Guy Standing: Protecting our Shared Wealth

In this episode of SystemShift, Guy Standing, economist and author, looks at the current economic system and its impact on labour and society as a whole. Standing is a campaigning economist responsible for some of the most innovative solutions to inequality of recent times and he calls on us to wake up to the threat posed by capitalism’s violent policies for extraction, exploitation and depletion of that which is both common to us all, but also vital to our survival. Austerity and neoliberal policies have depleted our shared commons – this plunder depriving us all of our centuries-old common rights to share fairly and equitably in our public wealth. Standing also looks at the increasingly global phenomenon of the Precariat and the rise of political extremism – and offers solutions, including the potential of a Universal Basic Income system as a tool for tackling inequality, climate change, and authoritarian populism. 

Carl Schlyter: 
Welcome to SystemShift, the Greenpeace podcast that explores how we can create systemic change in our economic, political and social systems. Today we have a very special guest, the economist and author, Guy Standing. He is a professorial research associate and former professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He has long been concerned with the economic models dominating our society and their impact on labor and society as a whole.

Guy’s latest book is ‘The Blue Commons’, in which he focuses on the economy of the sea and how it can provide solutions to the economic inequality created by what he sees as a rigged system supporting the already unequal markets and political power of privileged individuals and businesses. Guy argues that the neoliberal model that emerged from the economic revolution of the 1980s, led by the Chicago School and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, dismantled the social institutions and regulations of the postwar era in favor of finance and global capitalism. We also look at the subject of one of Guy’s earlier books, ‘The Precariat’, the hugely influential first account of a growing class of people that faces insecurity, moving in and out of precarious work that gives little meaning to their lives.

Guy predicted the emergence of a political monster if the insecurities and inequalities affecting the precariat were not addressed and you look at how this prediction manifested itself in the emergence of Donald Trump and similar leaders. Guy also warned of the internal divisions in society which have led to the villainization of migrants and other vulnerable groups susceptible to the dangers of political extremism. He argues for a new politics that puts the fears and aspirations of the precariat at the heart of the progressive strategy of redistribution and income security.

Guy was a founding member of the Basic Income Earth Network, and we explore the potential of universal basic income as a tool for tackling the worsening crisis of inequality, climate change and authoritarian populism. Guy argues that a basic income system is an essential component of an emerging alternative economic vision, a necessary pillar, the re-imagining of work and economic security in our crisis ridden world. Basic Income Scheme underwritten by taxation of the rich, would reduce economic inequality. It would also help promote gender and racial equity, and it would help to equalize power relations within households.

Join us as we explore the impact of neoliberalism on our economic system and the rise of right-wing ideologies around the world in response to the growing insecurities and inequalities of the working class. So without further ado, Guy Standing, welcome here. So nice to have you here.

Guy Standing:
It’s a pleasure to be back, as it were.

The Blue Commons

Carl Schlyter: 
Yes, certainly. So you have done so many interesting things that I want to go through here. But let’s start with the recent developments. What’s on your agenda now?

Guy Standing:
Well, it’s been an interesting experience because I have just written a new book called ‘The Blue Commons’, which is, in a sense,the latest phase of a series of books that began with my concern about the economic model that has come to dominate over the last 30 years. We think about a bit of neoliberalism, and I’ll come back to that in a moment. I’ve just come back from speaking in the British House of Commons to MPs and their assistants and so on, a big audience. It was very interesting because I began by putting the development of the Blue Commons, which is about the economy of the sea, in the context of the work that I’ve been trying to do over the past 25 years. The narrative begins with going back into the 1980s, when, as you will remember, there was an economic revolution literally in which the old social democratic model of the postwar era had broken down. It was a revolution which was led by the Mont Pelerin Society of the Chicago School and Thatcher and Reagan launching it politically.

Carl Schlyter: 
And for listeners the Chicago school is the neo liberal headquarters of economic reform.

