Basic Income, Lifetime Salary, Socialism 2.0 and Ecosocialism
Emerging Proposed Solutions
to the Crisis of Capitalism: A Discussion of Basic Income, Lifelong Salary,
Socialism 2.0 and Ecosocialism
Introduction
Growing concerns about the crisis of
capitalism and the attendant failures of establishment political parties, as
well as the rapid pace of automation and offshoring of jobs to inexpensive
labor markets, have caused both activists and government and corporate leaders
to seriously consider the merits of a basic or guaranteed income for all
citizens. Even conservative thinkers who have traditionally been opposed to
social welfare are coming around to accepting it because the pace of automation
and offshoring threaten to create unprecedented levels of social instability.
Radical new social welfare programs have to be implemented, and a basic income
seems to be an affordable and straightforward solution. Much of its appeal
stems from its apparent simplicity.
The discussion in this paper is
based on the proposal of Bernard Friot, a French sociologist and economist who
has found that the apparent simplicity and appeal of basic income proposals,
and their endorsement by corporate leaders, is due to the fact they involve no
reform of fundamental structures and the causes of the problems they aim to fix.
They are destined to perpetuate or worsen existing problems. He has suggested that
something very different called “lifelong salary” (le salaire à vie) would
be far superior.
A short documentary about Bernard Friot's proposal for lifetime salary,
with English subtitles.
Basic
Income vs. Lifelong Salary
Bernard Friot started his career
with a study of the evolution of the French social security system between 1920
and 1980. In his PhD he challenged the claim that the 1945 French social
security reforms were a natural element of early 20th century mass production,
a stage of capitalist development referred to as Fordism. He insisted instead
that these reforms involved a socialization of wages that was a distinctly anti-capitalist
intervention.
Professor Friot leads the European
Institute of Wages and a popular education association called Réseau
Salariat (Network for Wage Earners), which promotes the idea of an
“unconditional lifelong salary” (salaire à vie inconditionnel). He
denounces basic income as “a spare tire for capitalism” because it would leave
capitalism intact and many fundamental social problems unresolved. The lifelong
salary, according to his analysis, is the best subversive response to the four
main institutions of capitalism:
1. Lucrative (productive) property, which refers not to
private property, but rather to private property from which profit is derived.
2. Credit. A state does not need to borrow to finance
investment.
3. Employment market. Capitalism depends on the
precariousness of employment. Workers live under constant threat of becoming
unemployed, and in this state of perpetual insecurity they must compete with
others and be alienated from society.
4. Arbitrary valuation of only certain forms of work.
One’s work is valued only if it is done for a private corporation, and the
value usually depends on the number of years spent in a particular job. Civil
service jobs are valued less because they are seen to be parasitical, derived
from taxes on the “real” economic activity in the private sector. Other forms
of work such as parenting, community volunteering, care of the elderly and so
on are not valued at all.
Although the plan to implement
lifelong salary has been criticized as being utopian, Friot stresses that much
of it is dejà-là (already there) in the form of the already
socialized portion of salaries that goes to taxes to support the civil service
and the military, and in the form of payroll deductions for pensions,
unemployment insurance, health care, etc. The reforms of 1945 that introduced
this new system took France half-way to full socialism. They are regarded as
great progress and an integral part of the defeat of fascism in Europe.
Under the lifelong salary plan,
enterprises would not pay workers directly. All expenses dedicated to salaries
would be socialized; that is, paid into payroll deduction plans, and all adult
citizens would receive a lifelong salary from the government. Decisions on
economic management and policy would be made by elected legislatures and worker
committees. Workers would be able to improve their incomes and social standing
by obtaining professional qualifications throughout their lives.
Friot also does a critical analysis
of corporate ownership and governance, stressing that the revenue to support
lifelong salary must also come from a program that aims to democratize the enterprise.
Workers must own the enterprises where they work, and the dividends paid out to
a leisured investor class must be diverted to fund lifelong salary and other
social programs.
These details of Friot’s proposals
are explained in a half-hour video produced by a group promoting lifelong
salary as superior to basic income and other proposed solutions for
unemployment[1]. The video shows excerpts of Friot
debating his ideas with mainstream conservative politicians, who react with
dismay to his radical proposals, which they claim to be based on archaic
ideology with no popular support in the contemporary world.
Bar graphs presented in the video illustrate
how the revenue of enterprises could be re-allocated. Payroll deductions,
taxes, salaries, profits and shareholder dividends could be reconfigured to
give every citizen a lifelong salary based on qualifications achieved through
formal education and vocational training. The graphs make the eradication of
capitalism and socialist revolution seem rather bloodless and simple. People
with no knowledge of early 20th century history may not be aware of how violent
past struggles over these issues were, and they may not properly take account
of how violently the propertied classes of today would resist change.
Nonetheless, Friot has a point when he notes that French social reforms of the
1940s successfully achieved a non-violent, positive transformation of society (half-way
to full socialism) simply by requiring all enterprises to make payroll
deductions for health care, pensions and unemployment insurance. Furthermore,
civil servants and military personnel effectively achieved the lifelong salary
that Friot proposes everyone should have.
The rhetoric used in the video is
not stridently anti-capitalist, which, ironically, might make it more
effectively subversive. The lifelong salary plan amounts to a full socialist
transformation of society, and viewers should keep in mind how many nations
throughout history have been brutally punished for daring to implement similar
programs. The lifelong salary requires worker and citizen control (through
state institutions) of the means of production and a command economy, so it is
sure to invite criticism that it would be plagued with the same problems
experienced by the socialist experiment in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.
