Digital Capitalism and Universal Basic Income
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:19
Thank you, Jenny, for the introduction,
00:21
and welcome to our session from my side. I'm Magdalena, and I will be your host today. And yeah, our thesis is, many people say or think, universal basic income will be the social welfare system of the 21st century, that it kind of
00:41
will be the lifesaver for all of us who will probably use their jobs due to digitalization. But we kind of want to ask, is it maybe also basically a neoliberal idea that will make us all poorer in the end? And I want to start with a short show of hands.
01:04
All of you had the chance, like the Swiss had a couple of months ago, to vote for universal basic income. Who would vote in favor? Who would say yes, we want to have UBI?
01:21
Oh my god, OK. That's good to know. And who would say no? Good, so we have about 98%, I would say, in favor. I want to ask, yeah, maybe some are undecided. That's true. I will ask this question again at the end of the panel, and we'll see maybe if this has changed or not.
01:44
With me on the stage here, there's Dimitri Kleiner. He's the author of the telecommunist manifesto, critical thinker and software engineer based here in Berlin. And he's much more, but I try to keep it short. Then we have Mira Tsaremba.
02:00
She is a sociologist and campaigner for the NGO Mein Gruntenkom here in Berlin. And we have Timo Daum. He's author and expert for digital capitalism. He had the first idea, actually, to initiate this panel with all of us here. And yeah, keep out looking for his book
02:22
that will come out in this fall about user-generated capitalism. How will this whole panel work? I will give each panelist now five minutes to shortly introduce their idea to give us an input. And after these 15 minutes, I will
02:41
try to open this immediately up for a discussion to have the audience, to have you involved. OK, so Dimitri, you can take the mic. Hello. I'm Dimitri. I think that was a great question. It was really interesting to see how many people are for UBI
03:01
and how many people are against it. I'd like to ask a follow-up question. How many people are for free public health care? How many people think that everybody should have a right to a home? So quite a lot of people. Now, how about if universal basic income came
03:23
at the expense of free public health care and you had it instead of free public health care? Would you still support it? How many people? So almost nobody. So that really is the question, is what is the pleading and coming meeting of universal basic income and where is it coming from? So I think the question of if it's a neoliberal idea
03:42
is not really a question. I think that's a fact, that it is a neoliberal idea. It's been most fundamental. It's been supported by all kinds of people, like Joseph Beuys, I'm cheating by looking at your notes, and other people, but not really from the point of view of economists. If you look at its economic history, its history and economic thought, it's
04:01
not looking at random people that may have opinions about it. It is clearly a neoliberal idea. It's supported by the likes of Milton Friedman, developed as Guarantennial Income in some of his books. And he's very clear about the purpose of it. His purpose of it is to eliminate the ragbag, as he puts it, of public services
04:20
that the state currently provides in order to privatize them, in order to defund and privatize them. This is the main purpose of Friedman's proposal and the reason why a lot of neoliberal economists support it today. So they are coming after your health care. They are coming after your apartment support.
04:40
That is the purpose. You see, capitalism has a problem. It's called poverty. I guess maybe some of you have already noticed that. And poverty isn't a problem for capitalism as such, because for capitalism, it's actually a motivation to lower your wages. So actually, they like poverty. Poverty is a problem for them because it creates political lobbies, because it creates the ability to build campaigns
05:02
and politics around poverty, allows for people to create movements around poverty, and this is what they need to undermine. This is what they need to stop. So they want something that sounds like a solution for poverty, but actually isn't. So that's why it's a neoliberal trap. Universal basic income is meant to get you to believe that this is a solution when, in fact, what they really want to do
05:21
is defund and privatize public institutions. And they're very clear about this. They write about this. And if you look at the exact actual projects that are on the table, from Finland to Canada, they're always coached in exactly those terms. They're always expressed as being funded by savings in otherwise public spending.
05:41
And this is great for some people and very appealing for some people. If you're kind of a young, able-bodied professional that's had a lot of social capital and a very comfortable life, then this might actually work out quite well for you. But if you're somebody with disabilities, if you're somebody who is having other career trouble,
06:00
and you hear somebody who's actually depending on social infrastructure, then this could be a very poor deal. Imagine, for instance, if you're a disabled person. If you're a disabled person and everybody gets the same universal basic income, because the concept of universality means no means testing, which means everybody is the same in the eyes of universal basic income,
06:22
then you're gonna have to choose between perhaps getting the special medical equipment that you need for your house and perhaps other things that you could spend on, like education or perhaps nutrition. So you're gonna have to make trade-offs, right? And unlike actual institutions, like housing institutions, like public healthcare institutions,
06:41
funding projects are really easy to cancel, the stroke of a pen. You can just simply pass a law to reduce the number in the funding system, whereas when you have established institutions, these are much harder to dismantle, because they have an administration, they have a constituency that will support them. This is exactly why they want to do that.
