Capitalism, Unemployment, and Basic Income - CiteSeerX

Homo Oeconomicus 31(1/2): 125-143 •(2014)

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Capitalism, Unemployment, and Basic Income Ulrich Steinvorth University of Hamburg, Philosophisches Seminar, Germany. (eMail: [email protected])

Abstract: On the one hand, reasons for introducing an unconditional income seem overwhelming; on the other hand, resistance to it seems well-founded too. I weigh financial and economic, moral, and metaphysical arguments, concluding that the financial, economic and moral arguments against basic income are not very convincing while the metaphysical arguments do have weight. Yet they too, like the arguments against basic income of the other classes, do not sufficiently take account of the difference of contemporary economies from pre-industrial economies: that they have to prevent overproduction, or a saving glut, rather than underproduction, or starvation. JEL Codes: A 10, A 13, Z 10 Keywords: Basic income, exchange and use value, saving glut, stagnation, technological unemployment.

1. The problem Humans, except some tribes in some jungles, live today in industrial societies characterized by the continuous replacement of automatable human labor with machinery. Activity that is not creative or care work is being taken over by machines, robots, and computers (and to some extent even creative and care work is; cp. e.g., Lanier 2013: 97-100, on the “robotic bedpan”). Consequentially, more and more people become free from labor. As labor is laborious, a pain and a plight that the Abrahamic religions agree in considering a punishment, we should be happy with our labor’s replacement by machine labor. But we are not; losing labor means unemployment today and unemployment is even worse than labor. The reason is obvious. Without labor we lack the means to live a decent life.

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However, societies whose machines produce what people are less good at producing have the means to enable all their members to live a decent life; otherwise people would not become economically superfluous. Why then do our rich societies not grant all their members the money necessary to lead a decent life, no strings attached? Such money is called an unconditional basic income. Why don’t we introduce a basic income? 1

The answer is: people have reasons not to do so, pragmatic, moral and metaphysical ones. A majority believes that our societies cannot afford paying basic incomes, that it is unfair to pay an income to healthy people capable of labor, and that without regular and more or less coerced labor we even lose our humanity. I argue that these reasons do not withstand criticism.

2. Can present industrial societies afford basic income? It is generally recognized that in most branches of production, such as in agriculture, the food produced before industrialization by 100 labor hours is now produced by a fragment only, say by ten labor hours. If nothing else changes, 90 percent of the laborers become economically superfluous and might be fed without their labor. Obviously, though, some things do change. Most importantly, people’s demand for food (and other products) rises quantitatively and qualitatively. Yet the rise of demand entails a rise

1 The first advocate of basic income was Paine (1797). Under the name of a negative income tax, also Friedman (1962: 192) and M. and R. Friedman (1980) advocated basic income. However, David Sherman, in this volume, argues that Friedman’s negative income tax cannot pass as basic income. Martin Luther King Jr. favored basic income, too. Richard Nixon and his then-aide and future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to enact basic income in the early 1970s; also his 1972 Democratic opponent George McGovern advocated it. Economists including Nobelist James Tobin and John Kenneth Galbraith signed a 1968 petition endorsing the idea. Today, basic income is backed by individuals of different backgrounds. Swiss groups found enough popular support to initiate a national referendum on basic income in 2014; cp. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/ magazine/switzerlands-proposal-to-pay-people-for-being-alive.html? pagewanted =1&_r=0 of informing on present views on basic income; and the German language film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEsKRsjou5k There are many blogs on basic income; cp. e.g. http://notesbrokensociety. wordpress. com/ 2013/11/17/the-case-for-a-basic-income-time-to-rethink-incomes-and-work/ Richard Pereira, in the first two parts of his contribution to this volume, provides a good historical survey of the history of basic income. In the USA, basic income has recently been recommended by David R. Wheeler in the CNN magazine Breaking News, Apr 14, 2014, http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/14/opinion/wheeler-minimum-income/

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of production, which is undergoing the same decrease of human labor of 90 percent that the necessary labor has undergone before the increase of demand. Due to the progress of automation, the decrease of necessary labor may even have gone up to more than 90 percent. Therefore, the rising demand for food and other products since the beginning of industrialization cannot prevent more and more people from becoming superfluous in the sphere of production. By this consideration, paying them a basic income cannot be unaffordable for industrial societies.

