Basic Income, Social Security and the Labour Market

Abstract

The key to dismantling the interlocking barriers which stand in the way of a strategy for reducing collective toil and redividing social labour, lies in the idea of an unconditionally guaranteed basic income (BI) allocated to every man, woman and child in society. Precisely what this idea involves is explained in Section 2. Section 3 argues that BI connects an old theme of enlightened social thought with certain desirable shifts in the parameters of social organisation which the evolution of advanced capitalism has now brought within the horizon of possibility. This account of the secular preconditions for basic income is followed in Section 4 by a critique of the assumptions underlying the postwar Keynes-Beveridge regime of full employment and social insurance. It is the crisis arising from the breakdown of this regime which establishes BI as an idea whose time has come. The ways in which BI answers some of the most urgent needs of our age and simultaneously opens up new prospects of social transformation are elaborated in Chapters 10 and 11.