by Genevieve Shanahan | May 12, 2017 | Opinion
David Piachaud, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, last November put forward a four-pronged case against basic income – on the grounds of justice, simplicity, economic efficiency and political feasibility. While the argument, I believe, fails on all four counts, I’ll here focus on the justice argument.
To summarize, Piachaud outlines Philippe van Parijs’ famous argument for basic income from his 1991 paper “Why Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income” and claims that the fatal flaw of van Parijs’ argument is that he does not take into account a crucial distinction between the voluntarily and involuntarily unemployed.1 The former value their leisure, it is posited, at least as much as the lowest wage paid to their employed counterparts. In this way, only redistribution of income to the involuntarily unemployed can be justified on Rawlsian grounds. Unfortunately, Piachaud overlooks or underestimates van Parijs’ lucid explanation of why both are entitled to the basic income. In what follows, I’ll try to show why van Parijs’ argument is unaffected by Piachaud’s critique.
The Difference Principle
Both van Parijs and Piachaud begin their arguments from the Difference Principle – a key concept in political philosophy since its first presentation in John Rawls’ seminal A Theory of Justice in 1971. Briefly, the Difference Principle states that social and economic inequalities (or inequalities in terms of “primary goods”) are justified only insofar as they benefit the least advantaged. The most important consequence of this principle, on Rawls’ account, is that it justifies inequality in wages to the extent that offering higher wages for valuable work, or steep rewards for successful innovation, incentivises the types of behaviour that generate economic growth and thereby increase the standard of living for all.
A crucial point for the Difference Principle, of course, is determining who counts as “the least advantaged”. One of the first criticisms of Rawls’ theory was that, if the least advantaged are just the people who have the least wealth, it would unfairly favour people who prefer smaller incomes and a lot of leisure over those who prefer to work hard and earn vast sums. If we imagine that the “least advantaged” in our society are those who can only find minimum wage employment (leaving aside other clear forms of disadvantage, like chronic illness and disability, or marginalization), it can seem intuitively perverse to treat those who choose not to take up that minimum wage job as more disadvantaged, and therefore more deserving of public assistance, than those who do. It’s pretty natural to think, “Well, if the surfer doesn’t do the best he can to get that job at McDonald’s, that’s his look out. We can’t be expected to support him when he’s perfectly capable of supporting himself.”
To avoid counterintuitively lavishing taxpayer money on the surfer, then, Rawls proposed that leisure time be treated as a primary good:
“[T]wenty-four hours less a standard working day might be included in the index as leisure. Those who are unwilling to work would have a standard working day of extra leisure, and this extra leisure itself would be stipulated as equivalent to the index of primary goods of the least advantaged. So those who surf all day off malibu must find a way to support themselves and would not be entitled to public funds.”2
This basically gets us to the social welfare system as we (aspire to) have it now: public funds are used to support the least advantaged, who are those who cannot find employment, whether due to incapacity or a lack of jobs. To ensure this support only goes to those who are the least advantaged, conditions and testing are applied – recipients of benefits must prove that they cannot work or that they are actively looking for work. And while basic income advocates often point to the inefficient costs associated with conditionality, such that it may be better for everyone if we just accept and absorb the cost of free-riders, van Parijs points out that people are likely to be willing to forgo efficiency gains to preserve their view of fairness. That is, if we are to gain the requisite political support, we must show that basic income is not merely efficient but also just and fair on a reasonably intuitive view of fairness.
Philippe Van Parijs (photo credit: Enno Schmidt)
Twenty years after Rawls introduced the Difference Principle, van Parijs took this idea and extended it. While most of us basic income advocates aren’t primarily motivated by concern for surfers who can’t possibly take a 9-to-5 job because it wouldn’t leave them adequate time to catch the perfect, most righteous wave, van Parijs’ strategy is strong. If it can be shown that even surfers – capable but unwilling to work – deserve a basic income sufficient to live on, it would seem to follow that everyone else does, too. How, then, does van Parijs get from Rawls’ support for conditional income support to the full, universal, unconditional basic income that would be paid even to the surfer?