However, after industrialization there has been an increase of demand not only for food and clothes, for goods demanded already before industrialization, but also for entirely new products and services, for spinning jennies, steam engines, fertilizers, railways, cars, washing machines, pharmaceutics and surgery, radios and TV sets, telephones, computers, and weapons of mass destruction. Such goods and the services connected to them tend to generate an unlimited demand that requires a correspondingly unlimited amount of labor hours to produce the goods and provide the services. Industrialization, it seems, may decrease the necessary labor in agriculture and the textiles and some more branches, but also creates an unlimited number of new branches producing goods and providing services the demand for which is unlimited. Hence, if an economy leads to increasing unemployment, we might suspect that the reason is not industrialization but its failed organization. If rightly organized, industrialization allows and perhaps even requires full employment. There is, as also Keynes who introduced the term (1930: 3) conceded, no “technological unemployment.” 2

This argument is accepted by most contemporary economists. Yet it does not take account of the fact that the progress of industrialization, which is also a progress of automation, comprehends all branches of production, the new branches no less than the old ones. Human labor is replaced in the production of railways, telephones and computers no less than in the production of wheat. The services of laundries and banks and insurance corporations are taken over by automates and computers no less than the services of servants, farmers and coachmen. True, the invention of steam engines and computers has allowed a lot of coachmen and farmers to find a new employment. But their employment is only a transient stage and the preparation of a new wave of automation that brings industrial societies closer to the terminal of a society in which all labor is done by automates,

2 Keynes (1930) did not exclude that technological unemployment was only temporary and might be overcome if workers’ qualifications are suitably adapted to the new productive forces, but allows the interpretation that we should adapt the new productive forces to human expectations rather than the other way around.


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and only creative and care work is left to humans, work that needs what automates cannot acquire: imagination and emotion, creativity and love.

In fact, many contemporary economists concede there is a tendency to stagnation in the present economy. But they also claim that present economies’ tendency to stagnation can be overcome by innovation, as Schumpeter taught; by the introduction of inventions that stimulate demand and thus lead to new jobs. The new branches of production, however, will again undergo, and in fact have undergone, the fate of all industrial production, which is automation of all automatable labor. On the long run, they will not decrease unemployment.

Critics of the thesis of technological unemployment will point to statistics demonstrating that since the beginning of the 20th century, unemployment numbers have not constantly risen. In times of crises they shoot up but when economies recover they go down again. In the last decade or decades, unemployment may have risen, but in the same decades the economy stagnated. Once this is overcome, they argue, unemployment will approach full employment, while introducing basic income will prevent such recovery.

It is true that statistics does not support the claim of an unstoppable rise of unemployment, and it is true too that its rise is stoppable. We can claim only a tendency that exerts a constant pressure in the direction of rising unemployment, but tendencies can be stopped if the pressure is counteracted. Diverse measures are taken to counter this pressure: stimulating consumption by advertisement and by producing fashionable products of short duration; subsidizing economically superfluous jobs to prevent unemployment and increase the buying power necessary for the sale of products and the realization of the investments; investing in the military-industrial complex whose products destroy (not least unemployed people) and prepare a stimulus for new demands. Nonetheless, today economists have become skeptical about technology’s capacity to absorb unemployment (cp. The Economist 2014).

