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Basic Income as a Democratic Civil Right |
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by Franz Segbers
Email: mbatko (nospam) lycos.com (verified) |
29 May 2005
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The economic conditions in which the utopia of Aristotle or John M Keynes could become a real utopia objectively exist. We live under our real economic possibilities. The end of the work society is not the end of work but the transition to a really free society of citzens. |
BASIC INCOME AS A DEMOCRATIC CIVIL RIGHT FOR REAL FREEDOM
By Franz Segbers
[This address from December 16, 2004 at the church of St. Katherine is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.attac.de/genug-fuer-alle/dateien/GrundereinkommenSegbersDiakonie.pdf.]
0. Preliminary Remarks
For Christians, the Advent season is not the feast of a capitalist consumer frenzy to stimulate economic growth. Advent is firstly the time of practicing a basic missionary visionary attitude. In times of messianic or visionary drought, we need these times of exercise so our dreams are not lost. The principle “Whoever does not reach for the stars is also incapable of the next practical step” comes from Max Weber. We need principled orientations if politics should be more than adjustment to positional conditions. These orientations are like stars; they are unattainable but show the direction. The unconditional basic income is one of those perspectives that we must prepare today so they can become policy tomorrow.
1st THESIS: Hartz IV is a completely wrong track. Hartz IV is a basic security centered on paid work coupled to readiness for work. Citizens are disciplined in their conduct by the state (demanding and promoting).
The admonition of chancellor Schroeder was bellowed at the beginning of the Hartz reform project: “There is no right to laziness.” Just before the announcement of Agenda 2010, the popular or gutter press made its perspective very clear with “Florida-Rolf”: Work pressure, not social hammocks. The new regulation of Unemployment Benefits II brought about a change of paradigms in Germany. Whoever refuses reasonable work or integration measures will receive reduced unemployment benefits. The goal is compelling work at any price. In times of long-lasting unemployment, people are forced to labor markets that don’t make available any jobs. Therefore it is a misdiagnosis with fatal consequences when the dominant policy thinks one need only promote and urge the unemployed to accept so-called sub-market conditions. The victims of the labor market crisis are made into offenders.
For the one who finds no living wage paid work on the regular labor market, Hartz IV provides that benefit rights are only granted with a work obligation. The intensification to a work obligation ultimately becomes a work coercion.
When a society cannot guarantee that citizens can insure their existence themselves through paid work at dignified conditions, the obligation to paid work dissolves in thin air. The society only punishes people who cannot find any work with a life in poverty and increases the pressure on individual unemployed to accept paid work at any price without making available sufficient paid jobs.
Hartz IV really produces a state subsidized low-wage sector where employees receive a wage that is not enough for social participation. The result is poverty – with and without paid work.
Hartz IV is a basic security centered on paid work that is coupled to readiness for work. Citizens are disciplined in their conduct by the state (demanding and promoting). A radical system change is hidden behind the wrangling around need tests. The excluding welfare state replaces a solidarian social state. Therefore Hartz IV is a completely wrong tract because it weakens the solidarian society instead of strengthening and building that society.
In its core, Hartz is a conservative concept that does not tackle the real reforms necessary given the labor- and social-political development. Hartz blocks the reforms that are needed. A basic income assures that every person will be free – free for his or her life and free for varied activities by which a community lives. Basic income means a right to income for everyone on an individual basis independent of labor or other income. When existence is secured by a basic income, integrating paid work in cooperative human life will be possible. Whoever is not worried about existence is free. The unconditional basic income puts in question the basic ideology of the paid work society: Only the one who works should eat. In reality, income is not distributed according to performance. Money is earned through stock market speculation, with idiotic entertainment or industrial mergers according to the desires of stock market analysts. Persons who care for the next generation, raise children or care for the aged is supported with a trifling wage. The performance ideology conceals the power question of the distribution of resources. The guaranteed unconditional basic income begins from another starting point. Every person has the right to live in dignity. This right does not need to be acquired through anything. At the same time basic income relies on persons ready to contribute to a just cooperative life. The challenge of financing a basic income is not central but whether we want a society in which all people have enough money for a life in dignity.
