With the reglobalising and reliberalising thrust of economic life over the last thirty years, many of the “conquests” that emerged from the trans-Atlantic social consensus of the end of the 1940s have either vanished or are seriously threatened. The so-called “social” or “welfare” States are visibly losing ground before an economic order that is reminiscent in more ways than one of what prevailed in the interwar period and even prior to the First World War. The security and material well-being that a considerable part of the Western European and North American workers seemed to have achieved for once and for all with the compromises that were thrashed out between the classes under the aegis of a decidedly productivist form of capitalism, which was adverse to the financial speculation of the pre-war era and intent upon bringing about (Keynes’) “euthanasia of the rentier”, have progressively been reduced to job insecurity and tougher living and working conditions thanks to the last few lustrums of “globalisation” and the reliberalising joys of the international finance markets.

Two essential elements of the post-war “Fordist” or trans-Atlantic prosperity and linchpins of the “social” or “welfare” States, have now been seriously undermined:

(1) The – microeconomic – link at the basis of the compromise between the big industrial capitalists and the unionised working classes, which resulted in the “constitutionalisation” of the capitalist enterprise, thanks to which the businessmen and their agents ceased to be absolute monarchs and the workers achieved a kind of ius in re aliena in the enterprise that was subject to State regulation (rights of assembly, of association – union rights – and of expression within the company, paid holidays, some negotiating capacity over wages, etc.) in exchange for the latter agreeing to the prerogatives of control and authority claimed by the employers and their agents and unreservedly renouncing the aims of the pre-war workers’ movement, in particular introducing democracy and worker’s control from the shop floor up, and even “parliamentarising” the workplace.

(2) The links – macroeconomic – between economies of scale, the resulting lowering of costs and increased production of consumer goods, on the one hand and, on the other, mass consumption of these goods by the workers who, thanks to the greater productivity and salary negotiation based on these increases, saw their real wages rising by the year.

This present-day neoabsolutist capitalism – so new and yet so old – in which authoritarian tendencies have returned with a vengeance, deconstitutionalising the capitalist enterprise; this capitalism in which working populations have been segmented and restratified both in the sphere of production (with a backsliding and increasingly eroded nucleus of workers with stable jobs, growing numbers of workers walking the tightrope of more or less precarious employment, and an ever-increasing base of workers in desperate situations, this including the working poor,[1] the unemployed, women heading single-parent homes and legal or illegal immigrants) and in that of consumption (with the poorer strata of the working populations consuming cheap imported products, produced in conditions of semi-slavery – and sometimes out-and-out slavery – in the underdeveloped world); this all-besieging form of capitalism that has been inflicted on us over the last twenty-five years is the only kind that the new generations know and endure.

The left has come up with two kinds of responses to this besiegement and they might be summed up, broadly speaking, as follows:

First is the “defensive” or conservative position. We must conserve what remains of the “social” State or, in the more radical version, recover what we have lost. Such views are not uncommon among union organisations in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the United States. When the AFL-CIO leadership recently criticised the plutocratic policy of the Bush Administration in offering tax concessions on dividends to company shareholders, their style was unequivocally Fordist in pointing out that these companies invested their profits outside the United States, thereby taking American jobs outside the country. When José María Fidalgo of the CCOO (Spanish Trade Union Federation) insists that the solution for (almost) all evils lies in restoring the equation of greater productivity/more-employment-and-better-salaries, we see a similar kind of reasoning.

However, the other option of the more “antisocial” response is, let us say, of an “offensive” complexion. The general underlying idea is as follows: the post-war Atlantic social consensus must be totally replaced because, inter alia, the great social changes brought about by economic life over the last decades, ensure that, even if it were desirable, the dream of achieving a new social pact between the classes is politically unreal as the main actors have now disappeared. The hard core of big capital in Europe and the United States is no longer a productivist industrial bourgeoisie, and neither is the – male – industrial Fordist-type worker, once the nuclear social base of the traditional post-war European left, in any position of solid centrality within the working populations of the developed world. An option that is merely “defensive” with regard to the former “social” conquests is not only politically and socially illusory but could even be dangerously counterproductive.

It could create insuperable and unnecessary barriers between the stable and unstable segments of the working population with unions becoming mere defenders of the rights obtained by mature and privileged workers. It could deepen still further the gap that has traditionally separated the workers of the northern hemisphere, coming from the post-war trans-Atlantic social consensus, from their third-world brothers, whom they only see as disloyal competitors. And, to sum up, it could also contribute towards unexpectedly reinforcing the neo-absolutist authoritarian tendencies in the world of business: if the post-war social consensus on both sides of the Atlantic meant that the organised workers’ movement renounced, through the unions, the right to question management authority, accepting in its stead a mere constitutionalisation of the workplace that was overseen by the State in exchange for successive improvements in welfare linked to successive increases in productivity, now, with this equation broken or at least hamstrung, insisting on this and only this could give rise to the illusion – which it has already partly generated – that a package deal of yielding to the new absolutist managerial wave, giving up “just a little more” political freedom in the world of work, agreeing to the total or partial deconstitutionalisation of the capitalist enterprise, is the only possible realist solution for recovering the conditions of welfare and security that have been lost.