Guy Standing:
Yeah, that’s right. Basically their model was that they should promote a free market and that this meant dismantling the social institutions and the regulations of the postwar era. What I argued at the time and have been arguing ever since is that in reality, they weren’t creating a free market economy at all. They were creating the most unfree market system that was highly regulated, but regulated in favor of capital, regulated in favor of, above all, finance, global finance. Up to that period, financial institutions were regarded as intermediaries, you know, facilitating investment, facilitating savings and so on. But instead, the financial liberalization of that era has produced a global economic system, which I’ve called rentier capitalism. What rentier capitalism means, in essence, is that more and more of the income generated goes to the owners or possessors of property, private assets, physical assets, financial assets, and so-called intellectual property. And less and less has been going to labor. The people who perform work and labor. The model made it even worse for people who perform labor and work by saying that the social state, the welfare state, had to be shrunk as part of the privatization agenda. So we had privatization pushed by these neo-liberals all over the world, including in developing countries, at the same time as they wanted to squeeze the social state, to reduce spending on welfare policies, public services and so on. So it was a model that in a double sense was penalizing workers. By workers, I mean, not just members of trade unions and people doing jobs, but also all people doing care work and living on the edges of society. All of these people were penalized.

The rise of right wing politics

Carl Schlyter: 
As well as local communities, of course.

Guy Standing:
Exactly. So I wrote a book called ‘The Precariat -The New Dangerous Class’ When it came out in 2011, a lot of my left wing friends said, Guy, you can’t call it a class. I said, well, don’t stick yourselves into the 19th century when Karl Marx was writing, because that was a different era. It was a different era, and industrial capitalism was emerging. Today we have what I call tertiary activities, services and things, and our class structure is fundamentally changed. And I’m sure Karl Marx, if he were alive, would have understood that you evolved with the economic system and your conceptual approach evolves as well. I think it’s now accepted that we do have a precariat. When that book was published, I predicted on page one that unless the precariat was understood and unless we had a politics concerned with the insecurities and inequalities affecting the precariat, we would see a political monster. The political monster came in 2016 with the emergence of Donald Trump. A Donald Trump who was promising to bring back the past. People listened because the insecurities and inequalities had grown and even an ogre, a disgusting man like Trump, would get some of the less educated people in the precariat supporting him. It was the same with Brexit in Britain, the same with various right wing ideologues who emerged in this period. Of course that’s happened because no policies for the precariat have developed. And so we even get in Sweden far-right now, even in Italy, winning far-right and in various other countries. So my warning in the sense has proved unfortunately correct. Let me just say that I think for your listeners, we still need to say how do you define the precariat? I think it’s important to realize that, as I’ve said it in Sweden and other countries, and I’ve been asked to talk about the precariat over 600 times in 40 countries. It’s a global phenomenon. Every day I receive emails from people who say I am part of the precariat and we need to understand what the precariat is. It’s not just about having insecure jobs. What I’ve argued is that you need to look at the precariat in three dimensions. The first dimension is you have unstable labor, insecure labor, and you don’t have a sense of an occupational identity or narrative. You feel you belong to any particular profession and you’re developing yourself through your labor and work that part. That part, I think, is relatively easy to understand. This is the first mass class who on average has a level of education greater than the level needed for the sort of job they do. The second thing is that people in the precariat have a volatile income and often very low income and are losing non-wage benefits that were built up in the postwar era. Most do not have the prospect of a good pension. They don’t have the prospect of good medical leave and pay. They don’t have the opportunity for paid holidays and things like that. At the same time, this is the first mass class, and very, very important who are living on the edge of unsustainable debt. Their life is defined all the way through by having debt and the prospect of debt and therefore being economically insecure.

Neo-liberal reforms and debt

Carl Schlyter: 
Would I please also ask you to explain the link between the neo-liberal reforms and why this debt circle widened so much?

