by Kate McFarland | Aug 14, 2016 | News, Testimonies
Juon Kim has been an organizer of Basic Income Youth Network in Korea since 2013. In March of this year, Juon ran for a proportionate candidate of Green Party Korea in the general election, representing the party’s UBI agenda. She’s currently a graduate student of cultural anthropology, and plans to write her MA thesis about basic income.
In this Basic Income Interview, Juon talks about how she came to learn about and support basic income, and why she is now an activist.
About 5 years ago, only a few people in Korea knew about basic income, including my friends. Since they were studying basic income, I became aware of it but was not attracted to it at first. But after reading two women’s books, I decided to live as a UBI advocate and joined the Basic Income Youth Network based in South Korea.
One book is Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. “It is necessary for women to have five hundred pounds a year and a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry.” It reminded me of basic income immediately. The other is Carole Pateman, a feminist political theorist saying that basic income could guarantee universal economic citizenship of women.
Juon at the 2016 BIEN Congress in Seoul
When I was young, I dreamt of becoming a human rights lawyer. Many discrepancies in the society seemed to have been caused by law which is a tool only for the powerful. I entered university envisioning that I would stand in the forefront of social changes with the law as the tool for justice. I was even thinking of branding law firm ideas to increase my chances of being someone’s first choice to defend them.
But the university that I encountered back in 2010 was no more than a ruin. The gravity of making ends meet pulled heavily against my attempted search for friends with whom I would find solutions to the social ills. No time could be wasted if it wasn’t for career preparation, no space was available without fees, and ultimately no freedom to plan my life as I wanted was granted.
Fortunately, there were great classes and friends in and out of the campus. There were those who were being forcefully evacuated from the very place of their livelihoods in their cities, those who are taking their lives in their hands just to reclaim their lost jobs, and those religious figures, LGBT activists, disability-rights activists, grass-root activists and youth activists who fought against state violence and its forced militarization of Gangjeong village in Jeju island and forced nuclearization of Miryang in Korea.
I saw how they tried and worked to rebuild hope in their own respective communities. We met in support, delight and equality. I experienced happiness rising from others even amidst poor material conditions.
In our encounters I realized something. All of us who were dreaming of a better life, one that’s better than now, were in fact fighting against ‘dual poverty’. They fought against poverty of their own and simultaneously poverty of the world.
What I endured was not different from what they endured. It was in this moment I was introduced to the idea of ‘basic income’. I strongly related to its philosophy that the rights to eat and live should be guaranteed just for the reason that I am a constituent of this society.
What if the activists I met who suffered from dual poverty had basic income? What if my colleagues, women, youth and young adults, farmers, artists and seniors had basic income? What happens when there appears this gift called basic income in the Korean society, whose severe income bipolarization and winner-takes-all structures in all corners render all untrustworthy toward each other?
I imagined an alternative made possible by the hope called basic income to those who give up their lives or terrorize others’ lives because there cannot be a better tomorrow. Then I joined basic income movement because I wanted to imagine all these possibilities as one.
The ‘human rights’ that used to be so nondescript when I wanted to be its lawyer took shape as an economic citizenship, basic income. Basic income as the fundamental right for all humans. I hope it becomes a common sense to all everywhere in the world in the nearest future.
Photos used by permission of Juon Kim. (Cover photo: Juon promotes basic income at International Women’s Day, dressed as a suffragette.)
Juon wishes to thank her friend Heehe for translation assistance.
Basic Income Interviews is a special recurring segment of Basic Income News, introduced in July 2016 by Jason Murphy and Kate McFarland. Through a series of short interviews, we aspire to display the diversity of support that basic income receives throughout the world.
Have your own thoughts to contribute? Want to see yourself in a future Basic Income Interview?
Visit our interview form.
by Guest Contributor | Apr 23, 2016 | Opinion
From the Basic Income Canada Network by
Roderick Benns, on March 29, 2016
Robert-Falcon Ouellette
As a youth growing up in Calgary, Robert-Falcon Ouellette remembers being inspired by the 1988 Olympics. Ouellette’s parents struggled financially, and his father was in and out of the picture. But his mother managed enough money so he could enjoy swimming at the City pool where he took to the water “like a fish.”
“I was there as much as possible – I just loved every minute of it,” says Ouellette, who is now Member of Parliament for Winnipeg Centre.
“Until one day a coach spotted me and invited me to join the University of Calgary swim team.”
The coach talked to both Ouellette and his mother, but the cost was a couple thousand dollars per year. He remembers the coach telling his mom that her son had great natural talent which should be developed. But the financial barrier was too severe for the family. In fact, even the visits to the City pool for leisure swimming soon stopped, also for financial reasons.
“That was a real dream of mine,” says Ouellette. “I’m still marked by it.”
Ouellette, who has gone hungry before as a youth and even spent one summer homeless, says he is sure there are many stories like this that have played out similarly across Canada, many much worse than his. Persistent poverty and lost opportunities are the kinds of things he suspects would dramatically be reduced if Canada had a basic income.
