The debate about Basic Income in Spain is linked to the notion of the Welfare State. Critics of Basic Income tend to aver that Basic Income is in opposition the Welfare State. Sometimes they assert that Basic Income would be financed through cutting back the advances made by the Welfare State in public health and education, for example. Basic Income would indeed be in opposition to the Welfare State if the aim were really to finance it by cut-backs in education and health services or by dismantling them completely. Apart from this being an enormous financial blunder, no Basic Income supporter would support such a proposal. If a Basic Income were financed in this way, the poorer members of the population would be even worse off than they are at present.
However, there is a valid question about the relationship between Basic Income and the Welfare State, and this is whether the extant Welfare State would continue to exist if there were a Basic Income, or if this would mean its demise. Some people who, as admirers of the welfare state and in favour of Basic Income, will try to force compatibilities. Others are not such great admirers of the Welfare State but keen supporters of Basic Income, will be quick to find clear discrepancies of conception. However, if Basic Income means decommodification of the labour market, even if it is only partial, if it means greater freedom to choose the distribution in our lives of remunerated, domestic and voluntary work, if it can offer workers a resistance fund to maintain strikes that are presently difficult to sustain because of the salary cuts they involve, if it means that a lot of women can cut loose from financial dependence on their husbands, and if, in brief, it can offer greater freedom to a considerable percentage of the citizenry because, for the first time in the history of our species, they would have their material existence guaranteed, I think there are sufficient reasons for maintaining that there are more elements at variance with the Welfare State (which is based, inter alia on the outdated “assumptions” of full masculine employment, security in workplace and wages) than elements that represent continuity.
After 30 years of the offensive by decision-makers in big transnational companies – and it is a battle they have partly won – to put paid to the security and material wellbeing that a large part of the working population of Western Europe and the United States have achieved, and after the associated structural changes that have taken place over these 30 years, there is good reason for thinking that things will never go back to what they were before. In any case, if Basic Income could bring about the changes I have so briefly mentioned, we would be talking about a very different world from what we have at present.
On 28 April 2009, the Spanish Parliament created a sub-commission to study the need and viability of a BI in Spain, thus opening up the possibility that the value of this social proposal will be recognised by the Parliament and a good part of the population. It is also to be hoped that the issues I have mentioned above will be debated in depth.
President of Red Renta Básica (Basic Income Network), University of Barcelona
