Occupiers, Pirates, and Basic Income :
Our Weapons for Reappropriation of the Common
Graco (Commonspace L)
imirreducible@gmail.com
Activism without full-time activists
Once I brought up Basic Income (BI) to some candlelight protesters, and I faced a barrage of questions from them. I tried to tell them how important BI is for us. But I was afraid that they might think of BI as a sort of master key : 'We have only to introduce BI and then everything will be OK.' So I said : 'Real struggle begins precisely when BI is introduced. That's why we need BI.' This 'real struggle' actually means a variety of struggles for 'another world' and 'much better life', struggles which appear now as candlelight protest, now as occupying, and now as piracy etc.
Candlelight People gathered in Seoul Square every evening after work, and Tahrirites and many occupiers all around the world occupied the squares stopping or holding off their work. From this we can tell that today 99% movements are completely different from old movements where a few full-time activists mobilize the masses. Now the masses coordinate their own work and participation in struggles, and moreover they come to recompose their own lives in another rhythm. But there is a problem, that is, the discord between the action and the work for their living, and the frustration and pain this discord necessarily brings them. They are, as individuals, always required to spend much energy and make a lot of sacrifice in movements. BI can be a good solution to making our struggles endurable and sustainable.
Demands of Youth-Multitude
We, however, must not consider BI only as a 'good solution', because BI is more than money-in-our-hand. In BI movement, both theoretically and practically, what is at stake is whether BI movement can go beyond 'welfare program for minimum living'. In my paper, "Towards Biopolitical Basic Income", I tried to connect BI with three demands of multitude, suggested by Micheal Hardt and Antonio Negri : the right to global citizenship, unconditional guaranteed income, the right to reappropriation. To be more specific, I connected BI, as a version of unconditional guaranteed income, with the right to global citizenship and the right to reappropriation. I think this combination is indispensible if we want to go beyond the reproduction of the individual (be it private or public) towards the production (and reproduction) of the common.
The right to global citizenship is needed to break through social (and physical, cultural, racial, gender) barriers established by capital and reclaim the autonomy of space. But 'global' citizenship does not simply mean a 'free migration'. To demand 'global' citizenship includes not just extensive, i.e. literally 'planetary', citizenship but intensive citizenship (or intensity of citizenship) which means an abolition of hierarchies. Hence the earth as a metropolis.
Young people desire autonomous social mobility in this metropolis and then the mobility leads to many different encounters and relations. These are the precondition and the product of the common which is composed of multiple and singular knowledge, information, images, codes, affect. Social mobility, however, has nothing to do with 'class mobility' in the bourgeois sense. Global citizenship is not what is obtained by personal outstandingness, but what is ontological. What is important is to make possible traversing and occupying which cannot be confined within fixed borders.
The right to reapproriation aims to reclaim autonomous government of the common. It is the privatization that has been the most remarkable measure capital has taken so far. There have been no end of attempts to privatize not only public infrastructure (water, gas, electricity, transportation etc.) but also knowledge, information, images, affect and the like. (In Gangjung, Jeju, specifically, ROK Navy is attempting to destroy the relation of inhabitants with their natural surroundings and to privatize earth and sea.)
The right to reappropriation, aka the right to 'access', is also closely related to young people, and especially the reinforcement of intellectual property and the corruption of education are today global issues for them. If today's production is indeed the production of the common, the reinforcement of intellectual property (such as trademarks, patents, and the recent SOPA) would be to block access to materials and means of production and the corruption of education (such as high tuition, corporatization of university, budget cut in public education) would be to block the production of autonomous subjectivity. Today when the common is productive force and product simultaneously, access to knowledge and education is no mere 'service'. It enables us to reappropriate even the means of production.
The Chemistry of Occupiers, Pirates, and Basic Income
Now, let's talk about how the three demands of youth-multitude connect with each other and what chemistry this connection leads to. <BI + Global Citizenship> is related to a question : to whom BI is given. This is already included in BI movement : on one hand, unconditionalness of BI guarantees the intensity of citizenship, and on the other hand, global networking of BI movement expands the scope of BI to a global scale. Thus <BI + Global Citizenship> involves breaking through both inter-state borders and social hierarchies. Here Occupy movement going on all around the world becomes more significant.
Extensively, from Tahrir Square to Wall Street and to squares elsewhere in the world, Occupy movement is building global circuits for BI movement, and, intensively, it is helping a variety of subjects (never to be captured into old notion of class) to converge. And BI guarantees sustainability or reproducibility of Occupy movement. Thus occupiers can continue to join and cooperate together in a stable condition. And more significantly, people who have lived to the rhythm of capital come to make a self-determination about their own life regardless of the acquisition of exchange value. (In other words, not-yet-occupiers come to join Occupy movement.) In this way, Occupy movement and BI create a synergy effect.
<BI + Reappropriation> is related to another question : in what form BI is acquired. I have asserted that we should insist on not property but access and the income should be acquired not only in the form of money but also in the form of 'unconditional access to the common'. In this sense, I have suggested struggles against the reinforcement of intellectual property and the corruption of education as our most important task. Pirates all around the world and especially Pirate Party that has organized individual piracies into a collective movement, here, become significant.
Piracy movement and BI create a synergy effect, too. Piracy movement coincides with BI in the sense that they rupture property relation and the measure of value. When Piracy movement and BI are connected, we can imagine another form of BI than that of money. Piracy movement can overcome 'the dilemma of pirates' in practice by combining with BI. Given the present structure of production-distribution-consumption of contents, it can happen that we come to attack, unwillingly, small producers, along with large capitals. BI must be a kind of bridge between independence of producers from capital and piracy against capital.
From Movements to Movement of Movements
We are no longer 'proletariat' in the lexicon of modern political economy, which means people separated from means of production. In our age, human beings become the very means of production, and that is why this age is called 'post'modern. Knowledge, information, ideas, affect, relations and so on become means of production and they go to producing more knowledge, information, ideas, affect, relation etc. Now when we have not yet attained completely autonomous and democratic government of the common, we often falter under the dead weight of capital and state. In this sense, we are precariat, that is, precarious proletariat.
I have found, in BI, a clue to autonomous and democratic government of the common. And now, I suggest that we should connect BI with Occupy movement (Global Citizenship) and Piracy movement (Reappropriation). BI movement recomposed in this way cannot be reduced either to working class movement or to new social movements. This is a brand-new movement whose protagonists are all the people constituting the world and taking part in the production of the common.
Creating 'a movement of movements' out of separate movements (BI, Occupy, Piracy, LGBTQ, Student Movement and so forth)―this is one of the most powerful weapons of ours to occupy financial capitalism and to reappropriate the common.