Historicizing Basic Income

This piece argues that Basic Income is, and has never been, a simple “common sense” or “spontaneous” idea for those who want to struggle against poverty. In fact, it but the product of a profound shift in how we thought about the social question since the late 19th century. A shift that, by the mid-sixties, made cash transfers and the price system the main tool when thinking about redistribution against collective provision or more state-centered approaches. In his introduction to the UBI Forum, Dave Zeglen argues that basic income should not be understood as an “irrational demand.” Instead he casts it as a “common sense” response to capitalist excess. Rather than an instance of “false consciousness,” basic income is therefore an “empirical and limited” recognition of a reality not imposed from “above” but coming directly from “below”—a natural plight for the downtrodden. Zeglen makes a convincing case that the Left should not overlook the laudable impulses implicit in basic income demands but rather “insert them directly into progressive political narratives.” Strategically, there is little one could object to in this view. It is indeed the case that basic income is not an “irrational” demand or a “false consciousness.” However, basic income’s political content is not as obvious as Zeglen suggests, and certainly is far from a “common sense” idea coming from below. Stating this overlooks the entire intellectual history of the idea and how the proposal only turned into “common sense” after conceptions of work, poverty, social justice, redistribution, or the state underwent some dramatic changes. The basic income is therefore only “irrational” in hindsight. Or, our contemporary idea of a basic income—a continuous, discretionary grant uncoupled from any prior performance of labour—would certainly look extremely strange (one could say “irrational”) for any worker or thinker in the nineteenth century. In fact, its contemporary form was designed to respond to problems that were radically different to those discussed by Thomas Paine, who put forward his own “land grant” in the 1790s, or the socialist economist Oskar Lange, who was one of the rst to argue for a “social dividend” in the 1930s. There are some potential losses here. If we lose sight of the radical novelty of the idea— constituted, as it was, as a response to the decline of the centrality of work and of the postwar welfare state—we may easily fall into an empty transhistorical celebration. To put it differently, prior to Milton Friedman, almost nobody promoted a society where the alternative to full employment would be the maintenance of “workless” subjects through the transfer of a social dividend or basic income. Oskar Lange, Abba P. Lerner, or G. D. H. Cole’s versions of a “guaranteed income” remained strongly tied to full employment schemes and never really even operated with a society where people would receive payments without working as a proviso. This simply didn’t make sense to them. Moreover, such proposals were conceived in a society where the means of production had already been socialized. The same held for more right-leaning versions. Even Juliet Rhys1