Review of Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen, Guy Standing (Pelican, London 2017)

Abstract

In 2011, before the rise of recent populist politicians, the former International Labour Organization economist Guy Standing wrote a book in which he warned of the rise of a growing class “prone to listen to ugly voices.” Those strident voices could well erect an influential political platform. Standing argued that the neo-liberal project had contrived an “incipient political monster” and that urgent action was needed before that creature came to life.1 A co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network, Standing called that book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. His 2017 book on basic income offers an incisive, well-informed – and sometimes impassioned – probe of an idea with an old political pedigree that has been attracting increasing interest since his look at the precariat. For Standing, basic income is at once a policy and an urgent social movement, an essential part of the action required to stem the tides of right wing populism. This volume owes an intellectual debt to Tom Paine’s Agrarian Justice and the idea of a social dividend that is “not charity but a right.” Using this principle, Standing cuts his way through the brittle thickets of social policy that so often entangle discussions of basic income. Along the way, he puts forward a wide-ranging definition of basic income as much more than an anti-poverty measure. Standing defines basic income as “ ... a social dividend paid from the collective wealth of society created and maintained by our ancestors and as a shared return on the commons and natural resources that belong to all” (page 27). He goes on to describe this rationale for understanding basic income as a social justice imperative rather than as a response to poverty. Such an approach situates basic income within the left libertarian tradition. Other leading basic income supporters share this perspective, notably Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, whose 2017 book’s opening chapter is devoted to basic income as “an instrument of freedom.”2 Standing provides a comprehensive outline of the freedom-enhancing character of what he calls “republican freedom.” Freedom to refuse a bad job or leave an abusive relationship. Freedom to undertake care work and creative work. Standing contrasts this libertarian position to neo-liberal notions of freedom and basic income, providing a useful counterpoint to left critics whose rejection of basic income automatically equates it with neoliberalism. “Support for or opposition to a policy should not be based on whether someone one does not like supports or opposes it,” notes Standing (page 114). Yet Standing sometimes succumbs to the hegemony of neo-liberal libertarianism, arguing that “a crude Darwinian ethos ... underpins all forms of libertarianism” (page 57). It is testimony to the power of neo-liberal hegemony that even as sophisticated a thinker as Standing slips into this assumption. That aside, Standing offers a sharp distinction between work and labour, one that would surely please Bertrand Russell, who wrote “In Praise of Idleness.3” Standing is forthright – even acerbic – in taking on “the preaching of dour labourists” who continue to hold up full employment as a public policy gold standard (page 177). He regards labour as a commodity like any other offered on the market, placing him squarely in the Marxist tradition. Work, voluntarily undertaken, is something else again. A basic income would offer vital security for the unwillingly semi-employed precarious workers whose growing ranks so alarmed Standing in 2011. His libertarian approach is a welcome egalitarian antidote to the failure of so much social democratic imagination that seems unable to extricate itself from a world where jobs are an end in themselves. Standing points to the reality of much employment, so familiar to so many forced to subordinate themselves to bosses. Most, he explains, are “boring, stultifying, demeaning, isolating or even dangerous” (page 115). In a world where alienated labour persists and inequalities continue to grow, where is the pressure to reverse corrosive trends? There are, certainly, determined efforts to defend the common good in many northern welfare