We’re talking about a different mental register of paradigm for understanding the world. For so long, we’ve had this presumption of fiction that the homo economicus, the utility maximizing individual, is the chief agent in the way to see the world. The commons says there is a different way to see humanity—not simply as a notional ideal, but as a practical operational system and there’s countless examples out there.

This audio interview (and transcript) with our colleague David Bollier was conducted by Adam Simpson and originally published by The Next System Project.

David Bollier joins us this week to discuss “the commons” and what such a concept means for social transformation. You can read more about David’s ideas in his paper for the NewSystems: Possibilities and Proposals series, and also read more of his work at www.Bollier.org.

Interview transcript

Adam Simpson: Welcome back to The Next System Podcast. I’m your host, Adam Simpson, joined today by self-described commons activist and director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, David Bollier. David is the author of Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. He’s also the editor of From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond with John Clippinger, as well as Patterns of Commoning, and The Wealth of the Commons with Silke Helfrich.

Wouldn’t you know it, David is here to talk to me today about the concept of the commons. David, welcome to The Next System Podcast.

David Bollier: It’s great to be here.

Adam Simpson: Great. Well, before we get into the concept of the commons, David, I wanted to ask you: How did you first come to learn about this concept, what made you embrace it, what really drew you to this kind of work that you do?

David Bollier: Well, in the 1970s and 80s when I was working for Ralph Nader, all of my friends were fighting what I would now call enclosures of the commons, meaning privatization and commodification of things like federally funded research, public lands and the air waves, which are used by broadcasters for free and so forth. All these were being taken private, but we really didn’t have a language for talking about this. It wasn’t until the late 1990s and early 2000s when I encountered the work of Elinor Ostrom, a great scholar of the commons and I realized that the commons was a great way to describe how things get done outside of the market and the state, meaning through self-organized activities and self-governance to manage projects that create things of value. I realized this at a time when neoliberal capitalism and its policies were getting worse and worse.

It was essentially colonizing and taking over all of these commons in our life. Not only the resources that belong to us, but our ability to self-manage them for our benefit. They were basically appropriated by the corporate world for global trade and turned into private property.

I realized that the commons had great potential as an alternative political vision that is not some unified movement or ideology, like in the past, but something that is locally distributed and grounded in things that people love and want to protect. So, the commons is about sharing those things that belong to all of us that we want to protect in our ability to manage them for our purposes.

Adam Simpson: Right. It seems like you started with intellectual property as a way of thinking about the commons, and not, say, the management of environmental resources?

David Bollier: Well, that was actually, you might say the proximate cause, because in the late 90s you may recall the world wide web had just gone live in 1991, and here was a system that encouraged automatic sharing, yet copyright was being asserted to prevent us from sharing…

Adam Simpson: This was the time of Napster…

David Bollier: Yes, it was the time of Napster; it was the time of the emergence of open source software, and then a few years later, of the blogosphere and many other innovations. All innovations in which value and creativity was based on sharing and collaboration, something that conventional economics and markets don’t understand because they want to create things that are artificially scarce and individually ownable, as opposed to something that’s shared.

Copyright was a very important force for me in bringing into focus that we needed to protect our commons, and in fact, I helped co-create the group called Public Knowledge. It’s a Washington advocacy group to protect the knowledge commons: on Internet and telecommunications policy, it’s trying to protect shareable information.

Adam Simpson: Yeah. It reminds me that one of my first interactions with this space would have been the late Aaron Schwartz and his work on public knowledge.

David Bollier: A real pioneer. I mean, there was a whole movement that has ebbed and flowed, but Larry Lessig, when he established Creative Commons licenses to allow legal sharing of content, that was a huge innovation. It provided a legal infrastructure for people to share. You have to remember, copyright was based on any little scribble or a guitar riff being born as private property. There was no way for stuff to be legally shared, so everything was implicitly piracy if you simply imitated or used somebody else’s work. Creative Commons licenses were an enormous innovation that did what Congress or federal authorities would not do, which is to legalize sharing.

Adam Simpson:  I heard you imply a critical take on Elinor Ostrom’s work when you said that she focused on the commons in terms of resources, could you elucidate what you meant?

David Bollier: Let’s first introduce Elinor Ostrom. I mean she was a Indiana University political scientist who, over the course of 30 or 40 years, from the 1970s until her death in 2012, studied lots of natural resource-based commons: forests, fisheries, farm land, irrigation water, etc. She showed that contrary to the whole “tragedy of the commons” fable that Garret Hardin proposed in a famous 1968 essay, people can and do self-organize to sustainably manage resources. Her life’s work was, first of all, studying that on the ground level and then creatively theorizing to explain how and why that occurs. Well, she, as a woman working in the male-dominated economics professions, saw that social relationships mattered in creating things of economic value. That was a lot of what her work was about. But, at the end the day, she’s working within a rational economic framework as opposed to a cultural or social framework.

In some ways, she was providing an interesting counterpoint to the conventional economic theories. In other ways, she was still working within, what you might call, the ontological framework: the premises of our human relationships, rationality, and behavior. The very dominant theme then was the prisoner’s dilemma in which people supposedly are always trying to calculatedly maximize their personal gain, which of course happens but it’s not the full story of what humanity is about.

I think that there are other dimensions of our propensity to give, to collaborate, to share, to be part of something larger than ourselves, which is arguably non-rational and haven’t had been adequately conceptualized within economics. The commons helps to deal with that.

Adam Simpson: Part of the intervention of the commons, it seems to me, is a cultural shift as well because in the prevailing context of capitalism and neoliberalism, it makes sense for people to try to maximize their outcomes, but in the framework of the commons, it doesn’t make sense to put this kind of personal gain at the forefront.

David Bollier: Well, let’s just say nobody wants to be a sucker in being taken advantage of. So if the prevailing system is ‘get all that you can for yourself,’ you are a sucker if you just give it away. However, if you can develop a sufficient critical mass with protectable boundaries around your shared resources and generative capacity the way open source software does, the way a lot of local systems do, the way countless different commons do, you can create a different paradigm that is—I think—more humanly satisfying, that benefits more people without the gross inequality and exploitation that occurs now, and that is more ecologically benign because it doesn’t have the growth imperative that capitalism has. So you can start to reintegrate people with each other and with natural systems.

We’re talking about a different mental register of paradigm for understanding the world. For so long, we’ve had this presumption of fiction that the homo economicus, the utility maximizing individual, is the chief agent in the way to see the world. The commons says there is a different way to see humanity—not simply as a notional ideal, but as a practical operational system and there’s countless examples out there.