Friot, to his credit and unlike many
“anti-capitalist” writers and activists, doesn’t hide the fact that he is a
Marxist or worry about being tainted by a label that many in the post-1991
world view as ridiculously archaic. He seems to be a libertarian or “pure” Marxist,
sympathetic to the faction that lost power when Lenin seized state power and disbanded
the soviets and factory councils.[2] Friot assumes that the
transformation to full socialism could be done in a way that is democratic and
supportive of human rights. Salaries, prices and decisions about investment and
production would be managed by government. The plan doesn’t require the
elimination of private property, or of privately owned lucrative property, but
it does imply that the management of large enterprises would be highly
regulated to maximize social good, and their profits would be deposited in
state coffers. How democratic and just it would actually be would depend
entirely on the actions and decisions of millions of people participating in
such a social transformation, and how strongly it would be opposed. A
significant hurdle in such a reform, aside from the resistance that would come
from the very wealthy, is the resistance that would come from the middle class
who are themselves heavily invested in the equity market and depend on it for
retirement savings. Even many public sector unions are heavily invested in the
institutions of capitalism, and they famously suffer for their exposure to risk
during financial crises like that of 2007-2008.[3]
Socialism
and The Second Economy
It is common perceived wisdom that
socialism failed once before or that in China it has been transformed into
something unrecognizable as socialism, but twenty-five years later, the reasons
for the Soviet Union’s demise and the true nature of Chinese
capitalism/socialism are still subjects of intense controversy. Scholars still
debate the causes of the Soviet collapse, and because so many causes are proposed,
it is likely that the cause was not some inherent flaw in socialism itself.
Most of the causes identified have nothing to do with ideology but are rooted
in specific contexts, decisions, and policies of, and actions by individuals. To
a great degree that is under-appreciated in the West, the failures of socialism
were caused by the violent opposition that has always met any form of socialism,
nationalism or economic independence that challenges the post-WWII petrodollar system
or lies outside what American and British leaders euphemistically call “the
global order” or “the international community.”
One significant cause of the Soviet
Union collapse was the ever-expanding second economy—the illegal free market
that the state always struggled to control. While the privatization and
liberalization of the Soviet system is usually understood to be something that
happened in the late 1980s during Gorbachev’s reforms, the second economy had
been a problem ever since the revolution. Leaders debated what to do about it, and
some were more successful than others, but it was never completely suppressed. Stalin
was famous for his willingness to suppress all challenges to state control of
the economy, and that the second economy survived Stalin’s reign is a testament
to the persistence of human greed, or what might be charitably called the desire
to engage in trade and seek private gain. By the 1970s, the second economy was widespread,
involving both small and large-scale cheating. Thomas Kenny and Roger Keeran
described the situation in chapter three of their book Socialism
Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union:
After 1953, illegal money-making presented a much
greater problem than legal activity. Illegal activity eventually assumed an
astounding array of forms, eventually penetrated all aspects of Soviet life,
and was limited only by the boundaries of human ingenuity. The most common form
of criminal economic activity took the form of stealing from the state, that
is, from work places and public organizations. Grossman said, “The peasant
steals fodder from the kolhoz [collective farm] to maintain
his animals, the worker steals materials and tools with which to ply his trade
‘on the side,’ the physician steals medicines, the driver steals gasoline and
the use of the official car to operate an unofficial taxi.”[4] Variations on this theme included
the diversion of goods into the private market by truck drivers and the use of
state resources to build a summerhouse, renovate an apartment, or repair a car.
At times stealing from the state occurred in wholesale and systemic ways. This
included “well-organized gangs of criminals capable of pulling off daring and
large-scale feats.” It included the practices of managers reporting the loss or
spoilage of goods in order to divert them to the black market. It embraced a
common practice in state stores of salespeople and managers laying aside rare
goods in order to secure tips from favored customers or to sell them in the
black market. Consumer durable goods like automobiles for which waiting lists
existed presented “considerable opportunity for graft,” as well as for
“speculation,” that is, for resale at higher prices.[5]
After Gorbachev had been in power for
a few years in the late 1980s, he was known to be reluctant to use force to
settle problems, so separatists and entrepreneurs were emboldened to push the
limits. The more things seemed to be heading toward breakup and market
privatization, the more the government officials and the nomenklatura themselves
were eager to take possession of state assets. If Boris Yeltsin had not been
the opportunist who conspired behind Gorbachev’s back to break up the union, it
would have been someone else soon enough. After Yeltsin took power, Western
guidance assured that privatization became a feeding frenzy on state-owned
property throughout the 1990s.
If this problem of the secondary
market was the ultimate cause of the Soviet collapse, this may be the
fundamental flaw in human nature that any future socialist transformation would
have to manage extremely carefully. Any proposal for basic income or lifelong
salary will end up contending with the problems faced by the Soviet Union. A
socialist government needs to behave like an organized religion in as much as
it must always be ready to suppress the lust for self-enrichment, monitoring
and curtailing the animal spirits, constantly educating and providing moral
instruction and encouraging sacrifice for the collective.
Marx famously said the religion is
the opiate of the masses, but this is not, as it has always been falsely
understood, a complete rejection of everything that was good in the ethical systems
taught by the world’s religions. The Jesuit missions in 18th century Brazil
were successful communes that competed with the capitalist system sanctioned by
Portugal using slave labor. It is a truism, and a favorite criticism of the
American conservative religious movement, that Jesus Christ had socialist
sympathies. Marxism and religion both sought to expand circles of empathy and
constrain individual selfishness for the sake of social harmony.
While historians know that the Soviet
politburo constantly debated the need for ideological training and punishment
of those who were earning illegal income (and of dissidents like Bukharin who
argued for a limited free market), there is no reason to believe that such
discussions are out of place in capitalist systems. Since the 2008 financial
crisis, and particularly since the 2016 American presidential election, Western
media have published numerous editorials and reports on the crisis of
capitalism, the failure of neoliberal economics, and the takeover of democratic
institutions (to the extent that they used to represent the interests of
citizens to some small degree) by a corporate oligarchy. The general population
is being devastated by the problems of capitalism: de-industrialization, wide
income disparities, unrepayable public and private debt, excess
financialization of the economy, offshoring of jobs to low-wage zones, erosion
of tax revenue, the weakening of worker unions, and central bank money printing
(under the euphemism “quantitative easing”) leading to speculative investment
in non-productive assets. Political parties have no ability to competently
respond to these problems because they are all beholden to the interests that
profit from them. Meanwhile, the robot revolution looms, and from the
automation that has occurred so far, displaced workers have had no access to
the profits gained from higher productivity. It has got to a point where we can
no longer afford the luxury of living without socialism and redistributive
justice. The excesses of capitalism, the looming ecological catastrophes, and
the threats of automation make more socialism the inevitable choice if we want to
survive.