In any case, when we discuss if basic income is affordable, we discuss possibilities rather than facts. The question is whether modern industrial societies could pay everyone a basic income without loss of productivity and wealth. Similarly, the claim that modern industrial societies make an increasing number of people economically superfluous is not a claim of facts but of a concrete and easily realizable possibility. It is a claim on a chance quasi suggested by the facts of modern technology, as they allow realizing elementary human wants, the wants of leisure, of avoiding labor, of using life to do things for their own sake rather than of necessity.3

3 Steinvorth (2013) discusses basic income from a more philosophical viewpoint.


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So the question is: does modern technology allow introducing a basic income? There can be little doubt about it once we grasp the potential of technology. Here is an argument put forward by Russell in 1932:

Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed (Russell 1935: 3f). Russell recommended a radical reduction of everyone’s average labor

time. Such a reduction would effectively reduce unemployment, but it does not take account of a development entailed by automation: the employments that will not be replaced by machines offer creative and care work, attractive activities that are loved rather than loathed. Probably Russell wanted to allow people to work more than a small number of hours a week if they wanted, but in this case it would be better to propose an institution that secures everyone, whether or not dismissed, a basic income that secures them a decent life, yet leaves employment attractive enough as an additional income. Depending on the state of automation of the production, such a basic income could be higher or lower. Actually, this is what the adherents of a basic income propose. However, there is still another argument that basic income is not affordable. Our modern economies are based on investments by individuals or firms that expect to get back the value of their investments after a certain period of production. Such an expectation seems fair


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enough. Investors will expect to get back their invested value and, in addition, a profit that remunerates them for the loss they suffer when they invest value rather than consuming it. This expectation of a profit seems fair enough too, and most economists agree that an economy is capitalist if it is organized to meet this expectation. Yet with basic income, people are free to reject employments they judge to be badly paid; so basic income will balloon wages and reduce profits. With profit prospects reduced, investments will fall and the economy will stagnate. We can formulate the same argument using categories out of fashion today, the categories of exchange value and use value. Adam Smith, following John Law,4 distinguished exchange value and use value thus:

The word VALUE … has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods. The one may be called ‘value in use’; the other, ‘value in exchange’. The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and, on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce nothing… A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use… (Smith 1986 [1776/77]: 131f.). Smith goes on explaining that economists only look for „principles

which regulate the exchangeable value of commodities“, their „real price“, in distinction from both their ever changing actual market price and their use value. He implies that in modern economies only exchange values and real prices but not use values are important. Obviously this is true if we think of the motivation for investments. The investors want to get back the exchange value of their investments, not any kind of use value or useful things. Hence, presupposing this interest as the motor of present economies, we can argue against basic income by pointing to the fact that this motor fails if basic income is introduced.

Moreover, we can reject the view that “Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone” that Russell and many other thinkers adhere. They fail to distinguish between exchange value and use value. They are right that modern technique has made it possible to increase enormously the amount of use values, of useful things, but wrong to infer

4 Law (1750: 4) used the example of the diamond and water. He develops ideas of Locke (1691).


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that therefore we can work less. For modern economies need to produce not only use value but exchange value, even more exchange value than they started with, as otherwise there will be no profit that lures investors to invest.

Yet exchange value is not increased when use values are; on the contrary. Think of the water and the diamond. The more we have of the useful thing, the more its exchange value falls. Hence, modern technique decreases the exchange value of the products to the very degree it reduces their scarcity. As it reduces their scarcity, it reduces profit expectations. It is for this reason that Marx (1959: Ch. 13) predicted a tendency of the profit to fall in industrial capitalism.5

However, this argument against basic income can easily backfire. Declaring the idea that modern technology makes a basic income affordable a failure to distinguish between exchange value and use value can lead us to the idea that an economy that insists on recovering the exchange value of investments cannot cope with the productive potential modern societies have acquired by their machinery. We may argue, as Marx did, that because capitalist economies require increasing exchange value and basic income will endanger profits, this proves that capitalism uses the productive powers of modern technology in an inadequate organization form, a form that was good to start the industrial revolution but now prevents machines from doing all labor for us.

Thus turning the tables, we can explain the view that basic income is not affordable as a failure to distinguish the actual organization form of modern productive powers from its concrete, easily realizable possible form in which modern technology is used to increase use values, in particular the use value of leisure and of doing things for their own sake rather than living a life of necessities, most important among them the necessity to increase the exchange value of an investment.