Adam Simpson: On the notion of rational economic man, it seems to me that with a fairly rudimentary knowledge of anthropology one would see numerous examples of commons. I don’t know, this seems fundamentally a question about human nature: homo economicus and “rational economic man” versus a kind of collaborative creature that I think most social scientists understand humans to be.

David Bollier: Well, first of all, I’m dubious about saying there is some essentialist human nature. Having said that, evolutionary scientists are showing that our propensity to cooperate seems to be in-born even though, of course, we’re quite capable of competitive and quite awful things as well. But part of it, it comes down to what the culture validates and nourishes or what it allows to become the cultural norm. We, of course, within capitalism know what those norms are. But in some ways, we do have more capacity to create these alternatives worlds in making them sustainably not just as some fantasy or a cult or isolated community. We can see this in many different domains from natural resources to urban spaces to digital spaces.

I think it’s important to understand that this is a cross-sectoral/cross-cultural paradigm that can give us a way out of some of our very profound problems today.

Adam Simpson: A key concept in this conversation within this framework of the commons is the notion of property and ownership. I wanted to ask how does our current system of property and ownership fail us and how is the paradigm of the commons different?

David Bollier: Well, property law tends to privilege the whole idea of individual exclusive control, and it presumes that that is the only way to go, even though individual property ownership tends to deny the realities of our social connection to each other and our embeddedness in ecosystems. In other words, it denies relationality as the basis of human life because it focuses mostly on simply market exchange of objectified things that have been put inside an envelope of property.  So for instance, you have snippets of music sampling defined as appropriations of private property. It’s been taken to such extremes that all sorts of knowledge, like the breast cancer susceptibility gene, can be privately owned, nano-matter is being patented, and it goes on and on.

Basically, there is, of course, an important role for private property, but so much private property is, in fact, corporate property.  This is consequential for the natural ecosystem, because it’s gotten out of control. This dominion of private property is reaching extremes, with various cascading environmental problems and climate change happening as capitalism tries to propertize everything in the world.

The commons is an attempt to assert, “No, there need to be limits to private property and some things need to be collectively managed for the collective good and not simply leveraged as much as possible for market gain.”

Adam Simpson: I mean, this is exactly my next question: the question of commodification and enclosure. I heard, earlier today, that the human genome is 20% patented. What would you say are the consequences and the implications of this kind of continuous enclosure, this commodification of everything? What does it mean for our society?

David Bollier: Well, we’re living through it right now: it means grotesque inequality, with many shared common needs not being met. This is, in the large part, driven by the private propertization and marketization of everything. I mean, even social problems themselves are marketized. We have to create new kinds of property rights, for example, pollution rights, in order to tackle pollution. Or we need to financialize incentives to deal with nature, like let’s monetize how much pollination bees do for crops. Let’s put a market value on that and create a market security that can be traded as a way to solve the problems of bees disappearing.

In other words, it’s grotesquely out of control. We are trying to use property and market incentives to deal with precisely the problems these structures and incentives have created in the first place. Can we start to acknowledge the intrinsic value of nature instead? There are things that are outside of the market that should remain inalienable and not be propertized. I think this is one of the pre-eminent concerns of our time, but paradoxically even progressives and liberals who are tied to the market growth grand narrative can’t go there, because they see the only way to solve problems is further growth, further growth, further growth, and that’s something that we have to step up to and deal with.

Adam Simpson: Related to the question of growth—you suggest that continuous growth is one the maxims of our system. We can’t even have a stable or a steady-state economy, as it’s called. We have to always keep growing. How might an advocate of the commons understand the concept of economic growth or the steady state or de-growth, as some people call it?

David Bollier: Well, capital is driving this because capital wants more and more return and things that are un-owned—not yet propertized—are ripe resources for the market machine. A commoner would say, “How can we create things that are simply not for sale?”

I think we need to cultivate this ethic that many things are not for sale and devise either the legal or technological or social norms to prevent that from happening. We have to realize that the growth paradigm is no longer the tool for improved civilization in human betterment. It’s becoming destructive of those very things, yet capital insists that that’s the only way forward.

We have to have a reckoning on that, and it’s not simply going to happen at the macro level first, we have to cultivate that at the micro level where we live: in our own medium of productive needs.

That’s what the commons can do: meet needs in decommodified ways, where you don’t need to have market exchange. Your needs and what the market wants are different things entirely.

Adam Simpson: Related to the question of growth is the question of value; our market centered system depends on the enormous amount of ‘externalities’ that go unaccounted for. How does the concepts of the commons inform your understanding of value?

David Bollier: Well, market economics regards anything that can be exchanged and it has a price as being valuable. The commons regards all sorts of things that don’t have a price as also being valuable, but that doesn’t have any standing within the conventional political or economic discourse. For example, the value of rivers, lakes, oceans as natural systems of wildlife, species and genes as natural systems; the value of care work that work women and family, and unfortunately very few men are involved in. All of these are non-market phenomena unless they’re turned into something for sale. The whole notion of the economy which focuses on exchange value needs to start to focus on use value, meaning what’s valuable for us to use whether or not it has a price, whether or not money is exchange to make it happen.

The commons is about encouraging use value not as mediated by price or supply and demand, but by social need in negotiation, in coordination, and that’s a different proposition than the market.

Adam Simpson: You mentioned care work; I want to follow-up on that because that appeared in quite a few different passages of different works of yours I’ve read. As you mentioned, the market interpretation of care work would be that it is a service that is either bought or sold or traded, etcetera. As you stated, I’d like to reemphasize that whether we’re talking about child care or elder care, this is mostly done by women. It’s mostly unpaid and when it is unpaid, it’s mostly done by women. I want to know how the idea of care work fits into the framework of the commons.

David Bollier: Well, it is a major sector of non-market life that is regarded as external to the economy, and because it’s external to the economy and it’s therefore not productive, it’s not valuable in any price sense or a return on investment sense. Some ingenious people have been able to turn care work—elder care, child care or household activities—into a market. Suddenly, it’s valuable. The problem is that’s inconsistent with the very notion of care which cannot be regimented. You can’t put a price on what real care is about because care involves sacrificing of yourself. You’re not maximizing your utility; you’re giving of yourself to someone else. You’re spending a lot of time with them in ways that are not productive or creating value in a market sense.

There is an inherent contradiction involved in marketizing care work. Care work creates a problem for economics in the sense that we obviously know that care is essential to a human civilization. In a society, somebody needs to raise and enculturate the children, somebody needs to educate them, old people need to be taken care of. But the problem is that it doesn’t fit within market categories and economics doesn’t quite know how to deal with it—but of course it has to be done.