07:01
So in order to privatize hospitals, in order to extend the privatization of real estate, in order to attack rent controls and other supports for housing, they want to create a system where instead of any government involvement in any of that, they simply give you money. And when they give you money, this means that the provisioning of social infrastructure,
07:21
the provisioning which you're buying with the money, is still delivered by the market. So it's still a capitalist provisioning. So this is the main point, is that it leaves the capitalist in charge of the provisioning of healthcare, of housing, of education, of childcare, of senior care, of all the other things in our community. And so when people say they support UBI, what they really mean is they want people
07:41
to have housing, they want people to have education, they want people to have healthcare. And so we need to support these things directly. We need to support basic outcomes, not basic incomes. We need to support the right to housing, the right to health, the right to education, and we need to not get distracted by neoliberal attempts to switch the conversation to a market-based system.
08:03
I guess that's probably a pretty good summary of the critique. We'll have more time to discuss and maybe with the audience, so I'll leave it at that for now. Thank you, Dimitri. And now I'll pass the mic to Mira.
08:20
Thank you. First of all, I would like to say I'm an advocate for the basic income, but I'm not coming after your healthcare. And at Mein Grunstein Komm, who of you knows Mein Grunstein Komm? Okay, cool. We don't have a fixed concept of what basic income is.
08:43
We raffle out 1,000 euros a month, but everything else is up to a political debate. So what we do with healthcare, what we do with education, what we do with the right to housing is not something we figured out, but we want this to be part of political negotiations
09:03
that we still have to do. So I'm gonna tell you about the project we're doing, which I think we've been loving out very loud for the last two and a half years. And I will tell you how and why.
09:24
The basic income is being discussed as a solution to a lot, like a really high number of social problems we're facing. In that sense, it's a little bit like exercise or a good diet. It helps with about everything. To name a few things, we have a mental health crisis.
09:42
We have disengaged employees throughout our economy. We're facing climate change. We don't have enough people who take care of elder people or young people. The whole care sector is completely underdeveloped and underappreciated as well. And these are the problems we're facing today.
10:03
There are more to come. I mean, we're at Republica, so you all know a little bit about what's going to happen, but especially the labor market will change completely. And the most optimistic estimations are that we will have an underemployment rate of 12%,
10:20
and the most pessimistic think that we'll be about 50%. So there are more problems to come. But people are right to have a lot of open questions about the idea of basic income. Some people ask, you know, will people get lazy? What will happen to our jobs?
10:40
What will happen to our healthcare? Can we trust each other? Which is very difficult for a lot of people to do. How will the labor market develop, et cetera, et cetera. So what we're doing at Mein krund ein Komm is to just try it out. And we do that by crowdfunding basic incomes.
11:01
And whenever we have crowdfunded 12,000 euros, we raffle them out to random person and give them a basic income for a year. And we've done that 85 times so far. And the results are really, yeah, they're really simple, but they're also really incredible
11:21
because almost all of the basic income recipients tell us that they sleep better, that they're more relaxed, that their health improves, that they get more creative. A lot of them, they finally find the courage to realize some of their, you know, oldest dreams. They develop more compassion for themselves
11:41
and for their fellow human beings, and they develop a bigger interest in politics and society. And what's really interesting is that a lot of these winners, they only realize how much existential fear they had once they have the basic income and how much it weighed them down.
12:02
So my question is, like, I asked myself if we could all drop the weight of this existential fear, what this, like, what kind of potential those would be for our society in face of all the problems I just named. And yes, and I'm really excited
12:23
to discuss this potential with you and to laugh out loud some more. Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. Thank you, Milva. And then the last of the three inputs will be by Timo.
12:42
Okay, I will be summarizing this a little bit up and talking a little bit also about some third way when it comes to basic income. What do these three gentlemen have in common? They all advocated some sort of basic income.
13:00
On the left, we have Milton Friedman, spearhead of the Chicago Boys. He stands for the perspective of the neoliberal right, as outlined by Dimitri in his talk. Small government, abolition of social services, and a shift of the responsibility to the individual, that's their program.
13:21
In his view, basic income becomes a privately managed investment where every single person has to manage an amount of money given to them. In the middle, you find Joseph Beuys, German Fluxus happening and performance artist, who is known to have promoted basic income
13:43
from a leftist perspective. According to him, everybody is entitled to a basic credit from the state, which guarantees participation and satisfaction of needs. The left, and I would like to include myself at this point, likes about this concept
14:02
that it frees people, or has the potential to free people from the impositions of derogatory social welfare systems, the necessity to sell one's labor power on the market in order to survive, resulting in free time to do meaningful things.
