Memory and Basic Income

January 21, 2024

It is good sometimes to recall what we once knew.

I have been looking at some of my old writings for ideas to blog about. I came on a university essay I did on the topic of Basic Income (BI). I am surprised at how good it is.

The title of it was “A Post Modern Anamnesis vs. a Reciprocity Principle in advocating a Basic Income.” The course was about “post modernism”, a rather vague term. Since I was curious at the time with the “Reciprocity Principle” which some of the founders of the BIEN (Basic Income Earth Network) fussed about, I decided to make it the subject.

I have decided to put these ideas onto my blog. However, parts of it would be hard for an ordinary reader interested in the Basic Income idea to understand. Also, my ideas and understanding have developed since I wrote this.

Thus, I have reworked it to make it easier for non academic people to understand. I assume most readers have some idea of what a BI is about. The concept has become, not really more popular, but more known and discussed.

Since I first wrote this, I have become concerned about the direction of people who have become leaders of discussion about BI. A lot of these people are articulating the “billionaire’s” idea of a BI, as some way of managing all the people they do not want to employ anymore.

Also, I have more trouble now with the term “post modern”. The course was about post modernism. It seems to have come to mean anything the user wants it to mean, related to what comes after the present era. For my own discussions, I have taken the term to be synonymous with “post capitalism”, which means an actually realized socialism.

Some members of the “one percenter’ class seem to take post modern to mean the kind of neofeudal order many or most of them want to impose on the world. They want the population to shrink and its living standards to decline. They seem to see a BI as a means of facilitating this.

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A Basic Income (BI) is an income, adequate for all necessities of life, paid to everyone without condition. Most of its advocates imagine the idea has been around for a very long time but in fact has only been developed during the past sixty years.

This is the ultimate post modern social issue. It is getting more interest recently as the breakdown of the modern order is accelerating. Publics are starting to think more seriously about the problems of post industrial society and the possible solutions presented by post modern thinking.

The academics with a philosophic bent who have been promoting the Basic Income idea, are now giving way to social activist types who can actually produce the movement to bring it about. However, most debates about Basic Income are still in Liberalist/Modernist/Industrial age terms, and include an obsession with this concept of “reciprocity”. That most debates about BI have been in Liberalist terms is why its academic advocates keep losing.

However, the idea of a BI extinguishes orthodox Marxism as thoroughly as it does Liberalism. The Marxists simply do not engage with it. They are also modernists in a ‘post modern’ time.

Few people are advocating BI in post modernist terms, which you must do. Just as you cannot solve a problem with the thinking which created it, you cannot solve modern problems with modernist thinking. You must go to a higher level.

BI is really a post modernist idea which goes against liberalism. It addresses post modern, post capital, post industrial problems. Those who defend the BI concept in modernist and Liberalist terms do not really understand it.

So, they have decided that there is a “reciprocal” argument against BI. That is, that giving people enough money to live on without any reciprocal obligation is somehow taking something away from other people.

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Thus, the thesis is that the concept of a BI can only be effectively argued for in postmodern terms. To show this I will focus mainly on this “reciprocity problem”; to take on the various other issues about BI, post modernism and post industrialism is too much for an essay like this. I need to explain the reciprocity problem as well as clarify aspects of post modernism that speak to a BI.

This is could be somewhat difficult. In the case of reciprocity, I have never found where this exact “reciprocity” argument is actually raised against BI by its critics. Often you get the moron version of it, as in “why should some people get paid to sit around and do nothing while we have to work?”

Reciprocity is a football kicked around by academic BI advocates. Thus, for a “reciprocity” argument against BI I have relied on the essay by Stuart White, attempting to refute Phillippe Van Parijs and his book “Real Freedom for All; What ( If anything) can justify Capitalism?”

This title says it all about Van Parijs’ ability as an advocate. Yet he seems still to be the most prominent philosophical defender of a Basic Income. Everywhere I look into discussions of BI I keep running into Van Parijs and his arguments in this book.

Yet Van Parij has a calamitous way of arguing for BI. First of all, you do not try to refute an argument that is never made. Second, you do not argue for something in the terms of its critics; you do so in your own terms. Third, and worst of all, you do not make the opponents arguments for them. Maybe you do in academia, but not in the real world.

You do not need to construct a defence of capitalism in order to make the case for BI. If you are trying to convince people to support BI, you do not activate tropes in people’s minds which work against that idea. For example, talking about “Malibu Surfers” and whether they should receive an income.

Van Parij even puts a picture of a surfer on the cover of his book. To convince people to support something, you find tropes that support it. You convince people to accept these in favor of the old tropes.