That’s a theoretical limitation of conventional economics. It doesn’t want to go there because there’s no exchange value going on, so I think the ambition should be to integrate the commons into our notion of the economy so that the reproduction of life, families, households has stand-in in economic analysis as opposed to, “Oh, if not being paid for, it’s not worth anything.”

Adam Simpson: I want to move on to the possibilities that the commons unlocks. I’ve read about the commons being used to support programs ranging from a basic income, to environmental protectionism or even, I think, Peter Barnes’ combination of the two with a cap and dividend program around carbon emissions. Are there examples you would highlight that you come your mind immediately as the kind of political, economic and, or social programs that are unlocked through a more detailed understanding of the common?

David Bollier: Well, this is a frontier right now because the conventional state is so allied with markets and capital as the only way to get things done that it doesn’t consider the commons as something worth pursuing. It doesn’t generate tax revenue, or at least not as much tax revenue as market growth does, so the state is either indifferent or uncomprehending of the commons.

That said, there are a handful of interesting experiments that are trying to use state power to support the commons. You mentioned Peter Barnes, things like the Alaska Permanent Fund in which the state legislature created a trust to take revenues from state oil sales, put it in a trust fund owned by every resident in Alaska and every year, residents of Alaska get between $1,000 and $2,000 from that fund. Even people like Sarah Palin support it.

Well, the state could create trust funds for natural resources that we all own: groundwater, forests, minerals. This would be one way to protect them from simply being exploited by rip-and-run companies, so that the public could get some benefit from them and steward them so they’re not simply leaving ecological destruction in their wake.

That’s one interesting model. There’s others. In Europe, there’s a lot of cities that are developing so-called “public-commons partnerships,” where the city government is collaborating with self-organized neighborhood groups or other initiatives to facilitate them doing work that bureaucracies would otherwise do. It’s a great advance because the citizens care about their neighborhood, they want it to work, they can devise their own systems that are not legalistic or bureaucratic or come with lots of high overhead. It’s really a way to get people re-engaged with the city, and for governments to support genuine citizen participation. Another example might be participatory budgeting where people can have a direct say in how budgets are allocated.

There are some of these things but, frankly, this is more of a frontier that is now being explored as commons grow and start to bump up against conventional systems, market systems, bureaucratic systems.

Adam Simpson: I wanted to ask specifically about the notion of finance and money. In a lot of ways, money is a public utility that we use to lubricate exchanges, but money is something that’s really not controlled publicly as a utility in the current system, although there are experiments like with alternative currencies and things like that. How does the monetary system fit into the framework of the commons?

David Bollier: Well, people don’t realize that 95% of the money in the United States is created privately through banks. They give out loans and that creates new money. They don’t necessarily have a significant amount of money in the bank. Their loan creates the money, and they then reap the gains of that through interest payments all the time. Essentially, the US government has surrendered its prerogative as a sovereign state. It has surrendered the power to create money to private banks—and all the profits from that are privately capitalized and controlled.

This means that we, the people of the United States, don’t reap the benefits of that power to create money. This is called the power of ‘seigniorage.’ Well, could we capture some of that value ourselves by having the government or its designated trustees create money rather than banks? We saw, for example, how the government used that power to bail out the banks in 2008: it essentially created money to bail them out without it being considered public debt that needed to be repaid. That’s only because the government has that power: the state has that power.

Why can’t we have quantitative easing for the environment or social needs without it being considered public debt that needs to be repaid? We could do that responsibly so long as the money is sapped up through taxes so that we don’t create inflation. Mary Miller, a British monetary specialist has written about this in a book called Debt or Democracy? The point is, these alternative ways of creating money are entirely feasible and responsible as opposed to simply surrendering that power to private entities to reap all the gains.

Adam Simpson: Of course, sovereign fiat currency issuers have the power to create money in such a way and right now, we let private banks do it. Are you compelled by the notion of publicly owned banks or other institutions that might have another way of generating this for the people?

David Bollier: Well, public banks would be a huge improvement as well—because instead of a city or state governments having to borrow money from private banks at their exorbitant interest rates, they could radically lower their interest cost. For example, in creating major infrastructure, they could save a quarter, a third or more of the cost by having their own bank. A city, if it were to open its own public bank, deposit city funds in it, and then make loans, could save lots in infrastructure.

Ellen Brown of the Public Banking Institute is the leading expert on this. A lot of states and localities are now exploring public banks as a way to throw off the yoke of dependency on private banking. It’s entirely feasible.

Adam Simpson: Right. Now, I want to talk about the theory of change here. In your model’s paper, I believe it’s called Commoning as a Socially Transformative Paradigm, you mentioned that some parts of the left that rely on top down notions of theories of change like “if we get this elected office or enough people in this legislative body, we can affect change.” What do you think that these pathways that rely on the notion of taking political power, what do you think they get wrong about the theory of change?

David Bollier: Well, I think that as those top down approaches become autonomous onto themselves, they lose connection with the people they’re trying to serve—the way the Democratic Party has, for example, and they become a self-replicating political elite. Moreover, they lose sight of the fact that simply taking power is a dead letter if you can’t prevail on a transformative agenda or have the will power and imagination to do so. We saw how the left took over power in Greece in how it was pointless because they were trumped by international capital.

Even as a sovereign nation, they could not deal with their debt crisis because the international banks were saying, “Too bad, we hold all the trump cards.” I saw the same thing in Bolivia where Ivan Morales took power from the left as an indigenous person. He essentially had to retain the extractivist economy that had existed before because of their dependence on international capital and markets.

If we’re talking about being transformative, simply taking power through the state is maybe necessarily but is quite insufficient. It’s not going to be transformative unless it’s really organically connected to local change and local change has a different political and cultural logic. In other words, it doesn’t want to simply placate or accommodate or even support international capital.

I think that the seeds of change have to come from the bottom and that when they do, they will express a different political culture through people’s personal and social practices. That has to be origins at this point because the rest of the system is too indentured: too tied up with the existing logic of the system, and so we need some external forces to intervene because within the logic of the existing system it is just is not going to happen.

Adam Simpson: You talk about not just the commons, but the verb commoning. I was hoping to get you to elaborate on how commoning represent an effective theory of change and if there are some examples of commoning that you might refer people to.

David Bollier: I’m very suspicious of novel words being our salvation, and we’ve seen the lifecycle of the word sustainability, for example, where it’s now meaningless because everybody is sustainable. The point is what’s happening that’s achieving the goal of that word? The truth of the matter is there is no such thing as a common as such, there is commoning: the social practices of talking, negotiating, working it out for shared goals, bringing diverse perspectives into alignment. This is the processing of commoning, and this is a form of democratic empowerment and governance that can happen right now without permission from the government or the corporations. We can do it ourselves in lots of arenas.