Socio-political goals like poverty prevention or promotion of women are not tackled with a basic income. Other measures aim at these goals. Michael Opielka names the following goals that can only be reached with a basic income:
· partial uncoupling of work and income;
· increased security of existence on the backdrop of a more flexible labor market that can no longer offer continuous paid work for everyone;
· acknowledgment of self-chosen forms of life and work beyond paid work.
2nd THESIS: The right to life precedes the obligated independent assurance of livelihood through paid work.
The work society is called a work society because it forces every citizen to secure existence through paid work – as far as no other income exists. From the slogan “Whatever the work, the main thing is a wage” now comes the slogan “High wage does not matter, the main thing is work.” In other words, dependent employees are forced and humiliated to accept any work to have a job. Paid work changes its meaning in a society that has never been as rich as today. It becomes increasingly dispensable for producing wealth and increasingly indispensable for those compelled to secure their existence this way. The ideology of work was never proclaimed as impudently and the rule of corporations was never so unchallenged as in our very own times of mass unemployment. The competition over the scarce commodity work is an underbidding contest whose end is uncertain as in the poverty regions worldwide and increasingly also in Germany.
Unemployment in prosperity is alarmingly new, mass unemployment in wealth and economic growth, not unemployment in economic crisis. For Ralf Dahrendorf, the crisis is the result of the inner logic of a development relying on continuously increased efficiency. “The work society starts from work and ends work.” That work falls away and unemployment arises is itself a form of development. However when work “disappears” out of an inner logic of rationalization, the employees also become superfluous. Computers and automatic control systems are needed, not persons who work and earn their livelihood on these machines. The work that becomes superfluous makes people superfluous; the work itself become somewhat redundant.
Dahrendorf joined this analysis with a warning that is still burning: “Work ends in the work society but the masters do everything to bring back work and block the way to a society of activity.” The “masters” cut freedom chances in half by reserving the best posts for themselves and forcing others to remain in outmoded forms of a work society.” While Dahrendorf’s prospect for an activity society was discussed in detail, his warning was ignored by those interests that sought to prevent and block this transition. This happens today under the camouflage term “activating social policy” where work becomes a civic duty and a coercion.
The indispensable need for an income securing existence is one thing. The need to act, be active and do something for oneself and others is another. Capitalism or the work society couples both needs. If the connection of paid work and income constitutive in a work society is not artificially lengthened, then we need a new perspective that starts from the premise: the right to life precedes the right to paid work and the obligation to paid work. We could speak of a human right to a guaranteed basic income since only a proper social security can form the foundation for real freedom. Thus the demand for a guaranteed basic income is ethically justified.
3rd THESIS: The guaranteed unconditional basic income honors the unconditional right to life. This unconditional right to life has a priority before a right to work and is the prerequisite for realizing a right to work.
Although less and less work is necessary, it is said work is lacking. In this way the real situation is obscured. Work is not lacking but distribution of the social wealth. Capital needs less and less labor to gain this wealth. The word mass unemployment suggests a shortage in a rich society where wealth and abundance actually exist. Wealth and unemployment develop in one and the same act. What capitalism has merged, the need to be active and the right to an adequate and certain income must be separated so superfluous persons do not result from superfluous work.
Neoliberalism also knows the right to a guaranteed income at a minimum level. So the well-to-do can be relieved, Milton Friedman promises the victims a minimum in the form of a basic income. The exact amount of the basic income depends on what the state can afford. The minimum is not what is necessary for life but what the state can finance. The needy does not appear as a subject or as a citizen vested with rights. We need an alternative to the neoliberal social state development that knows a basic security a la Hartz IV but not a basic income deserving its name.
4th THESIS: Economic civil rights are the basis for a real freedom for all citizens.