Guy Standing:
Well, just to go on inside there, this is very much related to the rentier capitalism that I started with because finance has emerged, as I like to put it this way. The finance is the tail that is wagging the economic dog rather than the other way round. Finance wants everybody to be in debt. That’s their raison d’etre. That’s their justification. They want us to be in debt because that’s how they make their money. Of course, for millions of people in the precariat, that is their life and they are exploited through the debt mechanism and this goes very well as far as finance is concerned, because the incomes, the earned incomes of people in the precariat tend to be very volatile, fragile and often very low. But to go on the essence of the precariat and most importantly, most importantly, is the third dimension, which is that people in the precariat have a sense that they’re losing the rights of citizenship. They’re losing social rights, they’re losing civil rights, they’re losing economic rights, they’re losing political rights because they don’t see in the political spectrum parties or politicians who are representing their interests and aspirations. They’re losing cultural rights because they feel they cannot belong to communities that give them the opportunity to preserve and develop their cultural rights. The point that I want to end that definition is that above all, a person in the precariat feels like a supplicant. A supplicant is someone who has to rely on other people and other institutions to give them security. They cannot have it as a right. They have to make appeals, rely on charity. The original definition of precarious going back to the Latin was to obtain by prayer, obtain by begging. If you’re in the precariat, you feel that you are a supplicant all the time. And that, of course, has terrible stressful consequences for mental health, for political psychology and so on. To get to your question, here we have a situation where the precariat has emerged in the period from 2010 through to today consists of three groups really. The first group and the ones who are not particularly educated, relatively speaking. They belong to old working class communities and or families. They were industrial working class communities and they listened to populists who promised to bring back yesterday and promise to get the aliens, the migrants, the refugees, the minorities out of the system so you kind of have the past back. These people are frightening and they have an audience in that part of the precariat. For a long time that part was a very large part of the precariat. The second part of the precariat consists of the minorities themselves; migrants, racial minorities, people with disabilities. These people are part of the precariat. They won’t vote for neo-fascist populists, but they tend to be disenfranchised. They tend to have to survive and keep their heads down. But as everybody knows, sometimes the pressures get too great and they have a day of rage. I call these, the nostalgics. They don’t have a sense of home anywhere, and they don’t have a sense of having secure rights. The third group are those who went to college, went to university, were promised a future if they did that. They come out with debt, they enter the precariat and they see a life of being in the precariat. And they don’t see any attention to the ecological challenges of the time, the social challenges or the aspirations for a different type of life from the political circles. This group is the growing group. I call them the progressives. This group is not going to vote for neo-fascist populism. They’re looking for a new politics, a new paradigm of politics. For me, this is the great hope. This part, I am hopeful. I am hopeful that gradually we’re seeing the precariat emerge as a class for itself, in which this third group is the leading expanding group.

Privatization and the corruption of capitalism

Carl Schlyter: 
So what you’re really hoping for is that all these groups unite in the understanding that the current system is destroying the planet. All the effects on these groups are similar in the sense that they’re all disenfranchised from making lives that they could have?

Guy Standing:
Yeah, and that brings me back, Carl, to the economic narrative, that’s the context in which the precariat has been emerging. Because the economic context is that we are now globally dominated by global finance. Global finance has been increasingly concentrated in what’s called private equity. Now, private equity and venture capital and the plutocracy that’s emerged, all want short term profit maximization. And that’s why they are giving overwhelming emphasis to GDP growth, economic growth. We have it so that the politicians say we must have faster economic growth, we must have faster economic growth, and we must have faster economic growth. This growth fetish means that all the ecological concerns get treated as residual issues. They make rhetoric about global warming and want to do something about it and set up COP 25, COP 26, COP 27 and this year it will be COP 28 and COP15 in Montreal and all these wonderful agreements. But in actual fact,they’re not tackling the economic causes of our crisis.

Carl Schlyter: 
Rather capitalizing on the negative effects and new economic ways.

Guy Standing:
They’re offering mitigation, but they’re not offering a constructive structural challenge to rentier capitalism. When I wrote the book called ‘The Corruption of Capitalism’, which is about how this has emerged, there was one chapter where I said one of the things that the neoliberal rentier capitalism model has done, is deplete society of the commons. Now, the commons go back throughout our history by speaking to anybody from any European country, but also any other part of the world incidentally. The idea of the commons can be a little obscure to start with, but once you explain what the commons are, they said, “We have this, we want this”. A commons is something that belongs to all of us, and it goes back to ancient Rome, the Justinian Codex of AD 534,which said that there are four types of property, private property, state property, nobody’s property and common property. Among common property were the land, the minerals, the sea, the seashore, the air and the social amenities built up by our ancestors that belong to us as society. You can trace the development of a Commons perspective through to Magna Carta and the equivalents in other countries. Through the Charter of the Forest of 1217, which said that fundamentally everybody who is a commoner, including you and me, has the right to subsistence in the commons and that the commons must be preserved by the government, the monarchy and whoever is in charge of society. That it should be passed on to the future generations, preserved and passed on.

The tragedy of commons

Carl Schlyter: 
And this act of commoning is a word that you taught me actually once. I think it is really interesting that when neoliberal economists talk about the tragedy of the commons, they just look upon it as equating it with property rights and what could happen  if nobody owns it. Actually, commoning is a concept in which we are partakers. We are not owners; we are partakers in the common joint management of this. So actually, a true commons is not, you know, lack of management. It is proper management to benefit all or how would you express it?

