Book review

Citation

Rankin, A. (2005), "Book review", European Business Review, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2005.05417aab.005

Book review

A Citizens’ Income: A Foundation For a Sustainable World

Clive LordJon Carpenter PublishingCharlbury, UK2003pp. 153ISBN 1 897766 87 4

This is a refreshingly short work, both for Johnsonian reasons (“brevity is the soul of wit”) and because the most influential political works of modern times have tended towards brevity. In this regard Rousseau’s Social Contract and the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels spring immediately to mind, as does the American Declaration of Independence, which is a model of elegant and concise prose, and probably the most frequently quoted political text of the modern era. The green movement needs, and seems to be looking for, a change of direction, and so this concise but significant book comes at an opportune moment. It is certainly infinitely better than the official Green Party policy document, the “Manifesto for a Sustainable Society”, which is essentially state socialism recycled and parcelled in green wrapping paper.

A Citizens’ Income might be a short book, but it is densely packed with ideas that go well beyond the remit of its title. This is because, as Clive Lord points out, the establishment of a citizens’ income unlocks a range of possibilities for economic and social organisation. These possibilities are currently unavailable in our market economy, with its emphasis on competition and atomisation, and have been unavailable in socialist systems – even social democracy – because of the emphasis they place on collectivism and state control. Both approaches, essentially products of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, promote the work ethic. For market liberals, work is a means towards individual advancement, independence and material prosperity, with the social good as a secondary consideration. Wealth is said to “trickle down” from rich to poor and so the fruits of individual endeavours indirectly benefit the whole society. For socialists – and most social democrats – work is revered as a social good in itself, as a means of building and maintaining an egalitarian society and as the best, indeed the only, source of individual fulfilment. Despite their claims to be rational, both the “left” and “right” wing poles of economics view work from a moralistic point of view, and like most forms of moralism (as opposed to ethics) their view is narrow and mechanistic. Work is interpreted solely in terms of paid, preferably full-time employment that contributes to economic growth.

Central to Lord’s thesis is the view that economics has not kept pace with social and economic changes, still less with ecological imperatives. The decline of industrialism, in the so-called “developed” world especially, has radically altered patterns of employment at all social and educational levels. Expectations about work are changing, too, with many wishing to work part-time and a search for the elusive “work-life balance”. Meanwhile, it is now widely understood that the pursuit of unlimited economic growth is threatening the Earth’s ecological balance. Advances of science, and the evidence of our senses, teach us that resources are limited and not finite, and that the division between humanity and “nature” is artificial and destructive. A sustainable economy, therefore, means learning to live within limits rather than thinking in terms of continuous expansion. Competition and expansion, moreover, are proving to be less than efficient means of sharing resources equitably. They discourage co-operation and sociability between individuals, qualities as important to human evolution as personal enterprise and initiative. Furthermore, they inflame ethnic, religious and social animosities, leading to global injustice, terrorism and war. The economics of the industrial age are manifestly failing. Socialism as an economic philosophy has more or less died, leaving the left as a permanent opposition defined only by what it is against. Market liberalism, although strident and triumphalist, has declined into a form of fundamentalist cargo cult, in which the market itself becomes a Fetish and the “hidden hand” is superstitiously revered.

The Citizens’ Income is a relatively simple idea, by which each member of civil society – each citizen – is paid an unconditional living allowance as a right of citizenship. It operates on the same principle as child benefit in Britain, or free health care at the point of delivery. Lord notes that these two entitlements are the most popular and successful features of the modern welfare state. Unlike other forms of social security, which are targeted, these universal provisions reach across economic and social boundaries. Citizens’ Income can reach across political divides, too. It addresses at once the right’s objection to welfare bureaucracy and dependency and the centre-left’s parallel concerns about the poverty trap. And yet, although the Citizens’ Income is not a complicated proposal, its adoption requires a paradigm shift in our approach to political economy. As its stands, the social security system is based on coercion and punishment as much as welfare and support, on moralistic notions of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, and the assumption of full-time employment as the most practical and desirable goal. In other words, it is rooted in industrial era concepts of the work ethic, underscored by mechanistic interpretations of Judaeo-Christian morality.