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Reciprocity being a Liberal and therefore modernist idea, you look beyond that for answers. This brings me back to post modernism, the extinguisher of things modern. Several of the philosophers identified as post modern provide strong refutations of these ideas of reciprocity, or moral obligation.

Exchange has always been about symbolic representations. Who gets more has always been about status. We are coming into a “post production” or “post industrial” age where we have the capacity to produce everything everyone needs easily, with ever less real labor and resources, and most of the economy is about exchanging “services”. Seen in such terms, “reciprocity” is asinine.

But I still have some problems with defining “post modern”. Turning to Lyotard’s “The PostModern Explained”, I find that in putting the “post” in postmodern he often employs the term “anamnesis”. This is defined in one of the online dictionaries on that thing so despised by modern university teachers, and so useful in the post modern world, thus; “the recollection or remembrance of the past…”

In “Platonism”, anamnesis refers to; “the recollection of the Ideas, which the soul had known in a previous existence, especially by means of reasoning.”1 Lyotard also applies it in the sense of psychoanalysis, of trying to recall past events, traumas, or wrong turns which have led to present difficulties. In this way, ”Postmodern” is not a progression from “Modern” in the sense of an “Avant-Garde”, the generally disliked term.

Anamnesis in this sense means “initially forgetting” about all that has occurred in the modern age, since early capitalism, and then rediscovering what has been forgotten. It is not a kind of “PreRaphaelite” trendy fetishizing of things premodern. In the end, this anamnesis should allow us to move forward on a healthier basis.2

Seen this way, I can understand Postmodernism. The unhealthy part of it is the talk about “cyborgs” and of ‘transhumanism, loading your mind into a computer. This relates to the ancient talk of Gods, demigods, spirits, and immortal souls, of the desire to transcend time and death and human limitations.

What is healthy about this and relevant to “reciprocity” is the desire for a different kind of morality, conforming with a different way of organizing society and distributing the benefits of civilization. Several post modernist writers have something to say about this, mostly in terms of “symbolic exchange”. These provide a framework for resolving Van Parij’s “reciprocity problem.”

In fact Van Parij was not the first to raise this “reciprocity problem” in relation to various forms of social programs. It is really a very old trope. Yet it does not seem that an argument against BI has been framed in exactly this way before.

Certainly it was not raised by someone attempting, or pretending, to advocate for a BI. In fact, it seems like a straw man type of argument. And in fact, Van Parij did not use the term “reciprocity problem” but the term “exploitation objection”, which is if anything even more objectionable.

Reciprocity is not the usual welfare basher bellyaching about having to pay taxes to support “lazy bums”; the recipients of a BI are actually out to “exploit” other people. Instead, this is something like the argument of the copyright bully. That is, someone is taking advantage of her work although she spent very little effort creating the work and usually took full advantage of others work in creating it.

Van Parijs notices that in order to be an exploiter one has to derive some advantage from someone else, but he misses the corollary that to be exploited, one must be put at some disadvantage. This is a very important concept in talking about reciprocity.

Van Parijs says he equates freedom with ‘opportunity’, without specifying what opportunity. Presumably, it is the opportunity to “better oneself” by acquiring more wealth. Normal people really want only the opportunity to live their lives.

A BI is supposed to create “equality of opportunity”, Van Parijs seems to say. Achieving this seems like a matter of more fairly redistributing the resources of society.

Van Parijs has developed his very own system for deciding how this distribution should happen, and calls it “Leximin” or Lexicographic Maximum. This is when “…the person with least opportunities has opportunities which are no smaller than those enjoyed by the person with the least opportunities under any other feasible arrangement;…”

But not satisfied with that, this social engineer further ordains that; “In case there exists another feasible arrangement that is just as good for the person with least opportunities, then the next person up the scale in a free society must have opportunities no smaller than the second person up the scale of opportunities under this arrangement, and so on.”

He also declares himself to be a “Real Libertarian”, which seems to mean a “Left Liberal”, because he is concerned with “Liberty, Equality, and Efficiency”. All three are vague terms, but efficiency has potentially the most sinister meanings; it is unclear what “efficiency” is in Van Parijs’ world.

Another loaded term he uses is “self ownership” such as the Neoliberals would like to educate the next generation to practice. He wants the “highest sustainable unconditional income”, which shows a misunderstanding of the aim of BI as well as economic reality. This idea is also well refuted by Bataille and his ideas of energy flow and surplus.3

Lastly, Van Parijs by a long and totally unnecessary argument convinces himself that only a BI could redeem Capitalism. It is unclear why redeeming capitalism is so important. Maybe we could redeem slavery or piracy too.