Is Leisure Time a Resource?
Van Parijs argues that it is in fact unfair to treat leisure time as a primary good. As a liberal theory of justice – that is, a theory that is neutral regarding what constitutes a “good life” – the Difference Principle should not favour those who prefer working over those with other values. This means that, while we might say that people have to work to pay their own way on the grounds of justice, we can’t say people should work simply because hard work and self-denial is virtuous. Van Parijs shows, by means of a thought experiment, that such discrimination is the result if we follow Rawls and treat the value of leisure time as equivalent to the wage one could earn in the same time if one were working.
This thought experiment involves examining what the consequences of the approach would be in the case of an “exogenous windfall”, such as the state discovering valuable oil and gas reserves off its coast. In the case of such a windfall, the incomes of those who are working or deemed deserving of income support would (ideally3) increase, but the surfer’s set of primary goods would stay the same (i.e., he would have his day of leisure and empty pockets both before and after the windfall). The surfer is thus excluded from the benefits of the windfall – to which he is equally prima facie entitled as a citizen of the state – simply because his leisure time is deemed to be equivalent to the wage earned in a standard working day.
Here Piachaud enters the fray, defending Rawls’ suggestion that the voluntarily unemployed must value their leisure at least as much as the wages they forgo. If the surfer continues to shirk employment at the new, higher wage permitted by the exogenous windfall, the argument goes, it must be because the value of his leisure, to him, was all along at least equivalent to the new higher wage. In this way, the surfer’s share of primary goods continues to be at least equivalent to that of the least advantaged worker.
Piachaud’s argument here relies on a distinction between the voluntarily and involuntarily unemployed, drawn on the grounds of the value of leisure time to them – measured by their willingness or not to take up work where it is available. This is a mistake, however, though one very easily made (I feel its pull constantly in these discussions). It is a mistake because leisure time, like any other primary good, should not be valued at the level of the individual. It doesn’t matter that I value my leisure time a lot and you don’t. What matters is the value of this resource as determined by the market – that is, as van Parijs puts it, “in terms of competitive equilibrium prices.”4 Van Parijs here draws upon another widely influential theorist of distributive justice, Ronald Dworkin, who elegantly shows in “Equality of What? Part 1: Equality of Welfare” that what egalitarians must be concerned with is not equality of happiness, or preference satisfaction, or welfare, but rather equality of resources.5
Let’s illustrate the surfer’s evaluation of his leisure time with a more concrete example. Say I *love* lager. If you hand me a glass of the finest champagne at a party, I’ll hand it back and say “thanks, but please, give me a bottle of lager instead”. If it happened that it was incredibly expensive to make lager, such that one bottle cost $100, I would still buy cases, forgoing many other pleasures. That I live in a world where lager is pretty cheap is lucky for me. But should I be charged more so that the price I pay better reflects its value to me personally? No – that would be unfeasible (how, exactly, would vendors measure each customer’s preferences to ensure they were charging the right price?) and nonsensical (by the same logic, I could pay $5 for the champagne since I only get $5 of enjoyment from it, despite its massively higher market price).
The Costs to Others of Our Choices
This isn’t a simple question of efficiency. What we’re looking for, from a justice perspective, is that no one impose costs on others. It would be wrong from me to pay only $5 for the champagne, despite my personal judgement of its value, because of the vastly greater cost to others of producing it. Dworkin puts it this way – as a matter of justice, “people must pay the actual cost of the choices they make […] measured by the cost to others of those choices.”6
Returning, then, to the distinction between the voluntarily and involuntarily unemployed, van Parijs argues that it is welfarist – that is, mistakenly pursuing equality of welfare rather than equality of resources – to apply willingness-to-work conditions to the basic income. This approach “charges” for leisure time based on whether the able-bodied potential worker enjoys the time off or not (as clumsily measured by Jobcentre assessments of employment search efforts). As we’ve outlined here, the correct price to “charge” for leisure time is its cost to others – the worth of what others might have to give up for us to have that leisure time.