The question, of course, is if such turning of the tables is more than a verbal maneuver, and this question depends on whether the actual,

5 Also Smith (1986 [176/77]: 190 ff.) and other economists predicted such a fall. But they explained it by competition between capitalists rather than by the increase of use value production. Note that for his prediction, Marx could understand exchange value as determined by scarcity rather than by labor time. Yet he also could define it by labor time as far as labor time is the most important scarce good. Schumpeter (1912) even argued that technological innovation saves capitalism from the tendency to stagnate that he concedes does exist. As far as such innovation implies scarcity of the innovated commodity for some time, his empirical observations confirm rather than contradict Marx. He agreed with Marx that the “capitalist process … creates the conditions for ... the socialist form of life” (Schumpeter 1942: 162).


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capitalist, organization is less adequate than the possible one that thinkers such as Russell and Marx consider quasi suggested by modern technology and therefore easily implementable. How can we decide this question?

Marx claimed that the capitalist organization of productive forces is inadequate because it leads to economic crises and stagnation, and since we are presently suffering from economic crises and stagnation, we can be inclined to think Marx was right. On the other hand, in the post-WW II era capitalist economies have done a better job than the competing socialist economies of socialist societies such as the Soviet Union that appealed to Marx as their guide. So we may hope that the present stagnation can be overcome without changing the organization form, in particular without dropping the investment condition that makes an economy capitalist, the condition that the invested exchange value must be recovered with a profit.

Economists do not provide much help to answer our question. If they are not prejudiced partisans for either capitalism, the condition of a profitable recovery of the invested exchange value, or socialism, the denial that exchange values are important for modern industrial economies, most of them remain abstract in their statements and hardly allow judging the actual situation. Yet economic politicians and journalists who have to respond to and to comment on economic crises and other stagnation phenomena are of a different class. Their politics and remarks can help judge on whether or not the present capitalist organization of modern technology is adequate.

3. Economic politicians on the present economic stagnation Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, in 2005 introduced the concept of global saving glut to point to an important reason of the present economic stagnation and vulnerability to crises. Lawrence Summers, Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton, Alan Greenspan, Bernanke’s predecessor, and Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, took up Bernanke’s term and the idea connected to it. The idea that an abundance of financial means is an important reason of the present stagnation is paradoxical if we expect an economy to flourish the better the more it has resources to invest. However, this expectation is justified only if investments are not restricted by the condition that their exchange value has to come back after a production period, and with a profit at that. A saving glut indicates, first, that investments are restricted by this condition, second that the prospect of meeting the condition is considered too low as to invest the savings, third (as will soon become clearer) that those responsible for investments are not public institutions but private individuals and corporations, interested in their private wealth rather than the wealth of the whole of society.


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By talking of a global saving glut, Bernanke, Greenspan, Summers and Wolf suggested that the present economic stagnation cannot be overcome unless the savings can be in some way made to be invested. But how? – Summers and Wolf proposed

to use today’s glut of savings to finance a surge in public investment. That might be partly linked to a shift to lower-carbon growth. Another possibility is to facilitate capital flows to emerging and developing countries, where the best investment opportunities must lie (Wolf 2013).

The aims that they propose the savings to use for are obviously useful. To hark back to the outmoded terminology, the investments would serve use values that most people probably approve. Do Summers and Wolf rely on the high approvability of their proposals when they hope they might deplete the glut by investments? This is hardly plausible, as they know that if the usefulness of an investment was sufficient for an investment, there wouldn’t be a saving glut in the first place. Rather, they address those who decide on “public investments” and can “facilitate capital flows.” They want them to incentivize the proposed investments; probably, to use a phrase from Wolf (2013), by “monetary financing of government deficits”. Yet to use such incentives means to override or postpone the profit condition. Thus, although they probably do not want to abolish the capitalist investment condition of profitability, they want to escape it. Even as high-ranking representatives of the present economies as Summers and Wolf, and with them Bernanke and Greenspan, seem to see a conflict between the goal of profitable and the goal of useful investment, and decide for prioritizing useful investment.

Let us listen to another economic expert, to the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. As a regular op-ed columnist of the New York Times, Krugman talks not only of ideal economic models but also of the real economies. To the question, “what’s really different about America in the 21st century?”