Citizens’ Income, by contrast, slices through layers of welfare bureaucracy, abolishes degrading means tests and gives real choices to individual citizens, as opposed to the present system of coercion masquerading as choice. The citizen is empowered to work full-time or part time, taking account of opportunities and individual citizenship. He or she may take time off for childcare, or to acquire new skills, without being penalised by the social security system. He or she also has greater freedom to set up as self-employed and greater incentive to take entrepreneurial risks. Furthermore, the Citizens’ Income takes account of voluntary activity and unpaid work, both of which play a crucial role in the economy and civil society, which modern economics fails to acknowledge. This approach challenges many of the assumptions underlying our present political and social organisation. Citizens are treated as responsible adults. Freedom is seen as a greater incentive than force. Individual fulfilment is reconciled with the social good. Enterprise and personal initiative are encouraged, for the human and social benefits they bring, rather than for the sake of competition and growth. The Citizens’ Income, Lord argues convincingly, enables us to combine the most positive aspects of liberal and socialist economics, discarding those aspects that are outdated and detrimental to human freedom. Thus the liberal emphasis on enterprise, initiative and personal fulfilment persists, along with the socialist spirit of co-operation and mutual aid. The complementary principles fuse and evolve into a new philosophy, based on individual freedom informed by ecological awareness.

Lord therefore demonstrates the radicalism of the Citizens’ Income, as well as its simplicity. He sees it, with good reason, as the nexus of a sustainable society. Lord sees the move towards sustainability as an evolutionary leap necessary for humanity’s survival. Hitherto, human survival has been bound up with geographical expansion, seizing control of resources and learning to dominate other human groups. Lord suggests that as a result such tendencies have, in effect, been favoured by natural selection. Modern manifestations of such behaviour, including racial tensions and wars, derive from “primal programmes” as much as political or economic imperatives. To create an ecologically-based society, we must unlearn these patterns of expansion and domination, and shift our emphasis towards the primal programmes of co-operation, which have so often proved critical to our survival.

This argument is also compelling, and it is fascinating enough for a book in itself. Unfortunately, there is a moment in the book where Lord moves away from the discussion of evolutionary psychology and lapses into the “alternative prejudices” of the left. These include an outdated feminism in which a politically charged but emotionally sterile “female independence” takes the place of human interdependence, which is the rest of the book’s theme. Racism is presented as if it were a solely white phenomenon (itself a racist assumption, surely). Those who express racist views, or vote for racist parties are seen as people operating in response to primal programmes, rather than as citizens who feel politically and economically disenfranchised, but have drawn the wrong conclusions about the causes. Lord ignores the counter-productive aspects of the race relations industry, which in its bureaucratic and ideological excess fuels racial prejudice and keeps racial consciousness alive. Furthermore, the “anti-racist” campaigns of the left, which are overwhelmingly white, are based on totalitarian sentimentality rather than any concern for individual liberty or racial harmony, and appeal to primal programmes of domination just as much as the racism they claim to oppose. This brief journey through the left’s Looking Glass is a disappointing moment in an otherwise excellent book. It misses the opportunity to sketch out a distinctively green approach racial divisions, based on organic – as opposed to state-directed – multiculturalism and stressing shared humanity over the balkanisation favoured by racists and “anti-racists” alike. Lord is on stronger anthropological ground when he refers to peoples such as the Siane, of New Guinea, who have achieved balanced societies combining enterprise and co-operation. Such societies are not presented naively as “models” for the West, but as evidence of an evolutionary current of co-operation and sustainability.

Clive Lord is a leading member of the Green Party in Yorkshire. He believes – and as a reviewer I am entirely with him in this belief – that the future for Green politics is to reach across the conventional political spectrum. Conservatives, who are concerned about stewardship of nature, are potential recruits to the Greens just as much as those from a socialist background who emphasise co-operation and equality. Green politics, however, is not a compromise between these positions but a synthesis of the two, in which both “right” and “left” evolve politically and become something new. The problem which Lord comes near to facing, but does not quite face, is the extent of the Greens’ domination by an unreformed left, which has no intention of evolving, and which sees ecology as a means to an end instead of an end in itself. In this sense, the Green predicament matches that of the Conservative Party, hijacked by free-market fundamentalists and social bigots, with the “One Nation” Tory tradition increasingly squeezed out. The challenge for Green politics is probably greater than Lord imagines. It needs to return to first principles, one of which is an advancement beyond left and right.

A Citizens’ Income is a stimulating an exhilarating book. It is in places frustrating, but overall it is wise, timely and valuable. It enjoins us to rethink economics and politics in radical but constructive ways.

A Citizens’ Income is available from Jon Carpenter Publishing, Alder House, Market Street, Charlbury, Oxfordshire OX7 3PH, UK, for £8.95 including postage.)

Aidan RankinEditor, New European. E-mail: aidanr@dircon.co.uk