Doesn’t a basic income immediately violate this principle, requiring the rest of society to hand over a portion of their earnings to the voluntarily unemployed? Van Parijs says it does not, because the basic income, fundamentally, is just the individual’s share of the world’s resources he was entitled to from the start, by virtue of being a person.
It should be noted that van Parijs does distinguish between voluntary and involuntary unemployment in a way that affects the level of the basic income. Piachaud and van Parijs both agree that, where there is involuntary employment (i.e. not enough jobs to go around), there are employment rents that are properly subject to redistribution. That is, in a perfectly competitive, idealised labour market – where everyone has access to all relevant information, there are no geographical limitations to what jobs an individual can apply for, and there are no costs associated with hiring and firing, or regulations like minimum wage – supply and demand would balance. Workers’ wages would simply be the actual market price of their labour, and there would be no unemployment attributable to lack of jobs. By contrast, in any real labour market there is friction – due to imperfect access to information, geographical limitations, hiring and firing costs, and regulations – which means that many workers are paid more than would be necessary in a perfect market for their labour, and many eager potential workers are left without a job. In this way, on van Parijs’ account, the level of the basic income can rise and fall in accordance with the level of employment rents in a labour market.
“[…] in the case of scarce jobs, let us give each member of the society concerned a tradable entitlement to an equal share of those jobs. […] If involuntary unemployment is high, the corresponding basic income will be high. If all unemployment is voluntary, no additional basic income is justified by this procedure.”7
As another way of understanding this point, van Parijs suggests that we think of jobs as resources in themselves (though Piachaud does not seem to entertain this line of reasoning). Perhaps the classic way of thinking of a job is as labour one expends in exchange for resources (a wage). Yet we know that jobs are much more than that – many jobs have value beyond the wage earned, whether in terms of meaning, enjoyment, community, status, etc. This is part of the reason why one might not value the increase in leisure time afforded by unemployment: even where conditional unemployment benefits are generous, most people still prefer work. Since available employment is limited due to the market inefficiencies outlined above, the surfers are doing the aspiring workers a favour, correctly assigning themselves to the ranks of the unemployed so that more jobs are available for those who want them.
If we return, then, to the idea of justice as not imposing costs on others, we can see that the surfers are in the clear. The lowest level of basic income simply corresponds to each individual’s rightful share of the world’s natural resources. Then, where there are additional resources to be redistributed due to the existence in a labour market of employment rents, this is to compensate for the costs imposed on the unemployed by the employed in taking up scarce jobs. There is no distinction between the voluntarily and involuntarily unemployed in entitlement to this level of the basic income – each equally provides a benefit to the employed by freeing up their share of jobs and the various non-monetary benefits that go with them. Directly anticipating and defusing Piachaud’s claim that such rents should only be redistributed to the involuntarily unemployed, van Parijs warns:
“adopting a policy that focuses on the involuntarily unemployed amounts to awarding a privilege to people with an expensive taste for a scarce resource. Those who, for whatever reason (whether to look after an elderly relative or to get engrossed in action painting), give up their share of that resource and thereby leave more of it for others should not therefore be deprived of a fair share of the value of the resource. What holds for scarce land holds just as much for scarce jobs.”8
Arguments about distributive justice like these, that drill down to the fundamentals of the way our economies and societies work, are necessarily abstract. It’s therefore important to be wary of directly inferring real-world policy from such idealised thought experiments. Nevertheless, amidst the complexity of our modern interlocking economic systems, the core argument – that everyone is entitled to their share of the world’s natural resources – is a guiding light.
Reviewed by Tyler Prochazka and Kate McFarland
Read More:
David Piachaud, “Citizen’s Income: Rights and Wrongs,” Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE, November, 2016.
