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1 The proposal for an individual, unconditional, universal basic income is nothing new. In 1986, Philippe Van Parijs, Guy Standing, Yoland Bresson, and David Casassas formed the Basic Income European Network, which became the Basic Income Earth Network in 2004. Other scholars likewise have been arguing in favor of this initiative since the 1980s.

2 Experiments with an income of this kind in one form or another (basic income, subsistence income, guaranteed income, universal payment) have begun to spread slowly but surely throughout both the Global North and the Global South.

3 In France, it was Benoît Hamon who most recently popularized the idea during the Socialist primary for the 2017 presidential election. Today, the proposal is evolving in different ways, as we explore in this issue of Multitudes. One significant fact here is that in the 2022 South Korean presidential election, the idea was supported by two parties: the incumbent, as well as a new party established recently around this specific issue.

4 Whenever consideration is being given to introducing an income of this kind, certain questions typically arise. Polanyi summarized them in his chapter on the “Speenhamland” law (the last of the Poor Laws to be passed in England) in The Great Transformation (1944). They are: the effect of giving large subsidies to the poor in terms of their participation in the job market; the effect on wages; and the effect on poverty itself. Polanyi suggested in particular that it could have the effect of suppressing wages—the so-called salaire d’appoint (secondary wage) argument often deployed in the context of wages paid to women whose partners were also employed, whereby bosses, knowing their employee could rely on poor relief or else on their husband’s income, were not inclined to pay more than a far lower “supplementary” salary. This argument has surfaced again and again throughout the history of labor movements, of the socialist or communist variety, whenever workers have suspected employers or capitalist reformers of pushing the idea of a salaire d’appoint, i.e., a much lower salary than the one that would be delivered by outright class conflict. This is, almost word for word, the position that Bernard Friot defended in his most recent book of conversations with Frédéric Lordon. [2] For a long time, it was André Gorz’s position too, until he eventually switched sides around the start of this century and began supporting the arguments Carlo Vercellone and I had both presented to him in the context of the rapid transformation of capitalism toward a “knowledge society.” The second main argument against a basic income has come from business and political leaders. It is an argument that formally refutes the blue-collar orthodoxy. It is based on the principle that no unemployed person should receive, through welfare payments, a higher income than that of the lowest paid worker, because of the fear that this would deaden the appeal of the job market for the self-employed and employees. This is precisely the argument that the French labor minister, Élisabeth Borne, used to justify the tightening of laws surrounding unemployment benefits, given the situation where occasional workers were not returning to the labor market as quickly as she would have liked.

5 As regards the first argument—a re-hash of the idea of the industrial reserve army—my thesis De l’esclavage au salariat (1998) showed that the idea does not stand up to scrutiny, whether in the context of immigration, of slavery, or of the poor. This is for the simple reason that it only works in a closed context where there is no chance of escape, not merely for those actually enslaved, but for the poor too. Yet migration, whether domestic or international, is the rule, not the exception. The explanation therefore needs to be turned on its head. Poor laws, i.e., the earliest welfare laws; the transformation of dependent workers’ contracts from a commercial purchase contract to an individual contract where the only thing purchased is the right to use certain hours of service on an ongoing basis; the establishment of the welfare state; gradual improvements in working conditions—the purpose of all these changes was to tie the workforce down and instill a sense of loyalty, while the workforce was doing its level best to escape the constraints imposed on its mobility.

6 The second argument—that an income in a form other than salary would have a disastrous impact on the attractiveness of the job market—can also be refuted on similar grounds, without even needing to get into case studies (from developing countries like Kenya to the most developed countries with the highest salaries, like Finland or Switzerland [3]). When someone not in salaried employment receives an income that is higher than the lowest wage paid to a dependent worker, low-paying sectors become less attractive. But is this really a problem, for business as a whole or for global capitalism, at the national or supra-national level? No. On the contrary, a rise in wage levels in sectors that previously paid poorly acts as an incentive for those sectors to modernize and stimulates a form of “natural” selection based on average social productivity. This is often a key factor in international competitiveness.

