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

[Ryan Lanham]

I believe the best we can do is to identify best practices in reality.  To
me, the Nordic nations do best.  I would be content with global Sweden or
Denmark.  It is imperfect, but more just.  Global Germany or global US is
not good enough.  Now we need to convince everyone to be Sweden.  So Germany
should stop being itself and become Sweden.  Iran should stop being Iran and
become Sweden.  North Korea should stop being North Korea and become
Sweden.  So, who will become Sweden first?

Ryan


On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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