It must be said at this point that
public discourse over these issues has been confused by misconceptions about
the nature of modern capitalism. While some believe all problems stem from
unconstrained capitalism, others have noted that the global system is already a
“sovietized capitalism,”[6] a corporate-government bureaucratic
regulatory regime that amounts to a “socialism for the rich.” The financial
journalist Max Keiser often makes statements like this to underscore this
point:
A lot of people say free markets are what caused the
problem… [However], free markets would imply that prices are dictated by buyers
and sellers in the marketplace… but what has happened is that we live in an era
of central banks, and central banks have become the new rulers, the new
monarchs, the new potentates, the new politburo, and they don’t let free
markets work, at a very fundamental level. They don’t let the price of money be
determined by the free market.[7]
This is a crucial point to consider
if ignoring it leads to a misunderstanding that our present system is really a
free market and basic income is the answer to the problems it has created.
Investment analyst and advisor Mike Shedlock makes this point saying, “It would
behoove ‘living wage’ advocates to consider the possibility the real problem is
central bank sponsored inflation, not a failure of government to provide a ‘living
wage’ to those doing nothing.”[8]
Socialism
2.0
Nonetheless, this skeptical view of
basic income or lifelong salary doesn’t address what is to be done about the
dire predicament created by a free market that pursues infinite growth on a
finite planet. The logical conclusion points to limitations on market demands,
on the freedom to consume whatever resources one can buy.
If nuclear engineers can talk about
“lessons learned” after each nuclear disaster then carry on with their
operations, then perhaps socialists have a right to say we can get it right
next time despite the setbacks of the past. This time information technology
may provide an essential tool for avoiding failure. The great failing of
centrally planned economies was always that planners could never effectively
know all that was going on in society. They could not gauge supply and demand
as well as a free market could. However, now billions of devices connected to
the Internet can gather and analyze the data that was always missing in the
past. The writer Peter Joseph elaborates further that a new economic model
would not need to be centrally planned by a committee at all but would be rather
a Collaborative Design System. He states:
One of the great myths of this model is that it is
“centrally planned.” What this means, based on historical precedent, is that it
is assumed that an elite group of people basically will make the economic
decisions for society. No. This model is a Collaborative Design System (CDS),
not centrally planned. It is based entirely upon public interaction,
facilitated by programmed, open source systems that enable a constant, dynamic
feedback flow that can literally allow the input of the public on any given
industrial matter, whether personal or social.[9]
One may take issue with the notion
that society could be led in a positive direction by the collaborative, bottom-up
will of the masses and not by a government with pre-determined goals such as
limiting population growth, saving pollinating species, or any particular
chosen priority. The choices emerging out of a collaborative design system
might amount to a collective demand for large cars, more air travel, junk food
and reality television programs. It is a leap of faith to believe it would lead
to enlightened policy that would prevent ecological catastrophe. Nonetheless,
Peter Joseph’s point is valid. Technology has made it possible to know the
collective will, whether it is a matter of price discovery, gauging supply and
demand, or recording and acting on the social policy preferences of millions of
people on a wide range of issues. These possibilities would subsequently make
possible a democratic socialism that could overcome the disadvantages of
previous socialist experiments.
In the contemporary discussion of
social welfare reforms, basic income and full-employment schemes, there has
been little discussion of how these may need to be accompanied by individual
obligations and curtailments on individual freedoms. It may seem absurd, for
example, to suggest that a system providing lifelong salary would have to be
accompanied by ideological training (promotion of new policy) and obligations
to work. After all, citizens in capitalist societies receive their pensions and
socialized medical care without needing much coercion to approve of them and
make their contributions to them while they are young and healthy. However, the
move toward total socialization of salaries—full pensions for all working-age
adults—might provoke different responses. No one wags a moralizing finger at a
seventy-year-old for being a burden on society because we know he worked in the
past and earned his retirement benefits. Many promoters of basic income have
missed this point and made a false analogy that equates old-age pensions with
basic income for all adults.
Humans are moralizing creatures, and
our moral systems, whether they stem from religious traditions, Adam Smith, or
Marxism, emerged from our moral instincts, which have been observed in other
primates as well. Most of our moralizing is focused on policing who has worked
and contributed, ensuring fair distribution of goods (not to be confused with
equal distribution), family and group loyalty, and regulation of sexual
behavior, which is, ultimately all about a competition for a scarce resource.
Many people believe that certain private behaviors are victimless and have no
public consequences, but in socialist or communal setting, this is not the
case. Religious cults and communes are famous for disintegrating when the
sexual appetites of leaders erode the loyalty of younger members. In contemporary
capitalist societies, most people conform already to traditional constraints on
sexual behavior. They are socialist in this sense because they obey norms not
just out of personal preference (the freely made choice to be monogamous, for
example) but also to avoid social sanction or to willingly do something that
promotes social stability and child welfare.
In a socialist system, moralizing
and social sanction become amplified because suddenly there are more shared
resources that might be given to would-be freeloaders. With the emergence of a
system that provides a “living wage” to everyone, regardless of their perceived
efforts to “earn” a wage or “deserve” what they receive, numerous policy
decisions would have to be made that make the inevitable connection between the
right to work and the obligation to work. These are
co-requisite. One of the earliest socialist theorists, Étienne-Gabriel Morelly,
stated it in 1755 long before Marx rephrased the precept famously as “from each
according to his ability, to each according to his need”:
Every citizen will make his particular contribution to
the activities of the community according to his capacity, his talent and his
age; it is on this basis that his duties will be determined, in conformity with
the distributive laws.[10]
Thus free-riders would not long be supportable,
regardless of how many tasks could be automated and to what degree human labor
could be made redundant in the brave new world that will come after capitalism.
This would inevitably require some people taking their lesser-preferred job
rather than waiting for the job they would prefer to have.
