From: "Lowe Laclau" <lowelaclau-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: re: AUT: basic income
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 08:28:10 -0400



Andrew,




> 




>So the right to a basic income is a consequence of one's activity in fact being useful, because all activity has been subsumed into capitalism (or into some system conceived as beneficial to all).  In other words, if (hypothetically) some activity were NOT to be fully subsumed or were to escape the general system, it would no longer be worthy of remuneration and therefore should not lead to receipt of an income.  The assumption would still seem to be that useless people should be killed (or "allowed to die"), and that people should only be paid for "useful" work - even though the category of "useful" work is expanded to cover all existing activity (i.e. even if "useless people" do not, as a contingent fact, exist at the present time).  My point is that this assumption is itself objectionable, and should not be incorporated in anti-capitalist theories.  Its incorporation is in a sense a submission to the logic of capitalism (and certainly to the primacy of social production over 



>  desiring-production), even if its conclusions, when combined with other assumptions, are conducive to progressive change. 





This is complex question. The question of use-values is quite difficult sometimes for me to get my hands around. The issue of real-subsumption assumes that use-values are now outside of capital. Historically capital always reduces labor's use-values to exchange values in the process of incorporating it under capital (and excluding possibilities of development outside of its reach). But historically this reduction was always relative. Today one would have to say that its absolute. We're all reduced to exchange values. Thus technically, that which cannot be sold (exchanged, and thus possessive of exchange value) would be excludable, disposable populations as Balibar would say. But all of this still presupposes a certain image of capital accumulation that the post-fordist model wants to discard with. The point of the living wage seems exactly to counter-act this disposability. Excludability comes only when singularities are pit against each other... when there is the absense of "cooperation". By getting such a guarantee, one is attempting to do away with such disposability. 

>In addition, one would seemingly have to accept the empirical hypothesis of an overarching real subsumption which actually subsumes all social activity without remainder, in order for the argument to lead to a basic income.  The conclusion is vulnerable to falsification if a number of empirical claims are problematised - or, indeed, if future changes in the structure of the economy reduce the level of subsumption.  This leaves the basic income sitting on a rather insecure basis. 



I can't present to you here the empirical basis for the theory of real subsumption. Marazzi's book that I just finished 'La Place des Chausettes' does a wonderful job, unfortunately though its not in english. If I can think of another in english I will refer it to you. 

 

Ciao

 

Lowe



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