14:20
Mira pretty much took on this perspective, if I might say. And the third in this row, that's Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, business magnate, inventor, engineer, and investor. He stands for a whole new rationale
14:41
when it comes to basic income, a third way, if you want, you could say. He just said recently, and I quote, there's a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income or something like that due to automation. And he continues, if the trend to robot automation
15:01
keeps up, millions of humans could lose their jobs by the middle of this century. Former US President Barack Obama agrees with Musk on the threat of automation and the necessity of a system like basic income. In a conversation with wired editor-in-chief
15:21
Scott Daddich at MIT Media Lab director, Joe Ito, Obama predicted, and I quote, we will be debating the issue for the next 10 or 20 years, end quote. Same in Germany. In the late 2015, yeah. In late 2015,
15:41
Deutsche Telekom CEO Florian Hörtges on the left was the first captain of industry to speak out in favor of basic income, naming it, I quote, a good idea as consequence of digitalization and automation. And later on, 2016, Joe Kehsa in the middle,
16:00
CEO of Siemens, one of the front runners in industry 4.0 Technologies says, it's coming. Let's hear his justification. I quote, not everyone can become a software engineer. And he continues, foreseeably, some will fall astern simply because they are not able to keep up
16:23
with the speed that society has taken on, end quote. So according to Kehsa, basic income is not some liberating extra money for the creative class. It's a solution for a future army of non-software engineers,
16:42
meaning all those still working in the old industry in services and offices, and whose jobs will be abolished by digital capitalism. Kehsa talks about the suspended, the apgehängte, like German media like to call them, the social group.
17:06
And he's talking about the losers of digitization, the ones that foreseeably will remain on the line because they do not come along with 21st century network economy. And they are to be fobbed off with a minimum to survive.
17:20
They become sidelined from the economy, again, in Kehsa's view, as I think it is, basically. They become sidelined from the economy and the smart society of the future, while, you might say, desperately voting for Trump and IFD and voting themselves into bankruptcy.
17:41
So, is this cause for rejoicing all those illustrious figures backing an emancipatory utopian social welfare system? Rather not. In the perspective of these industry leaders, basic income is a flat rate for the poor. UBI will become the hard sphere of the coming decades,
18:01
free of sanctions, however, because when robots do the work, the work has become superfluous. Apparently, digital capitalism no longer needs to force people into work because there will be no jobs for them to be forced into. Last but not least, and then I'll finish,
18:20
Rutger Bregman, author of the just recently published best-selling book, Utopia for Realists, says, referring to an optimistic income, and I think I have to raise my fist while I quote this. Where was I? Let's give everybody a basic income,
18:41
a venture capital for the people. That's what Rutger Bregman says. So, let me finish. Capitalism apparently is about to enter a new stage in which less and less direct labor is exploited. It finds new ways for capital to reproduce itself and serves basic income as A,
19:02
pocket money for the pariahs of this new model, and B, creative micro money for the creative self-capitalists that will be us. Thank you.
19:24
No, it's okay. If you have on the stage a direct response to that, Dimitri, you can, yeah? And then, of course, if there's questions from the audience, you can already give me a sign, and we will pass the mic also to you.
19:41
And there's Keith back there, and Jenny also with mics. So, let's get the discussion going. Great. Oh, is this on? Hello? Hey. Hello, yeah. Yeah, so Mein Grundenkam, I think is, I mean, this is an art project, so I think we need to speak about this experience
20:01
in a little bit of a different way, because it's not a macroeconomic thing. We can't determine the macroeconomic effects of something for a small experiment of 85 people. So the interesting part there, what was mentioned, is that things like basic, the income doesn't make people lazy. And I think this has been a key argument on the right for a long time, that if we make the working conditions less harsh,
20:23
then people won't work, they'll become more lazy. And I think that projects like Mein Grundenkam are good projects to address that artistically. However, politically and economically, I know we're here in Germany in the home of the great social democratic party, which once great. And I think we had a much greater vision at one time
20:44
for how we could emancipate humanity to not be chained to the labor of capitalism that we had before. And just simply giving people money was not exactly it. So I think when you look at Elon Musk and why Elon Musk is concerned, is he really concerned about people not having jobs?
21:01
Or is he concerned that he won't be the one that owns the robots? So is his solution really being aimed at the well-being of the people? Or is his solution aimed at a society in which he can maintain his position as being a capitalist that owns a massive production organization and that owns the robots? What if we own the robots? And what if we could plan things differently?
21:20
What if we can realize the dreams of Karl Kautsky and the early SPD people of making society an open storehouse for all, where people can have access to the necessities they need, not simply money they have to negotiate on markets to buy? And so I think that's the key difference. So on the mind-grown income part, I think the important part there is that given money, people don't become lazy, they just do other things.
21:42
They do things for their communities, for their families, for themselves, for artistic reasons. And that's a good thing. And that's what the left has been arguing for a long time against the kind of agonism of the right that claims that if you make things better for workers, they'll become lazy and less productive. So you need strict bosses to sweat them into working.
22:00
But this idea of a third way, I think whenever you hear of a third way, it should raise your suspicion because it's usually missing something. And what it's missing here is that capitalism has a particular mechanic. And people like Elon Musk and everybody on that list is they're not an economist or very right wing. And people like Elon Musk want to perpetuate the system of capitalism.
22:21
They wanna keep the system going. And this is what they're worried about. They're worried about losing control of the robots. They're worried about losing control of the system and not being able to sell you products. So rather than having you fight for outcomes, outcomes like education, like housing, like healthcare, like food security, they want you to fight for an income so you can give that income to them on the market.
