[p2p-research] A basic income guarantee versus peer production

[Andy Robinson]

Didn't a basic income pretty much exist in Europe up until the neoliberal
onslaught? - people out of work got benefits, ill people and people with
disabilities got benefits, students got grants, low-waged workers got income
supplements, small businesspeople got subsidies, people on low incomes got
housing benefit and migrants had benefit rights also.  It was all nominally
conditional, but if no-one's checking carefully then of course someone can
sign up as a student and hardly ever show up, or sign on for unemployment
benefits without looking for work, or claim incapacity on a pretext (not
that many people ever DID, but I've heard a lot of the squatter/autonome
scene at the time were on benefits).  With neoliberalism, there are attempts
to pare back benefits, cut a lot of them below the level of need, and
enforce conditionality in strict and degrading ways.  This would seem to fit
into Offe's idea of the welfare state as decommodifying.  So in a certain
sense the demand for a basic income is a demand for the restoration of a
previous "concession", rather than a wholesale change.

I've generally stayed out of the economics discussions because they become
rather technical.  But I'd also add that peer-to-peer production tends to
create a kind of gift economy, hence a "basic income" of whatever is
peer-produced and abundant - it is possible to participate in filesharing or
freecycle or to download open-source software as recipient only, and the
motivation to participate as producer is not primary dependent on being
forced to produce by economic coercion or threat of economic exclusion (this
is most apparent with open-source software, which completely confounds the
economistic "free rider" paradigm in that the number of people "free riding"
on open-source production, using Firefox or somesuch without programming or
paying, vastly outnumber the number of actual programmers).

Hence in a certain sense it's a step beyond the basic income, which is a
capped distribution of a limited quantity in a form similar to gift economy,
but extracted from tribute.  A basic income implies an overall setting of
scarcity in which it is one little corner of abundance.  The overall system
still depends on the idea that people should be motivated to work
productively by the denial of income/goods above a certain level to those
who do not (whether or not this is the real motive for work - I'd suggest it
mostly isn't) - hence that it incorporates economic coercion, albeit in a
weakened form.  So the system is segmentary - in old-fashioned terms,
there's a "contradiction" between the logics of the two spheres
(gift-economy/tribute hybrid, and capitalism).  The question being, whether
the segmentarity is sustainable - whether capitalism maintains its
profitability without strong economic coercion.  One could moot a strategy
where gift economy starts out in a little corner and colonises the whole,
but Offe and Przeworski would suggest that this would impact profit margins
- beyond a certain point, the transition has to be "all of nothing".  On the
other hand, capitalism also uses subsistence production (which is a close
relative of gift-economy) to undercut wages, making the segmentarity
productive for capitalism.

bw
Andy
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