to share resources; the elite private ownership system was forced on the world by the colonial and enclosure movements beginning only about 500 years or so ago and not fully complete yet.

The book is not primarily about Universal Basic Income (UBI), but it attacks many arguments used against UBI and other forms of redistribution. It also makes a brief case for UBI in the very last chapter, as the video explains.

As a bonus, early in the video, if you look closely, you can see Alexander de Roo eating breakfast in the background.

Thanks to Ali Mutlu Köylüoğlu for inviting me to give this talk and for recording and posting it.

-Karl Widerquist, Morehead City, North Carolina, June 17, 2020

The Growth of the Australian Basic Income Movement (Forward to the book, “Implementing a Basic Income in Australia”)

by Karl Widerquist | Aug 21, 2019 | Opinion, The Indepentarian

This is a draft version of my forward to the book, Implementing a Basic Income in Australia: Pathways Forward edited by Elise Klein, Jennifer Mays, and Tim Dunlop New York: Palgrave-Macmillan 2019

Back in 1999, when I first started following international developments on Basic Income (BI), not much was going on in Australia. Allan McDonald had been writing about BI in the newsletter for a group called Organisation Advocating Support Income Studies in Australia (OASIS-Australia), but when he stepped down in 2002, no one was available to take over.

But over the last several years, interest in BI in Australia has picked up greatly. Australians inside and outside of academia are producing a lot of research and literature on it, and that work is beginning to have a major impact on politics. Australia’s two major parties might not yet be ready to endorse BI, but they can no longer ignore it. And in fact, the Australian Greens, a party that often holds the balance-of-power in Australia’s federal Upper House, have officially adopted BI as party policy.

Australia has become not simply one of the countries where BI is regularly discussed, but very possibly a major world centre for UBI activity. One sign is that the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), the only worldwide BI network, has selected Australia for the location of its 2020 conference.

Another sign became obvious to me in 2017 when Elise Klein invited me to come to Australia to speak at a BI conference. Members of Basic Income Guarantee Australia (BIGA) took the opportunity to set me up for as many talks or meetings as I could do in the time I had. That turned out to be a whirlwind of seven appearances in four days in three cities—Canberra, Sydney, and Melbourne. I spoke with members of parliament, with members of the media, with academics, and with university students. I slept on a train and on a plane, and I managed to stay awake for all or most of the two-day, BI research conference in Melbourne, where I learned a lot and had the chance to meet many of the authors of this book. I was impressed by the breadth and depth of BI work going on in Australia.

A third sign that Australia has become a major world centre for BI research can be found in the publication of the book, Implementing a Basic Income in Australia: Pathways Forward edited by Elise Klein, Jennifer Mays, and Tim Dunlop (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). It includes a dozen authors from fields as diverse as Anthropology, Development, Economics, Geography, Journalism, Political Economy, Political Science, Public Health, Social Work, and Sociology. It addresses major empirical and philosophical issues of implementing BI in Australia. Although all or most of the chapters are written in a way that will be interesting to an international audience, parts of the book’s focus is on issues that will be especially interesting in the Australian context, such as the specific problems and opportunities for BI in very remote areas as well as its value as a tool to counter the effects of Australian settler colonialism.

The book pays special attention to the political barriers in the way of implementation of BI in Australia and to the opportunities and prospects for political strategies to move BI forward. These include proposals to start with group-focused transfers, such as BI for young people; proposals for how community groups, professionals, and activists can effectively advocate for BI; and proposals for fitting BI into the existing welfare system.

Although these lessons come from the Australian context, the value of this book for the BI movement all over the world needs to be appreciated. It’s a book about implementation—an issue that needs much more analysis by the global BI researchers and activists. Social, economic, and political strategies for BI need to be explored in different ways in every conceivable context. Comparative analysis of different strategies in different contexts is how we’ll truly learn what works and what doesn’t, and this book provides a valuable contribution to that effort.

The book is an excellent read and a valuable resource for researchers, students and anyone interested in BI.

-Karl Widerquist, Doha, Qatar, December 8, 2018

Table of contents (14 chapters)

• Introduction: Implementing a Basic Income in Australia

Pages 1-20

Klein, Elise (et al.)

• Basic Income in Australia: Implementation Challenges

Pages 23-43

Marston, Greg

• Basic Income in the Current Climate: If Australia Can Implement Other Universal Provisions, Then Why Not a Basic Income?

