A question which has been
debated for centuries

“The land, in its natural and uncultivated state was, and always should continue to be, common property of the human race [...]. Each owner of cultivated terrain should pay a rent to the community". to all people, rich and poor [...] because this is part of the natural inheritance which, by right, is due to every man, above and beyond the property which he could have created or inherited from those who made it." (1) .
It is Thomas Paine, an important figure in the American and in the French Revolution, to be among the first to pose the question of citizenship income, proposing it in the form of a fee that land owners should pay to every other member of the community, in compensation for the exclusive right of enjoyment of common property.
Starting from the 18th Century, the subject of guaranteed income has been treated in different ways by various authors (Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Russell etc.,) and has assumed, in relation to the different versions in which is has been presented, the character of a "reformist-reactionary" or "revolutionary" measure.
At a distance of more than two centuries from the writings of Thomas Paine, the idea of separating income from employment has returned to circulate widely on the Western theoretical horizon, every time with different names; existence income, citizenship income, universal cheque etc., “In support of this idea” Zygmunt Bauman acutely observes, "arguments of every kind have been advanced [...]. Some have appealed to historical justice: the actual wealth of the West constitutes the common inheritance of entire generations and should go to the benefit of the descendents. Others have referred to the fundamental impartiality of human rights, in the sense that the right to survival precedes and conditions every choice: survival is the inalienable right of every human being and not something that must be earned. However, many of the common arguments are pragmatic rather than philosophical, insomuch as they dwell on the benefits that the societies unfailingly get from the fact of putting people in conditions to secure the means of subsistence without depending on the definition of work imposed by the work market itself.
Many are the fields of decision for life " for the quality of life and human relations " which require time and energy, but which are completely neglected or poorly taken care of [...]. To mention some: assistance to the aged, to the young [...] environmental cleansing, the care of the landscapes, voluntary activities in favour of the common well-being "in essence, the responsibilities which derive from the necessity of keeping alive the dignity of the community. (2) "


Political crisis and citizenship income

The subject of citizenship income, apart from the implied philosophical and ethical reasons or the considerations on the quality of life, is presented, today, as a valid antidote to the "political crisis". Conformity, disaffection of the electors and apathy, according to Zygmunt Bauman, are the symptoms of an evil which profoundly afflicts the politics in the Western countries.
The pleasure of sharing is lacking today, the passion for the "public good", and the strong call of ideology. The individualist and consumer logic of the market has altered, asserts Bauman, the sense and direction of the political commitment of contemporary man: "The art of politics, if we are speaking of democratic politics, consists in destroying the limitations to the citizens’ freedom, but there is also self-limitation, which means, to render the citizens free to allow them to establish, individually and collectively, their own individual and collective limits. This second aspect is, by now, practically ignored." All reaching for their own individual satisfaction, the inhabitants of the new world market are, above all, careful to claim their rights, with the sole objective of obtaining further free spaces and protecting those already acquired. The ethical dimension of the political practice has all, but vanished, the other face of democracy, the capacity to bend the will to the sense of duty is no longer recognized or is openly denied.
Ideology could be the solution to counter such tendencies: this mixture of theoretical assertions, convictions and deep faith has sustained the individual in the most difficult choices, to the point of personal sacrifice. But ideology possesses an ontological density which cannot be moulded in its essentiality and it is not adaptable, in its consistency, to a world in which everything is measured in terms of immediate satisfaction of always new and different needs.
The ideology, which represented the source of the political proposals and the last sense of the life of the agorà, risks appearing, today, like the antiquated legacy of a bygone epoch. Zygmunt Bauman again writes: "We tend to feel proud of what we should, instead, feel shame: to live in a “post-ideological” and "post-Utopian" age, to show indifference to any image which is coherent with a good society and to have traded the preoccupation over the public welfare for the liberty to pursue personal satisfaction."
Is it possible to hypothesize a solution to the problem of the "crisis of politics?" Bauman sustains that the introduction of the citizenship income would determine "new ethical criteria for the life of the society, substituting the principle of competition with that of sharing."
But the most significant consequence of the adoption of a minimum guaranteed income would be to free citizens of uncertainty, "render them free to search for their republican rights and duties."
In fact, the precariousness and the consequent lack of security, does not allow individuals to assume the risks that collective action entails. Because, to practice political activity also means to be opposed to what is existent, propose and provide alternatives, conceive different ways of living together: In short, to dare.
Those who are tormented by economic difficulties, consumed with worry for an uncertain future become insensitive to the stimuli which come from the political arena. The post-modern man " flexible and precarious " finishes by conforming, in an acquiescent way, to proposals formulated by others (conformism): his anxiety makes him restless and the search for a certainty which escapes him, conducts him far from the public political spaces.
The adoption of the citizenship income would definitively eliminate the poverty of the Western societies and the role it has played in maintaining and reproducing the present socio-economic model.
According to Bauman, "the sight of misery serves to remind all people of good sense that also the comfortable life is insecure and that the success of today is no guarantee against the ruin of tomorrow".day after day, the poor of the world carry out their obscure work: to undermine the faith and resoluteness of those who still have work and a regular income."
The liberation of the poor, paraphrasing the celebrated phrase of Marx on the liberation of the working classes, "would really lead to the liberation of all mankind". If it were so, all the proposals that attribute to the citizenship income the valence of a simple measure of social politics, would be limitative (3) .
And, given the importance of the sum at stake, all the possible objections of an accounting nature concerning "the financial compatibility" of the survival income with the State Budget, should also be overcome.
Never, as in this case, does the quantity influence the quality, or rather, the essence of the measure in question. Offered in the form of a modest contribution bound to the State Budget, the citizenship income will not perform any of its "greater miracle-working" effects and it will conserve the nature of an “ineffectual reformist measure".
Instead, adopted in the form of a substantial grant, it could represent a revolutionary measure able to "resuscitate or revitalize the withered institutions of the Republic and of the citizenry." (4)