Guy Standing:
Well you’ve raised my blood pressure because you’ve mentioned the tragedy of the commons. Well that is associated, as everybody in social science knows, with Garret Hardin’s 1968 article, with that title. But actually what he was talking about was open access. You’ve put it very nicely. A commons requires governments and it didn’t need Elinor Ostrom to teach people that. The reality goes way back through our history that it’s always been understood that for a commons you need a governance with a steward and trustees looking after it, managing it, and you need gatekeepers, voice organizations with agency able to hold the stewards to account. You had to have rules on access, rules on use, rules on other things that are described in my books on the Commons. Now, the irony is that, of course, Hardin, when he was writing in 1968, he was actually in favor of complete privatization. He believed, and this was why it was picked up and supported by the neoliberals so much, that you should have private property rights and that meant capitalism to take over from the commons. Actually taking over from open access. What he didn’t talk about, of course, was finance. He pretended like others that if you had private property rights, they would look after the future because they wouldn’t make profits down the line. Finance doesn’t deal with that. Finance wants profits in five years, seven years at most, and finance has increasingly dominated.

But the irony is that Hardin also wrote an article which anybody who thinks that he was a sensible person should read called Lifeboat Ethics. His argument was about lifeboat, that the lifeboat was full of people like him, and therefore it made sense to push off anybody who was in the water drowning, pushed them off the boat, because if they got on the boat, the whole boat would sink and they themselves would die as well as the swimmer. Now, this ethic went further in his mind, so he was campaigning against a world food program. Actively campaigning, and wanted no World Food Program because in his warped view, if you gave the poor food, they would multiply and survive and there would be too many people eating the food and would affect people like him. Now, if I repeat his argument, you would think it’s an exercise in madness. So I invite any of your listeners to go and read his article because that is precisely what he argued. But let’s return to the commons because the commons has been usurped and plundered. That’s the title of my previous book, plundered by being privatized, by being commodified, by being financialized, and increasingly turned into a zone of neocolonialism. So the World Bank and others have been encouraging global finance and global corporations to convert communities in developing countries into export oriented zones of production, destroying local resources, spoiling communities, destroying mangroves, destroying the capacity of those economies to reproduce themselves. But at this point, of course, once you go in an aggressive way to convert local communities in developing countries into export oriented activities for the benefit of global capital, you destroy the capacity of those local communities to reproduce themselves and develop for the benefit of their own communities. This affects the oceans and the sea more than anything else. That is the subject of my new book. 

The Truman Proclamation of 1945

Carl Schlyter: 
You have seen the effects of the European fishery agreements with many communities around the world, but all the profits are sent up and the local communities have their commons destroyed by the huge European ships, stealing almost all the resources. When you have this kind of shortsightedness of financial capital, you build a system where we have too few lifeboats and then the people in the lifeboat push all the others out of the world, so to speak. What would you suggest then? How would the seas better be managed as the commons they are? 

Guy Standing:
Well, I think the problem started in a big way when we had the enclosure of the sea. As most of us know, when we know our history, the great impoverishment of the European workers began with the enclosures of the land in Britain. We know that big enclosure Acts of the Tudors, and then the Victorians basically created contrived scarcity of land and pushed people off land and pushed them into the labor force as a proletariat and in other countries. You know, everybody should remember that what radicalized Karl Marx was the enclosure that took place in the Moselle Valley area. Other people will remember the enclosures in their countries. But what’s happened in the sea is far more dramatic, but far less known because we don’t live physically in the sea. It began with the Truman Proclamation of 1945, where imperialistically the United States declared that 200 nautical miles from its shores was henceforth state property, belonging to the United States. This was an act of enclosure, creating state property. Few other countries started to follow suit. To make a long story short, in 1982, with the passage of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, we had a situation where every coastal country in the world was given a state property 200 nautical miles from their shore, with some negotiations on how you shared it if there was several countries affected. Now, what this did was enclosed as state property, 138 million square kilometers of sea. Now, enclosure is the first step to privatization because you have to have state ownership before you have privatization. What we have seen is that governments have created privatized assets in the sea. At the same time they commodified things that are in the sea and allowed global finance to come in behind and accelerate the conglomeration of corporations who are benefiting from taking from the sea. That’s the story. Okay.

Carl Schlyter: 
Then also, even the harbors have been more and more privatized. So it’s like a reinforcing structure there?

