Standing Polanyi on His Head: The Basic Income Guarantee as a Response to the Commodification of Labor

This paper examines unconditional basic income schemes proposed by Philippe Van Parijs and by Ross Zucker in light of Karl Polanyi's analysis of the 1795 Speenhamland Law and of Esping-Andersen's use of decommodification as a signifier of social provisioning in welfare states. It discusses tradeoffs between productive advantages of market-based economies and dehumanizing disadvantages of commodified labor. Contemporary redistributive schemes such as those of Van Parijs and of Zucker extol the productive virtues of market economies well beyond what Polanyi, who advocated for subjecting markets to social purposes, would consider acceptable. Further, Van Parijs's and Zucker's basic income schemes extol capitalism, perhaps mistakenly, as a means of achieving a more egalitarian social order of which Polanyi would in all likelihood approve, if such economies functioned as portrayed and were properly implemented to de-commodify labor, that is at a level considered adequate and acceptable to the society in which one lives.