The most significant answer, I’d suggest, is the growing importance of monopoly rents: profits that don’t represent returns on investment, but instead reflect the value of market dominance. Sometimes that dominance seems deserved, sometimes not; but, either way, the growing importance of rents is producing a new disconnect between profits and production …

To see what I’m talking about, consider the differences between the iconic companies of two different eras: General Motors in the 1950s and 1960s, and Apple today.


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Obviously, G.M. in its heyday had a lot of market power. Nonetheless, the company’s value came largely from its productive capacity: it owned hundreds of factories and employed around 1 percent of the total nonfarm work force.

Apple, by contrast, seems barely tethered to the material world. Depending on the vagaries of its stock price, it’s either the highest-valued or the second-highest-valued company in America, but it employs less than 0.05 percent of our workers. To some extent, that’s because it has outsourced almost all its production overseas. But the truth is that the Chinese aren’t making that much money from Apple sales either. To a large extent, the price you pay for an iWhatever is disconnected from the cost of producing the gadget. Apple simply charges what the traffic will bear, and given the strength of its market position, the traffic will bear a lot … (Krugman 2013). Krugman claims that firms make profits today by charging prices for

their products that correspond not to the exchange values of the products but to the market power of the firm. The implication is that firms cannot expect to get back the exchange value of their investments (along with a profit) if they have to compete with other firms, as the economic models expect, but only if they can dictate prices, and in this case their profits are enormous. So he agrees with Bernanke, Greenspan, Summers and Wolf that the competitive way of getting back the exchange value of investments, which is taught to be the normal way in economic classes, no longer works.

Krugman also agrees that there is a global saving glut: … here’s the puzzle: Since profits are high while borrowing costs are low, why aren’t we seeing a boom in business investment? And, no, investment isn’t depressed because President Obama has hurt the feelings of business leaders or because they’re terrified by the prospect of universal health insurance. Well, there’s no puzzle here if rising profits reflect rents, not returns on investment. A monopolist can, after all, be highly profitable yet see no good reason to expand its productive capacity. And Apple again provides a case in point: It is hugely profitable, yet it’s sitting on a giant pile of cash, which it evidently sees no need to reinvest in its business. Or to put it differently, rising monopoly rents can and arguably have had the effect of simultaneously depressing both wages and the perceived return on investment (Krugman 2013).


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Unlike Bernanke and his followers, Krugman points to the failures of the organization form of present economies. He says:

You might suspect that this can’t be good for the broader economy, and you’d be right. If household income and hence household spending is held down because labor gets an ever-smaller share of national income, while corporations, despite soaring profits, have little incentive to invest, you have a recipe for persistently depressed demand. I don’t think this is the only reason our recovery has been so weak – weak recoveries are normal after financial crises – but it’s probably a contributory factor (Krugman 2013). The differences between Bernanke and his followers on the one side

and Krugman on the other are negligible if compared to their important claim that we are suffering from a saving glut. This claim is not really compatible with the claim that the capitalist organization of modern technology is fine, nor with the opinion that basic income is not affordable. It confirms the insight that modern industrial societies are radically different from preindustrial societies by productive powers that invert their basic economic problem. While former societies had to fight with underproduction, the present ones have to fight with overproduction. The enemy of the former ones was starvation; the enemy of the present ones is a saving glut or the refusal to invest. To fight starvation, the former ones had to admonish everyone to work; to fight saving gluts, this admonition is absurd. And yet politicians and moralists preach we should fight for full employment.

4. Is basic income unfair, unjust or in another way immoral? There are certainly several ways to reorganize the use of technology in production,6 but the introduction of a basic income could solve some of the present economic problems in a peaceful, piecemeal and sustainable way. It would solve the problem of unemployment by providing those who for whatever reason do not find employment with money enough for a decent life. Still, it would not abolish the system of employment, as the wages paid for employment would grant a higher income and therefore would

6 A remarkable alternative is proposed by Lanier 2013, see below. Lanier, who also starts from the fact of technological mass unemployment, considers Ford 2009, proposing a scheme rather similar to basic income, “an interesting contrast to my proposal” (Lanier 2103: 56).