7 In other words, the idea of cutting social security measures in order to avoid putting low-paying sectors in a difficult position is very similar, in its reactionary attitude, to the argument put forward by those who criticize the downward effect on wages. It is part of the muddled thinking that confuses capitalism with the search for absolute surplus value at any price. The notion of relative surplus value is of course more subtle, and it is true that capitalism has always relied on its capacity to not get boxed in to the market-centric view that sees wages simply as the minimum needed by a worker to survive.

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8 The massive transformation of production that we have witnessed over the past fifty years, far greater than anything seen during the transition from the Industrial Revolution (1750–1880) to the Fordist era (1920–1970), has completely altered the composition of relative surplus value and the reproduction of the workforce, and in particular of the “brainforce,” to borrow Michel Volle’s rather neat term. Like any fundamental transformation, though, it has not occurred in a smooth, linear fashion.

9 The proportion of the population in salaried employment, after continuing to rise steadily right up until the mid-1970s, has plateaued, and even gone down at times. Formal dependence on an employer bound by labor law is no longer the rule. Whole areas of dependent, prescribed work are now salaried in practice but not legally. We only have to think of the many examples of Uberization of the workforce (Uber, Deliveroo, Uber Eats, etc.)—without forgetting the less obvious, but probably more numerous, examples of Uberization of the brainforce.

10 Of greater impact still is the contribution—in terms of the reproduction of the force of invention, and more simply of the workforce—of activity and, more simply, of employment or paid work. Education, care, leisure, knowledge of technology or the environment, consumption, computer literacy—all these things are put to work (in the sense of being indispensable to the production of value) even though they are not recognized as being productive work, and even less so as work that deserves to be remunerated.

11 By analogy with the paradigm of pollination, I would even go so far as to say that there is no comparison between the value of these activities that are put to work for the production of value and salaried work under a contract of employment. This is the case both quantitatively, because the former is worth somewhere between 500 and 5,000 times as much as salaried work, and qualitatively, because it is a measure of the production of the living (the human) and the planetary (global ecological conditions included).

12 The more this trend—inherent to the transformations of capitalism—takes hold, the closer we come to a point where it is impossible to reverse the socialization of salaried work in the form of the aptly named “social wage,” tied to social productivity. One step along that path is the contribution sociale généralisée (CSG), a social security contribution levied on all forms of income, not just the salaries of those in paid employment. This development came in the wake of an earlier reform, largely forgotten nowadays but of huge significance, namely the move from the SMIG (salaire minimum garanti, or guaranteed minimum wage) to the SMIC (salaire minimum de croissance, or minimum wage for growth), which includes an element tied to increases in general productivity in the economy at large, not just in a given sector. Another development that played a part here was the signing of “progress agreements” with the big state-owned companies.

13 Before the oil crisis, the share of social security contributions in the total income of blue-collar workers stood at 30%. By the time the oil crisis was over, around 1995, this had become the norm for all households with a salary coming in (including the professional classes). The biggest drain of course was unemployment: poverty, which had previously fallen to 9% of the population, crept up again to a calamitous 14% (19% in Germany), and this was due to the rise of precarious, casual, temporary jobs (and, to a lesser extent, of “permittents”—people who only work intermittently, in the catering or hotel sectors, for example, and who are not even recognized in law as salaried employees).

14 The de facto socialization of capitalist production, the growing share of social security contributions in incomes, the increase in economic rents (particularly housing) within net household income, stagnation of the share of wages in the gross domestic product, worsening terms for those with jobs for life (those working in the public sector), etc.—all these phenomena have put paid to the wonderful utopian vision of salaried jobs for life.

