Capitalism's new weapon

The Basic Citizen Income, which is rumored to be implemented in the coming year, is being fed to society as a dazzling new concept that will replace the collapsing "social state policies." It is tragic that the person who brought this concept to the agenda is a professor named Guy Standing, who worked at the ILO between 1975 and 2006. According to the program, which has also been opened for discussion in Turkey, whoever is included will be entitled to a certain amount of public income transfer, regardless of their position or activity.

As for social rights or social support, the Poor Law enacted in England in 1601, the New Deal adopted in the United States in 1930, and the Beveridge Report can be cited as the first examples in the Western world. The first institutional social policy application of capitalism was the insurance system provided to individuals on the condition of old age and disability, developed in 1889 by the Prussian dictator Otto von Bismarck, who was alarmed by the developments of the Paris Commune. The most deep-rooted approach to social policies is the social democracy application built in the context of Keynesian policies following the Second World War, due to deep concerns about the rise of the Soviets.

In addition to the "precariat" poverty experienced today, it is also known that the deterioration to which workers in continuous employment are increasingly exposed will cause the situation of the working class to regress to much more miserable positions in the future. Alongside globalization, which makes this process even more intense against the worker, the rapidly developing and spreading financialization also appears to limit the struggle power of the working class and low-income people against the interests of the capital segment.

Guy Standing put forward some justifications when introducing the concept of basic citizen income. The stated basic justifications were based on views such as administrative difficulties arising in an increasingly complex structure, and the fact that some social expenditures are gradually losing their importance and their scope is narrowing. It is a result of neoliberal logic that Standing developed the view of basic citizen income instead of seeking a remedy for these problems within the social support system. The periods when this view was developed were the years when profit margins were declining in the Western world, capital tightness was experienced, and the neoliberal trend emerged. The distinct feature of the neoliberal period is to stimulate markets in the short term in the face of squeezed profit margins, and to erode all labor rights and social rights in the long term.

As can be seen in this brief account, social rights gained in line with both the struggles of various periods and the interests of capital are being eroded in the neoliberal period. The widespread artificial intelligence and robotization processes aimed at the future are also dragging workers and the entire public into the threat of unemployment and poverty. Suppressing potential social uprisings under these conditions requires directing a much higher share of the national income to welfare expenditures than today. However, as capitalism is also increasingly squeezed, cutting these expenditures becomes a necessity. It is calculated that in the advanced Western world, providing services equivalent to the current level of social services in 2050 would require the tax system to draw approximately 4-6% more resources from the national income. In the face of the increasing burden of today's social support policies on the economy, the necessity of introducing a glamorous program is obvious. Thus, Basic Citizen Income is a glamorous program developed by the increasingly regressing capitalist system against the general public.

While discussing basic citizen income, it is not clear whether this application will be implemented in addition to the existing social security system or as a replacement for the entire system. The first situation is not sustainable in the capitalist system. In this condition, the basic citizen income designed as a replacement for the existing social system will not only fail to be a remedy for poverty, but may even increase the level of poverty, because the inevitable result or cause of such an application will be the transfer of all public services to the market. As such, since it will not be possible to meet the poverty that will gradually increase with the development of technology through the basic citizen income application, a worker or citizen who falls into extraordinary need will either be a burden on other citizens or will become enslaved and agree to do any job just for the sake of a bare subsistence.

In this case, the following question should be asked: Does expanding and generalizing the existing social security system or the basic citizen income system place a relatively smaller burden on capital? According to the calculations of capital, the second system seems more advantageous within the framework of neoliberal ideology. However, the hell that capital does not calculate in order to get rid of today's burdens and to put all services on the market may burn capital itself at a later time. Specifically, the constant insufficiency of basic citizen income may intensify the uprising of the impoverished masses against capital. Nevertheless, capital, which always chases short-term gains and acts with the blindness of "in the long run we will all be dead," seems to prefer gaining an advantageous position today over potential future struggles.

The proposal for Basic Citizen Income, which also collapses the existing social security systems that have been woven like lace through historical struggles despite all their inadequacies, is an integral part of the neoliberal policy family. This system is not acceptable within the framework of the understanding of social rights and the contemporary understanding of society, which is based on the view that the individual should have absolute control over what they produce.