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Van Parijs is responded to by Stuart White, who says; “The UBI proposal is apparently vulnerable…to at least one serious ethical objection. (It) “will lead to the exploitation of productive, tax paying citizens by those who, while capable of working, choose to live off their Unconditional Basic Income (UBI).” He also takes issue with what he sees as Van Parijs’ main argument in favour of UBI; the “external assets argument”. He introduces the “reciprocity principle” into the debate.

This external assets argument principally means Van Parijs’ idea of a “job rent”. This is, that people who are fortunate to have a job during a time of high unemployment have an asset which should be taxed to fund a BI for those who are unemployed. Of course, we already have something like this. It is called ‘income tax’. As well, a job is a social relationship, not a commodity or asset.

White’s argument against ‘external assets’ runs as follows. He defines reciprocity principle, which is not Van Parijs’ term, thus; those who enjoy the benefits of society have an obligation to contribute back according to their abilities, to the total pool of “wealth”. Otherwise, they are treating other people as “instruments” of their own well being.

However, reciprocity to White is not about “putting in as much as one takes out” but of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Everyone must “do their bit”. Yet people should get back only according to their needs, which is contrary to the idea of a BI. Yet White says he does not object to the idea of a small UBI based on external wealth such as natural resources or these “job rents”.4

Van Parijs responds to White’s “products of social cooperation” argument and restricting a UBI to purely “external wealth”; natural resources and “job rents”. He is reduced to criticizing White’s definition of external wealth, even when he partly undermines his own arguments.

Specifically, Van Parijs now notices that even natural resources would be worth nothing if someone did not expend labor to make them available. A job is also dependent on the results of social cooperation; there is no job which does not require processing the results of someone else’s efforts, then handing on those results.

Van Parijs insists that “distributive justice” and “real freedom” require the distribution of “Basic Entitlements” to people, although the “commutative justice” of reciprocity must only rule over “allocation of privileges”.5 Whew! In normal language, justice and freedom require a basic entitlement to everyone. However, some sort of administration based on some idea of justice must still control who gets what.

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Finally we get to Van Der Veen, who seeks some compromise between White and Van Parij. Of course the latter two do not seem to be disagreeing about much. They seem to have a “narcissism of small differences” going on.
They want to get people’s basic entitlements right, and let ‘reciprocity’ or (non) ‘exploitation’ rule over the privileges. They seem to disagree on how much the basic entitlements should be.

White wants to impose a legal obligation to work, thus interfering with personal freedom. Van Parij wants to maximize the “resources” available for a BI without any limitation based on actual need. He seems not to recognize a “common wealth”, or the need for resources for government to carry out its functions, or even the need for surplus and redundancy in systems.6

None of this will convince either a Conservative or a Marxist of the need for a BI. Both would argue against anyone being allowed to be unproductive, or even being allowed to survive if they do not work.

White, Van Parij, and Van Der Veer can only argue within the limits and terminology of Liberalism. This puts them into contradictions between freedom and obligation, justice and exploitation, which they cannot get out of.

They cannot get out of the idea of scarcity, of a world of finite resources to be “shared out” in some way, which is at the heart of Liberal political/economic philosophy. Thus their arguments are incoherent. This means that Liberal modernity is not useful for describing post industrial reality and understanding requires going to a higher level of thinking.

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Now, the post modern idea of looking into the deep past for answers to the issues of post industrialism has an atheist using The Bible to illustrate a point about BI.

In the “parable of the vineyard”, a landowner hires men to pick his grapes. The men are found at different times of the day so when the work is done some have worked all day, some half a day, and some for only an hour, because they had not been hired anywhere else. Yet this landlord decides to pay them all the same.

The ones who had been there all day revolted at this. The landlord tells them, in effect, that he has done them no harm. They are going home with a day’s pay. The people who were there for only an hour have also done them no harm.

It is the landlord’s money and he wants to pay everybody what he considers ‘right’. Of course his reasoning was that people have needs, whether they can find work or not. He did not want anyone to go home to their families with only an hours pay.7

This is not simply a religious teaching. People really did think about economic problems in this way before capitalism and industrialization came along. This is what needs to be relearned in post modern times.

So update this to the (post)modern day. We have a BI. Everyone is getting enough to cover their needs regardless of how much or little they “produce”.

Some grudger complains that she is doing a job while someone else is sitting around collecting BI. She needs to be told that nobody is doing her any harm, including the person who just collects BI. She has her BI as well, and she is getting a paycheck from work.