Hilde Latour, “UNITED KINGDOM: David Piachaud Calls Basic Income a Wasteful Distraction from Other Methods of Tackling Poverty,” Basic Income News, February 9, 2017.
Philippe van Parijs, “Why Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1991.
John Rawls, “A Theory of Justice,” Harvard University Press, 1971.
John Rawls, “The Priority of the Right and Ideas of the Good,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1988.
Ronald Dworkin, “What is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1981.
Ronald Dworkin, “What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1981.
Ronald Dworkin, “Sovereign Virtue Revisited,” Ethics, 2002.
Main Photo: The photographer reading John Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Dana Hilliot
1. A parallel argument, unexplored here, would address the important question of whether employment is voluntary or involuntary. Under most of today’s welfare systems for able-bodied adults, conditionality and sanctions are used to “incentivise” recipients to take up any job available. This threat of destitution has moral implications, in that it calls into question the consensuality of such employment.
2. John Rawls, “The Priority of the Right and Ideas of the Good,” Philosophy & Public Affairs (1988) p. 257
3. At present, incomes generated from natural resources are directly distributed to citizens in only a handful of cases (the Alaska Permanent Fund and Norway oil fund spring to mind). More commonly, states channel incomes from natural resources into the general budget, or such natural resources pass into the realm of private property. While arguments can be had regarding direct versus indirect distribution – whether each citizen gets their share of the windfall directly, or instead indirectly through government spending – that all citizens should benefit in some way seems uncontroversial.
4. Philippe van Parijs, “Why Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (1991), p117
5. For a quick run-down of the problems with equality of welfare, see this summary from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
6. Ronald Dworkin, “Sovereign Virtue Revisited,” Ethics 113.1 (2002), p111
7. Philippe van Parijs, “Why Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (1991), p124
8. Philippe van Parijs, “Why Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (1991), p126
by Andrea Fumagalli | Apr 19, 2017 | Opinion
By: Andrea Fumagalli
Introduction: the minimum income
In Italy, the debate surrounding basic income has been ongoing for almost 20 years. It began, in fact, with the August 1997 publication online (on the site ecn.org) of my pamphlet entitled “Ten theses on citizenship income”. The pamphlet saw successful underground circulation, and was re-edited into the book “Tute Bianche“[1]. The pamphlet presents a survey of the Italian debate around the introduction of a basic income, a proposal that had begun to circulate in the neo-workerist environments of the previous 2 years[2].
Twenty years later, it should be acknowledged that the definition of “citizenship income” has created more negative effects than positive: at that time, although starting to increase, the phenomenon of migration had not yet assumed today’s proportions. The term “citizenship” was used without considering the concept of “citizenship” in a way that was not terribly ambiguous. In fact, it could then be used as part of an ethical and philosophical framework for designating that every human being is born already a “world citizen”, regardless of nationality. But increasingly today, the concept of citizenship has to do with the legal-national sphere and then with a grid of limited rights ius soli, and is not extended to those who were born outside a nation’s borders. From this perspective, the idea of a “citizen’s income” can only be misunderstood as a proposal limited to specific nationalities, in contradiction with what is our idea of a ”right to income”. The term “basic income” appears therefore more appropriate and inclusive.
There are now many examples of proposed basic income legislation, in Italy and abroad; policy initiatives and declarations in favor of the introduction of some form of income support independent of employment status.
And just as numerous, and well differentiated, are the various interpretations of such a measure. In the cultural political debate promoted by Bin-Italy[3], which for years has promoted a cultural and socio-political campaign aimed at introducing a guaranteed minimum income (basic income), it is necessary to define certain parameters, to reduce the interpretive confusion that has now reached a critical level that makes unclear what actually a “citizen’s income”, “minimum income” or “a dignity income” are (to use the most common names).
