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Barb jacobson basic_incomeirelandsummerforum2016
- 23. T.SPENCE: 7 MONTHS IMPRISONED FOR HIGH TREASON 1794
- 24. Left: MAN OVER MAN HE MADE NOT LORD Right: PIGS MEAT PUBLISHED BY T SPENCE LONDON
- 25. Left: ADVOCATES FOR THE RIGHTS OF MAN: THOS. SPENCE, SIR THOS MORE, THOS PAINE 1796 Right: AM I NOT THINE ASS
- 30. "For my belief is that if we live another century or so....and have five hundred a year each and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think...then the opportunity will come." 1929
- 55. ”But if you were a real boy you wouldn’t be allowed to work such long hours.”
Editor's Notes
- Do read this book sometime: Tufte makes a good case that the Challenger disaster was down to NASA's use of Powerpoint. He says it might have been avoided it if they'd stuck with overhead projectors and more detailed paper handouts. How does this relate to basic income? Just to make two initial points that: Not every technological advance helps our thinking – nor indeed destroys work B) We don't always fully understand or use every invention. C) Almost any invention can be used against us, or against life.
- Especially this one. Money is a nothing more or less than a human concept: a tool humans developed in order to trade with strangers. Unfortunately now we also use it to measure the value of everything, including other human beings. Especially those we don't know personally. Yet money is the one resource entirely created by humans. That means we can create as much or as little as we need. The scarcity of it is really a non-issue. Don't worry this will not be a talk about money reform, although that's what ultimately what got me involved with basic income.
- I've been asked to speak on the topic 'Men, women and basic income'. If you'll forgive me I have a bit of personal history with this issue. I got my start in active politics with the Wages for Housework campaign. WfH picked out women's unpaid labour as the on-going source of women's oppression, and in its early days raised a lot of good questions about paid labour as well. It grew from an alliance of Italian women in the early 70's into a truly international network of women's groups in Europe, US and Canada within five years. Now we call this 'reproductive labour'.
- Despite great slogans like this, by the time I joined in 1982, WfH was a kind of pariah among other feminists. Some reasons why might become clear later. I knew my own mother had stayed with my dad because she felt she didn't have much choice – she worried about supporting herself and me if she left him. I also liked having an economic analysis of women's oppression which went beyond the kind of 'men are bad' separatism also around in the late 70s and early 80s – and the 'jobs are liberation' line of early 'Women's Lib' stars like Gloria Steinham.
- And really with Thatcher in power that whole 'if only the world were run by women' thing just didn't wash.
- Here's where I met WfH, occupying a church in King's Cross with sex workers who were being harassed by the police. For a number of reasons, by the early eighties WfH had shrunk down into a handful of groups mainly in the US and UK. I'm fourth from right in this picture, which was taken in November 1982.
- That church occupation won a number of things: A person who would observe Argyle Sq for six months and make a report Some money towards doing a survey of sex workers 3) A lot of press attention for women speaking from sex workers' point of view 4) The life-time enmity of that group of feminists who think they can somehow end sex work and pornography altogether through laws, and rescue projects.
- It was a very bitter fight, and still is. If we're going to talk about the choices people make, and the impact basic income could have in ways that should please a range of parties on the issue, one could do worse than start with sex work. Somehow though for women in what is now called the 'rescue industry', women's lack of money is never seen as the main reason for doing sex work, and is never mentioned as the one thing which would vastly improve workers' power to leave the trade if they want. According to their lights, sex workers need to be re-educated.
- Not surprisingly sex workers found, and still find, this idea pretty insulting. This cartoon from the early 1980s shows how bitter some of those fights were. We used to dress up in tutus, high heels and pearls at meetings with anti-porn feminists just to piss them off. It worked, but didn't win us many favours. And the battle continues.
- One fight we did win in the 1980s was to make rape within marriage a crime. Although the money we said was needed to leave a bad marriage or a dangerous husband still eluded us.
- But there was also imminent doom to worry about so we did that too.
