Economic Sovereignty as the Democratization of Work: The Role of Basic Income

2.1 Basic income as a post-neoliberal democratizing project

Recently, “citizen rescue plans” harbouring packages of social rights have been presented by post-crash social movements in various regions of the world as a way to confer upon individuals and groups such democratizing capacity to “enter, undominatedly stay, exit and restart”. These “citizen rescue plans” have made appeal to the potentialities social and economic rights have in terms of empowering social actors with adequate tools to erect an interdependence that effectively respects their wishes and promotes their projects and life plans. Interestingly, basic income has played an important role within these “citizen rescue plans” in cities such as Barcelona, Madrid, Milano and New York, among others (Casassas et al., 2015; Fumagalli & Intelligence Precaria, 2010).

Let us put it in historical perspective, as it is only by analysing their context one can understand how and why transformative projects emerge and take a certain conceptual shape. As it is well known, the so-called “post-World War II social deal” or “Fordist deal” established what follows. On the one hand, working classes were offered relevant degrees of socioeconomic security through the guarantee of jobs with decent salaries to the male population and the implementation of public policies that had to come into play in cases of misfortune and to cover certain social needs. Of course, such achievement, which was deeply rooted in union fights and anti-fascist movements, meant a certain victory for working populations, as they managed to curb the harshness of capitalist labour markets and living conditions. On the other hand, these working populations had to explicitly renounce to the old central goal of contemporary labour movements, namely: the control over production. The fight both for property and for the organisation of work within the firm disappeared from the political agenda of workers’ social and political organisations. Needless to say, this constituted a huge defeat for the labour movement, as aiming at controlling the production had always meant aiming at controlling what to do, how to live, what to be. In other words, that social deal meant a huge loss of economic sovereignty (Casassas et al., 2015). ^[4]

But today the deal is broken. In fact, it has been unilaterally broken by neoliberal elites since the mid seventies. Also, the dispossessing nature of this turn of capitalism has intensified with the elite-driven response to the economic crisis we have witnessed since 2008. In effect, neoliberal politics have entailed labour reforms undermining workers’ capacity to foresee, plan and unfold stable life plans; the loss or the erosion of social rights, and the increase of precariousness. In this context, economic security is no longer guaranteed by labour markets, either because you cannot access them – unemployment rates have shot up – or because you do not get from them what you really need to earn a living and help support your household – this is the case of the working-poor. In addition, this scenario implies an increase of women’s subservience, as less social rights means more exploitation within the household, where women tend to provide all in-kind services the State was expected to offer. ^[5]

The big societal question that arises here can be synthesized as follows: what to do when a deal is broken? More precisely: what can the wronged betrayed side do when a deal is unilaterally broken? As said before, a deal tends to include a victory and a renunciation – this was clearly the case of post-World War II social deal. Since the recovery of the conditions that shaped the post-World War II social deal seems to be politically unfeasible – the economic elites do not seem to be willing to return to the sort of taxation regimes and public policies schemes that characterized the deal in question –, the wronged betrayed side may be feeling legitimized to try to dust off what it had to renounce as a result of the signature and implementation of the old deal, namely: the control over production, over the many ways in which we humans operate in order to collectively satisfy our needs.

But how to raise the question of the possible ways to conceive of and carry out the control over production under the circumstances of the present? Of course, I am not suggesting here that basic income constitutes a unique, univocal and comprehensive response to this challenge; what I wish to uphold is that basic income can help return the control over (re)production – over our whole lives – back to the societal agenda, because it helps recover something working populations lost as a result of the old Fordist deal: bargaining power. In effect, by unconditionally guaranteeing people’s social existence, basic income confers upon social actors the capacity to “say no” (Widerquist, 2013) to lives they don’t wish to live and to set up work and social arrangements in a way that is really “of their own”. At least, this is how the basic income debate has taken shape within social movements in the abovementioned cities: Barcelona, Madrid, Milano and New York (Casassas et al., 2015; Casassas and Manjarín, 2014).

2.2 Democracy-enhancing bargaining power

In other words, basic income can help contradict the dispossessing nature of capitalism, which Marxist theorist David Harvey (2003) has seen as a process of “accumulation by dispossession” and which Karl Marx himself so thoroughly described in chapter 24 of the first volume of Das Kapital. One might object that what Marx maintained is that capitalist dispossession leaves us without means of production, not only without income. However, basic income is not “only” income: because of its unconditionality – and thanks to the bargaining power deriving from it –, basic income is a sort of income that is convertible or translatable in terms of:

1. time to conceive of (and put into practice) a “life of one’s own”, be it individually or collectively – and if collectively, time to resort to the mediation of the State, unions and other organizations, and/or to create and nourish various forms of self-management;

2. a capacity to explore alternative options and to take promising risks – the positive correlation between risk propensity and freedom-enhancing bargaining power should not go unnoticed (Casassas and Loewe, 2001; Elster, 1989); and

3. the “right to credit”, in the twofold sense of the “right to financial resources” and the “right to social trust”: a constant stream of income should also be understood as the politically guaranteed right to second, third and subsequent opportunities to trigger and sustain (re)productive projects of one’s own, which is extremely important so as to build a truly inclusive and democratic socioeconomic environment. ^[6]

This is why it can be said that basic income is not “only” income, but a relevant set of resources that can be used when it comes to organize production and reproduction according to our own wishes, desires and life plans. In effect, bargaining power deriving from that unconditional income stream allows individuals and groups to try other forms of work, other ways of setting up productive and reproductive arrangements, other social relations within a world to be effectively made in common.