To actually talk about “basic minimum income” (we use this term in a broad sense and provisionally), we believe that at least 5 criteria have to be met:
- Individuality: the minimum income must be paid at the individual level and not at the level of the family. Following this, there can then be a discussion as to whether children under 18 years of age will have the right or not.
- Residence: the minimum wage must be paid to all people who, residing in a given territory, live, rejoice, suffer and participate in production and social cooperation regardless of their marital status, gender, ethnicity, religious belief, etc.
- Maximum extension of unconditionality: the minimum income must be provided by minimizing any form of compensation and/or obligation and be as free an individual choice as possible.
- Access: the minimum income is paid in its initial phase of experimentation to all who have an income below a certain threshold. This threshold may, however, be greater than the relative poverty line and converge toward the median level of the personal distribution of existing income. Moreover, this level of income must be expressed in relative terms, not absolute, so that increasing the minimum threshold (as a result of the initial introduction of the measure) the range of beneficiaries will increase continuously until it hasrisen to graded levels of universality.
- Funding and transparency: the modalities of financing the minimum income must always be set out on the basis of economic viability studies, detailing where resources are obtained based on an estimate of cost when necessary. These resources have to fall on general taxation and not on other assets of origin (such as, for example, social security contributions, sale of public assets, privatization proceeds, etc.).
The criteria 1, 2, 5 should not be amendable, while criteria 3 and 4, are expressed in relative terms, may be subject to additional definitions depending on the context, but within the principle directives we have just outlined.
When basic income is the primary income it is therefore unconditional
That basic income is good and necessary, is a claim inspired by the composition of labor and the modalities of accumulation and exploitation which are today dominate.
In this regard, it is necessary to propose a cultural leap before political steps are taken, and to affirm that Basic Income is a primary distribution variable: the basic income must intervene, in fact, directly in the income distribution of productive factors: such as salary, which remunerates certified labor time as such, or profit, that rewards the business entity or rent, which derives from a property right. Being a primary distribution variable means that it is not a re-distributive variable: it directly occurs at the level of the balance of power and social relations within a certain process of accumulation. Despite this, a redistribution of income, which occurs at a later stage, is the outcome of a second level of indirect distribution, an extra market level, thanks to appropriate discretionary economic policies.
If a basic income is remuneration, the question that naturally follows is what it is that it pays. To answer, it is necessary first to analyze what in contemporary capitalism the main sources of exploitation/valorization are. More and more studies and case studies confirm that today life itself, in every daily event, is the productive factor par excellence.[4] If we take into account the many acts of daily life that characterize our existence, they can be categorized into four types: labor, work, leisure, entertainment. More and more today no only labor is to be the basis of added value but also the time spent in creation (opus/work), the otium/leisure time, and entertainment time: all are included in a growing and continuous enhancement mechanism. The classic dichotomy of the Fordist paradigm between labor and non-labor time, between production and consumption, between production and reproduction are now partially obsolete. It is the result of a historic process of structural changes in manufacturing processes and labor organization, which marked the transition from a material Fordist capitalism to a bio-cognitive and financialized capitalism.
Today, wealth production derives, at the same time, from absolute surplus value and relative surplus value extraction, where for absolute surplus value there is intended a sort of primitive accumulation, in capitalist organization based on capital employment and on private property. The result is the change of the relationship between productive and unproductive labor. What in the material Fordist capitalism was considered unproductive (i.e. no production of surplus value and therefore not remunerable), has now become productive, while the remuneration remained anchored to that of Fordist era (the crisis of salarization, for example). As a result, we are facing new kinds of valorization such as “dispossesion” (Harvey[5]) and “extraction”, to which no remuneration is applied, according to the dominant rules (legal, industrial relations, uses and so on).
It is no coincidence that unpaid labor is sharply increasing, as it is from those sectors that more has been invested by the transformation of enhancement methods and the adoption of the new linguistic-communicative technological paradigms (new cognitve-relational activities).
