Volume 1, Issue 1 - Retrospective: A Capitalist Road to Communism - Twenty Years After

There has been a major shift in welfare policies in the developed world towards activation, decentralization, and privatization. The 1996 US welfare reform welfare for single mother families was no longer an entitlement and there were stiff work requirements enforced by sanctions and time limits. In Western Europe, although there is variation, welfare has become conditional for social assistance recipients – the "socially excluded." Social assistance is administered at the municipal level, which contracts with private companies. Caseworkers are supposed to make individualized contracts emphasizing work activities. This paper examines the field-level data in several US programs and finds that there is a symbiotic relationship between governments and contractors; caseworkers, whether public or private, focus on process rather than substantive plans; government does not question the data; contracts are imposed; the most employable are placed; and the most vulnerable are sanctioned or otherwise not allowed on welfare. Research in some European countries is showing similar results – activation programs are difficult to administer and increase the risks for the most vulnerable. Individualized contracts are a myth, given administrative constraints and client dependency. The paper argues that the difficulties of activation are an additional reason for a basic income guarantee. The socially excluded will have an exit option and well-being will be improved.

In this paper, the author argues that globalist egalitarians may face a dilemma between a generous welfare policy such as a national basic income (NBI) for all residents, and an egalitarian immigration policy such as open borders, because NBI may have a welfare magnet effect that generates pressure for tightening of borders or restricting NBI to citizens only. However the case for open borders is weaker to the extent that global transfers (such as might occur with a regional basic income or global basic income) address the economic inequities and motives for migration. In the absence of such global or regional institutions, NBI advocates can justify border restriction and a waiting period for BI entitlement, to the extent necessary to prevent a worsening of the condition of the least advantaged compatriots, as temporary measures on a path toward global justice.

In most OECD countries trade unions remain key players in the field of welfare state reform. And yet, surprisingly little attention has been paid by proponents of a universal basic income (BI) to the very position of workers unions on the radical reform that they are advocating. This paper tackles this issue in three complementary ways. First, it offers a brief overview of the (scarce) literature on basic income and trade unions. Second, it focuses on plausible arguments that could be used by trade unions to oppose or, alternatively, support a basic income. Finally, empirical information collected in Belgium, Canada, and the Netherlands is used to test the robustness of the theoretical assumptions. These investigations demonstrate that trade unions are far from being natural allies of BI advocates within developed welfare states. As evidenced by the Belgian case, they can even constitute a significant obstacle to the political progression of the idea.

This article was originally published in Theory and Society 15 (5), 1986, pp. 635–655. The editors of Basic Income Studies are grateful to Springer Verlag for permission to reprint this article as lead piece in this retrospective. A first draft of this text was written in May 1983 by Van Parijs under the title "The Capitalist Transition to Communism: A Radical Alternative" and was circulated for discussion at the third meeting of the September Group (London, September 1983). It aimed to establish a link between Van Parijs's own first formulation of the argument for basic income ("L'allocation universelle," Ecolo-Infos, 16 February 1983) and van der Veen's formal model of the transition from socialism to communism ("From Contribution to Needs," Acta Politica 19, 1984). A significantly expanded version, co authored by van der Veen and Van Parijs, was finalized in the Spring of 1985, and provided the lead piece for the symposium published in Theory and Society 15(5), 1986, with contributions by Johannes Berger, Joseph Carens, Jon Elster, Alec Nove, Adam Przeworski and Erik Olin Wright, and a reply by van der Veen and Van Parijs ("Universal Grants Versus Socialism"). The piece was subsequently republished, in the original or in translation, in Van Parijs's Marxism Recycled (Cambridge, 1993), in Umbau des Sozialstaats (Opielka and Ostner, eds., Essen, 1987,) and in Zona Abierta (46/47, 1988).