Even if people end up simply servicing
and supervising the machines doing the actual work, societies will organize
themselves in such a way that people have a job to go to and groups to belong
to. They need to feel needed and they need to escape the moral judgment of
others who would label them as parasites. Indeed, these jobs have already been
created to a great extent in this period of history when only a small
percentage of the workforce produces food and other essentials. Many people
feel, perhaps secretly, that their jobs are non-essential and contribute no obvious
necessities (such as food, shelter, medical care) to society, but they work
anyway because a job gives status, social connections, and wallet-size
certificates that one can exchange for food. They work happily, carrying out
the essential self-deception that they are performing essential work. The
anthropologist David Graeber has noted, but has also admitted to being unable
to explain, an obvious contradiction of capitalism: It is supposed to
efficiently eliminate waste and hire no extra labor, but for a certain privileged
sector of the population that has the right certificates (degrees, licenses and
so on, which are bureaucratic requirements) there has been a proliferation of
middle-management jobs involving filling in spreadsheets, filing, scheduling, managing
databases and so on. Advertisements direct eyeballs to more advertisements in a
different medium, rather than to products and services. “Efficient”
privatization schemes often result in public sector projects being given to the
private sector through layers of sub-contractors, with profit taken at each
layer. NGOs and charities are part of the free market because they depend on voluntary
spending rather than taxes, but they spend a large portion of their budgets on
administrative jobs. How could this ever-expanding bureaucracy occur in a free
market?[11]
Professor Friot is aware of the need
to educate about these aspects of the present system. His proposal comes from a
desire to educate people and cure the psychological and social ills arising
from lifelong competition for employment. Basic income proponents, on the other
hand, do not address the problem of alienation, competition and needing to sell
oneself on the job market. They seem to think that the problem is only
transactional: give everyone a certain level of monthly income and all the
social problems produced by the present system will be resolved in the market
place. Friot believes that we should be suspicious of such simplistic thinking promoted
by capitalist interests. Popular discourse around basic income proposals has
not been accompanied by much deeper thinking about its implications and
consequences. No one is questioning the incongruity of basic income being
promoted by free market champions, by people who seem to know, unconsciously
perhaps, that it only seems to be socialist but is not really a threat to their
interests.
Basic income is indeed being
conceived of as a crutch for capitalism, what Friot calls “a spare tire for
capitalism.” It is being thought of as assistance for those who are temporarily
unable to convince anyone to give them employment. It is hoped that
bureaucracies can determine a fair income level that would provide an
individual with the necessities of life, then needy individuals can be given
that amount and subsequently this monthly stipend will empower them to solve
all the varied problems they have had in obtaining good health, sound human
relationships, housing, education and vocational skills. It is a reiteration of
Ronald Reagan’s philosophy of getting government out of people’s lives. Government
and everyone else can just look away because now these unfortunate souls will
be empowered to solve their problems in the free market, or just be atomized
and warehoused in apartments with the minimum requisites for maintaining
biological vital functions: sofa, television, refrigerator, sink, shower, toilet.
Meanwhile, long-term planning and defined-benefit social programs, such as
public housing and food stamps, can be dismantled because the free market is
going to take care of everything. It is obvious that there is no socialism in
this plan. Basic income, as it is being promoted, is a bandage for the wounds
inflicted by neoliberal economics.
Discussion of basic income proposals
has failed to anticipate, or deliberately avoided, many of the difficult
questions that would arise, and have always arisen, when human groups attempt
to fairly distribute both labor and the fruits of labor. What follows is a
short list of some of the contentious questions that would emerge:
1.
Basic income has worked
experimentally over short periods in small communities in which everyone knows
each other and people can sanction free riders (and where the program is funded
by larger outside sources), but how will it work in a society of millions of
strangers in which no one has to worry much about what the neighbors think (or
all the neighbors are also on the dole)?
2.
Basic income proponents assume that
all people want to work because work gives personal dignity and provides an
outlet for creativity, but many of the jobs that need to be done (with or
without the robot revolution) are dirty, difficult, dangerous and boring, and
they offer little opportunity for self-fulfillment. People who are qualified to
do more interesting work have no interest in job-sharing schemes which would
involve them doing, for example, janitorial work one day per week. Some surveys
indicate that even garbage collectors say they would continue in their jobs
even if they could quit and live on a good guaranteed income because they feel
like they are doing something useful. But what would they really do? Results of
surveys asking hypothetical questions are highly unreliable, and honest social
scientists will admit this.[12]
3.
Some jobs are done in comfortable
surroundings, but the people who perform them often find that they are boring
“bullshit jobs” that have no apparent intrinsic value or social value.[13] The politicians and
bureaucrats who propose basic income plans perhaps forget, or have never known,
what it is like to perform the dirty, dangerous, tedious and meaningless jobs—the
kinds of jobs done by people who buy lottery tickets every week because they
have an enduring dream of not needing to work. What will it take to incentivize
people to do unpleasant work when they can receive a comfortable income for
staying home or pursuing the free education that they hope will lead to the
chance to do more agreeable work in air conditioned comfort?
4.
Would the creation of an idle class
on basic income create a demand for immigrant labor and illegal workers who
will remain excluded from access to citizenship and basic income? The
experiences of some resource-rich nations indicates this is an outcome in
societies where citizenship qualifies one to obtain a share of resource wealth.
5.
Related to the point about
unpleasant work is a phenomenon that is happening at the same time basic income
is becoming a popular notion. Prostitution is being legalized and normalized in
some countries as just another kind of work, a kind of “industry.” If the right
to work becomes an obligation to work, and there is a plan to counsel and force
people to transition from basic income into employment, will people be required
to work in the sex industry? If not, why should prostitution be legal? What
qualifies someone to be judged suitable for this work, and what right does one
have to decline a good job offer in this exciting new sector of the economy?
Similar questions arise regarding work in any economic activity that one might
find objectionable on religious or moral grounds.
6.
Will basic income be permanent,
enshrined as an inalienable right, or could it be cancelled by the election of
a government with different policies. Basic income wouldn’t mean very much if
people could not trust that it would be in place over the long term. In the
end, a society can only provide from what it produces collectively, and if
productivity falls in this new system, a vicious cycle of decline will weaken
it. The Soviet Union proclaimed jobs, housing, food, and health care as rights
enshrined in law, and it was fairly successful in this regard, but the quantity
and quality of the benefits were not always satisfactory, to say the least.
7.
The answer to question 3 about
incentives to work is, of course, that employers will have to offer salaries significantly
higher than the basic income to persuade people to do unpleasant jobs (assuming
that basic income provides an adequate income and not a piteous subsistence
income that in itself is supposed be an incentive to work). Basic income would
inflate salaries and prices, so within a short time the basic income would be
more like welfare payments as they exist now in most developed nations (meager
handouts that fall far short of being adequate provision), and it would serve
the same function. Inflation would make basic income become the new subsistence
income, a level of poverty so miserable that it leaves people safely stored
away from the mainstream population, even though it is supposed to incentivize
people to seek employment or to stay in their low income jobs. Furthermore, it
is worth repeating that later, once the benefits of basic income have been
eroded by inflation, many defined-benefit social programs will no longer exist.
