Basic Income, Stakeholder Grants, and Class Analysis

Politics and Society

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 79-87

  Wright, Erik Olin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

Basic income; Class; Redistribution; Stakeholders

Indexed keywords

EID: 1642356041     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329203261099     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (12)

1. The claim that this relation is properly described as embodying a "power imbalance" may be contentious to some economists, since many economists see the labor exchange as a purely voluntary contract within which power is absent. Capitalists do not really have power over workers, the arguments go, because workers are always free to quit if they do not like what they are told to do. The counter-argument is that the capitalist ownership of the means of production is backed by force in the form of state-enforced property rights, and this gives them effective power over workers given the basic scarcity of capital and the necessity for workers to seek employment from some employer. For contemporary discussions of the power dimension of the relation between labor and capital that are addressed to the skepticism of neoclassical economists, see Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "Contested Exchange: New Micro-foundations for the Political Economy of Capitalism," Politics & Society 18, no. 2 (1990): 165-222; Randall Bartlett, Economics & Power (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
2. The claim that this relation is properly described as embodying a "power imbalance" may be contentious to some economists, since many economists see the labor exchange as a purely voluntary contract within which power is absent. Capitalists do not really have power over workers, the arguments go, because workers are always free to quit if they do not like what they are told to do. The counter-argument is that the capitalist ownership of the means of production is backed by force in the form of state-enforced property rights, and this gives them effective power over workers given the basic scarcity of capital and the necessity for workers to seek employment from some employer. For contemporary discussions of the power dimension of the relation between labor and capital that are addressed to the skepticism of neoclassical economists, see Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "Contested Exchange: New Micro-foundations for the Political Economy of Capitalism," Politics & Society 18, no. 2 (1990): 165-222; Randall Bartlett, Economics & Power (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
3. Max Weber, Economy and Society, edited by Gunther Roth (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1922] 1978), 151.
4. Ibid., 153.
5. It may also be the case, of course, that issues of justice and fairness are closely linked to these indictments of capitalist class relations. The language of "exploitation" certainly has a connotation of injustice even if, on closer inspection, it is not a simple matter to link a class analytic concept of exploitation to philosophically rigorous understandings of justice.
6. Socialism was also seen as a remedy for a third traditional Marxist indictment of capitalism: the "anarchy of the market" in capitalism generates various forms of waste, inefficiency, and negative externalities. Socialism, as a system of democratic economic planning, was thought to be a solution to these macro-economic problems as well as the micro-economic issues of exploitation and alienation in the lives of workers.
7. By "comprehensive socialism" I mean an economy within which private ownership of the means of production has been largely abolished and markets have been replaced with democratic planning as the basis for economic regulation and coordination. One can, of course, be a skeptic of comprehensive socialism and remain a socialist critic of capitalism. The problem then becomes thinking through the ways in which socialist elements can be infused into capitalist relations in ways that neutralize the power imbalances of capitalism. Whether the limits on such a process mean that the amalgam in an optimal institutional equilibrium would be more socialistic or capitalistic is not something, I believe, that can be known in advance of institutional experiments.
8. In one of the earliest systematic defenses of basic income, Philippe Van Parijs and Robert Van der Veen, "A Capitalist Road to Communism," Theory and Society 15, no. 5 (1986): 635-55, characterized unconditional basic income as "A Capitalist Road to Communism" that would bypass socialism as a way of neutralizing the undesirable consequences of capitalist class relations for individual autonomy and freedom.
9. In Ackerman and Alstott's proposal, the central rationale for stakeholder grants is to remedy as much as possible a problem of inequality of opportunity generated by the fact that some young adults receive substantial inter-generational transfers of wealth and others - the large majority - do not. While using the assets from a stakeholder grant to underwrite self-employment is one of the uses to which the grants can be put, people are free to use the opportunity afforded by the grant in any way they see fit.
10. Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 116. The proportions of male and female workers - rather than all employees - who would like to be self-employed in the United States are virtually the same as for all employees: 66 percent of male workers and 46 percent of female workers in the United States report that they would like to be self-employed. The proportions of employees in other countries who want to be self-employed are generally much lower than in the United States: 49 percent in Canada, 40 percent in Sweden, 31 percent in Japan, and 20 percent in Norway.
11. See L. Calmfors and J. Driffill, "Bargaining Structure, Corporatism and Macro-economic Performance," Economic Policy 6 (April 1988): 13-61; Erik Olin Wright, "Working-Class Power, Capitalist-Class Interests and Class Compromise," American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 4 (January 2000): 957-1002.
12. See L. Calmfors and J. Driffill, "Bargaining Structure, Corporatism and Macro-economic Performance," Economic Policy 6 (April 1988): 13-61; Erik Olin Wright, "Working-Class Power, Capitalist-Class Interests and Class Compromise," American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 4 (January 2000): 957-1002.