22:41
And capitalism has certain rules. There is a prices system, which means prices come from the availability of money. I mean, even Friedman would agree with that, with his monetarism. And so the idea of giving you more money just means that the prices for necessities will rise. So not only is this a neoliberal idea whose primary objective is to take away your healthcare, take away your housing and privatize things,
23:01
but even if you were to enact it, and even if it would just simply cause prices to rise and you would have a new zero. So what previously costed a certain amount of money would just simply cost a little bit more. And people who were poor before would still be poor. People who are rich before will still be rich. Let's take a simple example. Say you have a community with like 100 houses, right?
23:21
And the poor people have the worst houses, and the rich people have the best houses. If you give everybody in that community a thousand euros a month, what's gonna happen? The poor people will still have the worst houses, and the rich people will still have the best houses. The idea that you can have this kind of universal basic income, that you can fix social inequality without any means testing,
23:40
without actually looking at the pictures of the people is a very fantasy idea. And once again, happy to talk more about it moving forward. I would just like to point out that the idea of basic income is not the idea of a complete welfare system.
24:03
It's just one element of a welfare system. And I'm not opposed to the idea that the people own the robots. But I'm still a fan of the idea that I get like a certain amount of money and then I can decide what I want to spend it on. And I think a complete welfare system of the future
24:22
would have a basic income. But of course, we need to make sure that everybody has like a home and access to healthcare. I don't think that's a contradiction. And I don't think when we debate basic income that's an either or decision. And I appreciate that you're so cautious, you know, and that you question the interests of the capitalists and everything.
24:42
But it's like, what I hear is the right wants that and the left wants that and they want that. But I would like to remember everyone that it's us, the people and that we need to decide what we want for the future and what we want from our welfare system and then make it happen.
25:02
And this is my vision that people remember that it's not some, you know, predetermined outcome of this digital revolution of basic income or the welfare system we have now.
25:21
Just a quick reply. What I like the most about basic income, whether it is an experiment or really a social utopia, is the aspect that detaches work from surviving. And you mentioned, Dimitri, you mentioned SPD,
25:41
the Social Democrats, at the core values of social democracy and of Protestant work ethics is you have to work and you get a decent wage for that and if you don't work, there's a long tradition in that. You're a gambler, I don't know,
26:01
you're something, I don't know, you're not a decent human being. Maybe that's maybe too harsh, but you know where I'm pointing it. And this detachment to say, okay, you don't have to work and still have the right to a citizenship and to survive and to have your basic needs covered. I think there's still an emancipatory kernel in this thing.
26:25
Maybe just, I want to also like give you all the chance to like jump in because, yeah, we still have 30 minutes. But you have, yeah, 30 seconds and then I already see like so many hands here,
26:42
so we'll open up. Who here knows the expression that and three bucks will get you a cup of coffee in Starbucks? Anybody, that's a very American expression. That and three bucks will get you a cup of coffee in Starbucks. So this is kind of how I feel about the UBI in addition
27:00
to social services kind of thing. So yes, once we accomplish housing security, health security, income security, child security, education security, and all the other things we're fighting for, maybe we can also have a basic income for some random pocket money for some chewing gum or something like that. Who can be against that? There'd be no reason to be devoted against that. But the idea of this is gonna achieve
27:21
any kind of social outcome or the idea that we can even achieve that is the question here. The question is not, would it be nice to give people money? The question is, how do we address these social concerns? How do we address people being exploited by capitalists? And if we want to stop that exploitation, we have to question capitalism itself.
27:41
So we can't just use universal basic income to make people no longer tied to the need to contribute to the economy in order to consume from the economy. If you wanna sever consumption from production, then sever it totally, then make it not even based on a market or a price. Then make the condition to housing and health and everything else unconditional itself, right?
28:02
You're only doing it halfway if you're saying it that, okay, we're gonna give you some money, but you still have to spend it in the market because that still constrains it and limits it to a certain amount of consumption, right? So in terms of this UBI plus, sure, why not? I mean, as long as we accomplish social services first
28:20
and as long as we understand that the existing campaigns at UBI are meant to privatize those social services. And right now, we're losing that fight. So anybody that's honestly looking at the social fight and saying the fight for housing and healthcare and education, that we're winning that fight and we can make additional demands for pocket money for gum and cigarettes, I think that's fictitious politics. I think that's simply not looking at the political situation honestly and openly
28:43
and not understanding the scope of the fight that we have ahead of us. Okay, so please raise your hands again. Maybe, yeah, we start back there.
29:01
Yeah. Does this work? Yeah. Great. Okay, just a quick question. I'm pretty surprised that Milton Friedman was an advocate for basic income as a capitalist, as a neoliberal. I myself, I'm a capitalist and I oppose the basic income fully. I don't believe in this system. I completely agree with Mr. Kleiner that prices will rise,
29:20
the package of cheese won't cost 150, it will cost 1000 euro 50, basically, if the basic income will come. And the only solution for basic income would be a universal one, which you guys also mentioned. So this would be a solution, but I don't really see parts of Europe and parts of Asia and Africa deal with the same levels. So we could actually come up with a solution
29:41
where 1000 euro here is the same value as 1000 euro in Africa. So I think we have certain dangers in the future. The optimization is gonna get rid of the service sector that basically freed many people. But at the end of the day, one thing that I didn't understand is we don't really live in a capitalistic world, unfortunately, as I might say. So I'm pretty surprised that people would then
30:03
even sell a very leftist idea of a basic income as a capitalistic or even neoliberal idea. Milton Friedman was an advocate for the negative income tax, which is definitely not a basic income. And then at the end of the day, and the last 10 years of his work, he even got rid of this idea and said that he definitely want to abolish
30:20
welfare system by coming up with a negative income tax, but he was never an advocate for basic income. Should we collect maybe some questions or remarks?