One might suspect that because governments have been trying to create an inflation
rate of 1%-2% in recent years, and failing, it may be the undeclared goal of
basic income proponents to use it to create inflation. A period of high
inflation would make government and private debts (and savings accounts)
relatively smaller.
8.
The point made in 7 above assumes
that basic income would provide, as its name suggests, a minimally comfortable
standard of living, but some proposals suggest nothing of the kind. The income
levels proposed would be a floor to prevent people from falling into abject
poverty, but would still inflict a level of hardship on recipients that would
incentivize them to seek additional income. The idea behind these proposals is
that it would be enough to “get people on their feet” so they can find work.
The basic income supplement wouldn’t be lost until an individual’s total income
(from both employment and basic income supplement) rose above a fixed level. It
is hard to see how this proposal differs from various social welfare and
unemployment insurance programs that already exist, or used to exist in other
forms. It is also difficult to see how this is not a gift to employers who
would be incentivized to pay less. They would feel justified in paying less
because they would be paying taxes to support basic income payments. This model
would cause wage deflation rather than inflation. There would have to be higher
corporate taxes and payroll deductions to finance such a plan, but no one seems
to be talking about that side of the equation. Finally, this plan would also
incentivize recipients to find income sources on the black market, or in the
second economy, as it was called in the Soviet Union.
9.
Basic income would be a faith-based
plan to the extent that planners would hope that the extra money in circulation
would stimulate the economy, but it would be a poor replacement for a serious
economic development plan with specific goals. The extra money circulating in
the economy would produce some new employment, but it wouldn’t change
industrial policy, build factories or create new export industries.
10.
What restrictions would be placed on
people receiving basic income? The thinking behind basic income seems to be
that there won’t be any restrictions. It will eliminate all the paperwork and
tedious hurdles to qualify for assistance. It will eliminate bureaucracy and
the degrading means-testing that makes people prove they are qualified and
deserving of assistance. With basic income, people would just be given money
and told to go away and do whatever they want with it. But would it work out
that way? In reality, not everyone’s needs can be met by the same level of
income, so their needs would still have to be evaluated. It is easy to imagine
that recipients would begin to act in ways that would bother people who were
still foolish enough to work. For example, contributors would begin to ask
these next questions (11—22):
11.
Do recipients have to stay in the
country? The local currency might buy much more in a foreign country with
better weather and nicer beaches.[14]
12.
Can recipients gamble with or buy
stocks with basic income? If so, what happens when investments and gambles turn
out badly?
13.
Can recipients use basic income to
qualify for a mortgage, and if so, will this inflate prices in the housing
market in a way that negates the original benefit of basic income?
14.
What is to be done with recipients
who have, or later develop, gambling, and drug and alcohol dependencies and
spend their basic income on these habits?
15.
What is to be done for people who
are not ready for employment because of a lack of education or training, or
because of problems related to physical, mental and emotional health?
16.
What happens if someone uses up all
his basic income before the next payment? He would technically be poor and in
need of assistance. He would be living on the streets, and the basic income plan
is supposed to help such people.
17.
What is to be done for a recipient
who makes one or more women pregnant? As the legal parent obliged to provide
for his offspring, does he get the necessary premium to feed the extra mouths,
or should this go to the mothers? If the extra basic income doesn’t go to the
father, does this erase his parental rights and obligations?
18.
What are the other effects on family
formation and family cohesion, or even on the transition from childhood to
adulthood? What would the answers to these questions be in a society in which
one did not have to struggle to earn a living?
19.
Because it provides a floor of
security, will basic income incentivize people to start new ventures and take
risks that they wouldn’t otherwise, or will it have the opposite effect? If
people have their basic needs guaranteed, they may have reduced ambitions.
Society might be much less dynamic when essentials become as easy to obtain as
oxygen.
20.
Another question relates to the
fatal mistake of the Soviet Union mentioned above: the emergence of the second
economy and the government’s inability to suppress it. With a basic income in
place, citizens would be highly motivated to retain their status as recipients
of basic income while they seek ways to secretly supplement it. Thus a second
economy would emerge in which people exchange goods and services, some of which
are legal, illegal or in a gray zone (like prostitution) of being illicit
(disfavored for one’s own body and the bodies of people we care about) but
tolerated when strangers are involved.
21.
Will recipients be coerced into
working? Will they have rights of refusal for employment offers, and rights of
refusal regarding relocation and taking care of family members? Will recipients
be coerced into undergoing therapy for whatever ailments prevent them from
working?
22.
What strings are attached to free
education and health care? Would everyone be able to pursue as much education
as they wanted, or would availability of education be determined by state
planners? What demands would there be on students to achieve higher standards
and graduate within a certain time limit? Education might become a more competitive
sphere than it is now in a market economy in which suppliers, who have no
obligation to provide jobs to graduates, are willing to admit any student who
can pay the fees. Likewise, recipients take on new obligations with free
healthcare, which motivates the state to dictate healthy lifestyles to those
who benefit from that care.
All of these questions elucidate
what Bernard Friot meant when he said basic income is merely a “spare tire for
capitalism.” Basic income proposals are being presented to the public without
any deep discussion of their social consequences or full disclosure of the
motivations for promoting them. Proponents of basic income are naively ignoring
issues that both Joseph Stalin and Ronald Reagan would understand well—neither
man suffered from illusions about human nature. They would both probably agree
with the view expressed by two American law professors who stated that nations
thrive on the solidarity, moral character and abilities of their people. Stalin
might have chosen to dismiss this as the promotion of “bourgeois culture,” but he
and other socialist leaders encouraged all comrades to follow the same socially
conservative precepts that these American law professors support:
Get married before you have children and strive to stay
married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work
hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a
patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and
charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew
substance abuse and crime.[15]
In the quote above, one would need
only to substitute “your employer or client” with “the revolution and your
comrades” to make these precepts align with socialism. In contrast to this
social conservatism that was common to both Cold War adversaries, basic income
is being presented as a social transformation that would provide everyone with
their basic needs while demanding nothing in return and allowing for great
freedom in lifestyle choices. The point was perhaps made more succinctly by the
poet Leonard Cohen when he faced an crowd at a chaotic and mud-soaked music
festival in France in 1970:
“When the music festivals are yours, they will not
belong to others… there is no revolution here. When others talk about the revolution,
it is their revolution… They are like any other owners.” He was incoherent, but
the message got through regardless: talk of revolution was… a fantasy that
concealed the fact that earthly achievements required earthly labor and
deserved earthly rewards…[16]
Thus it is that in present times socialist
solutions are being presented without any consideration of who is going to own
this revolution. What pressures would be put on citizens to contribute, and who
would decide policy priorities? Which communal resources would be developed and
how would they be shared, or rationed? And “rationed” is the more appropriate
term because “voluntary” restraint would have to be imposed restraint. A
logical response to the ecological crisis leaves no other choice.