A basic income guarantee can take different forms but it is generally understood to ensure everyone an income that is sufficient to meet their basic needs, regardless of work status. The rookie MP is determined to have empirical evidence of how such a social policy change might benefit Canadian families, by establishing basic income pilot projects in the country.
His determination to have data undoubtedly comes from his depth of education. Ouellette is something of a Renaissance man, with degrees in music, education, and a PhD in anthropology. He also has 19 years under his belt with the Canadian Armed Forces, retiring from the Royal Canadian Navy with the rank of Petty Officer 2nd Class. Even now, he remains a part of the naval reserve.
The MP, who serves on the House of Commons’ finance committee, recently invited Professor Evelyn Forget to Ottawa to make a presentation because he wants his Party to consider testing the idea in a few regions across Canada, including rural, urban, and on a First Nations’ reserve. Forget was the researcher who unearthed promising data from the well-known Mincome experiment, which ran from 1974 through 1978 and which helped establish a minimum income for about a third of the people who lived there.
Forget dug up the records from the period and found there were fewer emergency room visits and less recorded incidents of domestic abuse. As well, less people sought treatment for mental health issues and more high school students continued on to finish Grade 12 to graduate.
When she appeared before the committee, Forget recommended a basic income of $18,000 per year. It would be paid, when necessary, by using the existing federal tax system. People could still earn money over and above this basic income but Forget recommends it be taxed back at a rate of 50 per cent on each dollar earned over $18,000.
When he was running for a seat in the federal election, Ouellette actually met a woman in a working class neighbourhood of Winnipeg who had been a participant in the Mincome experiment. It was a story Ouellette found inspiring. The Mincome money she received allowed her to go back to school to finish her education while she raised her three sons. Today, two of her sons have their Masters degrees, with one working for the City of Winnipeg and the other for Manitoba Hydro. The third son owns his own business.
“Here’s a single mom who was always just trying to get ahead. She now owns her own, small home and she helped her sons do well. That’s the hope for basic income – that’s why it deserves to be tested,” says the MP.
To that end, Ouellette has sponsored an online petition here to bring pressure and attention to this issue for his own government to support further study. He will likely have some high level supporters in Ottawa. Jean-Yves Duclos, federal Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, stated to several media outlets that a guaranteed minimum income is a policy with merit for discussion. As well, Senator Art Eggleton, has just called on the federal government to launch a basic income pilot.
Quebec has strongly signalled its interest in turning their existing income support tools in the direction of a basic income guarantee and Ontario recently announced it would fund a basic income pilot in an undisclosed location.
“We often hear poor people just make bad choices. Sometimes societies make those choices for us, though. If we have a society that supposedly believes in meritocracy without opportunity, then you don’t have a society of merit you have one of privilege,” he says.
“And as a society we just might be losing out.”
by Stanislas Jourdan | Nov 22, 2015 | News
Next December 3rd, Basic Income UK will be hosting a conversation with Brian Eno, David Graeber, and Frances Coppola. The discussion will be facilitated by Becca Kirkpatrick from Unison.
Brian Eno is a musician, composer, record producer, singer, and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music. He recently spoke about basic income during his John Peel Lecture on Radio 6.
David Graeber is an American anthropologist and anarchist activist, perhaps best known for his 2011 volume Debt: the first 5000 years. He is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
Frances Coppola worked in banks for 17 years. She is now a musician and teacher, who writes on economics, finance and banking at Piera, Forbes and her own blog Coppola Comment.
Fond out the details of the event on Meetup.com
by Vito Laterza | Jul 29, 2015 | Opinion, Research
Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution, by James Ferguson (Duke University Press Books, 2015).
James Ferguson’s latest book focuses on the rise of social welfare programs in southern Africa, in the form of grants to low income and vulnerable groups, primarily the elderly, women and their children, and the disabled. Post-apartheid South Africa has led the way. It has an extensive system which administers grants to 30 percent of the population. Other countries like Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique have also implemented nationwide programs, while pilot programs are being tried elsewhere in the region.
Ferguson’s goal is not to provide an extensive ethnographic treatment of these developments, but rather to analyze their implications and the field of political possibilities they might open up. Half comparative ethnography, half political pamphlet, Ferguson’s impressive narrative is a tour de force questioning, deconstructing and reconstructing classic and contemporary notions of poverty, development and the welfare state in the region and beyond. Through a focus on direct cash transfers, the author brings together the anthropology of southern Africa, with the latest debates in development practice and anti-poverty activism.
Written in a highly readable style, the book is structured around a series of self-contained chapters, originally given as the Lewis Henry Morgan lectures in 2009 at the University of Rochester. One can easily read the chapters independently or as part of a larger whole.
Ferguson’s starting point is the contradiction between dominant narratives on the relentless expansion of the neoliberal state, and the substantial extension of state social provisions through grants. The modest size of these social payments sets them apart from more comprehensive welfare measures in Nordic countries, yet the author believes that this phenomenon marks the rise of what can be legitimately called “welfare states” in southern Africa. While their impact might be limited in the present form, the systems in place lay the foundations for more radical possibilities.