30:40
Hi, yeah. First, I would have to disagree with you, Demetri, just because I don't think it's a solution necessarily, but I'm a full proponent of basic income, because the basic fact is that these jobs are going away so you have to do something. I mean, that is a reality, we can argue of the economics and economic plans,
31:01
but the reality is these jobs are disappearing, and so we're gonna need something to deal with that. And if you read Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future, there's a giant sucking sound and it's all the money going up to the top. So I think that the problem is that's the reality,
31:21
and you do have to have some sort of basic income in order to deal with that, and how you structure it economically seems to be a secondary issue. I mean, this whole idea of automation-related unemployment is another complicated topic of conversation.
31:42
If you're gonna make those claims, I'd like to see some numbers to back it up, because labor force participation rate globally have not gone down, neither has technological opponent of productivity increases, so we don't see it, we don't see that phenomenon, it's a theoretical phenomenon. There's a change in the job structure where certain jobs are going away and other jobs are coming, but the global labor force,
32:02
it's as big as it has ever been in history, and only growing. So this idea of unemployment, I'd like to see some qualification for that. Certain kinds of jobs in certain kinds of places, yes, we don't have glass blowers anymore, we may not have medics that look at your MRIs anymore, that may be done by computer vision.
32:21
Jobs will change, but the idea that the overall number of jobs is going down, that I'd like to see some data for, and I think it's kind of out of scope for this discussion. Okay, Mira, directly to you. I think you can Google the data. I know. I have great data and detail. And I would like to reply that
32:40
I'm really sad about this because I have such an idealist, and I consider myself, you know, I consider myself to be on the left side of things, and I thought, oh my god, basic income, it can free us all and make us more creative, and you know, give us more time to get politically involved in everything, and by now, because of all these developments,
33:00
I think, wow, it's just, you know, it's necessary. It's like, I don't know what else we're going to do, and it's like, that's why I think, you know, I'm not opposing you with another version of utopia. I just don't have a utopia. I just think it's first aid
33:21
for everyone who will be affected by these developments, and it's also first aid for the people who already are affected by these developments, because when we look at the numbers of mental health issues in this economy, it's just really, really scary, and when I see how many people hold onto jobs that actually hurt them,
33:42
physically and mentally, I just think we really need this basic income to, you know, just like, get a reset for all of that. Yeah, but Timo has said before, he has something to say about that. Just two quick remarks. I think we,
34:01
that capitalism is changing, and it's changing work. Like, the work that worked for a lifetime that supports a family wage, where you can buy your, as a worker, your Volkswagen, and support your family, and et cetera. I think that's a model of the past, and capitalism is itself developing a new model,
34:21
and I think, I might like it or not, I think capitalism itself is developing a new model, which consists in micro jobs, plus basic income, so to say, and if, but if capitalism succeeds in freeing us from work,
34:41
so to say, that would be a great achievement of capitalism, and I would really embrace that, but of course, that's not the end of it. I mean, capitalism creates all these possibilities that we even are freed from work, potentially, and that would be the ideal moment for us to take over.
35:02
Okay, and then we have more, yeah, yeah, you're good. We have more questions. Okay, quick response, and then we had the lady in the back there with the red anorak, and okay, Dimitri can respond, and then we have more audience questions. I mean, I completely agree
35:21
that people are in a very bad situation, and that the economic conditions are creating desperation. I disagree there's anything new here. I think this has been the case for a very long time, and I think that when you say that we need UBI, what you really mean is these people need to have
35:42
the ability to live stably without these stresses and concerns, not UBI specifically, but they need to have these problems taken away, and the problems are really coming from actual social infrastructure. It's not specifically a lack of a UBI. It's lack of housing, lack of healthcare, lack of food security, lack of an ability to have a secure life,
36:03
and UBI is not the only possible approach we can take to solve this, and in fact, as an approach, it won't work because it depends on a market mechanism that will ensure that all gains are lost to prices. I know this sounds like a very hard argument to understand, but when you think about it at a macro level, you understand that if you give everybody $1,000,
36:22
let's just stick back to my very simple neighborhood example. Yeah, you have 100 houses. The poorest people have the poorest ones. The richest people have the best ones. You give all of them $1,000, explain to me how that's gonna increase the housing of the poor. You take the $1,000 from the people in the good houses,
36:42
but they still will have the, they will also have the $1,000. It's a redistribution. But why leave the capitalists in charge of the houses? Why not just take the money from the rich people if you need to? We can get into the economic role of taxation itself, which is a much more complicated discussion,
37:02
but why not just build the houses, give it to the people? Why depend on the market mechanism? Why try to inject income and try to push on a string, as economists say, try to use monetary means to create economic outcomes? The metaphor of pushing on a string, I think, illustrates that really well. You're trying to create an effect out here,
37:21
but instead of pulling from this side, you're pushing from this side. You're imagining that if you just throw more money into the market, leave the market alone as it is, that you'll have the outcome you want. Why not just achieve the outcome you want by simply you want housing, build housing? Yeah, I think. Yeah, Mira can respond,
37:40
but I promise. I think it's because I'm still a little bit attached to the idea of the market, and I really think it's easy to introduce a universal basic income as opposed to abolishing the market. Okay, yeah, that's a fair point, but wait, wait, wait.