- And came up with this slogan. Of course the money is there. Endless amounts for war, why not for peace?
- We did put our backsides into it, literally. Here we are looking not quite so happy at Greenham Common in 1988. I'm on the far right of this picture. We didn't stay much longer after that. Women (though not WfH) won that specific battle. But we really didn't win the war – or now I should say wars which are now feeding the military industrial complex. Talk about limiting most people's choices around the globe over what they do and the people they're with – whether they're in a warzone or not.
- Eventually I realised that this whole argument over choices, and and how to expand them for women and men, started neither with a fight between feminists in Manchester in 1971, nor with the Communist Manifesto in 1848. I left WfH in June of 1991. After that I studied the 18th century, did a lot of community organising on local health and housing issues and had a kid.
- I grew up with a solid faith in the inevitable march of progress. Here's Edmund Burke, who very much questioned the march of progress at the time, in a jeremiad against the French Revolution. In it he called the people 'a swinish multitude'. He was an Irishman who had fought both against colonialism and for the right of Americans to have their own country. He ended up, however, with a government pension.
- Here's the book which got him the pension. It was written as a letter to an anonymous friend in Paris, and supposedly in response to a diatribe against monarchy by Dr Richard Price. Despite his earlier support of the American Revolution, Burke was adamant in this book that forms of government should change only very slowly, and that British society in particular was still bound by an agreement with William III in 1688. It was 1790.
- Thomas Paine was in many ways that 'friend' Burke was writing to. They had been friends when Paine first returned to England in 1788, but fell out after the revolution happend. Paine would certainly have recognised the veiled personal attacks on him littered throughout Reflections. Paine reacted with a book which went on to influence politics for the next 200 years. In Rights of Man he insisted that every generation has the right to decide its own form of government, even if this turns polite society upside down.
- The best line among many great ones in this book is 'He [Burke] pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird,' about Burke's maudlin sympathy for Marie Antoinette, who wan't even dead yet. I often think of this when people are discussing banks, and how they might run away or give up if we actually prosecute them for their crimes against society.
- After Rights of Man was published in 1791, and especially after the second part which made economic proposals to end war and use the money saved to ease the lives of 'the swinish multitude', things got a lot tougher for Paine in England, and for all people there who wanted to choose a new form of government. In 1792 he was indicted for 'seditious libel'. Here he is seen to be plotting evil revolution with Joseph Preistley, a republican scientist who also isolated oxygen for the first time. Preistley's house in Birmingham was burnt down by a mob in 1791, and he fled to America.
- Paine himself fled to France towards the end of 1792, where he had been elected to the National Assembly by Calais. Less than a year later he was thrown in prison after he spoke against killing the royal family. Paine felt they should be exiled to Louisiana, but the Jacobins wanted more blood. As it did finally develop the Terror seemed to back up Burke's point late on in Reflections that it doesn't matter what system of government we have, if the people running it do not have everyone's best interests at heart.
- So after nearly being guillotined himself by the revolution he had so ardently promoted, Paine had another go at describing fundamental rights. In 1796 with Agrarian Justice, Paine recognised that democracy cannot flourish where poverty prevails. By this time he was out of prison, and Napoleon on the ascendent. Paine called for a Land Tax on rents. He said these should be pooled into a common fund to be used to pay youth starting out in adult life a lump sum, and an unconditional regular pension for anyone over 50. And free education for all children. This is why he is mentioned so often in the context of basic income.
- Slightly off-topic, but I had a fight about 15 years ago with Germaine Greer about whether Paine was pro-women or not. She used some of his bad poetry against him, and silences in Mary Wollstonecraft's writing to make a case that Paine was a misogynist. I contended that whatever Paine himself thought about women, women at the time recognised that the universal money and education he proposed would help them. Several women actually went to prison early in the next century for selling his work. Greer retorted that Paine was not a political economist. But she never again said another word about him in public.