Breaking away from conventional welfare and poverty interventions, grants are not delivered with the final goal of reproducing a healthy and productive workforce in the cities, or creating a class of productive farmers in the rural areas. The eligibility criteria are simple – mostly age for pensions and child care grants – and do not include conditions like searching for employment or investing in productive activities.
This hints at economic structures that affect the vast majority of southern Africans: the rural areas are witnessing a constant decline in agricultural production, while the formal sector in urban areas, even when experiencing high growth, simply fails to absorb most people who are in need of employment. Far from being a temporary situation that can be rectified through economic policies, this is a chronic feature of contemporary capitalism in southern Africa and increasingly in other parts of the world, including Northern economies like the US and Europe.
The author points out that production remains the dominant paradigm in economic anthropology, development discourse and practice, and radical left thinking. He calls for a radical shift away from “productionist” tenets towards distribution. His wide-ranging critique builds on a re-elaboration of key themes in classic and contemporary southern African ethnography, from kinship-based reciprocity across the rural-urban spectrum to a mix of moral and economic concerns at play in sex, love and intimacy in times of precarious livelihoods.
The “distributive political economy” mapped by Ferguson is characterized by a myriad of acts of wealth distribution, entangled in multiple and complex relations of dependence influenced by configurations of gender, kinship, labor, community, ethnicity, society and the state. Rather than producing more wealth, this “distributive labor” is primarily directed at dividing sources of wealth into “smaller and smaller slivers as they work their way across social relations of kinship, clientage, allegiance, and solidarity” (p.97). It is this kind of activity that sustains and reproduces society, more than engagement in production as defined by macro-economic frameworks centered on the labor of able-bodied men in the formal sector and the reproductive work of women as wives and mothers. One powerful example of this reversal in South Africa is the shift from dependence of women, children and rural relatives on remittances from men working in the mines in the heyday of the apartheid economy, to the central distributive role played today by women and elderly people. The latter are the main beneficiaries of state grants, and disenfranchised men at the margin of the productive economy have increasingly come to rely on them.
Establishing and maintaining dependence on others who have access to wealth becomes a full-time job for those who are excluded from the benefits of middle class life. Dependence, in Ferguson’s treatment, has more to do with sharing than either gift or market exchange. Sharing and dependence cannot be easily subsumed under the conventional opposition between equality and inequality. These relations hint at a “new politics of distribution” beyond these two poles.
Within this framework, Ferguson convincingly reinterprets varied political movements calling for redistribution in the region, from the populist socialism of new radical movements in South Africa to the region-wide basic income grant campaign, and debates around land reform and resource nationalism. Calls for redistribution go beyond narrow views of African patrimonialism. People demand what Ferguson labels their “rightful share” in wealth that is owned collectively. Legitimate participation in this process can be framed along citizenship lines at the state level, but there are other levels of belonging too when local communities and traditional leaders are involved. These claims are not exercised from a position of inferiority or supplication. People own collectively all the resources of their community of belonging, hence they have a claim to a share of the wealth produced from these resources.
By inserting the normative and political dimensions of these movements into a long history of local idioms and practices, Ferguson provides a different angle on activist discussions around radical measures like the basic income grant (BIG). BIG is argued from a variety of perspectives, ranging from radical Marxism to left-leaning libertarianism and technocratic social democracy. The distinctive feature of a basic income is that it should not be tied to any condition and everybody should be entitled to it. The ideal world imagined by BIG activists is one where all human beings receive a basic income that would afford them a decent livelihood, with no compulsion to work for a wage or generate income through other activities. This is a radical break from existing welfare measures that tie unemployment benefits to the reintegration of beneficiaries in the labor market. In line with other activist scholars, Ferguson notes that these emerging state systems of cash distribution provide an essential infrastructure for the possible establishment of BIG. At the same time, his anthropological analysis develops moral and political arguments in favor of BIG that are grounded in local discourses and aspirations, a dimension often missed by global activist groups and regional campaigners.
Ferguson joins a growing number of anthropologists who subvert the conventional boundaries between analysis and engagement. With his creative and flexible analysis, he provokes thinking for action beyond narrow ideological boundaries. One could imagine enthusiastic endorsements of his work by Marxist campaigners, World Bank technocrats and traditional leaders alike. This highly original book is likely to leave a lasting mark not only on contemporary anthropological debates around poverty and development, but also policy and activist thinking in southern Africa and beyond.
This review was originally published in Anthropology Book Forum.
by Josh Martin | Feb 3, 2015 | News
In this video, David Graeber, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, is interviewed about the rising idea that people have “pointless jobs” where they do not actually do much work. Graeber discusses the reasons behind these pointless jobs and claims that while they fail to make sense in a truly capitalistic setting, they do make sense within businesses where people may be more powerful if they have more people working under them. Graeber then goes on to explain why he believes a basic income could solve the problem by freeing people from these pointless jobs in order to pursue their passions.
