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Postal workers had to take to the picket lines for better pay this summer
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Better than wage slavery?
Is there an alternative to our way of life with its long working hours and scramble for decent wages? Keith Flett thinks there just might be. . .
Basic Income: The Material Conditions of Freedom. By Daniel Raventos. Pluto Press £14.99.
TRADE unionists don’t just fight for better wages. As a trade union activist I know well that a union these days deals with a huge range of other issues, including racism, health and safety and opposition to war. But wages remain at the centre of capital-labour relations.
Very few people go to work for the love of it. Although numbers may well love what they do, many jobs, for example keeping London’s sewers working or street cleaning, might provide more of a pride in a job well done than love, as such.
So how much we get paid, and what we do to get money if we are unable or don’t want to work, is a key issue in a market society like Britain.
Marx demonstrated at length in Capital that the trick – also explained in Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – is for those who own and run things to pay us less money than they make out of our labour and to use the rest for their own purposes. Some goes for investment, but some goes into the pockets of shareholders.
Does the world have to be like this? Is it the only way things can work? “Yes” is almost certainly what the boss would tell you if you suggested a different way of working, but the actual answer remains a firm “no”.
“Basic income”, sometimes called “Citizens income”, is one alternative and Daniel Raventos has written a useful guide to the principles of the idea.
Basic income is not a minimum wage or unemployment benefit. It is an amount paid by the state to all individuals. According to Raventos the only country to actually have a basic income model at the moment is Alaska, which funds it from oil revenue. A residency qualification means you can’t just pitch up in the country and claim it from day one.
The ideal is that it is enough money to allow you to decide what to do with your life. You might work to top-up the basic, or you might decide to do other things.
This raises all sorts of questions, all of which Raventos deals with methodically in the book. For example, why pay it to those who are already wealthy? Where will the money come from to fund it?
The essential point about a basic income – and Raventos leans towards this in the book while considering, in some depth, the philosophical pros and cons of the matter – is that if it is implemented it shifts the relationship between labour and capital a bit towards the many, that is our side.
If you don’t have to work then the employer will need to think more carefully about the jobs on offer and what they are like.
Similarly, it may well be that lots of useful things that people can’t currently do because they don’t have time, being too busy doing the day job, would get done.
As someone perpetually in search of people to help with community projects that have little budget, I can see the potential straight away.
The principle of basic income has quite widespread support. The Green Party has backed it in some areas and it has found a welcome in the Houses of Parliament as well.
But, of course, liking an idea and doing something about it are two different things. In order to change the relationship between boss and worker, organisation and the sometimes hard slog of protest and campaigning will still be needed.
Finally, a qualification. From the early days of the labour movement, the slogan that those who don’t work will not eat has been current.
There is a dignity in labour, so basic income isn’t about what the 19th-century French activist Paul Lafargue called the right to be lazy – that is a different argument altogether – but about arranging the world a bit differently.
As Mrs Thatcher didn’t say, there is an alternative.
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