[lbo-talk] Peter Frase on basic income and "socialist blueprints"

Bhaskar Sunkara bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com
Tue Feb 9 10:45:44 PST 2010


http://theactivist.org/blog/do-they-owe-us-a-living <http://theactivist.org/blog/do-they-owe-us-a-living> Serious debate about our visions for the future is always welcome, so it’s nice to see Jason Schulman<http://theactivist.org/blog/the-economics-of-socialism>

and David Schweickart<http://theactivist.org/blog/on-economic-democracy-a-reply-to-jason-schulman>

debating <http://theactivist.org/blog/in-defense-of-participatory-planning> “market socialism” and related things on this site. I don’t have a lot more to add about formal models of the socialist economy, because frankly I’m not all that interested in them. Schemes for socialist economies–whether market or planned or whatever–tend to come off as a a bit of an exercise in what Marx derisively referred to as “writing recipes for the kitchens of the future<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm>.” Trying to predict exactly what socialism will look like is foolhardy–and moreover anti-democratic, since it pre-empts the actions and decisions of the actual masses who will have to make a post-capitalist world happen.

So while these thought experiments about alternative economic models can be useful in clarifying our principles, I don’t think we need to take the details all that seriously. Rather than trying to draw up a detailed blueprint of a socialist economy, I prefer to think in terms of what Andre Gorz called “non-reformist reforms”<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-reformist_Reform>: changes to the system that can be implemented under capitalism, but which set the stage for further radical transformations. And I want to highlight one particular such reform that’s associated with Gorz, and which commenter R. Burke brings up in the comments of Jason’s recent post<http://theactivist.org/blog/in-defense-of-participatory-planning>: the guaranteed minimum income, or “Universal Basic Income<http://bostonreview.net/BR25.5/vanparijs.html>” as it’s sometimes called.

[...] http://theactivist.org/blog/do-they-owe-us-a-living



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