Universal Basic Income: A Weight Lifted

When the shadow of COVID-19 fell across Canada, as with much of the world, it immediately revealed the many fault lines running through our current mode of social organization. With some qualifying for the now-rescinded Canadian Emergency Relief Benefit (CERB) and others not, some being declared essential and thrust to the front-lines while others were able to shelter at home, the chasm between privilege and disadvantage was thrown into terrible relief.

Economic stimulus cheques sent a muddy message to the public: if $2000 a month is considered the minimum amount a person needs to remain alive during a pandemic, why, for so long, have so many been forced to live on so much less?

Governments are like parents – the majority of the people they rule over didn’t ask for their custody, they were merely born into it. Like parents, a government has a responsibility to provide care for the people they are in charge. Ostensibly, this is the whole point of government.

If we are born into living in a world where everything has a price, then it should be the government’s duty to ensure that every citizen has money to spend. If our human rights – our access to water, shelter, and food – are slapped with a price tag, it is a human rights violation to make these things inaccessible.

Utopia Now

“No penalty on earth will stop people from stealing, if it is their only way of getting food. It would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood so that nobody is under the frightful necessity of becoming first a thief, then a corpse.”

— Thomas More

These lines are from More’s classic work of theory fiction published in 1516, Utopia. More’s close friend, the humanist scholar Johannes Ludovicus Vives went further in envisioning a means of delivering subsistence to every citizen, regardless of their economic background. The American revolutionary Thomas Paine saw the need for a basic income given to the people by the state as repayment for the theft of landed property, the brilliant socialist Charles Fourier thought so too. The history of a universal basic income is the history of the struggle for egalitarianism within a stratified capitalist system.

If the government already owns every piece of land, every natural resource and has barred us from the ability to eke out a free living ourselves, a guaranteed wage is only the start of what we are owed.

Dignity for All

If everyone had a guaranteed minimum income, we would be free to realize our potential in whatever way we see fit. People would be less likely to remain in dangerous living situations for economic reasons, would be less likely to take jobs that pose risk to their mental and physical health. As the late, great David Graeber theorizes in his indispensable book Bullshit Jobs, a guaranteed income may expose just how many jobs are being performed in our society for no good reason at all. Automation can help. We are well passed the point where robotics and AI are advanced enough to make redundant every thankless job.

Either blessed or cursed with the gift of reason, we humans are meant for more than drudgery. For too long have we held ourselves back.

The Times They are a-Changing

There have been many UBI pilot projects all over the world, all with startlingly positive results. One of these is in the fight against climate change.

UBI can reduce the emissions caused by the current 50 hour work week, as well as slow the unsustainable cycle of consumption and production in which we have trapped ourselves and the natural world. A guaranteed cash payment to every citizen could ease the transition away from a fossil fuel economy into green energy that would otherwise leave millions jobless. In Indonesia, a guaranteed income project reduced deforestation in the region it was implemented by 30%.

UBI is a weight lifted; not only off our own burdened backs, but from off the planet, too.

Universal basic income can make extreme poverty extinct. It smashes the need for a welfare state and empowers every individual to realize their full potential. It is a way of making capitalism work for everyone, not just the wealthy. It is a way of taking back from the resource monopolists a small share of what is ours.

To learn more and become involved visit ubiworks.ca.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

The Other Side Breaks on Through to Here: Poltergeist Phenomena as Capitalist Resistance

Zhupel of the revolution (1905) by boris kustodiev

“The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself.”

— Walter Benjamin

Get Out of My House

Floorboards creaking while everyone is asleep. Cupboards swing open before your eyes. The iPad levitated for thirteen seconds before slamming to the ground. The poltergeist behaves like a neglected child, upsetting order to grab attention. It moves unseen through the corridors of the newly renovated town house, starting the Vitamix well before you’re ready to make your maca smoothie. When the front door opens and the family pours in, arms filled with shopping bags, the poltergeist is there, petulant, hurtling a Fitbit against the wall.

image from pixabay

And even in moments of silence, when you do not know you have a ghost in your house – it is there. It’s in the simmering uncertainty held down by another Netflix binge. It’s the cold sweat of what have I done? I don’t want to be a policy analyst. It’s in the silence as you drive the family to the water park. It’s the noise beneath the placid surface of the capitalist dream. The incorporeal shade haunting the hallowed homes of a material world.

“The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way.”

— Walter Benjamin

Bring the Noise

Poltergeist, from the German “poltern” (a sonic disturbance) and “geist” (spirit), might be translated as “knocking ghost”, or “noisy spirit”. However one renders it in English, the meaning is plain: it is loud and restless. Indeed, poltergeist phenomena are always associated with sounds. From the spectral Drummer of Tedworth beating out an unseen cacophony in 1682 , through to the disembodied voices and wall pounding of the notorious Enfield poltergeist which tormented a single mother in England in 1977; the hauntings are uniformly a sonic barrage described as a “disturbance.”

image from pixabay

And what, exactly, is being disturbed? What is the purpose of all this noise? Writing of harsh noise in music, Csaba Toth defines noise as that which “disrupts both the performer and listener’s normal relations to the symbolic order by refusing to route musical pleasure through the symbolic order.” Pleasure is easily commodified and the vectors for pleasure (art, alcohol, drugs, sex) are monopolized by both government and corporation as a means of social control.

But noise resists commodification: it does not appeal to the pleasure principle, experience of it is not mediated by any centralized authority. The poltergeist is then not so different from transgressive sound artists like Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle. Noise as a form of social disruption. Discomfort to short circuit the forces of control.

The Ghost in the Gadget

“But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere… Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads.”

— Walter Benjamin

The poltergeist unleashes a sonic assault on everything we have been taught to believe is sacred about a domesticated, capitalist life. It is important to note how, aside from a few spectacular tales, accounts of poltergeist activity involve only damage to property. In fact, much of the violence inherent in these manifestations is directed against physical objects best representing the private domicile: doors, beds, cupboards, and tables.

Like a protest that turns to smashing the windows of a Starbucks, the poltergeist expresses the rage of an anarchic soul confined by capitalism. It may even possess the symbols of capitalism itself: I am become the floating smartphone, destroyer of stability. In the 1960 case of the Baltimore poltergeist, the spirit exploded Coca-Cola bottles from within.

The poltergeist operates spontaneously, it is unpredictable, capricious, and angry – it is ungovernability itself and, by insinuating itself directly into the home and freely using objects therein, it attacks the very concept of private ownership that lies at the heart of capitalism.

A Spectre is Haunting

“No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.”

— Walter Benjamin

Skeptics will say that poltergeist phenomena, often emanating from a human “focal point,” usually in the form of a teenage or pre-teen child, is simply either conscious or unconscious mischief. The child, lacking attention, projects a fantasy spirit to achieve power over the household and assault the hierarchy of the family unit, within which they’ve been rendered powerless. To this I say, where does the projection end and the haunting begin?

image from pixabay

The only thing more ungovernable than the poltergeist is the willful child, to whom property is confusing and rules made only to be broken. Like the youth led innovations of punk, hip-hop and industrial noise, which obliterated capitalist notions of class, race, gender with explosions of sound, both child and poltergeist raise the volume to make themselves heard over the willful silence of the status quo.

Silence is violence but noise destroys.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline