Following up on my “why we call it Citizen’s Income” piece and reactions to it and other ideas people have put across; I don’t have any specific problem with anything anyone is saying. But I do not think much is going to come of these discussions.
It is as I said; the people interested in a guaranteed income do not know enough yet. Therefore, a nation wide organisation to promote a Citizen’s Income is not going to happen just yet. There is a lot of educating which has to be done, as well as some researching as to how best to promote to the public a new type of society. And, sorry folks, talking about a guaranteed income or basic income in isolation from everything else is not going to go anywhere. I think I have had more experience than most people on this list at talking up the concept with various kinds of people. I also know a little about framing. I would like to know a lot more. Any kind of guaranteed income is a direct contradiction to the frame or paradigm most North Americans have had rammed into their heads from a very early age. There simply are no answers to the objections to be raised about a BI-GAI within that frame. You have to break the frame. For example, you cannot argue for a demogrant from fairness. What you get back is that a bigai will be very unfair to the people who will have to work harder to support the people who are ‘not pulling their weight’. Some people with a philosophic bent are calling this the ‘lazy versus crazy’ or ‘free rider’ problem. It is unanswerable on its own terms. The answer to all this is; “Nobody has any ‘weight’ to pull. There is enough of every necessity for everybody. People who are working harder are doing so because they want to or believe they have to. There is no sense at all to keeping everybody working 40-60 hour weeks when all material needs can be satisfied with less than a twenty hour work week. In the ‘lazy versus crazy’ parable, crazy is crazy not because she is working twice as hard to carry lazy, but because she is wasting the limited resources on their little desert island. But the real world is not one of these little castaway islands beloved by economics debaters. We left the neolithic age behind long ago. We live in a sophisticated technological society with finished goods several stages removed from the resources extracted in making them. The technological machine has made it possible for us to produce everything we need with little effort but we cannot make the mental adjustment to a world of leisure and abundance. We still act like neolithic people. We have about fifty years to make the mental changeover. Then we go back into a dark age for who knows how long. The climate change and environmental contamination all around us is not going to be solved by some modifications to the existing economic structure. Talking about sustainable development is nonsense, there is nothing which can be ‘developed’ indefinitely. The breakdown of the natural environment is happening because we are trying to take out of it more than it can give. The solution is to take less. That means an end to the present economic system which depends on constant growth and the reification of money. Reification is the fallacy of making a thing out of an abstract idea. Money is an abstract idea. We are going to organise a steady state economy, in which production is limited to what we can reasonably get from the natural world given our technological level. This is going to happen one way or another. We are going back to the middle ages or we are going to develop a kind of very big co-operative. Now, what are you nattering at me about communism for? Who told you what communism is? Who told you what anarchism means? Who told you what libertarianism means? Who told you what democracy is? The government of China still calls itself communist. It is a totalitarian state running a system of state capitalism and beating the hell out of the private capitalists on this continent. It has as much to do with communism as the United States has to do with free markets or the vatican has to do with christianity; nothing. Any time communism, or cooperativism because it means the same thing in effect, has had a chance to work, it has worked very well. So well in fact, that extreme efforts are always made to stop it; for example, in the old Soviet Union under Stalin. Yes, capitalism has worked very well for awhile, or corporatism, a much better word for it; the control of society by and for large interests. Then it destroys the base on which it depends, because it requires constant growth in a finite world. However the world is going to be run in the future, it will not be by a system requiring interest on money which must be repaid with wealth that does not exist when the credit is issued. Nobody knows exactly how a steady state industrial economy would work, because one has never been tried. But there is no choice but to find a way. And before new ways of running an economy can be found, those with a big investment in the outgoing system have to be moved out of the way. And there are plenty of good ideas about how to make such a system work. They have to be tested. But while all this is going on people need to live. People will be much more ready to accept experimentation and change in the economic system once we get acceptance of the principle that people have a right to a basic security of the person. It is in the constitution of the country; security of the person. If it does not mean security from being thrown out on the street because the economic machine declines to employ you, then what does it mean?” Well, I could go on and on, but you can see how it works; you have to know what you are talking about. You have to have a very clear picture in your mind of what you are advocating. And a bigai simply cannot be sold separately; it is too much at odds with the entire framework of conventional thinking. It can only be sold as part of a set; a different system of thinking about the world. And by the way, orthodox Leninist communists are as rabidly hostile to the idea of a citizen’s income as any capitalist. “What? That is just another ‘reformist’ trick for pacifying people so they do not ‘struggle’ and put the revolutionary party in power. And when the revolution is achieved, people will have to work like hell to produce more armaments than the imperialist powers...” I hope people on these lists who are in or near Toronto can make it to the Social Forum at Ryerson (55 Gould at 7 pm) on the 26th, and start getting some idea of what is going on in the world beyond colonial Canada. Then, you will have something to answer back when you get into debates about the truisms of the established order. You have to know what you are talking about. tr A Citizen's Income is "a just income paid to everyone without condition and as a right of citizenship". _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