38:00
Yeah, back there, yeah. Hi, I came to the talk fairly late, so if I say something incredibly stupid, please forgive me. I'm very new to the UBI idea. I'd like to support it. I'd like to think it's a good idea. In Germany, the system, when it comes to paying for parents and them taking care of their children,
38:20
the system was supposed to support the lowest income families so that they could take better care of their children, spend more time away from work, take better care of their children. One of the backfiring effects of it was that the state has spent a huge amount of money on the middle-class family that then takes a three-month sabbatical off and goes traveling around the world, which is fantastic for them,
38:42
but the lower-income families are investing the money that they're given on diapers and still struggling to make ends meet. It seems kind of like there could have been more effective ways to invest that money, and I kind of see that same frustrating structure
39:03
being replicable if it came to the UBI. What am I missing? You're referring to the Elton Ged here in Germany? Okay, okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because we have so many people who had their hands up.
39:22
Yeah, over there. Yeah, the other one. Now it's working. Okay, well, I have two points to make.
39:42
The first one would be that the problem lies in the way the UBI is promoted because you take an idea and you remove all the political frameworks it may be embedded in. That makes it much smaller and allows everyone to sort of,
40:01
well, get in on the matter, but it also gets the people in that might use the UBI, well, for political purposes that lie contrary to emancipatory purposes, and well, this might be some sort of backlash of the whole marketing idea of the UBI, that you take something, and you make it so small
40:21
that it seems the perfect fantasy for everything, and in the end, the question we ought to ask is what will it solve in the end? And if you embed the UBI in a political framework, such as is done by DiEM, for instance, then you have a much broader catalog of measures to embed.
40:43
So this would be the first point, and well, the second point is an argument relying on power, because basically when you take the UBI, you create one huge lever for all measures related to,
41:00
well, a redistribution, healthcare, housing, and whatever, and so you just give one big layer to the leaders in charge, and that makes it much easier to change because there's just one lever to pull than, well, a whole catalog of measures. So this would be a question that sort of rather ties
41:20
to, well, the way the UBI is implemented, because this could be, well, solved by simply splitting up the UBI in, for instance, thousands of various basic measures, which would remove the whole lever aspect, but nevertheless, this is a point to consider, because you give a power concentration
41:42
that has never been seen before to a leader in charge, and I wouldn't say that democracy is stable as it is, as we've seen with Trump or the Brexits, so this would be something to take into account. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, please, more applause, of course,
42:00
and more questions. I saw before I said, yeah, from Jenny. Hello. I'd like to just introduce a method by Fredrik Bergman. He's actually Austrian, but he taught in Ann Arbor for a long time, and he basically took, I think, a leap,
42:22
and he's not very well known in this whole context. He basically took all the unemployed people from the early Ford factories in Detroit and helped them to work through their free time and to develop things that they wanted to do with their time and basically produce. He was like an early precursor of the maker movement,
42:42
if you want, to produce their own things and their own stuff, and asked him once what he would do with the basic universal income, and he said that he thought it would be much better to actually have a third of the time devoted for public things, like helping the elderly,
43:02
things you were mentioning earlier, and then having a third for the time for personal purposes and for free time. And I thought that's a concept that's not very much talked about in the whole debate around universal basic income, and I think it's really worth talking about his ideas.
43:23
He developed that stuff in the 60s and 70s, way ahead of everybody else, so if you want to, Fredrik Bergman is a good reference point. Okay, thank you. Okay, we have direct responses to that. Yeah, I'm replying to the first, I think you said, like the first person.
43:43
We like to think of money as a means to access things. Like, I get a thousand euros, okay, that gives me access to a lot of things. But I think this perspective has to be turned around, because money in the first place is a means to separate us from stuff that's already there.
44:02
One example, there is housing, and I'm with Dimitri, and maybe in this part, maybe we agree there. There is food and social services, there is a lot of goods and stuff out there, and then everything gets a price tag, and that separates things from us.
44:20
Like, we can't access them directly anymore, but via this mediator, which is money, the basic effect is to separate, to narrow the access to those goods. So, another problem with money is that it's,
44:44
money has to turn its own logic into an investment. If you have, everyone who has more than 5,000 euros on his or her checking account starts to be nervous, this money has to work for me. I have to invest it, I have to do something with it. It just can't, I can't just leave it there to rot.
45:01
And this logic, it's stronger than we are. So, I think we have to turn this around, and ask, okay, how can we access directly to the things we need? Oh, can you wait for the mic, please? Because we can't really hear you.