Guy Standing:
Yes, I mean, there are 835 major ports in the world. It’s an incredible thing. My own country has 120 ports and harbors. All of them have been privatized and most of them are owned by foreign capital and by finance, by private equity. Extraordinary. What they’ve done when they get that ownership is they convert it for the interests of global trade, but not for the local community. So you have destruction, ecological destruction, social destruction and so on. That has been accelerating and you’re absolutely right to mention that. But let me go back to fishing, because fishing under the UNCLOS as it’s called, they had a peculiar concept called the maximum sustainable yield – MSY. Which some mad crack U.S. civil servant in 1949 invented. His theory was that we actually should maximize or optimize the taking of fish from the sea because if you took a lot of fish, it would thin the population of fish and that would allow the young ones, the virile fish, to produce more because you would be catching all the old fish. And therefore it should be the maximum sustainable yield. Not too much, but a lot. And that concept was taken into UNCLOS and to get the agreement of rich countries with long distance fishing fleets, they said any developing country that couldn’t catch up to its maximum sustainable yield had to make a fishing access agreement with a foreign country.

The illusion of Maximum Sustainable Yield

Carl Schlyter: 
But the whole ideological basis for this is also that all nature is human property and we have a dominance and control relationship to nature. So it’s fundamentally flawed in that sense.

Guy Standing:
Absolutely. It’s a disgraceful way of looking at the sea. Looking at what’s in the sea. We have a situation where there are 28,000 known species of fish in the sea and over one third are unable to reproduce because the mortality rate is higher. So we’re losing thousands of varieties of fish. But the story of the fishing access agreements has meant that there are over 300 today whereby foreign countries and foreign corporations are taking all the fish from the countries, developing countries, creating an ecosystem collapse, making huge profits so that the countries all around Africa, in Latin America and Asia are actually benefiting less than 10% of the value being sucked. And of course, globally, long distance fishing fleets, we’re talking about boats longer than 100 meters, 140 meters. The biggest fish factory out there is 244 meters long. They can take thousands and thousands of tonnes each day, that sort of boat. The agreements have been used to, as I say, a neocolonial activity which is being compounded with turning local small fish into fish meal because you need it for aquaculture, fish farming. That’s a zone of financialized capital that every Scandinavian knows about, particularly if they’re Norwegian, because Norway has become the major producer of farmed salmon.

Carl Schlyter: 
To make matters worse, the MSY you mentioned before, even those recommendations are not followed. Because in Europe, when you set aside how much to fish, it’s the governments who say how much. So first the commission makes a recommendation based on that, and then the politicians decide, the governments decide, and almost always they decide to fish more even than that is recommending.

Guy Standing:
The reason there is that the fishing management organizations, including the Common Fisheries Policy, but also all the producer organizations that have been set up and the regional fishing management organizations that exist all of these have been taken over by corporate capital. The big industrial giants of the seafood industry, and they dominate. You are absolutely right. What happens? They have a total allowable catch that is supposed to exist, right? The scientists recommend a certain amount. They say if you catch more than that, you will have resource collapse. But every time the actual agreement is something like 20% above what the scientists recommend. It is resulting in the collapse of fish populations all over the world. And then they introduce marine protected areas.

Carl Schlyter: 
Half protected. Maybe we should call them.

Guy Standing:
Well, they’re not even protected. Actually, industrial scale fishing is greater in marine protected areas than outside them. I mean, it’s pathetic. So we have a fig leaf and I think this is part of the collapse of the blue economy. 

De-growth and Cooperation over Growth and Competition

Carl Schlyter: 
But can I ask you some questions on how to solve this? So what would a proper system of ecologically functional networks of marine protected areas mean? How would we do that? How should we manage our seas, do you think?

Guy Standing:
Well, we haven’t talked about the biggest problem that’s coming up this year in July, which is deep sea mining and the various other aspects. But leave those aside for the moment. Any progressive agenda from the point of view of where we are today, not where we might like to be, but where we are today have two things in mind.

The first is that the ecological imperatives must be foremost, and that is why increasingly I’m in favor of something like de-growth rather than growth. As an overarching ideological orientation. You mentioned earlier the importance of not taking a humanistic approach to the point where nature exists for humans. We are part of nature. We must develop a concept of conviviality, tribe-ability through our living in nature, with nature, as nature. I think that’s fundamental.
The second thing is we will not have a new progressive politics unless we have new forms of agency, new forms of voice. The sense of governance by the commoners for the commons. Giving that as priority so that the living standards are mediated through local communities, organizations that represent nature, preservation and reproduction, who can be gatekeepers and be part of the governance of the system, not from outside, but inside. And that sense of revitalizing governance as and by the commoners is vital. 