Her response is likely to be that she is having to work harder because so and so is sitting back taking BI. She should be invited to quit and subsist on BI. Her next line of attack would be to complain that she is having to pay taxes so that someone else can sit around.

She should be told that the taxes are not her money to decide what it is spent on. A BI is paid out of the common wealth of society, of which labor is a small and decreasing input. There are many more people available to work than there are jobs available producing the things, and running the things, which keep civilization running and everyone supplied with the basics.

Grudger works because she wants more than her basic needs. This gives her no right to demean those who are happy with that. Amen.

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Now, to look at what some post modern philosophers have to say. Baudrillard talked about three orders of “simulacra” in the modern age. In the classical renaissance, symbols were “counterfeit” and obeyed the natural law of value. In other words, natural resources, especially land, had value, and what was exchanged were representations, counterfeits, of that.

In the industrial age, “referential value” meant the “market law of value”; what price something could fetch on a market. The difference between that and the cost of production was ‘profit’, according to that old guy Marx.

In the age which is now coming on, the cost of producing most things is becoming negligible. I do not entirely agree with this. There will always be limits to productivity. But this is Baudrillard’s idea.

So, in Baudrillard’s post modern, value is according to a ‘structural law’. Payment is by simulation of activities, with little really getting done or exchanged. It is like the saying; “they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work”. Or as in the modern financial economy, which is based on trading in “derivatives” which have no direct connection to tangible assets.

Post industrial/post production times will not mean the end of production, but the end of any problem of producing cheaply enough to meet everyone’s needs. Thus, “referential value’ is annihilated, giving the structural play of value the upper hand.” Structural value means; whatever value the social, and political structure give to something.

What Baudrillard really means here is status. This makes it “the purest, most illegible form of social domination”. Further, “No other culture has this distinct opposition of Life and Death…life is accumulation, death is due payment.” Further, “labor is instituted on death.”

What all this means is that people are threatened with death in order to become labor. Of course this is true even if they enjoy their work. Slaves often did not want to be set free.

Basically, your work is someone else’s leisure. In the productive age we are leaving, labor was living death; you gave up other possibilities in life in order to postpone death. Later, you could refuse to work, but faced a living death of poverty on welfare or the street.

The only other option was revolt; immediate death. In modern times this has usually become a living death in prison.

In the age we are entering, most work is symbolic. It really produces nothing, because little labor is required to produce. Yet we still buy back some death by consuming goods.

This is of course really about control. People are supposed to think they are being given something; permission to live, gifts of goods bestowed upon them. It is a “simulation of redemption.”8 Baudrillard’s view of the post modern and post productive can be grim.

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Bataille’s worldview is more appealing. He denounces humanity’s misunderstanding of the material basis for our life and the correct ends of the forces which we employ.

Any living system, an ecosystem, an organism, or an economy, must use more energy than it needs to sustain itself. If it cannot be expended on growth, as when further growth is blocked, then it must be “lost without profit”. The ways this happens by either constructive or destructive means is: war, building pyramids, holding lavish festivals, conspicuous luxuries, or creating “services.”

Further, a modern industrial economy like ours “expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, ( and ) which it cannot limit,…” These are very hard concepts for Liberal thinkers to swallow. Then Bataille says that the demand for increase in living standards is not a demand for luxury but for justice, an easy concept for BI advocates.

Further, he states that problems are posed as a scarcity of resources in first instance, from what he calls the particular point of view, which is where Liberalism comes from. Problems are posed as an excess of resources in first instance from the general point of view, which is where BI comes from.

In other words, scarcity is an individualist idea, because everybody thinks they do not have enough. Abundance is a communal idea, defining the problem as a just allocation of abundance. Bataille makes the very important point from a BI perspective, that idleness is the simplest means of eliminating surplus.

In other words, we need excess capacity capacity, a reserve capacity. The excess should be absorbed by giving everyone more free time, not by creating artificial demand. This is another difficult concept for Liberalism and capitalism.”9

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It would seem, and it is starting to be argued, that the real need for a BI is to mitigate these negative aspects of a post industrial political economy. Yet to argue for reform of public policy is to seek to convince a critical mass of the public to see things in a different way.

This requires extinguishing old tropes and establishing new ones in people’s minds. You do not do this by arguing in terms of the old tropes, endlessly trying to square the circle while driving in the old tropes.

