Money for everything? Universal basic income in a crisis

Thompson, Matthew

doi:10.1080/03085147.2022.2035930

Cited by 15 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Second, it calls for re-engineering monetary, credit and financial flows away from interest-bearing, debt-based capital, towards alternative circuits based on social and ecological value. Degrowthers and municipalists alike thus see great value in experimentation with alternative currencies, time banking, mutual credit systems, LETS, and Universal Basic Income (UBI) as interstitial and symbiotic transformations of money; indeed, UBI experiments have been initiated at the city scale by various municipalists, such as in Spain (Bua and Davies, 2023), while UBI Labs are being set up to campaign for city pilots of UBI across the UK and internationally by quasi-municipalist activists (Thompson, 2022). Third, such reconfigurations are rendered by Russell et al (2023: 2140) as part of the ‘self-expanding circuit of the commons’ – or, rather, ‘the common’ (for this important distinction see Bianchi, 2023) – which also includes innovations in labour organisation and land ownership, such as community land trusts and worker-owned cooperatives.…”

Section: The Four Dimensions Of Radical Municipalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Politicising proximity: Radical municipalism as a strategy in crisis

2023

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As new municipalism comes of age, prefixes proliferate: from democratic and autonomist to post-growth and care municipalisms. How do all these variegations relate to each other and to the wider movement of which they claim a part? What does all this conceptual creativity amount to, epistemologically and politically? How can we distill the most salient lessons for the further development of theory and practice in the years ahead? This article is our attempt to answer such questions and to define more precisely the contours of this emerging field of praxis. First, we delineate within new municipalism the target of our analytical gaze – radical municipalism. Radical municipalism is not simply progressive policies happening in cities, and should not be conflated with pragmatic, entrepreneurial or state-centric perspectives. Rather, we argue it is a speculative hypothesis about how systemic transformation might be wrought through coordinated action at the urban or municipal scale, understood as a strategic entry-point for counter-hegemonic struggle. Key here is proximity and the politicisation and socialisation of proximate relations of encounter and assembly. Second, we delve deeper into what we identify as four salient dimensions marking this terrain – economic reorganisation, democratisation of political decision-making, feminisation of politics, ecological transformation – as a multi-dimensional lens through which to introduce, and situate within the wider literature, the 15 articles that comprise this double special issue. Throughout these contributions to the theory and practice of municipalist strategy, the issue of crisis looms large: both historically, as an animating spur to action and opportunity for political intervention, and operationally, as a structuring condition and limiting factor of a strategy arguably in crisis itself. Finally, we reflect on the epistemological, methodological and political implications of pursuing radical municipalist strategies in the current conjuncture.

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Section: The Four Dimensions Of Radical Municipalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Politicising proximity: Radical municipalism as a strategy in crisis

2023

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“…The starting point of the proposed framework is the functionalist discussion of how basic income operates as an effective solution in a crisis context. It is important, in each crisis, to first arrive at an objective account of both the advantages and limitations of adopting a basic income as part of a crisis policy response (Thompson, 2022). This involves first specifying the particular problem a basic income is meant to address, which can vary across different crisis events.…”

Section: The Political Economy Of Basic Income and Crisis: Four Buil...mentioning

confidence: 99%

A basic income for every crisis? Building blocks of a political economy framework

Chrisp

Wispelaere

2023

Journal of Sociology

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In the wake of several recent crises, universal basic income has emerged as a serious policy solution. Not only is basic income pitched as a tool to mitigate the effects of a diverse set of emergencies, it has been argued that successive crises have importantly contributed to the surge in media and policy interest in basic income. In this article we critically examine this proposition. We first argue against the inherent functionalism of many accounts and instead propose a political economy framework that ties basic income directly to a series of mechanisms that may explain the opening up of basic income policy windows during recent crises, including the Covid-19 pandemic. It is equally important to carefully distinguish between different types of crises and we argue that two key competing types – cyclical and permanent crises – face a distinctive set of political economy constraints. We illustrate our approach by analysing the prospects of basic income in six distinct crisis events.

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