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allure people to employment.7 True, employment must become attractive not only by offering additional money but also by the quality of work. But this condition corresponds to the present trend of replacing all mechanical human labor with machine work. This trend leaves only creative and care work to humans, work that can be done for its own sake and therefore is attractive even without money. The introduction of basic income would thus lead to a system of employment that offers work that is attractive for its own sake and requires less money to attract.

On the other hand, those who use basic income to dedicate their energies to do what they like most to do, outside of employment, can also choose creative and care work as well as a life of pleasure, leisure or laziness. In his defense of basic income, Philippe van Parijs (1995: 35; cp. Van Parijs 1991: 101-31) explicitly argues that the lazy, including those who surf all day off Malibu, have a right to basic income. In contrast, Rawls (1993: 181-2 n) claimed that “those who surf all day off Malibu must find a way to support themselves and would not be entitled to public funds.” Yet van Parijs is consistent. From its beginnings in Thomas Paine, basic income has been conceived as a fund everyone has a right to because it compensates the exclusion of most people from access to land and other natural resources, therefore to be paid by those who have appropriated natural resources (cp. lengthy note at the beginning of this paper). Even though in the end it is not very important whether basic income is based on the equal right to access to natural resource or on utilitarian arguments, it is important to see that it can be based on this right.

As it can be based on a right, basic income is not a welfare institution that provides people with the alms of the benevolent. It is a substitute for what everyone has a right to, the use of natural resources that according to most philosophers, liberals and libertarians (such as Locke 1960: §§ 24ff, and Nozick 1974: 180f) as well as socialists and conservatives agree in considering is the common property of all mankind including the future generations. It is a problem how to calculate the value of natural resources, but this problem can be solved by stipulating that the amount of basic income must not be higher than is compatible with a flourishing economy that preserves to future generations equal access to the natural resources.

However, even though basic income compensates the injustice of private appropriations of natural resources and therefore has to be paid to everyone regardless of whether they are lazy, it is improbable that it promotes laziness. If we look at babies, who show humans in their originally natural state, they rarely are lazy and prefer activity to passivity.

7 For details on the piecemeal implementation of a basic income, cp. Ulrich’s paper in this volume.


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So adults likely prefer activity too if their milieu favored the development of their talents. Rid of the necessity to be employed, they will do what they love most rather than leaving their abilities unused. Yet being active they will contribute to the wealth of their societies, which even today is not brought forth by employed labor alone.

Nonetheless, the view is widespread and deep-rooted that without some coercion people will not work. This view is refuted by the fact that very often the upper classes, enjoying lives of leisure, produced individuals who just because of their leisure time contributed to the wealth of their societies by artistic and scientific accomplishments. Still, the idea of a basic income arouses in many commentators the response that Russell met in a duchess who hearing about plans to grant workers some holidays by law replied: „What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.” Russell was surely right to add: “People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion” (Russell 1935: 4). He was also right to imply that because today people find pleasure in passive states, many people immediately after the introduction of basic income would tend to look for passive pleasures, yet that this tendency will change when people recognize their talents to produce.

The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part (Russell 1935: 7f.). However, these are speculations; we do have to concede that it is

possible that some people will use basic income to lead a lazy life that is of no worth for anyone. Is it fair, just and moral to give money to such people? The answer is yes because the money is given not as alms. It is given as a compensation for the injustice of being excluded from access to many natural resources, most important among them land. In preindustrial societies for people who did not find employment there was a place in agriculture where they could contribute to an economy always in need of hands ready to labor. In preindustrial societies, everyone had access to the most important natural resource and could provide for what they needed.

Today, employment also in agriculture is limited. Employment, much as it remains under coercive conditions, has become a privilege rather than a necessity. Therefore, everyone has a right to compensation for the exclusion from access to the natural resource of land and other conditions of work. To demand that such compensation will be provided only if people are ready to labor is an illegitimate intervention in individual liberty.