Recipients of basic income would not
be content for long with having their freedoms and dignity restricted, or with
being marginalized and warehoused as a parasitic underclass if the free market
continued its failure to provide full employment. Basic income would have to be
followed by an obligation of society to create full employment, and with this
change society would have to become fully socialist. Society would have to coerce
people to work and turn themselves into contributors to society, and, most
likely, defenders of the new society against outside attack and subversion.
(Ask a Cuban about this). Excessive recreational drug usage, or sexual
promiscuity, for example, would not be viewed as harmless, victimless habits
because these behaviors would be seen as detrimental to social harmony, as refusals
to accept obligations to continue building the ideal society. Likewise, society
would have to take responsibility for saving the downtrodden, homeless and addicted,
infringing on their freedom to die on the street and actively doing something
to rehabilitate them. Historically, this has been frowned upon in “free”
societies as a deprivation of freedom that blurred the line between punishing non-conformists
and helping the needy. It was ideological “re-education camp”—a sort of prison
with work duty required until the patient/inmate was considered rehabilitated.
Such treatment has always been viewed negatively in societies that love freedom
and prefer the cheaper option of leaving people asleep on cold concrete.
Socialist nations have always
understood these problems well and their welfare policies involved, ideally, providing
full employment while obliging everyone contribute to society. Citizens could
not easily refuse work or requirements to relocate for work, yet they could not
freely relocate to look for work elsewhere. Forced relocations in the USSR
reached cruel proportions in the 1930s, as is well known, but at the same time
in the United States the crisis of capitalism forced millions of farmers to
“voluntarily” relocate. The USSR, however, never had individual freedom as a
creed to live by. It did not produce a generation of young people who took gap
years during college to go traveling in Europe and Central Asia. The famous
“hippy trail” through Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s consisted of young
Westerners observing Soviet citizens helping to build hospitals and
universities there.
In contrast to the questions raised
above, basic income proposals are being proposed in full avoidance of a
discussion of whether they could succeed in a system which does not curtail
freedoms and compel people to work. Instead, basic income is being promoted as
a way to deal with the inconvenient problems and contradictions of capitalism.
It is being suggested as a way to streamline bureaucracy, to efficiently
deliver assistance while eroding or replacing defined-benefit programs that are
(or were) supposed to guarantee a certain quality of education, health care,
housing and food. A cash payment is to be given to individuals with which they
are supposed to just walk away and look for solutions to all their problems on
the market. These proposals offer nothing in the way of meaningful help for
people who need to maintain or restore their lives within networks of caring
fellow human beings.
As I was searching for a way to
describe this situation, I heard Max Keiser describe it this way on his
financial news show, The Keiser Report:
There is no discussion of morality anymore. It’s
accepted wisdom and fact that Wall St. commits financial terrorism, that we are
entering into a Wall Street-led ecological holocaust, and that it is
inevitable... so… without any moral dimension in the discussion, without any
consideration of how to design society… our financiers on Wall Street and in
Washington, how are they going to allow themselves to be carried away on this
vector of shameless narcissism leading to premature human extinction?[17]
Ecosocialism
Max Keiser’s mention of ecological
holocaust points to something that even Mr. Friot’s concept of lifelong salary
seems to not address, as it is heavily influenced by early 20th century
discourse about productivity and industrial expansion under worker control. The
ultimate cause of the present social and economic crisis is rooted in energy.
All of the easy energy resources have been extracted, and we are now left with
those that involve an unfavorable ratio of EROEI (Energy
Returned on Energy Invested), a calculation of the energy input
that is required to extract a certain amount of energy that can be put into use
doing work in society. The rising rate of necessary EI (energy invested) was a
factor even long ago in the Soviet era during the 1970s and 1980s when planners
faced the shock that all the easy resources had been tapped, and this was
followed by the added shock of low oil prices that the Americans and Saudis are
alleged to have deliberately created as a tactic for fighting the Cold War.
At that time, the Soviets were also
facing the shock of what the second economy was doing to socialism. The problem
was so widespread and demoralizing that it was revealed at the highest levels
of government, involving the daughter and son-in-law of General Secretary
Brezhnev himself. However, unlike the present leadership of global capitalism,
the Soviets were at least able to recognize this crisis as a moral problem.
Several attempts were made to punish offenders, re-establish ideological education
and remind citizens of the purpose of the 1917 revolution. Soviet planners were
also aware of the dangers of being too utopian and ignoring the constraints of
human nature. They tried to undo the policy of “wage-leveling” by introducing
policies that would give higher rewards to the highly educated, overtime
workers and other people judged as making valuable contributions to society
(those who worked on the nuclear weapons program were particularly well
rewarded). Many such nuances of Soviet history are poorly understood in the
West because of the biases of scholars and journalists who were eager to always
portray Soviet planners as idiotically utopian and blind to the self-interested
aspects of human nature. The revision of wage-leveling policy was meant to
reduce incentives to participate in the second economy, but it also created a
class of people who had extra money to bribe shop clerks.
History shows that the Soviet Union ultimately
failed to suppress the second economy. It kept growing and completely devoured
the system once Gorbachev’s reforms came. The thesis of Keeran and Kennedy’s
book, Socialism Betrayed, is that the
collapse was not inevitable. In their view, the second economy could have been
suppressed if Gorbachev had not been so keen to focus on nuclear disarmament, so
reluctant to use force, so enthralled with Western social democracy, so
pessimistic about the Soviet system, and so blind to the way unprincipled politicians
like Boris Yeltsin were able to exploit the openings created by glasnost and perestroika.