Let us explore a few spheres where such a democracy-enhancing bargaining power might unfold:

1. Within the field of wage-earning work, individuals and groups need to be empowered both to exit those spaces when employers arbitrarily interfere in their daily life and, in case they opt for staying, to credibly threaten the employers and negotiate better working and living conditions. In effect, “workplace democracy” cannot be reduced to a gift kind-hearted employers capriciously decide to offer to their employees, as it would put the latter in the situation of those slaves that are treated with respect but nevertheless remain slaves, that is, alieni iuris. If the goal is effective workplace democracy, employees need unconditional resources to face bargaining processes with real opportunities to co-determine the running of the productive unit.

2. But productive life can go beyond the walls of the capitalist firm. Workers need also to be enabled to decide with some fellows to stop performing wage-earning work for others and constitute a cooperative self-managed productive space where they might count on higher degrees of control over what to do and how to do it. The decommodification of labour force and the creation of productive spaces of this sort would constitute another expression of the kind of workplace democracy basic income would help consolidate. ^[7]

3. Economic democracy should also reach the domestic sphere. In effect, the democratic organization of all the work that needs to be done in all domains of our societies very crucially includes women’s capacity to obtain fairer division of tasks within the realm of reproduction and care. The unconditional nature of basic income could constitute a domestic counterweight for women to question and dispute current sexual division of work and to propose and, if needed, impose other care-related arrangements. Also, the individual nature of basic income – basic income is not paid to households, but to each person – would avoid patriarchal forms of intra-family domination. ^[8] In sum, economic democracy is not possible without solid forms of “household democracy”, and many reasons assist us to think that basic income could play an important role in promoting it.

4. More generally, our lives include many activities that are not paid by labour markets – or only intermittently. Many forms of care work are a good example of it, but we can expand the analysis to other fields such as education all along the life cycle and artistic work. Also, the mere act of trying to pave the way for one’s professional life – and to stay in there, nourish it and reconnect with it in case of misfortune – means loads of time of unpaid work: investment in experience and professional recognition, networking, etc. ^[9] A very clear example of this can be found in the activity of those who set up a business or a self-managed cooperative and need to work with no or little revenues until they reach the breakeven point. In all those cases, the link to the sources of payment of work are cut, which means that social actors lose an important asset – income – for them to negotiate the terms and conditions of the ways in which they perform all those activities – care work, lifelong education, artistic work, entrepreneurial tasks, etc. If economic democracy has to do with the capacity to co-determine what you do and how you do it, you need to be materially protected when you legitimately decide to (temporarily or permanently) stop your relationship with labour markets. Basic income can offer such an activating protection.

5. The political sphere constitutes another space where we perform many forms of (paid or unpaid) work that is highly valuable both for individuals and for the society as a whole. Either under direct participatory democracy schemes or within indirect representative institutions, one needs resources like time and some initial endowments in order to be able to make genuine choices with real effects. As 5th Century BC Athenian revolutionary democrats introduced a remuneration – the misthon– for those who had been elected to public office in order to secure their personal and therefore political independence (Raventós, 2007), basic income can constitute part of the material conditions of a free autonomous life within the many possible agoras of our time.

6. Finally, basic income can help shape these conglomerations of different types of work in a flexible way. The value of flexibility has often been embraced by managerial sectors aiming at reducing costs by eroding workers’ legal and institutional protections, which has often turned the discourse of flexibility into a suspicious strategy. However, we humans do need flexible lives where we autonomously perform different tasks according to our needs, which change all along our life cycle. When and how to do productive work and when and how to do care work? When and how to open up the doors to artistic or entrepreneurial work? And how much of these kinds of work do we want at each period of our lives? These questions need to be answered by individuals and groups, which means that the old Fordist imaginary of one single work for all your life needs to be questioned – and is actually questioned by contemporary social movements who see the (not too likely) return to monolithic lives around one activity as a clear sign of an important lack of economic sovereignty (Casassas et al., 2015; Standing, 2014). Again, an unconditional income stream would help enable people to command flexibility in an effectively secure way that would enhance their effective freedom to choose what work(s) to do, when, how, and in which proportion. ^[10] Marx and Engels (1845) had very famously and forcefully endorsed this aspiration in their German Ideology:

[...] As soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

It is for all these reasons that basic income can be presented as a tool favouring the normative goal that has been upheld in the first section of this paper: individuals and groups need democratic ways to enter, undominatedly stay, exit and restart all kinds of social relations, starting with work relations. The unconditionality of basic income confers upon ourselves relevant doses of bargaining power to oppose social relations we do not wish and to nourish and develop other social relations we wish to have but today escape us because we are forced to accept what is “on offer” out there. By guaranteeing our existence, basic income plays a crucial role when it comes to autonomously decide how to lead our lives.

And this is something that was not possible even under welfare-state capitalism, where the centrality of wage-earning work as the main mechanism for the structuring of our societies blocked a myriad of possible productive and reproductive arrangements that only emerge when work and income are decoupled and unconditional resources trigger many sorts of (paid and unpaid) life projects. As mentioned before, some social movements seem to have appreciated such potentiality of basic income in times of distress, where the old Fordist social deal has been unilaterally broken by the elites and an indignation that is deeply rooted on a feeling of betrayal nourishes unprecedented social and political ambitions (Casassas et al., 2015; Casassas and Manjarín, 2014). Marco Revelli (2010) made it crystal clear when he quoted the graffiti he found on a wall at the Politecnico di Torino: “Ci avete tolto troppo, adesso rivogliamo tutto” (“You’ve taken too much from us, now we want everything”). May basic income serve as a tool to help conquer such an “everything”?