Commoning, you might say, is the seedbed of a new democratic practice. Well, Peter Linebaugh, great historian of the commons says there is no commons without commoning, and I think that’s a way to keep the vitality and aliveness of the commons. In fact, it’s the only to keep it alive because if you’re simply mouthing the word as a buzzword or marketing or messaging strategy, it’s dead right then. You have to have a community of people who have the commitment, the activity and it has to be constantly recreated.

To put it in high flown words this is the relational theory of value. The value is created through people enacting their relationships together through commons, so that’s where I think really transformative change is going to come from. It needs that grounding in people’s lives, in local practice.

Adam Simpson: Thank you, so that was actually my last question. I think it’s a great place to end actually, but is there anything you’d want to add for our listeners about the subject of the commons or about your work?

David Bollier: Well, we didn’t discuss so much the broad range of things going on but I would just say, first of all, there’s lot of people that are, you might say, commoning and don’t even know it. The value of the commons language and vocabulary is it helps validate something that they might consider trivial, marginal, not consequential. But it is, and I think that’s part of the importance of the language of the commons, especially as a counterpoint to the market narratives that are seen as the only legitimate, the only productive way of producing things.

Second, I would point out that there are lots of projects in different domains. I mentioned the city as commons, lots of digital projects from open source software to Wikipedia and dozens of Wikis to open access scholarly publishing and it goes on and on, which are forms of commoning that are incredibly productive, creative arguably more so than the proprietary versions.

I just wanted to say that there is a broad variety of social activities that are commoning right now, so this is not some utopian abstract thing, it’s happening; it’s practical whether it’s recognized culturally as commons: as a different form of value generation. That’s precisely what a lot of the commons movement is all about: validating this as an important activity that needs to be protected and extended.

I would just leave it at that and what people know that there is a lot of resources out there. I can direct them to my website blog which Bollier.org, but there’s other important ones like the Peer-to-Peer Foundation, which has a lot of stuff on peer production, open design, and manufacturing. You can go to the Commons Transition website, and then in Europe there’s quite a few different sites, if you have more specialized interest, for instance in Barcelona, which is in the vanguard of a lot of activities around the commons.

I just wanted to end with the notion that this happening, even if it’s not being culturally recognized—at least in America.

Adam Simpson: Well, to our listeners, thank you for listening this week and, David, thanks so much for joining us.

David Bollier: Thank you.

The post Social Transformation Through ‘The Commons’ with David Bollier appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Alyssa Battistoni: Five years ago, dropping the abbreviation UBI in conversation would be more likely to earn you a puzzled glance than a knowing nod. But these days, universal basic income—a policy often glossed as “paying people for being alive”—is gaining popularity both in the United States and abroad. UBI, where everyone gets a regular check from the government regardless of what else they’re doing or how they spend it, is an old idea. But it has seen renewed interest since the 2008 financial crash: as millions of people lost their jobs and wondered whether they’d find new ones, some also began to wonder whether they needed to work at all.

UBI was recently endorsed by the Movement for Black Lives as part of a reparations program, while Canada’s Leap Manifesto calls for consideration of UBI on the grounds of environmental sustainability. Jeremy Corbyn said last September that the Labour Party would investigate the prospects for basic income in the UK, and experiments are on the agenda in Scotland, backed by the left-wing SNP. In France, Benoît Hamon recently won the Socialist Party presidential nomination on a platform that included a basic income.

Growing public discussion has been accompanied by a small but significant number of experimental programs, mostly in Europe. Starting this year, about 250 people in Utrecht will receive €960 each month (about $1,030) from the government, while a Finnish experiment will pay between five and ten thousand people €550 (about $600) monthly. Neither amount is enough to live on, really, but they aren’t negligible either.

The United States is home to the closest thing to a basic income program existing in the world today: the Alaska Permanent Fund. Since 1982, the fund has paid every Alaskan resident anywhere from a few hundred to $2,000 annually out of its oil revenues. But the most prominent supporters of UBI in the United States today are technocapitalists like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and with the exception of Alaska, basic income experiments are being implemented not by the state but the private sector. Most notably, the seed accelerator Y Combinator is starting a basic income pilot program in Oakland this year, proposing to pay a hundred families between $1,000 and $2,000 each month, “no strings attached.”

It’s often noted that Milton Friedman as well as Martin Luther King, Jr. supported basic income—and the new generation of advocates is similarly eclectic, running the gamut from Trump-supporting venture capitalists like Thiel to “fully automated luxury communists” like Peter Frase. There are, in short, many different reasons for supporting UBI—and just as many versions of what it could be.

One version functions as a kind of noblesse oblige—a handout to the unfortunates being made obsolete by robots smarter and more efficient than they are. Another version aspires to egalitarian universalism and challenges the legitimacy of privately accumulated wealth. There’s a version that sees UBI as the spark for a generation of entrepreneurs, and another that simply attempts to stave off a revolt of the precarious masses.

Basic income is therefore often posited as a post-ideological solution suited to a new era of politics: the odd confluence of interest from the left and right tends to be read as a sign that political positions should be eschewed in favor of rational compromise. But UBI’s cross-ideological appeal is the bug, not the feature. Because basic income is politically ambiguous, it also has the potential to act as a Trojan horse for the left or right: left critics fret that it will serve as a vehicle for dissolving the remains of the welfare state, while proponents herald it as the “capitalist road to communism.” The version of basic income we get will depend, more than policies with a clearer ideological valence, on the political forces that shape it.

Which is why the prospect of pushing for basic income in the United States right now—when the right controls everything—should be cause for alarm: UBI’s supporters on the left should proceed with caution.

But that doesn’t mean basic income is a lost cause. To the contrary, capitalism’s inability to provide a means of making a decent living for the over 7 billion people currently alive is one of its most glaring defects—and one of the most significant opportunities for the left to offer an alternative. A universal basic income, though not the only answer, might point us in the right direction.

Raising the floor

Unsurprisingly, labor unions have been slow to get on board with a policy that suggests jobs may not be necessary. But as interest grows, UBI has picked up at least one convert from the labor movement: Andy Stern, the former head of the SEIU, whose 2016 book, Raising the Floor, explains why basic income is the way to “invent a better future.”