There is a scarcity of goods in the world; everybody must do their bit to produce enough, otherwise somebody else has to work harder. Yet this is making me feel less free, being on the treadmill all my life, producing but seeing little of the results of my efforts. I want to be master of my own life, meaning to have enough to be secure against being forced into subjugation, serfdom, slavery. But this means I must be exploiting someone else; and around it goes, with White and Van Parijs never getting anywhere.

But enough is produced in the world to provide all that everybody needs and it has been so in most places in most times. Labor has always been only one input into production and is often needed only occasionally. There has rarely been a need for everybody to be working and never on a full time, permanent basis.

The real economic problem has always been about what to do with surpluses. Sometimes an aggressive elite has demanded surplus for growth or to engage in conquest and aggrandizement, but these are no longer practicable outlets. Increased leisure becomes the consumer of surpluses, making “work ethics” and “reciprocity principles” absurd.

As well, technology is making labor an ever smaller part of production. People who work are being forced to work, or made to desire to work, beyond necessity and nobody is exploiting anyone by doing nothing. In fact, someone who does nothing is less of a draw on finite resources, and is therefore a benefit to someone who wants to work and get more. ( I do not need this “job asset”, you can have it.)

Further, this makes the idea of trying to maximize the size of the BI absurd. It assumes a need to maximize growth instead of making minimum use of resources. Discussion should be about what people really need in order to live a good life and to provide this to all with the least effort and draw on resources.

Much of this will not go directly to individuals but to the governments, which organize services and insure sufficient reinvestment in productivity, and maintain infrastructure. Thus, talking about BI in post modern terms is to talk about it in real world terms. Talking in Liberalist/Modernist terms is talking within the frame of an idealized world which never really existed.

The latter lead to endless unresolvable debates which can only reinforce existing prejudices. The former open up the topic of BI and create a framework for productive deliberations on a vast number of topics related to it, especially to the organization of society in a post modern world. White and Van Parijs cannot resolve this “reciprocity problem” despite going into great detail and constructing very elaborate arguments, because they have never understood the problem in the first place.

When looked at through the lens of post modernism, the problem just disappears. This gives assurance that most other problems with a BI, now being intensely debated by BI advocates schooled in Liberal economic and ethical concepts, will also vanish or become clarified when more people with a post modern view are able to be heard. This is actually starting to happen, and by this point my thesis is sufficiently demonstrated.

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So that is where I ended my essay. I even decided to leave in the citations, below. It was a fun write, and fun revising it.

Researching it and writing it over a decade back accelerated me moving away from mainstream thinking about BI. That is really looking at it from the frame of liberalism, meaning capitalism, meaning deliberately created scarcity. It is also about guilt tripping for not working hard enough to feed the machine.

Under liberalism, BI will only be about further trapping people. People the economy does not want can be put out of the way. The rest can work for even less.

Post capitalism, people rediscover the way political economy worked for most of human history. Abundance is assumed as long as there is no waste or destruction of resources. No one has an obligation to work based on the idea that otherwise they are taking something from somebody.

It is not proper to talk about a BI as some sort of ‘dividend’ or compensation for being alienated from nature and its resources. No one has any ‘share’ in nature. Everyone is entitled only to what they need to live on, and a BI is everyone’s living allowance based on that.

This is what people will relearn over the next few decades. It will then be possible to develop a BI which is not a trap for most people. We can base not only whole economies, but individual lives, on real needs.

It is good to go back sometimes and recall what we learned, how, and why. Enough said.

1 http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/anamnesis downloaded March 26, 2014.

2 Page 79-80 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Post Modern Explained. 1993, University of Minnesota
press,Minneapolis.

3 Pages 1, 25, 28-29, 138, 169-70, 233. Van Parij, Philippe; Real Freedom or All; what (if anything) can
justify capitalism? 1995, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

4 Exploitation, and the Case for an Unconditional
Basic Income Political Studies, Volume 45 issue 2, June 1997.

5 Page 330, Van Parij, Phillippe “Reciprocity and the Justification of an Unconditional Basic Income. Reply to Stuart White.” Political Studies, Volume 45, Issue 2, June 1997. Downloaded March 29, 2014.

6 Pages 161&163, Van Der Veen, Robert, “Real Freedom versus Reciprocity: Competing Views on the
Justice of Unconditional Basic Income” Political Studies Volume 46 issue 1, 1998.

7 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+20:1-16 Downloaded March 26, 2014.

8 Pages 6-10, 38-40, 50, 147. Baudrillard, Jean, “Symbolic Exchange and Death” 1994 Sage
Publications, London, UK.

9 Page 21, 24, 26, 38, 39, 119, Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share, volume 1 Zone books, New
York, 1988