45:23
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's, oh, it's, ah. Sorry, did I understand that correctly, then, that logically, we need to have no money whatsoever, we just need direct access to social securities, and not to invest money in anything? I don't understand the logic behind how that changes
45:42
how middle income families have a high luxury that they can be using, while very low income families will continue to struggle with their investments. Yeah, well, I think actually, starting with your original concept, I think that's your original point that you made at the beginning of this round of comments. I think this is very illustrative, right?
46:00
When you have an income support mechanism, that income support mechanism creates market outcomes that reflect the existing structure of the market. So in your example, if that money was instead of, instead of directed as a funding solution, was an infrastructure solution, provided infrastructure to support poor low income parents
46:21
in terms of the actual infrastructure they need, from availability to, I don't want to speak to what those people need, but you know, you mentioned diapers, so availability to diapers, perhaps childcare for working mothers. So there's, you can fund the actual programs that will help these people, and will also help middle income people, of course,
46:41
or you can create income schemes, and those income schemes, funding schemes, always have the same kind of market effect as a ready to structure exists and amplify them, right? Does that answer your question, or do you want to be more specific? It's more like, focus on what you're actually trying to achieve, right? So if you want to educate children,
47:01
provide education for children, don't give parents money that they will give the capitalists to provide the education of children, because you want to have the social outcome that you want to have, so focus on the outcomes. And of course, it's very easy to take any argument, you know, to absurdum, so I get to construct an argument at absurdum is always quite easy,
47:22
so it's always easy to imagine, well, are we talking about an economy of no money at all, right? And you know, if you look at the writings of the socialists, the concept of a society as an open storehouse for all is there, and it is a good concept, it is a leading concept, but nobody should suggest or imagine that we can just simply get there.
47:41
To get there is a political question, which brings us to the second comment there, but Diem, who here has heard of Yanis Varoufakis? Who here thinks of him as somebody who can legitimately change Europe?
48:02
Would you like something to say? Yeah, we can have more questions, of course, but I really like this, what the lady brought up with this idea of comparing it to the Eltenget that we had in Germany, which is, we call it in German, Möbelpakung,
48:21
like it's something fake, and I think it was, in the beginning, it was never meant to actually provide people with 1,800 euros a month. If you look at it, you're only eligible for that if you really earn a lot of money, and I think what we can really take from this discussion, or maybe ours as a learning, is that you need to be honest
48:42
at what you're really, really asking for when you ask for universal basic income. I really like the approach that Mira and Mein Grundenkommen, that they actually do it and give it to people, and actually, in your case, you do it on top, on the top of having a job,
49:00
or whatever, on top of having, you know, maybe hard sphere, or you don't ask any questions, do I understand it correctly? So, and that people actually work with it and create the lives around this for one year. So I think, I mean, to have this kind of a practical,
49:21
I know Dimitri said before, 90 people, it's not so much, but in the end, it's, if we really think of like, what will our future look like, we have to have also these tests ground, you know? I think from your anti-capitalist point of view, it's, the criticism always comes easy, sort of, you know what I mean? Like, it's a-
49:41
I mean, I think it's a great project, too, but it's, we have to understand that it's one art project, that this is not a social answer. Yeah, but let's take more questions. We have, no, I promised to this man here in the front row, and then- We never really talked about that, Mira. Okay. Okay, I really like to have different opinions
50:04
around the table, and I really like discussion, and although I'm for the UBI, I really like to have, that we have Dimitri here, and to have an opposing opinion, and that we have someone to discuss this with, but then, Dimitri, I do want to say something about, like, the way in which you make your argument,
50:22
which I think was not quite fair. You introduced the UBI as a neoliberal idea, and then you mentioned it several times, that it's a neoliberal idea, and I think you say that in order to discredit it, because, like, nowadays, nobody wants to be called neoliberal, including me, but I think we are, all of us, including you,
50:42
we are all smarter than that, just because maybe, originally, Friedman introduced this, and he was a neoliberalist. I don't care whether he came up with the idea first, or whether he was a neoliberal person. Like, we can discuss this thing apart from that, and then, also, later, you always talk about they,
51:04
like, the people that support the UBI, and I think, with that, you also mean, like, the neoliberalists, and then you said, they are afraid that we will take away their robots, and that kind of thing, but we just saw that 98% of the people here are for the UBI,
51:21
so if you talk about them, you mean 98% of the people in this room, and do you really think we are all afraid for our robots? I mean, I don't want to speak for all the people in this room. Like, they can speak for themselves. When I say it's a neoliberal idea, I mean that it's an existing community of people
51:41
that are using this idea, and we need to confront them. Whichever way, whichever part of the camp you want to put yourself in, this is an actual political movement that's actually currently pushing through social welfare retrenchment all over the world, and it's actually happening in real life right now. Vera Fakis knows that very well from his experience in Greece,
52:02
and so this is what I mean. I mean, this is an actual political tendency that we need to confront right now, and these are the ideas and purpose of that tendency. I don't necessarily mean that anybody that supports them is part of that same thing. I don't even think that necessarily just because somebody from the neoliberal school of economics said something that it's wrong. The neoliberal school of economics also occasionally says correct things.