Stern has long positioned himself as a visionary ready to lead the labor movement out of stagnant traditionalism toward new horizons. Within the labor movement, though, he’s a controversial figure criticized for being too friendly with the boss. He’s worked with Walmart on healthcare reform and with Paul Ryan on fiscal responsibility; in a recent interview with Vox, he described the labor movement as having a “boutique role” in representing employees. It was only a matter of time before he made powerful friends in the tech world.

Upon leaving SEIU in 2010, Stern describes catching the tech bug. He switches from a PC to a Mac and starts Googling; in industry rags like TechCrunch and the fringe-futurist site Singularity Hub, he reads about robot financial advisors, robot journalists, robot bartenders, robot hotel cleaners, robot guards, and of course, sex robots. In one jaw-dropping aside, he compares the number of people playing the online game “Mists of Pandaria” to the ranks of organized labor: “It had taken the entire American labor movement decades to achieve that much member power.” What a time to be alive! And yet—what will happen to the 47 percent of workers whose jobs are purportedly at risk of automation? Stern, whose last book aimed to make America a “country that works,” began to worry about the coming “jobless future.” He doesn’t mean there will be literally no jobs, of course—just not enough.

To figure out what to do, he talks to a lot of people. Stern talks to the investment banker Steven Berkenfeld—an executive at Lehman Brothers at the time of the 2008 crash, whose qualification to assess the future is questionable at best—who declares that “to put people over profits in this country is almost un-American.” He talks to Carl Camden, the CEO of Kelly Services, the original temp agency—or, as Stern euphemizes, the company that “first saw the business potential in temporary employment.” (The company became famous for calling its temp secretaries “Kelly Girls”; one 1971 ad proclaimed that a Kelly Girl “Never takes a vacation or holiday. Never asks for a raise. Never costs you a dime for slack time.” And of course, “Never fails to please.”) He talks to David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell International, who says that jobs are just “going to come”—they always have before.

Stern also talks to a few labor organizers, like Saket Soni of the National Guestworker Alliance and Ai-jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, to understand the “dark side of the gig economy”—the side represented by day laborers sleeping rough in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and being paid a fraction of the money allocated to construction contractors. To understand growing economic inequality, he reads Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, sort of. (“Like most of the people who purchased the book, I read very little of it,” he admits.) He hires a woman from Kenya to transcribe an interview, for which he’s billed $4.67, and uses TaskRabbit to dismantle and ship his bike across the country, for which he pays $80 plus shipping. He eventually comes to the conclusion that the jobs that will remain after the robots come will be the best and the worst—Google programmers and Uber drivers. The latter will be so bad—so insecure and so poorly paid—that the swelling ranks of people forced to resort to them will need something else to get by. That’s where basic income comes in: as the backstop of the gig economy.

A utopia for realists

The Dutch journalist and basic income advocate Rutger Bregman’s case for UBI, meanwhile, is pitched not as a way to stave off a still grimmer future, but as our best shot at utopia. Advances in science, technology, and medicine mean that the prospects for human thriving are better than ever—and yet political ambitions have faded into technocratic tweaks, dreams of the good life answered with waves of consumer junk. Is this really the best we can do? Why is it that when just about anything seems technically possible, we seem unable to imagine anything genuinely inspiring? For Bregman, basic income represents the way to true human fulfillment—the post-work utopia that we need and that we can, in fact, achieve. It is a utopia for realists.

This utopia—to not have to work so much or so hard; to pass time in leisure rather than labor; to do what one wants rather than what one’s told—is perhaps the oldest of all. The medieval Land of Plenty was, in the words of one poet, where “money has been exchanged for the good life,” and “he who sleeps the longest earns the most.” And for more than a century, it’s seemed within reach. Karl Marx, Benjamin Franklin, John Stuart Mill, Oscar Wilde, and John Maynard Keynes all looked at soaring productivity with the certainty that it would soon be high enough to satisfy people’s needs and wants with just a few hours of work a week. In the 1960s, with automation on the rise, it seemed so imminent that the question wasn’t whether people would have more leisure time—it was what they would do with it. Would we get bored? Waste all our time in front of the TV? Lose our purpose in life?

Such worries now seem charmingly naive. “We aren’t bored to death,” Bregman warns, “we’re working ourselves to death.” But it’s not because the likes of Keynes and Mill were wrong—they just didn’t account for politics. Instead of increasing leisure for working people, productivity gains went into growing profits for owners of capital. The 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession only made things worse. These days, instead of relaxing into a life of leisure, most people are working more in a desperate attempt to cling to their jobs, or working less than they need to support themselves.

Work is bad enough on its own. But Bregman argues convincingly that working less could also help solve any number of other problems—stress, climate change, disasters, unemployment, wealth inequality. In fact, increased leisure time is as close to a silver bullet as they come: “is there anything that working less does not solve?” Bregman asks. Instead of making people work to earn a living, then, why not just give them money—a universal basic income? Experiments consistently show that having adequate income makes you happier, healthier, and even smarter. Giving poor people money—whether it’s to homeless men in London or quarry workers in Nairobi—turns out to be good for everyone. It reduces crime, child mortality, malnutrition, and teen pregnancy, and increases gender equality, educational outcomes, and economic growth.

But while Bregman is utopian, he isn’t in thrall to technofuturists: he argues that to understand automation and its effects, we’d do better to study history than speculate about the future. After all, the robots have been coming for decades. The current surge of interest in basic income, too, has historical precedent: there was a wave of interest in the 1930s, and a larger swell in the late 1960s and early ’70s; in 1969 Richard Nixon even proposed a bill (though it was never passed) for a form of basic income he called “negative income tax.”

The 1970s also saw a smattering of projects putting basic income into action, with five trials occurring in North America. The most significant, a five-year federally-funded experiment with basic income in the town of Dauphin, Canada, in the 1970s was an unexpected success across the board. When people were guaranteed an income above the poverty line (around $19,000 for a family of four), they stayed in school longer and spent more time with their families, while hospitalizations, domestic violence, and mental health complaints declined. In four experimental programs across the United States around the same time, meanwhile, people consistently worked fewer paid hours and put most of their spare time into parenting, independent artistic pursuits, and education. It turns out that people aren’t indolent when they aren’t forced to work (though would it be such a terrible thing if they were?)—they just do the kinds of work they actually want to do.

Bregman’s case for UBI is powerful, animated by humanist principles and bolstered by pragmatic evidence. It’s so convincing, in fact, that one’s left wondering only why, if basic income is such an obvious good, it doesn’t already exist. The problem isn’t that basic income doesn’t sound good enough—it’s that it sounds too good to be true. This, in fact, is one of basic income’s biggest political challenges: getting people to take it seriously. Politicians tend to be wary of endorsing such a seemingly pie-in-the-sky idea. A much discussed referendum in Switzerland last summer proposed a basic income at a significantly higher baseline—around €2,300—but resulted in a resounding defeat, with 77 percent of voters rejecting the plan. But none of the major national parties backed the initiative, which was understood more as a publicity tool for UBI than an actual campaign.