15 Lifetime employment in the private sector (invented in Japan in response to social unrest among textile workers between 1900–1912) has provided stability for roughly a third of the staff, mainly male, of very large corporations, even if this has been at the cost of these corporations then creating a myriad of smaller sub-contractors operating under notoriously (and systemically) precarious conditions. One consequence in particular that we need to think about today more than ever is the way unions have become defenders of lifetime employment and have stopped attending to the salaried workforce as a whole, let alone the dependent work done by sub-contractors—which is nevertheless technically labeled “independent.”

16 In the Fordist era, this corporatist solution had the effect of splitting the working class permanently, whether in countries with a strong communist presence, social democracies, or liberal anglophone countries. Nowadays, in a time that can no longer even be considered post-Fordist, this solution is laughable.

17 The real battle over the cost of the reproduction of the workforce (or, increasingly, the brainforce) is taking place in the area of the indirect social wage. Social security contributions—rightly underlined by Bernard Friot as a key factor here (though without identifying the broadening of their scope)—are borne by the population in general. Pensioners and minors drawing on services (health, education, leisure, shared equipment) contribute; workers contribute too, in the broadest sense of the term, not in the narrow sense of those in active employment: demoralized jobseekers contribute just like those who have managed to find a job or some kind of work. In short, it is not the case that social security contributions fall solely on those in active employment—far from it!

18 For all these structural reasons, the class war is shifting, inexorably, from the arena of salaried employment, in the narrow sense, to that of the means of subsistence of a population whose productivity is now understood in a far broader sense. The centrality of salary is fading away, and the demand for a minimum wage for salaried employees (even one such as the SMIC) is therefore being superseded by the notion, both tactical and strategic, of a guaranteed income or basic income.

19 This basic income, or subsistence income, is not some charitable add-on tacked on to the redistribution of a portion of the value created elsewhere, whether in the surplus-value-generating factories of salaried employment, or in the factory society of capitalism. Instead, a basic income can become the space par excellence for harnessing the productivity of society. It constitutes recognition of the fact that social pollination is now of greater importance than selling whatever is produced by the factory or office worker. This is because, for the traditional sites of the production of value to remain viable, i.e., to reproduce themselves, they have to change, adapt, innovate, invent, and feed the collective brain at the center of the network.

20 Salaried employment—like slavery, its close forebear—shouldn’t be expanded further (capitalism has already done that, and very successfully). Instead, it should be curbed.

21 In the early days of industrialization between the 1880s and the 1920s, the spread of salaried employment along the lines of the Putilov workshops in St Petersburg served as a model for a kind of socialism (to each according to their work) that focused on producing something other than “crappy shit,” as Marx put it in the Grundrisse in his powerful description of “big industry.” Now, one hundred years later, in the era of the brainforce, the specter of real communism (to each according to their need) compels us to reduce the salaried workforce, not increase it.

22 And what can help to mitigate the disastrous, collapsological effect of capitalism, which always presents itself as an asset for society because of the division of labor it produces and maintains? Certainly not its further expansion in the form of the dictatorship of the extractivist salaried workforce (endlessly postponing the closure of factories that are polluting the environment, for example, in order to save their jobs), but rather a salaried workforce that is tempered, weakened, and held in check by the ever-growing counterpower of busy pollinators.

23 A subsistence income or basic income, at a time of climate emergency, would make it possible to resolve the intractable conflict between the dictatorship of the salaried employment model, with its imperative to maintain jobs, and the interests of the wider population and the planet.

24 Paying a subsistence income at the (very modest) level of what people need to survive has the massive macroeconomic effect of allowing us to do away with harmful forms of employment and invent new activities, new divisions of labor, that are compatible with the population’s and the planet’s survival.