52:22
I'm sure they agree that two plus two equals four, so I wouldn't call that a neoliberal idea just because Milton Friedman also says that. The point is that this is an actual existing political tendency that is actually currently lowering working conditions and lowering social conditions in the whole world
52:41
right now and needs to be confronted, and so what I'm trying to tell you is this is the way that this community, this tendency is thinking, and you can read the wrong literature as well, and this is what I mean, so I don't mean to speak to everybody that might support UBI as a neoliberal. I mean that the existing neoliberal political tendency thinks this way.
53:01
Okay, I just want to start. Yeah, we have this question here, and then I'll take your question, or you have the mic, then you can start. Just a short question. You said we have to focus directly on the outcomes. And not to give funding to fulfill
53:21
the outcomes of the people, and I think what if you don't know what the outcomes should be? If we have a cultural explosion, much more subcultures are evolving, and I don't think it's possible to find out
53:41
which outcomes you want to have, so give the people money, then they can decide for themselves which outcome they want to have. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I also like this idea so much,
54:01
because I think you have an open, what did you say, storehouse is a nice idea, but I think in its core, it's like the same social democratic philosophy we're seeing now that the state, or the people that govern, that they know best what people need, and that we know, okay, diapers are a good example,
54:22
I think everybody needs diapers when they have children, but still what we've been seeing on the market over the last decades, that wouldn't have been possible without the market dynamic, and I appreciate that, I just don't like the side effects, and I think the UBI could really help with them.
54:40
And I don't want people deciding what we need. And what I wanted to say is, in the social welfare system, we see the same thing, they say, okay, we only offer you the services which we think are useful. So if you're unemployed,
55:01
that's not useful to pay your money. If you have children, yeah, that's useful, and we think you need this amount of money to raise a child. If you study, we think you need this amount of money to raise a child, and I think there are like 150 of these social services, and they're all designed on some ministries, and everything,
55:21
and I think to simplify that, and to give the people more power now with money and the market, I think that's just the most realistic scenario, and then we can talk about other utopias. So Timo has a response, and then Timo's curious. Just a short comment. I think maybe we all have to mature
55:41
at this moment where we are now, because I think we're living a paradigm shift. Basic income is becoming these days a project from the ones in power, and like the situation we had before
56:00
where basic income was an interesting idea, and also an emancipatory idea to fight existing social systems and old structures, et cetera. Maybe this sweet time is gone. Now there is, this will be my thesis, there is a basic income project
56:20
from the ones in power, and we have to react on that. Do we kind of accompany that and say, okay, this is the right direction, but we fight for a leftist, or a more democratic alternative, and try to make the best out of it, or do we oppose it entirely?
56:40
And I think that would be the debate that maybe would be necessary, rather than are you against, or are you in favor of basic income? Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Can I add something? We only have two more minutes left, though. I wanted to give this, okay? But you can. Yeah. As you know, the...
57:01
It's always the same with me, I know. That's something that really worries me about this communist position, because I think instead of discussing what we can do now, or what utopia is best, I wish the left would just get into the debate
57:22
of what kind of basic income we need, because if you just oppose it, because it's not perfect, not ideal, not just enough, you just have this effect you don't want. You leave the idea exactly to the neoliberals, and we need people who have their hearts in the right place. We need people who want social justice
57:42
to claim the concept, and build an idea of a new welfare state around the concept for all of us. Wait, wait, I promise, I promise. You need to... Sorry, your question. I just wanted to say, don't you think that the whole discussion on universal basic income
58:01
has just a huge elephant in the room if we are not mentioning the taxes, because taxation may be the single most important issue here, and if we want to create universal basic income without dismantling the whole system, helping people who need help most,
58:21
we will need huge amounts of money, much more than we get in different states from taxes right now, and the question is can we allow corporations to pay just corporate interest tax less than 1%? Can we allow Google to be registered
58:40
as a Permian company, and isn't the taxation strategy the most important thing in order not to lock people in the current or worse situation with the universal basic income? Hello? I agree funding's a big topic,
59:01
but in one minute we can cover tax economics. We can talk after. I just want to respond to these final comments, because this is a typical actually right wing talking point, that it's the right wing that's being practical, that's making realistic solutions, while the left wing is being idealist, and wanting scary big changes, when actually the reality is the basic income as being portrayed
59:21
is not a realistic solution, but what is a realistic solution is defending housing, defending healthcare, and this is what the left is actually doing right now in the streets every day, not like pretending that we can solve problems with some magical money from fairies. Thank you. Okay, it will be, I think, impossible for me to wrap this up.
59:40
I mean, what I take from this discussion is that the whole debate about UBI, about universal basic income, kind of is growing up, is leaving behind the infancy, and we really need to have a heart-to-heart discussion about it, and I'm, yeah, I'm pretty overwhelmed.
01:00:00
by all these different points that came up in this discussion. Maybe you are, too. If you want to follow up, we published three texts on Berlinerazette.de in German by these three people. And we have a very, very lively discussion on these texts there. It's in German. But still, please go there and join the discussion.
01:00:22
And thank you all for being here. And thanks to you. Thank you.