Pages 45-68

Mays, Jennifer

• Feminist Perspectives on Basic Income

Pages 69-85

Cox, Eva

• Basic Income and Cultural Participation for Remote-Living Indigenous Australians

Pages 87-109

Altman, Jon (et al.)

• Diversion Ahead? Change Is Needed but That Doesn’t Mean That Basic Income Is the Answer

Pages 111-126

Bowman, Dina (et al.)

• Finding a Political Strategy for a Basic Income in Australia

Pages 129-145

Hollo, Tim

• Basic or Universal? Pathways for a Universal Basic Income

Pages 147-161

Quiggin, John

• Stepping Stones to an Australian Basic Income

Pages 163-178

Spies-Butcher, Ben (et al.)

• What About Young People? Why a Basic Income for Young People Matters

Pages 179-198

Kaighin, Jenny

• Situating a Basic Income Alongside Paid Work Policies

Pages 199-213

Scott, Andrew

• Social Work, Human Services and Basic Income

Pages 215-235

Ablett, Phillip (et al.)

• Basic Income in Canada: Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead

Pages 237-257

Mulvale, James P. (et al.)

• Concluding Remarks and an Invitation

Pages 259-262

Klein, Elise (et al.)

Elise Klein

The Prehistory of Private Property

by Karl Widerquist | Jun 9, 2019 | Opinion, The Indepentarian

My latest book project (coauthored by the anthropologist, Grant S. McCall) is called The Prehistory of Private Property. It book tells two parallel histories. It tells the story of how modern property theory became dependent on three misconceptions about the origin of the property rights system and the difference between societies with common and privatized resources, and how those misconceptions continue to have a negative effect on contemporary political thought and beliefs about our shared responsibility. The second story traces the origin and development of the private property system through history and prehistory to debunk those misconceptions.

The three claims at the center of this book are: 1. The normative principles of appropriation and voluntary transfer applied in the world we live in can only support a capitalist system with strong private property rights. 2. Capitalism is more consistent with negative freedom than any other conceivable economic system. 3. Inequality is natural and inevitable, or egalitarianism is unsustainable without a significant loss in freedom.

The book devotes a great deal of space to show how these misconceptions are embedded in many influential theories in political philosophy, because political philosophers are often unclear about the extent to which their theories rely on empirical claims. The clarity problem is nearly as important as the dubious nature of the claims. Obscurity and ambiguity help shield these claims from scrutiny.

Underlying this specific theoretical agenda is the more general goal of raising the level of discussion of empirical issues in political philosophy. Ambiguous allusions to empirical claims should be unacceptable in any academic literature. Philosophers have the responsibility to be clear about what empirical claims they rely on and about the level of support they can offer for those claims. Their critics should not let them get away with the sloppy use of ambiguous allusions to empirical claims.

Once the need for each claim is clearly established, the book subjects each claim to rigorous empirical investigation using the best evidence available from anthropology, and then discusses the implications of those findings for contemporary theory. Some of the book’s central findings follow.

1. The normative principles of appropriation and transfer much more easily support common or collective claims to property. Private property rights systems tend not to develop without state aggression against small-scale societies with better claims of a connection to “original appropriation” than people establishing individualist private property rights.
2. The hunter-gatherer band economy is more consistent with negative freedom than any other form of socio-political organization known to anthropology. If freedom is an overriding value, everyone must become a nomadic hunter-gatherer. This finding implies both that the justification of any other system must rely at least partially on some other value such as opportunity and that aid to the disadvantaged is not necessarily freedom-reducing: it often counteracts freedom-reducing aspects of private property.
3. Inequality is not natural nor inevitable nor in conflict with freedom. Contemporary egalitarian theory can benefit from the experience of small-scale societies that successfully maintain very high levels of political, social, and economic equality.

The book is not directly about Basic Income, but it will connect to the idea in the final chapter. We will argue that the mass of humanity lead lives of manufactured desperation. People are not naturally in a struggle to “find work” to ensure they have food, shelter, and clothing. They are artificially put in this situation by a stratified property rights system that is not necessary for human social organization and that most societies (from the earliest hunter-gatherers to more recent peasant farming systems) did not find it necessary to manufacture such desperation. Basic Income is one way to compensate people for the imposition of a stratified property system and to relieve them of desperation that has come with it.

We have full drafts of 8 of the books ten chapters, and we are positing them online at this link as they reach presentable form. We hope to have a full draft we can send to our publisher (Edinburgh University Press) within a few weeks or months.

Enzo grills Karl at the PPA+ conference, Amsterdam, 2019