25 The most foolish notion held by many advocates of salaried employment today (if not already by the start of the twenty-first century) is the idea that any job that generates surplus value is necessarily productive and that it is not responsible for what it produces. This misplaced brand of Marxism (in the sense that it runs counter to the spirit of Marx while slavishly adhering to the letter of the socialist religion of work) means that the oil rig engineer or technician, the coalminer who stifles the atmosphere, the heavy metals extractor who poisons the water table, etc., is allowed to get away with not thinking about the deeply unproductive nature of what they are doing. Because that is not, or is no longer, the question. And because we no longer compare “socialized” or “socialist” forms of corporate ownership with “capitalist” ones, since, in the case of environmental disaster, that is precisely where “realized socialism” eventually leads!

26 So long as protecting jobs continues to be used as an argument against the energy transition and protecting the planet, we can be certain that all we are doing, like Apollinaire’s crayfish, is progressing “backwards.” We are stuck in a bind between fast-approaching automation and the preservation of salaried employment as the dominant form of work and of access to an income. Railing demagogically against government inaction serves no ­purpose.

27 Introducing a subsistence income is the only thing that will help bolster steps to reduce the dominance of salaried employment, counteract the threats surrounding job protection, and, most importantly, invent new types of activity, new trades, and new divisions of tasks, maintaining those aspects of salaried work culture that serve to liberate us and protect the planet, and casting aside those that subjugate us and further destroy the environment.

28 Let us add one final remark about the highly topical nature of the idea of replacing the minimum wage with a basic or subsistence income as the central plank of a more ecological welfare state. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shaken things up considerably. If a subsistence income—as true recompense for the pollinizing work that humans do (on their way to becoming more bee-like, as opposed to regressing back to some state of wasp-ness)—is going to be the driving force for the reproduction of our collective brainforce, then it must be of the same value for everyone, without any conditions, and fixed at the minimum wage level.

29 In this journal, we have already discussed the scaling up that would be needed, in macroeconomic terms, to fund this sort of social and environmental revolution. We envisaged an increase akin to the one in the social security budget upon France’s liberation at the end of the Second World War (or the one needed to cover all the welfare provisions proposed by Beveridge in the United Kingdom or those in Scandinavian countries)—in other words, a doubling of public expenditure. And we stressed the need for a fiscal revolution based on introducing a pollen tax on all money and financial transactions.

30 Such a reform program may have once seemed rather utopian, given how dominant the neoliberal, Thatcherite, counter-revolutionary dogma was with its limits on public debt and public expenditure and its quantity theory of money.

31 Since the financial crises of 1997, 2002, and 2008, as well as the Greek crisis, central banks have begun to abandon this dogma. “Social expenditure” costs “crazy money,” as Emmanuel Macron conservatively put it, but since Mario Draghi and the European debt crisis, central bankers have adopted the principle of “whatever it takes.” “Non-standard measures” was the phrase used by the ex-governor of the Banque de France, Jean-Claude Trichet—with very British humor. The slowdown in the economy during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a fundamental change in the European Union with the adoption of a recovery plan (a huge step forward in itself), but it led above all to a Hamiltonian revolution whereby member states’ debt was mutualized in order to finance this plan. In other words, it led to the birth of a true European federal reserve. This has the huge consequence of making the Maastricht criteria obsolete (according to which the budget deficit of each member state is not supposed to exceed 3% and the debt-to-GDP ratio is not supposed to exceed 60%).

32 Two further arguments should be mentioned with reference to the liberating effect of the pandemic.

33 With the slowdown in the economy, the argument was put forward for an income guarantee for employees and employers who found themselves wholly or partly out of work. The explicit reason given by the finance minister, Bruno Lemaire, was that it was necessary to safeguard human skills potential, which had been lost during previous financial crises as a result of business closures and permanent redundancies. All of this had the effect of delaying economic recovery, in contrast with the situation in Germany. The income guarantee serves to remind us that human capital has become the essence of productive capital (a development that even neoliberal economics has embraced in line with Milton Friedman). Hence the many consequences for the other limb of salaried employment: qualification. Qualification is no longer about the material demands of a job, or about fixed capital; instead, it concerns the competence of the social individual and hence of the social wage that comes from the broad redistribution of national income. One’s years of training, education, and socialization all take priority now over the learning of a specific trade—which itself was modeled on the (already outmoded) hierarchical practices of the pre-industrial artisan workshops.