The programs of the 1970s, too, foundered on the shoals of politics. When a conservative government came to power in Canada in 1979, it scrapped the basic income experiment before it had even analyzed the results. In the United States, interest in UBI twisted into suspicion of welfare recipients under the rise of the New Right in the late 1970s. Though basic income went nowhere in the end, the robots stayed. And we’re still living with what happens when automation isn’t accompanied by a political response: stagnant wages, a crumbling middle class, declining union power, rising inequality.

Yet it’s curious that UBI doesn’t today seem to suffer from the same political challenges as those described by Michał Kalecki in his classic 1943 essay “Political Aspects of Full Employment.” Kalecki argues that the challenges to achieving full employment are not economic but political: if people can make a living without taking whatever job they’re offered, at whatever pay, the power that comes with the ability to fire—the most significant power a boss has—diminishes sharply. Basic income would do the same by virtue of providing a dependable source of income; thus its labor-left advocates point out that it would essentially act as a permanent strike fund.

Given that, why do bosses—at least the ones in Silicon Valley—seem to like UBI so much? Some of their enthusiasm may simply be well-meaning naiveté: as Sam Altman of Y Combinator says, “50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people”—as if this hasn’t been one of the defining features of capitalism all along. Presumably freedom from the need to earn a living will unleash people’s entrepreneurial spirit, their inner innovator—rather than simply give us the chance to fish, hunt, and criticize just as we please. The view of UBI as the foundation of the gig economy, meanwhile, is a tacit acknowledgement that capitalism can’t pay its full costs—a transfer of responsibility for a living wage from private employers to the public. Then there’s an even worse case for UBI as pressure outlet: Stern argues that basic income supporters would do well to convince the anxious rich that it’s their best bet to avoid “the guillotine” amidst growing inequality and desperation.

But you don’t need to be Robespierre to be suspicious of a proposal that explicitly announces its intent to protect the rich from working-class rage—particularly when one of the major questions of UBI is where the free money will come from. Stern cautions UBI supporters against advocating a “soak the rich” tax on political grounds: the broad coalition that UBI requires will be impossible if the rich are against it from the start. (Alas, this is already the metric for most policies.) Instead, he proposes to fund UBI by cashing out major welfare programs (food stamps, housing assistance, the earned income tax credit) and charging a value-added tax on consumer goods; more tentatively, he considers a wealth tax, a financial transaction tax, and cuts to military spending. But funding a basic income by cannibalizing existing welfare programs and imposing regressive consumption taxes perversely places the burden of subsidizing low wages on the poor and working-class people making them in the first place.

That this is a proposal put forth by a former labor leader is a measure of the left’s weakness. And indeed, Stern’s view of labor’s political prospects is remarkably dim. In fact, UBI is explicitly posed as a solution to the problem of declining union power: “It was time for me to look beyond unions for answers,” Stern declares in the first thirty pages. Instead, he proposes a Basic Income Party that could run candidates in every Congressional district and threaten a tax strike—the weapon of the wealthy—until Congress agrees to vote on a basic income package. It’s obviously a non-starter. But it reveals the limits of Stern-style unionism: start out collaborating with Walmart on healthcare, and soon you’ll hope only for the dwindling state to throw a few bucks at the reserve army of Uber drivers tasked with ferrying the rich from one gentrified enclave to the next. Instead of fighting off the dystopian future, settle into the interregnum of the present, with all its morbid symptoms. But as the writer Ben Tarnoff has pointed out, the places where technological development hasn’t produced a dystopian, jobless future (like Sweden) don’t just have technology, they also have strong unions and a robust welfare state. The kind of starkly unequal society that Stern and other UBI futurists fear wouldn’t just come about because the robots arrived—it would come about because only a few people owned them.

Recognizing this, Bregman explicitly advocates “massive redistribution” of money, time, and robots—that is, of income, work, and the means of production. All wealth is socially produced, he argues, and so it should be shared accordingly. It’s not so much that this time is different—it’s that we have the chance to make it so. Though he stops short of inciting us to seize the robots outright, he advocates taxes on the wealthy and on financial transactions as a means to both fund basic income and disincentivize certain activities—like banking—that make money “without creating anything of value.”

Though Bregman’s version of UBI is far more appealing on the merits, his political program is disappointing. Ideas change the world, Bregman declares, and UBI is such an obviously good idea that we just need to spread the word. The last line of the book belongs to Keynes, the book’s implicit hero, who famously said of ideas, “indeed, the world is ruled by little else.” But of course, it’s ruled by many other things—money and power chief among them. The fifteen-hour work week Keynes predicted didn’t come to pass because the idea alone wasn’t enough. More importantly, Keynes was talking about ideology rather than ideas per se, about the systems of thought that underpin our assumptions whether or not we know it, not just clever notions.

And the problem with basic income is that it tends to be read as an idea without an ideology. Bregman describes the pro-UBI movement in Europe as grassroots and “cross-ideological” in character. At the local level where most programs are proposed, the debate is largely pragmatic. The program in Utrecht, for example, is known as “Weten Wat Werkt” or “Knowing What Works,” in acknowledgment that many see the current welfare system—which even in Europe has ceded more and more ground to workfare—as unaffordable and dysfunctional. But of course, what counts as pragmatic depends on the existing balance of political power. Even Bregman’s own position, though solidly on the left, shifts between advocating for UBI as what the Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs described as the “capitalist road to communism” and the capitalist road to . . . saving capitalism from itself.

Stern’s post-ideological stance is even more blatant: at one point he imagines an exchange between the libertarian political thinker Charles Murray, whose 1997 book The Bell Curve famously argued for racial differences in intelligence based on genetics, and Martin Luther King, Jr. He argues that their disagreements about the relationship of basic income to the role of the state in society are simply diversions from their shared idea of giving people money. But these disagreements get to the heart of the matter. The debate about basic income is about the obligations we have to one another, the origins of property, the ends of human life, the shape of our society. And when these broader visions are translated into policy, they don’t simply suggest a shared plan to give people money—they offer drastically different accounts of how much money people should get, where it should come from, and who should get it.