In a democracy, civil rights are not withdrawn from the superfluous. However they increasingly lose their capacity of including all citizens in social participation. How could social, economic and civil rights be combined? The alternative to the present social state development in the form of a basic income is not a counter-model but the logical further development of the basic understanding of our society based on civil freedom. Democracy needs a social foundation. The formal civil freedom must be expanded to an economic understanding of real freedom. For all citizens to make use of their freedom, they do not need charitable donations of a paternalistic alms-giving welfare state like Hartz IV. Real freedom is not the freedom to buy and consume. It is the freedom for everyone to live as he or she wants. Everyone should have the option to a life on the basis of a guaranteed basic income with a corresponding measure of free time and leisure or the option of life oriented in paid work with a higher income. Everyone should be able to freely choose between these two options or a compromise of the two.
The real freedom of come-of-age persons needs a civil right to an unconditional basic income. This basic income is a civil right with two aims or objectives. On one hand, all citizens should have the same real chances to share in the economic possibilities of society. On the other hand, all should become free from the exactions and pressures of the labor market. From this perspective, the guaranteed basic income has the function of making possible a life that is free, not a life without work.
The distinction to the social state development with Hartz also appears here. Basic income removes dependence on the ideology of paid work and is worthy of a really free citizen who can decide autonomously about himself, his time and his income. Basic income does not stand for exodus from society but intends entrance into society. How he or she enters is left to the individual citizen. Everyone is entitled to this freedom, not only the rich and idle heirs or sluggish children of rich parents.
5th THESIS: Economic development includes free engagement for the democratic community.
The demand of a guaranteed basic income has lost its utopian, starry-eyed character since it is adopted by the jobless and income support initiatives. The maxim is: Everyone must be able to live in dignity in his or her paid work and from paid work and without paid work.
In the bloom of Athen’s democracy, citizens who appeared at the marketplace to participate in the plenary assemblies and affairs of the community received royalties. The privilege of free citizens in ancient Athens was grounded on the slavery that insured the material viability of the city-state. The Greek philosopher Aristotle regarded the submission of slaves under their masters as absolutely necessary… What slave labor accomplished at that time can be done today in very different ways by machines and with a constantly decreasing involvement of living workers. For a long time businesses practiced a radical reduction of working hours like the Deutsche Bank that simultaneously announced 25% profits and laid off 2,500 employees. This crooked distribution of profits and labor is unworthy of a democratic society.
What social utopias could guide political conduct today under our conditions? How can we hold out in insisting that work, paid work and activities for the common good are not the conditions for a citizen income but vice versa? The guaranteed basic income first creates the condition that citizens are free to do their utmost for the community.
Citizens have the choice between a right to paid work even with interruptions and an active life where vocational work and unpaid activities alternate and complement one another without people falling under pressure or into economic distress through this change. There is so much to do for a blossoming community that we should not leave to the market.
In short,
· The guaranteed unconditional basic income is possible economically because we live in an historically unparalleled rich society;
· The guaranteed unconditional basic income is overdue in labor policy because the flexible labor market can no longer offer normal working conditions that the past social security system assumed;
· The guaranteed unconditional basic income is necessary in social policy so poverty and exclusion can be prevented;
· The guaranteed unconditional basic income is worthy of free citizens because it opens up options for a free organization of life without disciplining.
From an emancipatory and secular approach, who owns lifetime? How should it be used? How can economic efficiency and the economy be useful to this lifetime?
The influential English economist John Maynard Keynes saw chances for realizing this ancient vision when he expressed the hope in his famous 1930 address on the “Economic Problems of our Grandchildren” that a time will come when the pressing economic problems will be solved and economics will not be so important. “For the first time since the creation, the person will face his real constant task – how to use his freedom from oppressive economic worries and how to fill his free time that science and compound interest won for him so he can live wisely, comfortably and well.”
The economic conditions in which the utopia of Aristotle or John M. Keynes could become a real utopia objectively exist. We live under our real economic possibilities. Seen this way, the end of the work society is not the end of work but the transition to a really free society of citizens. Dahrendorf warned that the “masters of the world of work” will block this development. Whether a basic income can be financed depends on its organization. Basic social rights must be first set on the agenda contrary to the current political climate. That a really free society can arise against the bisection of freedom chances will not happen automatically but requires our struggle. |
See also:
http://www.mbtranslations.com
http://www.commondreams.org
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