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 With some qualifying for the now-rescinded Canadian Emergency Relief Benefit (CERB) and others not, some being declared essential and thrust to the front-lines while others were able to shelter at home,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 F-word: The Soft Face of Fascism

image from pixabay

The F-word is once again haunting the public discourse. For a while it seemed like the word was doomed to be thoughtlessly hurled at stingy parents and customer service representatives, its true relevance long banished from the western world.

But we aren’t seeing a resurgence in fascism – it never really left.

Fascism is less a political ideology than a way of life. It need not be strictly authoritarian – but it is always sadistic. It may not be outwardly racist, but it is often preoccupied with race. It may not be an iron fist it rules with but a green dollar. Fascism is all around us, ever has been - in some form or other it ever will be. We must learn to recognize its many faces.

For the Love of Country

Merriam Webster defines fascism as a philosophy, regime or movement which exalts the nation above the individual. There is the implication of autocratic control though this need not be necessarily a dictatorial rule. It may be rule by a wealthy elite (plutocracy), a corporation (corporatocracy) or, even the market itself (what some ludicrously call “anarcho-capitalism,” but what we’ll call market-fascism). It often romanticizes a mythic past. It rarely looks forward.

Fascism ultimately positions human rights (universal access to food, shelter, and freedom from harm) as subordinate to the glory of the nation in all its racial, geopolitical and economic forms.

In a fascist state, it is a crime to burn the flag but not to doom someone to homelessness through eviction. Racist police do not face legal repercussions for murder in a fascist state, but those who speak out against injustice do. In a fascist state the nation eats before your family does. There is much for sale in a fascist state, but little of it you need. There is much rhetoric and little truth.

Pay-per-rule

image from pixabay

The United States, now firmly in the world’s eye, with the f-word on many lips, has long been a consumer fascist state (and increasingly, so are we). Trump is merely the lump which belies the tumor. His failure to gain a second presidential term does not banish fascism from America, it merely drives its ugliest form back into the shadows.

Consumer fascism, or soft fascism, positions corporations’ ability to make money and monopolize resources in the name of a national economy as paramount to all else. You may not have access to the abilities of producing your own means of survival, but Amazon does. Loblaws does. Corporations lobby the state and private policy initiatives, they trade data with governments. Increasingly, the line between state interest and that of the market becomes irrelevant.

image from pixabay

People struggling to make ends meet continue to pay corporations for access to food, clothing, or diversion (from the fact that we are not free). We willingly relinquish our lives to be ruled, for the glory of the economy. For the good of the nation.

It wasn’t racism that elected Trump, though it helped. It wasn’t misogyny, though it was readily employed. It was by appealing to the concept of nation and attaching to it the corporate brand he carried. His supporters are quick to praise his positive affect on the stock market as, perhaps the only, sign that he has been an effective leader.

Fascism exists in the subservience of the human animal to the nation and it’s here in Canada too.

The Canadian military was recently found to be engaging in propaganda tactics to influence public opinion. These tactics, which included forged letters warning of wolves in Nova Scotia, are publicity stunts clearly inspired by corporate advertising strategies. This is the military trying to go viral.

What can we do?

The most direct way is to stop empowering corporations. Stop buying their products. Stop enabling their destruction of communities, their monopolies on natural resources. We all know Amazon is evil, but so is Loblaws, and Apple. There is nothing these corporations provide that a combination of lifestyle reconfiguration and local shopping can’t provide.

We can empower the individual by supporting universal basic income initiatives. With a guaranteed income, we are less vulnerable to corporate exploitation.

Trump may be on his way out of office, but he is not taking fascism with him. It surrounds us, everywhere. Beckons to us behind every waving flag, every corporate overreach, every piece of data mined. So long as there is patriotism without criticism, corporate welfare over social welfare, there is fascism.

Consumerism leads to fascism by elevating the national market above the human being. So as long as we continue to buy, we are all complicit in its rise.

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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