Left and Right Unite! – For the UBI Fight!
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Italy has launched its citizens’ income welfare program designed to reduce poverty and unemployment.
The program, essentially a new system of welfare and unemployment benefits, provides those eligible with €780 ($882) credited to monthly, prepaid debit cards to pay for groceries, pharmaceuticals, utility bills, rent and other essentials. In exchange, able-bodied participants enroll in a job-finding and job-training program.
Who is eligible?
Italian or EU citizens, or legal residents who have lived in Italy for at least 10 years and whose annual household income doesn’t exceed €9,360 euros
Participants cannot own pleasure boats, second homes worth more than €30,000 or have bought a car in the six months prior to applying.
Able-bodied workers must sign up for job placement or training programs. The first job offer is to be located within 100 kilometers of home, the second offer within 250 kilometers and the third anywhere in Italy, with some exceptions.The program is expected to cost €7.1 billion this year, €7.8 billion in 2020 and €8.0 billion in 2021.
https://www.dw.com/en/italy-launches-7-billion-citizens-income-plan-to-combat-poverty/a-47798245
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/19/universal-basic-income-free-public-services
New Economics Foundation Vs Compass’s proposals
Free services Vs UBI
I am late to the debate.
Basic income, or basic participation in the collective means of production: oh there is a sting.
I am reminded of a better welfare payment. And then we ‘manage’ our own health, security, housing, and means to survive with it. It is a individualisation/ responsibilisation trope. The means continue, and the old binary continues under it: capital over labour, centrality over dislocation, active over dormant, and so on…
If I had a basic income under a capital controlled social formation: would I be set aside, paid to be dormant? If I relied on welfare, am I not divorced and alienated from the power/productive means- perhaps.
Why not a power with relation to production- and the means of it activity supporting all, for all, with all- the ideal social- made real.
I like the idea of unconditional basic income- but it is giving itself away in the dichotomous term: basic. The other is abundant.
Abundant over basic is more of the same, and ethical differential into have/ have not, control/ controlled.
It would be nice not to struggle, but it would be nice not to know struggle!
Thank you all,
Thought I would just make a quick minded contribution,
L.B
The Congress Party in India offer up their version
“…every family would be guaranteed an income of 12,000 rupees (£130) a month, paid into their bank accounts. The scheme would be known as Nyay, Hindi for justice…”
L.B., have you seen this video against UBI that someone posted on our Facebook page? It shows that it wouldn’t work as intended (it would be a subsidy to employers leaving most people no better off as their income from employment would fall) and that, if we want to go down this road of breaking the link between consumption and work, we might as well have free access to the plenty that we have the technology to produce:
Alan, I can see the articles: and it would lift those who struggle out of near hour to hour living. However it would be week to week, or year to year subsistence. It would be a granted, apex whim.
By apex, the hierarchical distributions of power.
What if basic income demands was direct democracy demands- democratic socialism- and that the vertical relations of power could be deconstructed into horizontal ‘power-with’ relations, local to global… then there would be no basic- no abundant relations. Okay, Marxism can focus too much on the economic relations, a non discursive thing, but it is discursive, and it can expand to the biopsychsocial.
Some UBIs may seem wonderful, but they should include the social, the political, the biology of who we are: and more, the totalising egalitarian and the ‘dream of democracies to come’.
I am trying to tame the post modern in me, as it is still a contentious thing, even after so long.
ALB, I see those concerns about basic income as a subsidy to the wealthy too. And the link is sobering- but I also see it as lifting those who are the most marginal out of death and subsistence- and this is what capitalism gives us as a solution! Do we choose life over subsistence wages- In the West this is under threat- with more casual, precariat employment, and where I currently live: the ‘cheap casual’! Basic is less, limited, and putting workers out to pasture- like a blind horse who survived the mines.
Basic income and direct democracy? Direct democracy gives us shared abundance- who would vote for basic?
Basic income is a life changing thing for many- but it does not change the relationship between the one who grants it, and the one who receives it. The thing is, direct democracy changes the whole thing. It is not a grant, a thing that can be given or taken away; but a thing that is, and just is!
The prize is- total inclusion in wellness: biopsychsocialpolitcal- all the rest is misdirection/mythdirection!
L.B
Our minimum and maximum program is socialism-communism. The left and the right are the beauty parlor of capitalism. They can unite or disunite each other and both will continue being the same wings from the same bird known as capitalism. We are going obtain real and genuine democracy when the vast majority of the peoples from the world have possession of the means of productions
The UBI for some reason I am conflicted: there is a part of me that will see it as a reformist agenda- and a part of me that will see it as an immediate response to those very most in need.
Who created this dilemma: yes a reformist. Who will benefit: a reformist and a population in need.
It is the population in need that worries me; and that population is what I work with- yes I work in an oppressive system in an anti-oppressive way, but this a sting, and is concrete and immediate- it is not some removed debate for me, but if a family puts food in their mouths, or gets through the year- the day.
Then I see it as the parlor room of the left and the right- a polarity of the capital system. But I deal with the fall out, the deaths, and the despair- I could provide you with a clinical white washed narrative (that is best left to the money interested and the philanthropist.
Economic disparity is the conversation of the Left/ and the right; a fair share, or a fair go at making it.
I have to work in those divisions amid the political tirade of either side. What I do, sorry, what many people do who work to try and bring an end to the bullshit, is do something about it.
I do not feel I engaged in the rhetoric of the current system, but try to bring an end to it, in some kind way, some active way.
There has to be some room for communicating, even with the different, the centre, or the obscure right- to teach and to encourage people away from presocial policy and toward prosocial policy. Otherwise people like me in the day to day of it- we are putting off tomorrow time after time- but we need to know it makes a difference, and is being debated! Here I know it is, but be careful of casting some of us as sheer reformists. We still need to live on a wage, and help others until the deep democratic reality comes to fruition…
I solidarity, L.B.
“There has to be some room for communicating, even with the different, the centre, or the obscure right- to teach and to encourage people away from presocial policy and toward prosocial policy. Otherwise people like me in the day to day of it- we are putting off tomorrow time after time- but we need to know it makes a difference, and is being debated! Here I know it is, but be careful of casting some of us as sheer reformists. We still need to live on a wage, and help others until the deep democratic reality comes to fruition…”
You don’t need to remind socialists about communicating – it’s been our stock-in-trade with a vengeance for over a hundred years. The problem is that by “putting off tomorrow time after time” you, and countless others, are helping to ensure that the “deep democratic reality” never comes to fruition.
Dave and Matthew,
Thank you for your corrections.
I guess I have been fighting for so, so long- near on demanding the government pay attention to adequate funding for the sector I work in, that I have entered the ‘parlor room’ that Marcos had mentioned. Maybe it is the New Left- or toiling so hard to have our voice heard, that communication of a simple message has gone with pats on the head: “work harder to help the poor”. I am tired of that middle space, and sacrificing my own socialist principles to earn a living, and to work toward addressing inequitable distributions of wealth.
“at least he is talking to us”- they are sharp words, but I embrace the correction. It is just that I need here and now solutions to what I do, and what many other social sector workers do. We see people die, many times in the grip of social problems generated by capital control- so at time we might enter that parlor room, seek a revisionist agenda, and then feel bad afterwords… socialists are great at communicating, and the message has taken many forms for so long. I want a UBI, but I want it to be not basic, but full and meaningful- an end to poverty and class status. I would love my job to be redundant- but there is so much need,
Socialism informed me, and I am saddened that I negotiate with neoliberal funders, who talk of the price of care, even of funeral. But at times I have to enter that parlor room or space, and state concerns for money, money used to fund a vital response- and it is a grey area.
I am talking to you so I can get perspective, grounding, and renewed focus- so when the grey area presents itself- I can remain centred.
I hope my last post was seen as a act of sheer: what the, and not as a flippant compromise. I am in an oppressive system, yet toil anti-oppressively.
I need to open dialogue with those who are right in their political beliefs, if not to argue and wrestle for even the most basic- but I want so much to argue an end to capital control.
We all toil. At times I may of lost sight of the purpose. Thanks you two, really needed some cold water.
L.B
Post comment:
Any feedback to my last comment: can it be sensitive to my learning curve, and realise that I do have ‘burn out’ from vicarious first respondent work… and maybe reading laclou and mouffe for too long.
Are most post moderns this difficult- or is it just me!
Interview with US presidential candidate, Democrat Andrew Yang, supporter of UBI (and of ‘social credits’).
First paragraph:
‘Andrew Yang is a 43-year-old American entrepreneur who is seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2020. His campaign focuses on solving the problem of job losses to automation—an issue many politicians seem happy to ignore. Starting right now, Yang wants to create a whole new kind of economy from the ground up, in which automation is transformed from a threat into the foundation for widespread human flourishing.’
Forgot to give the url for it:
..reading Laclau and Mouffe for too long.
(Laclau corrected name).
Sounds like a fine furnishings company, which leads me into saying I haven’t read any of their stuff and I would be reluctant to do so, having devoured earlier cultural theoretical stuff and not having got much out of it. Sounds like, if I may be crude, Foucalt even.
It all seems like navel gazing and obstructs the primary task which William Morriss defined, as ‘making socialists’.
This needs everyday language. Something we strive for in the Socialist Standard and our literature.
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