- And so we get to Thomas Spence, who was infuriated by Agrarian Justice because it left private land ownership in place. He was a pamphleteer from Newcastle, who came down to London in the 1780s. He was imprisoned for seditious libel in 1794. Like Paine he denied the king's right to exist, or rather the right of any king to exist with power over other people's choices.
- He called his monthly journal 'Pig's Meat' in a swipe at Burke's epithet about the people.
- Notice here that he's put his own name at the top of these three 'advocates for the rights of man' – and recognises Paine as what we would now call a comrade, along with Sir Thomas More. 220 years later these three men have again been linked in a history of basic income written by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderbrout, which is due to be published soon.
- He wrote 'The Rights of Infants' in response to Agrarian Justice. Paying mothers to exist was at the top of his agenda. He went further than Paine, and declared that all land should be held in common, and a portion of proceeds from it should be put in a common fund and used to pay everyone a regular amount of money – what we now call a real basic income - so that mothers could raise their children without the threat of poverty.
- Spence envisaged the 'End of Oppression' not so much as the breaking of chains, but as the end of private landownership. Here he shows a bonfire of land titles. I have to admit I've been dreaming about a bonfire of all sorts of contracts for a long time.
- So we jump a hundred years or so, to Virginia Woolf. I'm afraid her novels left me unmoved. But I liked the non-fiction essays.
- In Three Guineas she said money for war is money against women.
- In A Room of One's Own, Woolf declared that women need their own money and space in order to be able to fully express their talents. So where are we now on the question of choice, and the money needed to have the freedom to make our own choices? [Shakespeare's sister] who never wrote a word and was buried at [a] crossroads...still lives in you and in me, and many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity...is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so....and have five hundred a year each and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think...then the opportunity will come."
- Well, this is largely the attitude, and not just in the US.
- And we're also dealing with this mindset, thanks to Malthus and his present-day recyclers.
- Debt is used to narrow both the education and job choices of young people.
- And where they live.
- Paid work is supposed to set all of us – especially women - free, and yet this is hardly the reality for most people.
- And our capacity to do a job isn't enough, these days we're supposed demonstrate how much we love the job. All the time.
- So we all are constantly chasing something, and often get confused about what exactly that is.
- And even when we figure out what it is we really want to do, we often find we're locked into the maze through lack of money.
- And the threat of unemployment.
- Even though as David Graeber argued in 'Bullshit Jobs', a lot of the stuff we have to do for money doesn't really need to be done.
- So that far from Spence's vision of a bonfire of contracts, we're living in an age which is multiplying them.
- And often 'success' means a higher salary to no longer do what we're best at.
- But here's the real story – wages have not kept up with productivity, so our share in the economy has been going down, not up.
- And rather than to people's needs, here's where our share is going.
- It is leading to this. Not great a great set of choices.
- With the weakest among us caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare to get the support we need.
- Often the choices we're given with are a Hobson's choice. This is true for both women and men.
- Which is leading to this.
- Do we really want these conversations with our kids?
- It all started with people being generous towards some unexpected visitors.
- And continued while the visitors took everything they could find. (Credit where it is due, Edmund Burke's fight against colonial abuses inspired this cartoon in the 1780s. Really it is all about the money.)
- Until now we have this situation in Africa. And a whole lot of war. When people voice their fears about migration and basic income, I always want to show them this graphic. We may not be able to bring in less racist immigration policies at the same time as basic income, but we need to keep in mind that whatever money and services we rely on in Europe, much of it is paid for with the proceeds of colonialism. And now neo-colonialism.
- And people everywhere are still are selflessly putting aside what they might want, out of pity for our richest 1%, who it seems can never have enough money – or choices.
- So ultimately we're in this bind. Basic income is what I believe will best help us start to resolve it.
- But maybe we should spare a thought for the robots too?
- What we do know is that charity is not the answer, we need money now as a right.
- So whether we chose to do this
- Or this
- Or this, it's not all about the money.
- A huge thank you for listening to me, and for the chance to share some of my favourite images with you.