Carl Schlyter: 
How would such a system of increasing cooperation rather than only competition look like?

Guy Standing:
Well, for example, you can go to the ports we mentioned earlier. Okay. It is a total disgrace that we are allowing our ports to be run and developed by finance and corporate capital and not by local communities and the interests of the commons. I’ve been analyzing a particular case of Teesside in northeastern England, which is the fifth biggest port of the country. It’s a good example because it’s now run by a Canadian private equity company and they are interacting with the government, which is complicit with what they’re doing. They’re expanding the port to make it the deep sea water port for foreign trade and therefore big, huge container ships and things. Recently they decided unilaterally to take 250,000 tonnes of sediment from the river and take it offshore, dump that offshore. Shortly afterwards, all the crabs and lobsters and shellfish and things started dying, twitching, dying. If you take pictures of the beaches around there, there are thousands of dead crabs. It’s a horrifying sight. Now, the local fishing communities have been destroyed and they’ve all been saying it’s due to this putting this sediment out there, irresponsibly. The company has said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s algae.

Now, the coincidence is too much to believe, the company. The government, which is working with the company, has said, well, we’re not sure which way. We’re not sure.

My point is this, if we had a proper governance system, those communities of fishing folk and the local people living there would be part of the governance before the decision is taken. So that the precautionary principle would be respected.

The Norwegian Oil Fund

Carl Schlyter: 
So stakeholder based logic rather than shareholder based logic.

Guy Standing:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Whereas the shareholders sitting in Canada and elsewhere are making nice profits from this, the local community has been destroyed. There are examples in most countries of where the local community and the commoners have been completely ignored. Now we must fundamentally change that. It’s a new form of eco-socialism, if you like, but it’s blue green. You know, I don’t like the term green so much these days because we’re neglecting the blue and the oceans cover 71% of the world. So neglecting the blue is not good enough. It’s not good enough. Then I will get to my last point, which goes back to my whole argument, which is that our income distribution system has broken down.

Broken down. Goes back to why it’s broken down, where we began the conversation. I believe that we need to produce what I call Commons Capital Funds. A build up, a system in which you say to all those who are benefiting from taking our commons, you have to pay levies to compensate the commoners who are being deprived. If you are doing activities that are causing global warming and pollution and you get around the regulations because they’re not strong enough, you have to pay a levy to compensate the people who are being adversely affected. That’s the basis of the argument. It’s a justice oriented, ethical argument and they put that into the fund and the fund has to be invested in ecologically sustainable ways. And you build up the fund and you distribute the dividends from the fund as basic income. For me, the Norwegians have got the right to start with the Norwegian Oil Fund, which is a fantastic concept, but they haven’t gone to the next stage, both in terms of moving away from just thinking about oil to other common resources, including salmon and including hydropower. And they haven’t moved to the next stage, which is to say that the commoners are equal and every commoner must have an equal dividend. You shouldn’t be allowing this to be used for whatever a particular government wants. That’s a matter of income tax, consumption tax and so on. 

Carl Schlyter: 
The interesting thing with the Norwegian Oil Fund is recently it actually gets more additional capital from its own management rather than new oil revenue.

Guy Standing:
Quite that was the long term intention because once you build up a fund, even as oil runs down, it’s now the biggest sovereign wealth fund, if you like. It’s the biggest capital fund in the world except for the Chinese, their state one, and it has changed the income distribution system in Norway so that if you look at the distribution system in Norway today, every decile below the top decile in the distribution system is better off than anywhere else in the world. So all the way down, second decile to the poorest decile. They are still better off than any other decile comparable decile in any other country in the world. And that is why a fund like this can help with the distribution question. It can help with putting the costs on those who are causing the costs and therefore discouraging them from doing so and has a social purpose as well. For me, this is a no brainer and I’m glad to think that more people are arguing in a similar way.

Carl Schlyter: 
And then of course, we need other regulations in the financial system. So that these funds themselves don’t become the new capitalists that destroy communities around the world, of course.