Against this background, one proposal could be advanced to counter this phenomenon of unpaid labor (i.e., basically “slavery” with another name, even though for most it is not perceived as such) is to proceed with its salarization. But, we might ask: is this possible? If the answer is yes, no longer necessary is a basic income.
The vagueness of labor time
This question opens a second theoretical problem – political and, at the same time, methodological. When technological and organizational transformations favor the spread of increasingly intangible productions with a high degree of non-measurability, when value is created by a whole range of life activities, from learning processes, to social reproduction[6] and networks of relationships, there arises the problem of “measure.”
The theme of measure is linked to the calculation/quantification of labor productivity. Unlike in the past, where this calculation was possible because employee labor activity could be measured in hours and by an equally measurable amount of production on an individual basis, productivity today has changed shape: it depends on the increasing use of new forms of scale economies: learning and network economies). These are scale economies no longer static but dynamic, because it is the flow (continuously) of time that allows for growth and learning of social skills as well as social reproduction and thus increased productivity, whose effects can be seen no more on individual basis but on the social one. Both learning and networking, in fact, need a social context and social cooperation. Productivity in bio-cognitive capitalism is therefore primarily social productivity or, with reference to the role of knowledge, general intellect.
Learning economies are based on the generation and dissemination of knowledge. Knowledge is not a scarce resource, such as material goods, but abundant: the more you swap, the more it spreads, the more it grows, a highly productive cumulative mechanism: cumulativeness requires relationships and social networks. Learning and networking are two sides of the same coin: if knowledge is not spread through relationships, individual processes are not economically productive. Only if you develop social cooperation and general intellect do you become productive.
We’re not talking about the traditional sense of the term co-operation, that is, “join forces” but co-operation, namely the interaction of individual operations that only achieve synergy in the common processes of accumulation and thus of surplus value creation. These relational activities often hide forms of hierarchy and exploitation, whose value is difficult to measure, not only on individual bases but collective ones, too. If the traditional factory productivity was based on precise technical mechanisms that allow you to measure individual productivity in the labor places today, the productivity of social cooperation cannot be measured in terms of individual productivity.
Not just individual productivity but also the same product of social cooperation is not measurable. When you are producing symbols, languages, ideas, forms of communication, social control, what kind of measurement we can take? Every relationship between output value, its production time (measured in hours) and its remuneration (measured in wages) becomes almost impossible or very difficult and subjective.
The crisis of the labor theory of value derives from the fact that not only the individual contribution today is not measurable but also the output tends to escape a unit of measurement, the more the more the production tends to become immaterial. And this takes place in a context in which the measure of value is no longer constrained by a scarcity factor. As was pointed out earlier, learning (knowledge) and network (space) are as abundant, and theoretically unlimited (especially if we consider the virtual space), as human nature. A theory of value based on the principle of scarcity, such as the one implicit in the theory of free market founded on the law of supply and demand, today has no longer any economic and social relevance. It is only artificially perpetuated in market dynamics where are continuously defined by power relationships. Paradoxically, the only theory of value that appears adequate to contemporary bio-cognitive capitalism, the labor theory of value, is not able to provide any measure.
How measure social cooperation and general intellect?
One possible aspect to consider has to do with the sphere of financialization: the pervasive and central role of financial markets, such as investment financing tools, privatization of social welfare and the partial compensation of knowledge labor, has affected not only the sphere of realization but also that of production. In capital gains, the speculative activity partially derives from the value produced by the cognitive-relational living labor. It is in financial markets that we can roughly see the implementation of the process of expropriation of social cooperation and of general intellect.
This process is not immediate and direct. It is often handled by the dominant bio-power management and the hierarchical relationships that continually redefine the property structure and market structure.
From this point of view, basic income, as a primary income, becomes even more a tool of direct re-appropriation of the wealth that is generated by the common life time put to labor.