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5. Why don’t present societies introduce a basic income? So if basic income is affordable and morally acceptable, why don’t present societies introduce a basic income? Certainly the views that it is unaffordable and morally unacceptable are strong enough to contribute to preventing basic income, but I doubt that they alone are sufficient to prevent it. There are more reasons. There is a fear beyond financial and moral fears that acts against introducing basic income. It is the fear that people without an account of their good deeds, assessed by a standard that is the same for everyone, lose their responsibility and dignity. It’s a metaphysical fear that we’ll stop being human if there is nothing to measure our real worth or value. In the Christian Middle Ages, our real worth was measured by Christian standards; in the Renaissance, perhaps it was measured by Renaissance standards. But today, the standard we are left with is the number of hours we work not for us or our pleasure, but in an employment. If we think that the same labor time of different individuals have different value because of the different quality of their labor, the standard we are left with is the money we get for our labor time.

Russell understood this fear as a result of Western labor morality, the morality that finds in labor or necessary work the meaning of life:

Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery (Russell 1935: 3). Russell is right to despise the morality of work as the morality of slaves,

but in countries that inherited a strong labor morality it is part of a metaphysical fear. Without being coerced to work, people will lose the measure to assess their value and start acting without responsibility and dignity. Proverbs in many languages bear witness to this idea. The devil finds work for idle hands; Müßiggang ist aller Laster Anfang. Lediggang er roten til alt ondt; L’oisiveté est la mère de tous les vices; La ociosidad es madre de todos los vicios; L’ozio è il padre dei vizi.

The idea is neither that leisure itself is immoral; the upper classes were expected to live in leisure but were also expected to have the standards proper to their class to assess their value. Nor is it the idea that if people are not coerced to do something they will not know what to use their life for and therefore will become bad; also lower class people loved leisure and knew that the lazy are lazy also about doing evil. Rather, the proverbs express the fear that leisure leads to actions too whimsical to assess by an


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objective standard and too arbitrary to allow the idle to act with responsibility and dignity.

Connected to this fear is the expectation to find the basic meaning of life in work and to allow enjoying anything only under the condition that the joy is earned by hard work. The greatness of joy must be proportional to the hardness of work. Activities cannot be joyful but only arduous. Joys are reserved for consumptions, for which we must be passive. The good and meaningful life consists of actions we must be coerced to and of pleasures that reward us after work in a state of passivity. In contrast, the ancient aristocrats Plato (1992: 357b-d) and Aristotle (1953: 1050 a23-30, and Aristotle 1934: 1094 a5, 1140 b4, 1140 b 4), looking down onto the lower classes that like the bourgeois choose to work, or like the needy have to work, found the good and meaningful life in doing things for their own sake, in the pursuit of action-immanent goals rather than in goals, such as pleasure, fame, money or power, that can be pursued only as a reward for or a result of an action. Finding meaning in the reward for actions rather than in actions themselves deprives activities of meaning. And yet our life and everything we are responsible for consists in activities rather than in passive states. Without action-immanent goals, “all desire would be futile and in vain”, as Aristotle said (1934: 1094 a 21).

These insights in the conditions of a meaningful life have been forgotten in later times when the aristocrats lost their ideological dominance. Today, as Hannah Arendt (1958: 5) remarked, “What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them.” She added: “Surely, nothing could be worse.” Sure, something can be worse: a society of laborers who understand they neither can nor need to remain a society of laborers, yet do not use their chance to become a society of idle rich, using their leisure to do things for their own sake. The introduction of basic income would be the first step to such a leisure society.

Today, the idea that the meaning of life is work has faded away, but basic income, allowing leisure, is distrusted as much as idle hands are. Basic income deprives society of its objective standard of assessing the worth of individuals by their labor time or the money they get for it. Now, this standard is lost anyway by the rise of unemployment. As long as unemployment can be understood as a state that the unemployed themselves are responsible for, the distrust of leisure hits the unemployed. To the extent this understanding is recognized as obsolete and unjust, the need for another understanding is acknowledged. This ambivalence in the presently prevailing judgment appears in the curious fact that when you ask people what they would do if they did not have to work, they do not see a problem in having more leisure time, often answering they will do


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what they love doing most, while asserting that other people would probably succumb to laziness.