Presently, the ecological crisis
makes the economic and social crisis of the entire planet much more acute than what
was faced by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. Bernard Friot proposes a
system which could capture all the lucrative property of France and divert
revenues from it toward lifelong salaries for all, but there seem to be no
deeper questions asked about where this lucrativeness will come from when the
ecological crisis demands that we use less energy and consume less of
everything. How could a de-growth economy (décroissance
is the term that was originally coined in France) provide an adequate standard
of living for all if it did not eliminate capitalism’s need to maximize
consumption and profit? Friot seems to be working with 19th or early 20th
century understanding of economics that relies on industrialization and takes
for granted access to favorable EROEI sources of energy.[18] However, Friot’s willingness to
talk about a radical overthrow of corporate control is the necessary
prerequisite that so many erstwhile ecologists dare not speak of out of fear of
alienating sponsors and supporters who don’t want to contemplate the necessary
radical changes. In his book Green
Capitalism: the God that Failed, Richard Smith declares what is seldom said
but should be obvious to any observer:
The only way to rationally reorganize the economy, to
de-emphasize the “careless” industries and emphasize the “caring” industries,
is to do this ourselves, directly, by consciously and collectively and
democratically planning most of the industrial economy, even closely
coordinating most of the world’s industrial economies. To do this we would have
to socialize virtually all large-scale industry (though, as I’ve said
elsewhere, this does not mean we need to nationalize “mom & pop”
restaurants, small-scale owner-operator businesses, worker cooperatives, small
farmers, and the like, though even some of those would need to be tightly
regulated). Naomi Klein is rightly skeptical about “energy nationalization on
existing models,” because Brazil’s Petrobras or Norway’s Statoil are “just as
voracious in pursuing high-risk pools of carbon as their private sector
counterparts.” But that’s because the “existing model” they operate in is the
capitalist world economy—so even if they’re state-owned, they still need to
abide by the rules of the market. This only underlines the eco-socialist
argument that the only way we can stop global warming and solve our many
interrelated environmental crises is with a mostly-planned, mostly
publicly-owned, mostly non-market economy.[19]
Even by mid-20th century French
leaders had understood this fundamental problem they faced after the nation was
defeated in WWII and the colonies were in danger of being lost. It was clearly
understood then that WWII was fought for access to oil. The outcome of the war
was certain when the Japanese lost Indonesian oil and the Germans lost in
Stalingrad on the way to the Baku oil fields. With the war over and most of the
world’s oil under American, British and Soviet control, Charles de Gaulle and
other leaders knew that France was poor in natural resources and would have to
hold onto its colonies in order to have any status as a world power. At the
very least the French would have to find a way to retain their former colonies
in a new relationship that came to be called neo-colonialism, or Françafrique,
a system that assured French dominance in the new nominally independent
nations.
France succeeded in this and managed
to retain access to oil and uranium in African and Middle Eastern nations. To
this day, even after the introduction of the euro, France still controls
African economies through the French-backed West African Franc and Central
African Franc. However, in a reformed French economy providing a lifelong
salary, this unequal arrangement would not be something for a good Marxist to
endorse, unless the relationship could be made much more mutually beneficial
than it has been so far. Thus a consideration of France’s energy sources raises
some difficult questions about how a lifelong salary policy would deliver a
decent standard of living for all when there is also an imperative to enter a
new stage of history that the French ecologist Serge Latouche has called décroissance (de-growth).[20]
A successful lifelong salary system
would also raise tensions about nationalism and citizenship, about who is
qualified to receive a lifelong salary. A nation that provides a good life for
its citizens becomes an envied magnet for outsiders, but a sudden influx of
outsiders forces the government to defend its achievements from external forces
that would undermine it. Nationalism
is a dirty word in modern capitalist discourse because of its association with
fascism, but a certain degree of nationalism used to be considered a good
thing. From 1945 to 1970, before the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal revolution,
nation-based economies were permitted to flourish and improve the standard of
living of their citizens. However, now this system has been greatly weakened
and nations are straining under the pressure of refugee flows.
One final question to add to the
list above is this: If I could write all of the above and raise so many
questions about basic income and lifelong salary, why do we not notice experts,
media reports and politicians doing the same? Why is basic income being
discussed as if it is not a reiteration of very old debates about human nature,
work, freedom and the fairest way to share the excess wealth that an energy
resource-exploiting society is capable of producing? On that note I finish with
a quote from Max Keiser’s guest, Chris Martenson, interviewed in the same
episode mentioned above:
They [past and present Federal Reserve chairpersons]
are conducting massive social experiments. Money is not this thing you study in
textbooks and is real. Really, it’s an agreement that we hold with each other,
and they are violating our agreement at the core level, and she [Janet Yellen,
Federal Reserve Chairperson] knows this well... Plutarch notes that the oldest
and most fatal ailment of all republics is the gap between the rich and the
poor. I wrote that because I knew [in 2008] they [the central banks] were about
to start printing money. I knew that it was going to create a wealth gap. How
did I know that? I’m just one guy sitting in a room. How did I just analyze something
that escaped the attention of the whole Federal Reserve and all their
researchers? It didn’t. They know they are creating this wealth gap. They are
doing it specifically. They are taking money from pretty much everybody because
Janet Yellen has decided that she knows better.[21]
Conclusion
This quote is indicative of the growing
feeling of urgency about the need to reject and radically transform long-standing
institutions of domestic and international governance. One can occasionally
glimpse this in the standard channels of the mass media, but in Japan there is
even less awareness of the discontent and radical proposals that have appeared
in North America and Western Europe in the last decade. Japanese university
students hope to be entering basically the same Japanese corporate and
political structures that existed for their parents’ and grandparents’
generations, and they have little awareness of, or perhaps live in denial of,
the storm clouds forming in other nations they are closely connected to by
economic and military alliance. I have written this discursive essay in the
hopes of bringing greater awareness of the new thinking emerging from what some
optimistically call the “stage of late capitalism.” Although a radical
socialist transformation in France or anywhere else still seems like a remote
possibility, the fact that basic income is now a mainstream topic and lifelong
salary is being discussed seriously by millions of people is indicative of a
significant change in public discourse that has appeared since capitalism’s
systemic crisis of 2007-2008. Should another such crisis occur, it may prove to
be the event that transforms this talk into action and tips the present system
over the edge. Professor Friot himself has stated:
There is a large demand for change. For sure, still
only a minority is aware of this plan, but it’s an influential minority. We are
actually in a cold period of history, but during a hot period when people start
to agitate for change, which happens regularly (1789, 1870, 1936), this
minority will trigger the movement. We have to prepare for it now with public
education programs.[22]
Notes
[1] Usul, “My dear contemporaries: lifelong salary
according to Bernard Friot (Mes chers contemporains: le salaire à vie selon Bernard Friot),” 6 Coups 6 Mouches, 2015, https://youtu.be/eyrEykrcQi0 .