34 A second lesson to draw from the recent COVID-19 experience has to do with the dual impact of an income guarantee “whatever it takes.” All the invisible work carried out in the context of small informal jobs—activities not officially labeled as “salaried” (or as paid employment) or not even recognized as work that should be paid for—failed to qualify for any of the government support on offer. Hence the palpable financial difficulties faced by students, the precariat, many of those in part-time work, and undocumented immigrants who deliver parcels or food. The social assistance spontaneously provided by various associations had the effect of erasing the clear line established by fifty years of neoliberalism, which reduced the problem of poverty to the 5% of “welfare cases.” This meant that these groups all needed an income guarantee in the form of access to the welfare system and an extension of social security benefits to those not eligible for them because they weren’t formally classed as salaried workers. On all sides of the political spectrum, proposals sprung up for a workplace benefit for young people, and for a student income (resurrecting the old student salary idea). Meanwhile, the highest courts in the land ruled that so-called self-employed contracts with the Ubers or Deliveroos of this world were in fact contracts of employment.

35 At a more general level, the effect of this guaranteed income, for a year or even more, was to boost wage demands in all sectors where pay levels, officially or otherwise, were at or below the minimum wage threshold. A conclusive rebuttal of the industrial reserve army thesis.

36 The other, probably even more significant, effect of the economic slowdown, and the fact that 30% of the brainforce, including those in the service sector, were working from home, was that people started to question fairly radically the current division of labor, particularly the three hours spent commuting each day (which is not counted as working time), but also the tedious hierarchies of the office, all the nonsense that goes with bullshit jobs, as well as the limited space in urban dwellings, which made them totally unsuitable for households where both parents were working from home and where the children were also being taught remotely.

37 This led to changes in the labor market that were largely hidden at first (a move away from jobs in the big cities and the suburbs, the search for a better quality of life). The full extent of the changes was evident, however, once the economy began to “recover”: a massive shortage of education workers, care workers, nurses, home carers, and waiting staff, explained in large part by the difficulty of these jobs and the extreme lack of job security, in addition to a shortage of qualified staff. In France, we need over 120,000 more workers. The Great Resignation has taken on huge proportions, on a scale never seen before. We have seen top students at the most prestigious universities declaring that they are going to turn their backs on the gilded yet ultimately meaningless life promised to them. Greta Thunberg was one of them. The result is a labor market under strain. Big brands like Leroy Merlin, known for their low wages, have been forced to agree to large pay increases.

38 In short, it is possible to foresee an end to the lean years for the enlarged salaried workforce (which began in the 1980s).

39 And then it will be a question of seeing whether the new wave of conflicts will form around traditional blue-collar issues, such as guaranteed employment (or even the windmills of reindustrialization pursued by those present-day Don Quixotes such as the left-wing former minister of industrial renewal, Arnaud Montebourg), or whether they will focus on a subsistence income, which impacts the whole of society more immediately, seeking a new division of labor, in terms both of geography and time, in order to establish a new way of life and a different relationship to the planet.

40 The time has now come when funding a European subsistence income is no longer just some kind of joke akin to Draghi’s image of banknotes being airdropped from the sky by helicopter. Things are ready to change on all fronts: that of a devastated Left in search of policies and votes, like the Prince of Soubise in search of his army; that of a serious government program to address the climate crisis; that of federal reforms to the European Union treaties; and that of the funding of a new social Europe by the European Central Bank.

41 And what have the advocates of a salary for life or the other opponents of a subsistence income got to say about all this? Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Rhodes is here, here is where you jump… Or for those who still like to keep to the left: Here is the rose, dance here! [4]