Guy Standing:
Absolutely. And that is why the two things must go together. The governance reform, so that the funds are operated independently of any particular party or government, but with an orientation to this sense of commoning and common nature and ecological reproduction. With the values of the commons that I describe in the book, the seven principles that I outlined as the guiding ethical lines for the fund. If you do that, you get that balance back.

Universal Basic Income 

Carl Schlyter: 
Now we’re actually coming closer to the first of your research that I came into contact with, and that was the one on basic income. I mean, when you have been describing the precariat now, actually I see a link between old fashioned North-South colonialism and so on. The groups that we now identify as precariat here in the North, we have actually seen for a long time during all the colonial era in the South. Many countries in the south have different struggles to get rid of this colonialist heritage. I know you have been leading some experiments also in the Global South, about basic income. Can we learn something from these experiments up in the North, too?

Guy Standing:
Yeah, definitely. I’ve been advocating basic income for many years and we built up the Basic Income Earth Network, which has thousands of members. Any of your listeners must join please, because we are gradually winning the debate I believe. I believe a basic income is fundamentally an ethical matter, a matter of justice. Basic income for those who are not familiar with the concept means that each individual in society should be provided with a modest, unconditional amount of money each month paid from the state mobilized to the way I’ve just been talking about, probably or through other forms. There are plenty of ways to pay for it and that this would be based on three ethical principles. The idea, first of all, is that it’s a matter of common justice. We have been deprived of our commons. We should have compensation for that. It’s also a matter of religious justice if you’re religious. I’m not. But if you are religious, God gave people unequal talents and in a sense, giving everybody a basic income would be a compensation for those who don’t have the talents of making money or being successful. We would have in this concept, supplements for those who have extra costs of living, people with disabilities or people with particular needs or lack of opportunities, they would be supplements because the idea is that everybody should have equal basic access to resources in which to build their lives. You could have other benefits on top of that. So don’t think that this is meaning every other public benefit goes. You don’t do that. Now, the idea of a basic income is also a matter of freedom. You can’t be free if you’re chronically insecure. Basic income enables more people to say no to exploitation or oppression.

A basic income also defends liberal freedom, the freedom to be moral. You can’t be moral if you have to just do what you never have to do to survive. You can only be moral if you can make a reasonable choice based on what I think is right to do, proper to do. And it also strengthens Republican freedom. The sense of being free from the power of people or institutions of unaccountable power. A woman is not free if she has to ask her husband if she can do X or Y, even if she knows that 99% of the time he will say yes. A woman is only free if she can make the decision herself. Where we’ve seen the experiments of basic income, one of the findings is that some women move out of abusive relationships because they have little financial independence.

Carl Schlyter: 
I remember when Nixon, of all people, actually made such an experiment and we saw exactly that effect, that women in relationships that were appalling actually finally had the freedom to leave.

Guy Standing:
Yeah, I mean, the Nixon experiment was not very much, but there were some negative income tax experiments where you’re absolutely right, they found that. But this is better than a negative income tax. I’m glad that even Milton Friedman came right to realize that because a negative income tax is paid after the event for a start and it’s paid on a family basis. Basic income is paid, you have rights, whatever else, you know what you’re going to get tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, right?

So the third thing about basic income is it would give people basic security. And security is a human need, basic security. And it’s also a public good in the sense that you have basic security. Doesn’t deprive me of having basic security like a private good that you buy a lemon then I can’t buy a lemon because you bought the lemon. So this is a public good. But basic security is fundamentally important for behavioral reasons. Psychologists have taught us that if you don’t have basic security, you lose your mental IQ, it diminishes it genuinely diminishes your mental capacities. Of course, if you diminish in mental capacities, why should we be holding people responsible for their actions? That is a critical question.

Universal Basic Income case studies

Carl Schlyter: 
That is actually very tightly linked to the Finnish basic income experiment, where from the neoliberal point of view, they said, oh well, people didn’t work much more, that was the purpose lalala. But what they saw, they didn’t work less, but what they saw was that these people who were very far from having a job on the normal market, what they did was actually having increased trust in others and society. This itself started to build a foundation for relationships. So this is a very important dimension that if you feel insecure, you increase your distrust. It’s much easier for negative campaigning politicians to pit one group against another. In the experiments you have done have you seen this effect that the competition, the rivalry, the hate between groups; have those diminished? Have we started to build better communities?