The leftist-futurist version of basic income is often described as a non-reformist reform, per Van Parijs’s quip: a goal that’s achievable within capitalism but that has the potential to change the conditions of capitalism enough to lead beyond it. Basic income is the fully automated monorail to luxury communism, where we all own the robots and everyone gets what they need. This UBI isn’t a backstop for bad jobs, but the material condition for human fulfillment. But not just any income will do: for it to be a genuine step toward a post-work society, it has to be genuinely universal and unconditional, provide enough income to actually live on, and supplement rather than replace the welfare state. This UBI is the one that draws from the Marxist feminists who pointed out the unwaged labor of social reproduction in the 1970s, the working-class women of color who fought for the rights of welfare recipients in the 1960s, and the architects of the Freedom Budget who attempted to translate the gains of the civil rights movement into a program for economic justice. They wanted not just a basic income but a sufficient one—one adequate not merely to survive, but to live a decent life, and maybe even a good one.

The right-wing version of basic income, by contrast, wherein paltry lumps of cash replace public services and goods, is a UBI not worth having. This version of basic income is a mechanism to streamline—a more accurate word might be “gut”—the welfare state in the name of libertarian ideas of freedom. People know what they need better than the state does, the argument goes; how people will be able to afford healthcare on $12,000 a year is less often addressed.

Who exactly should get a basic income is another question. It’s sometimes called a “citizen’s dividend,” explicitly limiting recipients by nationality. More generally the “universal” is aspirational: basic income programs have only seriously been proposed at the national or local levels. So, as with other welfare programs, debates over basic income will undoubtedly be bound up with questions about nationality and migration. In the European context, we should be wary of the deployment of basic income to solidify Fortress Europe as the refugee crisis intensifies. In the debates over the Swiss program, for example, Luzi Stamm, a member of parliament for the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, said he could imagine supporting UBI—but only for the Swiss. “Theoretically, if Switzerland were an island, the answer is yes,” he said at the time. “But with open borders, it’s a total impossibility, especially for Switzerland, with a high living standard.”

In the United States, meanwhile, the combination of nativism and libertarianism that makes up the Trump coalition is particularly dangerous: it’s hard to imagine any way a basic income program implemented in the Trump era would be anything but a vehicle for dismantling the remains of the welfare state while simultaneously reinforcing nationalism by excluding non-citizens from shared prosperity. That said, basic income doesn’t seem likely to be on the agenda of the Trump administration anytime soon. Instead of inventing the future, Trump’s move is to borrow from the past via boondoggles like the Carrier deal, which give public money to private companies in an attempt to revive a mid-century imaginary where men had real factory jobs. Welfare programs, meanwhile, are likely to come under renewed attack from a Republican administration ready to slash government spending.

The apparent success of Trump’s appeal to mid-century nostalgia, though, has thrown cold water on utopian visions. After a few years of UBI flirtation, the American left seems to be returning to full employment—rather than full unemployment—as a demand, particularly via the idea of a federal job guarantee. There’s plenty of useful work to be done, of course, and like income, jobs should be distributed as evenly as possible. Remaking the ideology of work may be too heavy a lift for the next few years.

Still, we shouldn’t stop pushing back against reifying work as the source of both income and social worth.

Ongoing expropriation and proletarianization have left billions worldwide in a condition of what historian Michael Denning calls “wageless life,” rendered surplus to capital’s needs and struggling to scrape by in a system that starts “not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living.” And so while basic income sounds like a program for rich countries—a luxury made possible by a certain level of prosperity—it may be even more promising in places where it seems most unaffordable. In recent years UBI pilot programs have rolled out in Namibia, Kenya, and Uganda, mostly funded by NGOs; more generally, cash transfer programs, which aim to diminish poverty by giving poor people money—though often with specific criteria or restrictions—are the latest fad in development. Elsewhere, public support provides more in the way of livelihoods than do private wages: the anthropologist James Ferguson notes that more South Africans receive income from government welfare programs, whether child allowances or disability aid, than from waged labor. Basic income, Ferguson argues, may be the way to achieve social welfare in countries where the prospect of job creation on a scale adequate to the population is little more than a fantasy.

Of course, the above model, based on postwar growth in the United States and Western Europe, is now a fantasy here too. Donald Trump will fail to make America great again in the way he’s promised. The factory jobs aren’t coming back, and neither are 4 percent growth rates. Even the desperate deals to keep individual plants running won’t stave off the robots: Carrier, for example, has already said it will put most of the money it promised to invest in its Indiana plant into automation. Which is why, despite the dangers of UBI, it remains an important time for the left to develop a view of a society less oriented around work: as the futility of Fordist nostalgia becomes more and more apparent, both here and around the globe, the left should seize the opportunity to push for a different view of what work should be, how much of it we should do, and what role it should play in our lives.

That will take time and a broad coalition—but not the one that Stern describes between the ultra-rich and the masses of gig workers, or even of post-ideological rationalists described by Bregman. Instead, the elements of a staunchly left and genuinely political coalition—comprised of workers who need more leverage and the unemployed, those fighting for a sustainable environment and racial justice, care workers both waged and unwaged—are nascent but increasingly visible.

The left hasn’t seriously organized around welfare rights for years. But in the coming years it will be more important than ever to defend what remains of U.S. social provision from Paul Ryan and company, particularly given the nasty racial tack that fight will undoubtedly take. And we can’t defend welfare just as a backstop for vulnerable and unlucky members of society, or as a handout to the benighted poor, but as a fundamental and universal good for all. In other words, we should advocate for the exact opposite of the Clintonian welfare reform programs of the 1990s, and the only kind of welfare program that can build a broad and universal constituency for social provision rather than marking out the undeserving poor.

A recent New York Times op-ed argued for UBI as a kind of reparations for decades of unpaid work done by women, echoing socialist-feminist arguments about the value of social reproduction. The Movement for Black Lives endorsed basic income as part of a reparations program, in the model of a new Freedom Budget. The labor movement in the United States has understandably focused on higher wages, but it can—and must—also revive the demand for shorter hours and more leisure. Basic income isn’t the only way to make that demand, and it isn’t even a necessary part of it—but its utopian elements can help drive a more visionary agenda for labor.

None of the UBI proposals we hear today—in Canada, the United Kingdom, or in France—is likely to be quite the basic income imagined by luxury communists (there aren’t enough of them to win an election yet), but they’re a start.

Utopia is possible. If we want it, though, we’ll need to make it a part of the demands and visions of the left movements we build over the next few years. Because we can’t just invent the future—we’re going to have to fight for it.

Alyssa Battistoni is a PhD candidate in political science at Yale University and an editor at Jacobin magazine.

