by Yannick Vanderborght | Dec 10, 2010 | News
On 28 Dec 2010 the 2nd general meeting of BIKN was held in Seoul. The 1st general meeting was the inaugural one on 25 June 2009. Firstly, the opening addresses were given by Min Geum, chairperson of the BIKN steering committee, and No-Wan Kwack, chairperson of the BIKN studies committee, both of whom were newly appointed at the previous committee meeting. Secondly, about 30 committee members were introduced. Thirdly, vigorous activities of BIKN in 2009 and 2010 were reported briefly. Fourthly, it was notified that the life member system like BIEN’s one was adopted by the committee. All those present were actively encouraged to become a life member of BIKN. By the way, as of December 2010, the number of BIKN members is 548. Lastly, the basic outline of the BIKN’s plan for 2011, which is mainly focused on studies, courses, and organized activities, was simply explained. And this meeting ended with a year-end party.
BIKN website : https://cafe.daum.net/basicincome
by Karl Widerquist | May 27, 2010 | News
Following the recent creation of the Basic Income Korean Network (BIKN), Koreans have now launched the Basic Income Coalition (BIC). According to BIEN, BIC held its inaugural event in Seoul on April 25. Fifty civil organizations and more than 770 people participated in this coalition. The aim of the BIC is to support candidates in favor of Basic Income in the upcoming local elections on June 2. There are 28 candidates who are members of the coalition: 23 from the Socialist Party, 3 from the Democratic Labor Party, and 2 from the New Progressive Party. Participants in the event also announced the declaration of BIC’s inauguration. According to BIEN, organizers argue that BIC is the first coalition in Korean political history to focuses on a future-oriented alternative such as Basic Income. Most committee members of the Basic Income Korean Network (BIKN) are involved in the coalition.
For further information: https://basicincome.kr/.
by Karl Widerquist | Mar 18, 2010 | News
South Korea has a new basic income network. According to BIEN, the idea of a basic income took off in Korea only a few years ago, when Koreans with connections in Paris and Berlin discovered and reported back home that the leftist Italian philosopher Toni Negri and the wealthy German businessman Gotz Werner both defended an unconditional basic income. Google soon entered into action, and by 2006 the ramifications of BIEN’s network were being explored, and BIS articles downloaded. In 2006, Kwack No-Wan, a left-wing philosopher at the University of Seoul published an article in which he critically discussed the international theoretical literature on basic income and formulated a proposal for its implementation in South Korea. This spread the idea in Seoul’s left-wing community. The Socialist Party (a left-wing party founded in 1998) took it up, and so did, for example, the University teachers’ Trade Union. A network was formed in February 2009, and several books and pamphlets have now been published, including, most recently, a Korean translation of Redesigning Distribution (by Ackerman, Alstott & Van Parijs).
According to BIEN, hundreds of people gathered on January 27-28 at the heart of the world’s third biggest metropolis for two intense days of lectures and discussions entirely devoted to the proposal of an unconditional basic income. Hosted by Sogang University, the meeting was an impressively organized joint venture of several Seoul-based universities, a number of left-wing associations, and Korea’s small Socialist Party.
The first day (“Basic Income for All!”) was intended primarily for an activist audience. It started with opening addresses by Kang Nam-Hoon (Hanshin University), one of the first Korean scholars to become actively interested in basic income, and Philippe Van Parijs (Louvain & Harvard), chair of BIEN’s international board, and gave the audience an overview of the state of the basic income discussion in Japan (by Toru Yamamori, Doshisha University in Kyoto and coordinator of Japan’s basic income network), Brazil (by Eduardo Suplicy, federal senator and honorary co-chair of BIEN) and Germany (by Ronald Blaschke, parliamentary assistant for the party Die Linke at the Bundestag, and co-founder of Germany’s basic income network), as well as several contributions by Choi Gwang-Eun (representative of the Socialist Party and author of a Master’s thesis on basic income) and others about how basic income could fit into the Korean context.
The second day (“Sustainable Utopia and Basic Income in a Global Era”) was intended primarily for an academic audience. Contributions covered, among other themes, the relations between basic income and conditional guaranteed income schemes (Blaschke), disability pensions (Choi), migration (Van Parijs), single mothers (Yamamori) and investment in human capital (Neantro Saavedra, University of Tsukuba, JP), the “glocal agora” (Kwack No-Wan, University of Seoul), the impact a basic income would have on the distribution of income (Baek Seung-Ho, Catholic University, Seoul) and capital formation (Ahn Hyun-Hyo, Daegu University) in Korea. The conference ended with a very lively panel discussion which Senator Suplicy concluded, as only he can do, by getting the audience to sing “Blowing in the Wind”.
All the papers presented were available in advance in both Korean and English in the form of two hefty volumes (600 pages in all). The conference was also the occasion to present to the press a very eloquent “Seoul Declaration on Basic Income” signed by over six hundred academics and activists. And the foreign speakers (Suplicy, Van Parijs, Blaschke, Yamamori) were dispatched the following day to address seminars, student audiences and activist groups in various places throughout the city (Gyeongsang National University, Seoul National University, Socialist Party, New Progressive Party, Alternative Forum, Academia Communix, etc.).
