Martina Tazzioli: I would like to start with a general question about your work: how does your theorisation of basic income connect with your reflections on precarity and on the emergence of ‘the precariat’ as a class? 1 Guy Standing: Well, I’ve been working on both subjects for many years. When we set up BIEN, the Basic Income Earth Network, in September 1986, of course that was a period when Thatcherism and neoliberal economics were coming into the fore. They were pushing for flexible labour markets. And what flexible labour markets meant to me, when I was working in the International Labour Organisation, was increasing insecurity for workers. I was convinced that the whole strategy of neo-liberalism would increase inequality and increase economic insecurity. So I initially favoured a basic income, way back then, for moral reasons, for ethical reasons, and as a way of giving people security and freedom. So I had this philosophical approach to basic income, but at the same time I was working on labour markets, as I’m a labour economist. And I was convinced that what would happen is that a more fragmented society would develop, as a result of neoliberal policies. And while I didn’t call it ‘the precariat’ back in the 1980s, by the 1990s, and since then, I’ve been thinking that what’s been happening is a fragmentation of the old class structures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as understood in Marxian terms. What’s happened is that we now have a plutocracy at the top, then a salariat with employment security, in the middle; but below these two strata, the old proletariat (the industrial proletariat that people analysed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) was shrinking, while the precariat was growing. This was clearly going to increase insecurities for many people. I wrote the book The Precariat in 2011, but actually I’d been discussing the growth of the precariat for many years before that. And it seemed to me that this growth was one of the major reasons for expecting that more and more people would come to support a basic income. If you’ve got a growing precariat, with all the insecurities and problems that come with that, then you should come to realise that the only way forward is to have some sort of basic income system that guarantees income security. So the two come together, as an integrated approach. MT: In your book you argue that basic income should be unconditional – it is not just for precarious, impoverished people, it’s for everyone, right? GS: Yes. But the difference is that members of the old working class enjoyed some degree of labour security. They had full-time stable jobs, they had pensions, relatively stable wages, and so on. Therefore to get them to support a basic income was harder than it is with the precariat. With the precariat you have volatile wages, you have insecure jobs, you don’t get access to state benefits that give you some security, and so on. For these reasons the precariat will be inclined to support a basic income more than the old proletariat ever was, and I think that this prediction is coming true. MT: As you argue in your book, basic income should be unconditional and should not depend on citizenship status. Does this mean that someone who arrives as a migrant and is in the country temporarily could get access to basic income payments? GS: The payments should be unconditional in behavioural terms. In other words you shouldn’t have to do X or Y or Z in order to get the benefit. I think for pragmatic reasons we have to say that we can give the basic income to usual resident citizens and to migrants who come into the country legally and who have been in the country for some time. That’s a pragmatic criterion, not a philosophically grounded one, but if we don’t have some sort of rule like that, we will never get the political support for introducing a basic income because the neo-fascists will play the standard xenophobic alien/stranger anti-migrant arguments. This does not mean that we should neglect the needs and aspirations of migrants. I believe in an open … Continue reading From forced labour to creative work