Guy Standing:
Yeah. I’m glad you brought up the Finnish thing because I was advising at the beginning, I wanted it to be a community wide basic income rather than full 2000 unemployed. And of course a lot of people have tried to make a criticism of the Finnish project. One thing is that a lot of people were told by the media that it was a failure and that it was discontinued. But I want to emphasize it was not a failure and it was not discontinued. It continued through to the end. The things that you’ve said are absolutely right. The interesting thing is that nobody can criticize it on the grounds that it would reduce work and labor. There was no reduction. That may have been a slight increase in work, but there was also an increase in doing secondary activities and so on by the unemployed. But the Finnish experiment is only one of many. You asked me a few minutes ago about those that have been done in developing countries. You’re listening to someone who’s had enormous privilege, very rarely given to an economist, of being able to put into practice something in which he believes and has been advocating. I’ve been involved in the design and implementation of pilot schemes of basic income in Africa, in India and in Latin America to a certain extent, and in Canada and in Europe and England.

I’m now advising the Welsh Government on a pilot that is taking place at this moment, and one planned in Catalonia, with the presidency. We have at the moment approximately give or take, a hundred pilots taking place around the world. And we’ve got the results from a number. I would like to just summarize those results.

The first thing you see is improvements in nutrition, particularly among children. So that height for age goes up in children in developing countries. The second thing you see is improvement in health, particularly in developed countries, particularly in mental health. Mental stability, less stress, feeling of being in control of one’s life, very important human needs. Also health care. What we found in India, for example, where we did it with thousands of people, was that health care improved and the taking medicine went through to completion. Very important. Basically, when you get this basic income, people spend it to improve their lives, they spend it to give them a sense of belonging in their community. And that comes through. I don’t know that smallholder in that little village what his or her particular needs are or the next person living just down the road, okay. They know better than I do. I don’t believe in paternalistic social policy. I believe that you must trust people and in return, people will trust the state, if you like. They trust the institutions of the state, and behave better as a result of that. That’s what you’ve just been saying about that. But all of the experiments have shown this tendency, not for every individual, of course not, but in general as a thrust. And then improvement in schooling, people staying in school for longer, attending, performing better. Turns out one big pilot in North Carolina, of all places, which happened to be a longitudinal study. It turned out that over sixteen years in which this essentially a basic income was being paid to one part of the community and not to another, at the end of the 16 years, the children on average taking other factors into account, well, one year ahead in schooling, in their schooling attainment, if they’d been in the basic income families. Now that sort of finding that we’ve seen in developing countries, we’ve seen in the experiments that have taken place in rich countries as well, and I want to emphasize the next point. Every experiment with basic income has shown that it results in an increase in work, not a decrease. 

The Care Economy

Carl Schlyter: 
But that actually worries me. I mean, you’re an economist. You’re really happy where people work more, but if you work more, you will have more income, you will have more environmental destruction, you have more growth and so on. And so please comfort me now Guy.

Guy Standing:
Yes, so I want you to listen further, because every time I make this case and there’s a long chapter in my basic income showing all the evidence as well as the theory, somebody will go out and say the trouble with basic income is that it will make people lazy and stop working. Right? One of the sins of neoliberal economics and neoclassical economics is that all the work that is most valuable for humans is treated as non-work, and that is the care. The care we give to our loved ones, the care we give to the community. None of it gets counted in economic growth statistics, and as a consequence, there’s no compensation or respect for people who do that sort of work. One of the great things about basic income where we’ve done the experiments is it leads people to doing more of the work they want to do and aspire to do, rather than the work that a landlord tells them or an employer tells them, etc. It leads to a greater sense of respect about what they do and want to do, and it leads to the sort of work we need to be encouraged. I think that came through very clearly during the COVID period. I wanted to conclude the benefits that we’ve seen, because it’s not just the increasing work, it’s increasing the productivity, the collaboration, the cooperative spirit in which work is done. We’ve seen a sense of social solidarity in communities being strengthened, which is the essence of good work. 

Carl Schlyter: 
Well, that’s actually a perfect ending of this episode. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Guy Standing:
Thank you very much. Nice talking to you.

Carl Schlyter: 
Nice talking to you too. Thanks a lot.

Guy Standing is a Professorial Research Associate and former Professor of Development Studies at SOAS University of London. His latest book is “The Blue Commons” in which he focuses on the economy of the sea and how it can provide solutions to economic inequality. He is also the author of “The Precariat” – the hugely influential first account of an increasingly global phenomenon where an emerging class of people faces insecurity, moving in and out of precarious work that gives little meaning to their lives.