Photo by (a)artwork

The post The False Promise of Universal Basic Income appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Jason Hickel: Every student learns about Magna Carta, the ancient scroll that enshrined the rights of barons against the arbitrary authority of England’s monarchs. But most have never heard of its arguably more important twin, the Charter of the Forest, issued two years later in 1217. This short but powerful document guaranteed the rights of commoners to common lands, which they could use for farming, grazing, water and wood. It gave official recognition to a right that humans nearly everywhere had long just presupposed: that no one should be debarred from the resources necessary for livelihood.

But this right – the right of habitation – came under brutal attack beginning in the 15^th century, when wealthy nobles began fencing off common lands for their own profit. Over the next few centuries, the enclosure movement, as it came to be known, shifted tens of millions of acres into private hands, displacing much of the country’s population. Excluded from the basic means of survival, most were left with no choice but to sell themselves for wages for the first time.

And it wasn’t only England. The same process unfolded across Asia and Africa and most of the global south as European colonisers staked private claim to lands and forests and waterways that were previously held in common, leaving millions dispossessed. In much of the colonial world the goal, or at least the effect, was to drive people into the capitalist labour market, where, in exchange for low wages and poor conditions, they and their descendants would power the mines, plantations and sweatshops for export to the west.

As the era of colonialism came to an end, the governments of many newly independent nations sought to reverse these patterns of historical dispossession with land reform programmes. But they were quickly forced to abandon this approach by big foreign landowners and international creditors. Instead, the new plan for eradicating poverty – the dream of development – came to hinge on drawing people ever deeper into the labour market. Jobs came to be hailed as the salvation of the poor: as the World Bank puts it, “jobs are the surest pathway out of poverty”.

But now this promise is beginning to look hollow. With the rise of robots, robust employment is no longer a realistic hope. We know that automation is a real threat to jobs in the global north, but the threat is much worse in the south. The main industries there, such as small electronics and textile manufacturing, are some of the easiest to automate. According to a United Nations report, up to two-thirds of jobs in developing countries could disappear in the near future.

This is all bitterly painful, particularly for the postcolonial world. First they were dispossessed of their land and promised jobs instead. Now they will be dispossessed of their jobs, and many will be left with literally no way to survive. Their dispossession will be absolute. Technological unemployment will almost certainly reverse the modest gains against poverty that have been made over the past few decades, and hunger will likely rise.

Governments are scrambling to respond, and they don’t have many options. But one stands out as by far the most promising: a universal basic income.

Once a fringe idea, basic income is now speeding its way into the public imagination. Finland is running a two-year experiment in basic income. Utrecht in the Netherlands is conducting a trial, too. Y Combinator is trying it out in Oakland in the US. Scotland looks likely to follow suit. And cash transfer programmes have already proven to be successful in Namibia, India and dozens of other developing countries, sparking what some scholars have billed as “a development revolution from the global south”. In Brazil, to cite just one example, cash transfers helped to cut poverty rates in half in less than a decade.

But the success of basic income – in both the north and the south – all depends on how we frame it. Will it be cast as a form of charity by the rich? Or will it be cast as a right for all?

Thomas Paine was among the first to argue that a basic income should be introduced as a kind of compensation for dispossession. In his brilliant 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice, he pointed out that “the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race”. It was unfair that a few should enclose it for their own benefit, leaving the vast majority without their rightful inheritance. As far as Paine was concerned, this violated the most basic principles of justice.

Knowing that land reform would be politically impossible (for it would “derange any present possessors”), Paine proposed that those with property should pay a “ground rent” – a small tax on the yields of their land – into a fund that would then be distributed to everyone as unconditional basic income. For Paine, this would be a right: “justice, not charity”. It was a powerful idea, and it gained traction in the 19^th century when American philosopher Henry George proposed a “land value tax” that would fund an annual dividend for every citizen.

The beauty of this approach is that it functions as a kind of de-enclosure. It’s like bringing back the ancient Charter of the Forest and the right of access to the commons. It restores the right to livelihood – the right of habitation.

Critics of basic income often get hung up on how to fund it. But once we come to see it as linked to the commons, that problem becomes more tractable. In the US state of Alaska natural resources are considered a commons, owned collectively by the people, so every resident receives an annual dividend from the state’s oil revenues.

The Alaska model is popular and effective, and scholars have pointed out that the same approach could be applied to other natural resources, such as forests and fisheries. It could even be applied to the air, with a carbon tax whose yields would be distributed as a dividend to all. And the upshot is that this approach helps protect commons against overuse, giving our planet some room to regenerate.

Implementing this idea will require political will – but it is far from impossible. In fact, some research indicates that it might be politically easier to implement than other social policies. Even in the US, leading policymakers – including former treasury secretary Henry Paulson and two former Republican secretaries of state – have just put forward a carbon tax and dividend proposal. The idea of a basic income also has broad and growing support from high-profile figures including Elon Musk and Bernie Sanders.

There are risks, of course. Some worry that a basic income will only increase the nativism that is spreading across the world right now. Who will qualify for the transfers? People won’t want to share with immigrants.

It’s a valid concern. But one way to address it is to think in more universal terms. The earth’s natural bounty belongs to all, as Paine pointed out. If the commons know no borders, why should a commons-linked income? Indeed, why should people in resource-rich nations get more than their neighbours in resource-poor ones? A tax on resources and carbon around the world could go into a global fund, in trust for every human. Dividends could be set at $5 per day – the minimum necessary for basic nutrition – corrected for each nation’s purchasing power. Or we could set it at each nation’s poverty line, or some ratio thereof. Scholars are already thinking about how such a system could be designed.

We already know, from existing experiments, that a basic income can yield impressive results – reducing extreme poverty and inequality, stimulating local economies, and freeing people from having to accept slave-like working conditions simply in order to stay alive. If implemented more broadly, it might help eliminate “bullshit jobs” and slash unnecessary production, granting much-needed relief to the planet. We would still work, of course, but our work would be more likely to be useful and meaningful, while any miserable but necessary jobs, like cleaning the streets, would pay more to attract willing workers, making menial work more dignified.

But perhaps most importantly of all, a basic income might defeat the scarcity mindset that has seeped so deep into our culture, freeing us from the imperatives of competition and allowing us to be more open and generous people. If extended universally, across borders, it might help instil a sense of solidarity – that we’re all in this together, and all have an equal right to the planet. It might ease the anxieties that gave us Brexit and Trump, and take the wind out of the fascist tendencies rising elsewhere in nativism that is spreading across much of the world.

We’ll never know until we try. And try we must, or brace ourselves for a 21^st century of almost certain misery.

Cross-posted from the Guardian.

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Additional image by Mr Higgs

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