Anyway, the metaphysical fear of losing dignity and responsibility with the loss of employment appears in the desire to keep to an objective standard by which to measure the value of any individual. We find a paradigm of this desire in Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and musician.

Lanier sees that present computer technology leads to mass unemployment and “a new kind of class division between full economic participants and partial economic participants” that prevents “shared economic interest to support long-term democracy” (Lanier 2013: 248; cp. Ch. 8 on mass unemployment). Yet he rejects schemes like basic income. His therapy, founded on appeals to dignity and a “humanistic information economy”, is to change the Internet into “two-way linking” so that the origin of any data is recorded and “provenance is treated as a basic right, similar to the way civil rights and property rights were given a universal stature in order to make democracy and market capitalism viable”. Thus, “faking or erasing provenance would at the very least require taking on nontrivial effort and risk” (Lanier 2013: 245. For the many appeals to dignity, use the book’s index).

Besides making “the Internet faster and more efficient,” (Lanier 2013: 245) the two-way linking allows registering and evaluating every input and output of all Internet users, that is, according to Lanier’s conception of the future, of everyone. The evaluation is crucial for Lanier’s idea of human responsibility and dignity. It makes sure that everyone gets the value they merit. The value is “partially determined by buyers and sellers in the moment and partially determined by universal policies. Each price will have two components, called ‘instant’ and ‘legacy’.” The legacy is to exclude unfair price demands and to include taxes that Lanier also calls “infrastructure fees” (Lanier 2013: 272f; taxes and the name “infrastructure fees” are explained p. 290). Lanier gives this “example of how you might make money from the cloud” – a server that registers your inputs and outputs – “in a humanistic future of more complete accounting”:

You meet a future spouse on an online dating service. The algorithms that implement that service take note of your marriage. As the years go by, and you’re still together, the algorithms increasingly apply what seemed to be the correlations between you and your spouse to matching other prospective couples. When some of them also get married, it is automatically calculated that the correlations from your case were particularly relevant to the recommendations. You get extra nanopayments as a result (Lanier 2013: 274).


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Obviously, Lanier tries to account for every aspect of a biography that contributes to some advantage or disadvantage of all other people and thus to secure to everyone the recognition that society owes them. But by the very consistency and penetrance he does so, his idea of dignity and responsibility becomes absurd. First, there will always be aspects in human lives that will not show up in the Internet, even in the lives of computer freaks who do nothing without a computer click. Second, he assumes that any contribution to society or other people can and should be measured in economic value or money. Even today, many people prefer recognition in form of fame or prizes to that in form of money. When technology will have become as productive as also Lanier expects, we’ll live in abundance and money will lose its present attraction. People will still crave for recognition, but not in the form of money.

Basic income, if embedded in a system of non-monetary recognitions, is a better way to take account of the increasing entwinement of what people do to one another. Moreover, while today activities outside the economic sphere, the activities in the family, education, art, science, administration, have to conform to the goal of recovering an investment, basic income could free them for the pursuit of their specific internal goals. In fact, the present economies are complex systems of cooperation in which the achievements of the economically successful and best paid individuals depend on the various and immeasurable contributions even of the least successful and unemployed. Modern technologies have made people so dependent on one another that economies have become communist. Only the capitalist organization of these productive forces, in particular the forms of ownership, are not.

6. Conclusion Introducing an unconditionally paid basic income would revolutionize societies without a destructive revolution. It would make people independent of the markets without abandoning markets. It would liberate labor markets by providing the owners of labor power with the same freedom to refuse an offer that the owners of capital have to refuse an offer from the owners of labor power. It would allow people made economically superfluous to do socially beneficial work that can give meaning to their life. It would stop measuring our value by whether we have got an employment and by how much money we earn. It would contribute to measuring the value of things by their utility or contribution to doing things for their own sake rather than by their exchange value. If embedded in institutions that support the autonomy of individuals and professions, basic income could become a nucleus of a society no longer fixated on money and jobs.


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