An interesting indication, perhaps, of the fact that some European unions are starting to move towards a more ambitious stance in the medium and long term, yet one that is better adapted to present circumstances, is a growing interest among the more intellectually and socially concerned sectors in the proposal of a Basic Income of Citizenship (BI). This is a payment made by the State to every full member or resident in a society even if he or she does not work or is unwilling to accept a job if offered, and regardless of whether he or she is rich or poor, in other words, irrespective of other possible sources of income and domestic arrangements. BI has formal attributes of laicism, unconditionality and universality that are the same as those of universal democratic suffrage: everyone is eligible, for the simple fact of being a citizen (and, moreover, in the case of BI, a resident) of a country, regardless of gender, income and religious orientation. The aim is to provide a material guarantee of the right to minimal social existence to all the members of the society, for the simple fact of being so. From the standpoint of our concerns here, the BI represents an interesting two-way departure from the logic of the post-war North-Atlantic consensus. First, as is obvious enough, it breaks away from the productivity/welfare nexus since it unconditionally guarantees all inhabitants a minimum threshold of wellbeing that is completely independent of their contribution to the social product. Second, it is an attempt to ensure a minimum degree of autonomy and material independence for everyone, liberating citizens who settle for this minimum from the excruciating daily necessity of having to seek permission of others – or the State – in order to live, understanding here that those who are not satisfied with this minimum and who wish to submit themselves to others in order to improve their standard of living, will have as their starting point, and also a possible way out, an economic basis that will enhance their bargaining power and, conceivably, their autonomy and freedom in whatever job they take. A minimally generous BI,[2] would plausibly tend to reverse the pattern of capitulation in the post-war workers’ movement with regard to freedom and democracy in the workplace, and would potentially open up a new social space, this time no longer to defend the threatened constitutionalisation of the capitalist enterprise but to embark upon an all-out democratising offensive in the ethical-political republican tradition of the best North American (“citizens in the workplace”) and European (“economic democracy”) trade union practice.

Furthermore, the struggle for a BI, like other “offensive” initiatives that are not prepared to exchange freedom in everyday life for material wellbeing and job security, can not only attract a broad new social base of excluded people, those working in precarious conditions, the long-time and recently dispossessed, and young people and women, all of whom are worn down by the sheer drudgery of the ferocious dynamics of economic and social life today and longing to combine a minimum of material security and real autonomy in their social existence (precisely the cocktail offered by BI, especially if it is a little generous). And not only can it contribute – although modestly – towards mitigating the segmentation of working populations. It is also perfectly compatible with today’s necessary struggle in defence of the core set of the undeniable moral and material benefits (universality and unconditionality of health services and public education, etc.) that the advent of the “social State” ushered in for underprivileged groups as a whole. This could then help to conserve and to rearticulate a revived left-wing project within the Fordist-type working population and its much debilitated union organisations.

Perhaps Basic Income does not have much more to offer than that, for naturally it is not a panacea for today’s radical transformation of planetary modes of production and consumption, but it is still a lot in the circumstances. Whatever the case, it is valuable enough in itself.

NOTES

1. The fact of having a remunerated job is no guarantee in the European Union of not falling below the poverty line (and this has long been the case in the United States where jobs paying only seven or eight dollars an hour are no rarity). According to an estimate (at the end of 2003) of the European Industrial Relations Observatory, 8% of European Union workers (and 9% in the Kingdom of Spain) should be classified as poor because they lack the necessary income for a minimally decent standard of living.

2. We are thinking of a sum that would be equal to or above the poverty threshold, defined by the EU as half the per capita income in a given geographic area. A major study, directed by Jordi Arcarons, Professor of Econometry at the University of Barcelona, on financing BI in the Catalan context, (soon to be made available at www.rendabasica.org), has shown the redistribution of income that would result from the introduction of a BI in different quantities: in brief, the 40% of the Catalan population with the lowest income would benefit in net terms in comparison with the present situation, while the richest 20% would lose.

Antoni Domènech and Daniel Raventós*

* Antoni Domènech, author of El eclipse de la fraternidad (Barcelona. Crítica, 2004), is a philosopher and Professor of Moral Philosophy in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Barcelona. Daniel Raventós, author of El derecho a la existencia (Barcelona, Ariel, 1999) is an economist and lecturer in Sociology in the same faculty and university and president of the Red Renda Básica.

(Translated from the Spanish by Julie Wark)

Le Monde diplomatique (Spanish Edition) 105 (july 2004)