[2] Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political
Economy of the Mass Media. Lecture, University of Wisconsin—Madison, March 15, 1989, https://chomsky.info/19890315/ . While Chomsky here accuses Lenin of
staging a coup against the workers’ revolution, the standard defense of Lenin
and Stalin is that they knew that the new socialist state would be attacked
mercilessly both internally and externally. This proved to be the case
throughout the entire life of the Soviet Union as if faced first the civil war,
then the attack by Nazi Germany, then opposition from the United States during
the Cold War. Their rationale was that true socialism would have to wait until external
threats disappeared.
[3] Consider, for example, the Canadian province
of Ontario, where the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System is a major
“partner” in Bruce Power, the province’s “private” sector nuclear energy
utility. (Note how the distinction between private and public sector is blurred
in this example. Is it really private sector when its major partner is a union
of municipal employees?). Another example: the Ontario teachers’ retirement
fund took heavy losses in 1997 in the infamous and massive Bre-X gold mine
fraud.
[4] Roger Keeran and Thomas Kennedy, Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of
the Soviet Union (iUniverse, 2010), Chapter Three.
[5] Gregory Grossman, “The Second Economy in the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” Berkeley-Duke
Occasional Papers on the Economy of the Soviet Union, July 1990.
[8] Mike Shedlock, “Living Wage Idiocy
and Free Market Experiments,” Mishtalk, January 9, 2017, https://mishtalk.com/2017/01/09/living-wage-idiocy/ .
[9] Peter Joseph, “Economic Calculation in
Resource-Based Economics,” P2PF Wiki,
accessed September 2, 2017, http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Peter_Joseph_on_Economic_Calculation_in_Resource—Based_Economics . See also Peter Joseph, The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing
the Economy to End Oppression (BenBella Books, 2017).
[10] Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders, ed., Socialist Thought: A Documentary History
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 18-31. The relevant excerpt from
this text can be read at this web page: Code of
Nature, or The True Spirit of Laws, https://www.marxists.org/subject/utopian/morelly/code-nature.htm.
[11] Chris Weller, “A
top anthropologist says the US is flooded with 'bulls---' jobs that should
disappear,” Business Insider, December 15, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/david-graeber-jobs-should-disappear-2016-12.
[12] I admit that my views on these issues have
been influenced by life experience. I’m old. I worked some dirty, dangerous and
miserable jobs when I was young, and I’ve seen a lot of shirking in my life. I
witnessed rampant fraud among peers in Canada’s formerly generous unemployment
insurance system and worker compensation programs. Everyone working these jobs,
except the students who believed they were just passing through these blue
collar jobs, bought lottery tickets and spoke of a wish to escape from the
drudgery of their work. I do not doubt for a minute that most of them would
have retired instantly if a comfortable pension had been available. One
acquaintance, a former sawmill worker, confessed to me that he had deliberately
cut off his own finger with a table saw in order to collect long-term worker
compensation benefits. He told me this while dressed in a Santa Claus suit. His
compensation claim had been accepted and he now worked occasionally as a
shopping mall Santa. I was the photographer assigned to work with him on this
seasonal gig.
[13] David Graeber, “On the
Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” Libcom.org, August 20, 2013,
https://libcom.org/library/phenomenon—bullshit—jobs—david—graeber .
[14] A standard trick in Canada in the 1970s was
this: Unemployment insurance recipients, many of them seasonal workers who knew
they would be rehired in the summer, evaded the requirement to stay home and be
actively engaged in looking for employment. They asked a trusted family member
to forge their signatures on checks and deposit them in their bank accounts
while they wintered in Mexico. This loophole had to be closed down by
introducing “humiliating” means testing and another layer of “useless”
bureaucracy: forcing the unemployed to appear in person every two weeks and
show photo identification in order to receive their checks.
[15] Amy Wax and Larry Alexander, “Paying
the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture,” Philadelphia
Inquirer (Philly.com), August 9,
2017, http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/commentary/paying-the-price-for-breakdown-of-the-countrys-bourgeois-culture-20170809.html.
[16] Liel Leibowitz, A Broken Hallelujah: Rock n Roll, Redemption and the Life of Leonard
Cohen (W.W. Norton and Company, 2014), 160-161.
[18] R.T. Howard, Power and Glory: France’s Secret Wars with Britain and America,
1945-2016 (Biteback Publishing, 2016), Chapter 6. Howard notes the
contradictions faced by French communists in the 1950s toward French control
over African resources: “Even French communists, who were instinctively
sympathetic toward the struggles of colonial peoples, were lukewarm towards the
increasingly vocal claims for Algerian independence, regarding it as a threat
to the standards of living of ordinary French men and women.”
[19] Richard Smith, Green Capitalism: the God that Failed (World Economics Association
Book Series, 2015), 113. In this chapter Richard Smith mentions specifically Al
Gore, James Hansen, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, and the UK Green Party as
examples of respected leaders of the environmental movement who are adept at selling
books and raking in donations for their causes but unwilling to face
contradictions and admit that “mainstream debate has been frozen in a time warp
of failed bankrupt strategies, confined entirely within the framework of
capitalism.”
[21] Max Keiser, The Keiser Report, Episode
1040, 18:22~, https://youtu.be/Y0NlD1iBrkU .
[22] Emmanuel Daniel, “Lifelong Salary: Work is Dead. Long Live
the Salaried Class (Salaire à vie:
l'emploi est mort, vive le salariat!),” Slate,
March 3, 2013, http://www.slate.fr/story/68185/salaire-vie-travail .
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