The inadequacy of wages: body and mind
The order of discourse leads us to say that the traditional salary structure is no longer adequate, it does not fully capture the transformations in the valorization process. The classic wage structure can still be useful in those parts of the overall production cycle in which there is a measure of the value of labor in terms of time. But it cannot be generalized. From a theoretical point of view, this issue leads to the need to review, rethink and redefine the Marxian labor theory of value.
The inadequacy of the wage form as remuneration for all the productive aspects of life, leads to say that we need another way of remuneration (in addition to the wage forms where these are measurable). From this point of view, a basic income is something structurally different from a salary (though potentially, in the future, convergent): it cannot simply be understood as an extension of the wage form, because it is necessary to take into account the quantitative and qualitative change that new technologies have generated.
In particular, I’d like to stress the relationship between human and machine.
In the sixties, the relationship between human beings (with his body, his nerves, his muscles, his brain, his heart, his eros) and the machine was a relationship between separate domains: on the one hand, the human being, living labor, on the other hand, the machine, dead labor. The relationship between life and death was clear, physically traceable. From the point of view of human inner, the machine was something external and tangible, separate from himself.
Since the nineties to the present, such a separation is no longer so clear. The machine loses some of its materiality: the old Tayloristic machine becomes increasingly linguistic and relational. In presence of linguistic-communication technologies (ICT), only the support is material (hardware) but the core depends more and more on cognitive-relational human faculties processes. The use of language as the main tool of the operation changes the relationship of interdependence between human and machine typical of Taylorist technologies.
What kind of direction does this hybrid between man and machine take? And is it ‘the machine that is humanized or rather the human becoming mechanical?’ Are we witnessing the becoming human of the machine, or rather the becoming machine of humans? That’s the challenge of bio-robotics.
Consider the web 2.0 and the recent spread of social media. “The profit of advertising agencies, just like the profit of all firms web 2.0, [is] almost entirely depend on the ability to develop [and] control technologies.” Social control is then presented as the only way to innovate, develop in the future. But what is checked, exactly, today? Our identities and how they change. “The profiling algorithms of digital technologies feed on human biodiversity that it is itself channeled and integrated “in a Panopticon space, completely transparent, where we are called to act publicly.” See Google Pagerank, for instance.
Control of the body-mind becomes today (in agreement with the unpaid labor) the new enhancement border. Even if such activities could be salarized or simply paid otherwise (which is not the case), our freedom of choice would be conditioned.
An unconditional basic income is also a tool not only to recognize that our life is an active part (though often not aware) of contemporary exploitation but also able to exercise the right of choice, that is towards an individual and social self-determination: the right to choose our destiny as far as social participation is concerned, and also the right to refuse bad and indecent labor conditions. And this cannot be allowed, otherwise there is the risk of breaking the fragile balance of social control and supine conditions of subordination. From this point of view an unconditional income is subversive and that is the political struggle.
Andrea Fumagalli
(Università di Pavia – BIN Italia)
Andrea Fumagalli note for the conference: “Future of Work” Zurich 4 May 2016
Notes:
[1] A. Fumagalli, M. Lazzarato (eds), Tute Bianche, Derive-Approdi, Roma, 1999
[2] M. Bascetta, G. Bronzini (eds), La democrazia del reddito universale, Manifestolibri, 1997. Il tema di un reddito sganciato dal lavoro, etichettato con il termine salario sociale era già stato patrimonio del dibattito degli anni Settanta a parte dalla formulazione del rifiuto del lavoro (salariato).
[3] See www.bin-italy.org
[4] A. Fumagalli, C. Morini, “Life put to work: towards a theory of life-value”, in Ephemera, vol. 10, 2011, p. 234-252
[5] D. Harvey, “The new imperialism. The accumulation by dispossession”, in Socialist Register, 2004
[6] C. Morini, “Riproduzione sociale” in C. Morini, P. Vignola (eds), Piccola Enciclopedia Precaria, Milano X, Milano, 2015
Reviewed by Cameron McLeod
