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Ulrich Schachtschneider

 

Degrowth and Basic Income

Some comments to the stirring paper from Stefan Füsers and Ronald Blaschke

I agree to most of the relationships between BI and degrowth the authors outlined. First I will take them, bring them in a certain order with my words and add some arguments (1). Then I will discuss the authors thesis concerning the link between BI and the turn to ecologically responsible consumption (2). At last I will shortly discuss how we can reach social wealth without sustaining commodity production (3)

1 Basic Income against productivism and consumerism

I see two big lines of arguing:

a) Basic Income is opposed to productivism:

• Every production, every economic activity becomes less attractive because of the heightened social security given by the basic grant. With a BI everybody can say „No“ to work offers which are problematic in an ecological, social or economical way. The social-psychological situation we need for the ecological transition of economy to a degrowth economy which is linked to a far-reaching change of workplace and careers is “change without fear”.
• A BI makes the society more equal. Equality as a social reality and as a feeling is important for the acceptance of environmental policies, which foster ecological transition of the economy and therefore foster even degrowth.
• With a BI working relationships will become less hierarchical: The consequence: The people will only take part in productions which make sense in their point of view.

First Conclusion: Due to more security, more equality and less hierarchy a BI leads toless, but more authentic production.

b) Basic Income is opposed to consumerism:

• With its economic basic security, experiments with anti-consumistic lifestyles would become easier for everyone, not only for avantgardistic groups (which join the Degrowth Congress…). The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote: „A psychology of scarcity produces anxiety, envy, egoism […]Not until this fear of failure is conquered will questions of life quality be answered without accelerated consumption of goods, holidays, contacts etc. : “
• The more unequal a society is the less a feeling of abundance is possible  regardless of where the individual is placed in the hierarchy. More economic inequality causes more status-oriented consumption (Wilkinson/Pickett). With consumer goods people are able to show their status. A BI leads to less inequality. Thereby it generates the social-psychological conditions for replacing the pressure to “keep up” with the feeling of abundance and satisfaction.
• Inequality is not only to be understood in an economical way. Whoever feels himself suppressed in his family, his work, in politics, will try to compensate this through consumption (“now its time to treat myself”). People who feel well-accepted need this less.

Second conclusion: Circumstances with more equality and less hierarchy will reduce those shares of consumption which are caused only by competitive and compensatory motivations. It remains less, but more authentic consumption.

The whole economy becomes more authentic from both sides which determine it, from the consumption side and the production side. Hence we can name the BI an authenticity lump-sum (“Authentizitätspauschale”).            

2 Ensuring sustainability and degrowth for the whole society

Thus a BI will sustain und induce lifestyles of less consumption. But we cannot be sure, that this will be the case for the majority:

The authors write:

“An Unconditional Basic Income supports reproductive work, which is in favour of human beings and is sparing in the use of resources.”   
And later “An UBI means radical redistribution from rich to poor…This supports the option for more ecological (more expensive) consumption for lower income classes…”

But its not convincingly, that the consumption attitude of lower income classes (as well as the higher…) will change in this ecological direction. One criticism against the general idea of a basic income from an ecological point of view is: With the larger mass purchasing-power more environmentally damaging things will be bought. There are counter arguments, e.g. the change of behaviour through more liberty, equality, less hierarchy (see above). But we cannot be sure. And we cannot be sure to which extension the change in consumption patterns will take place

If we finance an BI with eco-taxes, this uncertainty will be avoided through the change of relative costs. Environmental-friendly goods will become cheaper than those with higher ecological footprints. This causes various reactions:

Firstly it fosters alternative technologies (e.g. a  car with less fuel consumption)

Secondly it promotes alternative consumption  (e.g. public traffic)

Thirdly it stimulates less consumption (e.g. staying at home and playing guitar)

The ecological financing of a BI will sustain both technical and cultural way to sustainability. Or in other words: It will sustain the two big strategies in ecological discourse – Ecological Modernization and Degrowth. And could combine these two strategies!

3) Social wealth independent of commodity production

The authors write: “…we need another system of distribution what more and more distributed the social wealth independently of the taxation of commodity production.” From my point of view the division of labour, even organized with jobs paid with money, is not the problem. It belongs to a complex work sharing society. And we need a money system even for redistribution policies, at first for the basic income.

The problem is the quantity of monetarian work and linked to this, the quantity of goods and services. The core question is of course: How can we reach social wealth without depending from a certain quantity of monetarian work? Can we reach this, when we finance the BI mostly by taxes on income? Social wealth then remains dependent from a high level of paid work. Nonetheless we could rise the income tax rate in case of degrowth, but this has boundaries. Uno actu we would demotivate every work action without differentiation whether this work has an emancipatory or ecologically quality or not.

When we finance the BI with eco-taxes, we have even the problem: What should we do in case of the wished degrowth? Even then we could rise the eco tax rate of unwished resource extractions. But this would not be such an indifferent action as the increase of income taxes. The opposite is the case: Only ecologically damaging work and consumption would be demotivated – that’s what we wish.