Fitting the topic into a
Marxist-Leninist framework

In the Marxist-Leninist area, the citizenship income, as a general compensation attributed to all citizens alike, is considered a reformist-type measure. Intervening, exclusively, at the distribution level, it would not influence the dynamics of the capitalist accumulation process.
The citizenship income, as such, would, therefore, be considered as "an instrument of pacification and social-imperialistic integration". Sceptical of the possibility that a periodic monetary largesse can, especially if of a modest entity, assure those who receive it, a dignified existence, free from the “blackmail of need”, the Marxist theorists maintain that an effective emancipation of the exploited can come about only with the abolition of salaried work and the suppression of the classes. According to the Marxist theorists, it is the class system which produces the different social levels that lead to injustice and exclusion.
According to such analyses, the citizenship income would not serve even to counteract precariousness and unemployment, insofar as both constitute firm results of the free-trade economic policy, the consequence of a capitalistic use of resources.
On the contrary, the request for a constant income would favour the fragmentation of the working world and the reduction of salaries, wiping out the conquests obtained in ten years of the labour struggle.
Instead, the proposal advanced in the area of the Extreme Left is in the nature of a claim for a minimum guaranteed salary: that is, compensation attributed exclusively to the labour force (employed or in search of work) by reason of the permanent availability of same to be utilized by the capital. The minimum salary would also perform the task of "safeguarding the labour force" and would have the "beneficial" effect of reunifying a vast circle of the proletariat.


Citizenship income and antagonist thought

"The great problem of today is that of the citizenship income because it represents the material network behind the transformations of the salary. Furthermore, to move on the level of a guaranteed income could allow the re-opening of the fronts of social struggle and collective negotiations." (5)
These words of Toni Negri are sufficient to indicate the central position which the subject of the citizenship income is taking in the antagonist area. It is in the operation of the post-modern economy that the citizenship income will find its raison d’être. What are, then, the essential features of the new productive model? Again, Negri speaks: “Once, the fixed capital, which permitted production, was offered to the variable capital (that is, the labour force) by the owners of the means of production.
The work instruments were pre-constituted by the owner and the workers used them [...] Instead, today, the cognitive and abstract work immediately becomes productive [....] and the variable capital is represented as fixed capital (6) .
The elements which determine an immediate and autonomous productivity of the human resources are the sharing of knowledge, the flow of new knowledge and “the all-round capacity to produce and generate new relations and subjectivity (7) . The social fabric, according to this analysis is, in itself, productive: not only the knowledge, but also the emotional inspirations, even the dead social work (8) acquire a strong propulsive valence of the entire economic system.
Negri writes, Today, a city, in itself, is a source of production: the territory, organized, lived in, walked on, becomes a productive element, just as, in the past, the worked land was a productive element (9) .
Paradoxically, on the basis of such analysis, also who does not work contributes to the growth of the global wealth. Work or no work, Paolo Virna writes, “develops an identical productivity, based on the exercise of general human faculties: language, memory, socialization, aesthetical and ethical inclinations, abstraction and learning capacity.
From the point of view of what is to be done and of how it is to be done, there is no substantial difference between employment and unemployment. In other words, unemployment is unremunerated work; work, in its turn, is remunerated unemployment [...]. The ancient distinction between work and no work is between the remunerated and unremunerated life. The boundary between one and the other is changeable, subject to political decision (10) .
According to this line of thinking, an essential characteristic of the post-modern economy is excess. In the metropolis, which has become “a great social factory without an exterior (11) , the accumulation follows the course of the cognitive flux, with random and sudden increases. The abstract work possesses a very high productivity and the system acts as multiplier of the wealth.
A simple increase in knowledge can lead to radical changes in the way of life. Therefore, it is difficult to measure the yield and cost of cognitive work. And it is even more arduous to sub-divide this latter in time units (hours) of the homogenous value.
To continue to pay employees on an hourly basis is, in this light, only a sham, a stratagem invented for the convenience of the capitalists.
According to the theory under examination, supported, in Italy, by important figures of the antagonist thought (12) , the new productive system, being perfectly able to organize itself, no longer has any need, in order to function, of the organizing contribution of the capital. The capital is a hindrance and exerts only a blocking action and, consequently, should be eliminated (13) .
Now, we reach the heart of the problem. How must he be paid; what should be the remuneration of a worker of the post-Fordist economy? If the capital no longer performs any function and, therefore, is not remunerated; if the abstract work is not susceptible to be evaluated (in monetary terms) in time units, and if it is true that the system produces in excess, then, suggests Negri, it is necessary to think of an average social salary, equally distributed to all citizens, whether workers or not (14) .
The proposal of Negri logically follows from the attribution of an immediate productivity and diffused throughout the entire social fabric: if everyone contributes to production, then, everyone must be remunerated.
Furthermore, the citizenship income is particularly adequate to the present economic model, whose distinctive characteristics are in the mobility, flexibility, creativity and adaptability of the labour force.
The existence income, Negri writes, refers to a complexity of rights tied to reproduction of the multitudes, health, culture, child education and the habitation. The citizenship income, therefore, is articulated in various claims, so that numerous services must be furnished gratis in addition to the periodical payment of a sum of money.

The point is to see how such proposals can be realized, whether in conformity with the operation of the institutional system in force or outside of its regulations. The theorists of the antagonist thought hold that the present representative democracy is not suitable to accept the expectations tied to the new way of life of the post-Fordist society.
The mechanism of representation, in fact, leads to the formation of a unique will, but it is done at the price of annulling the conflicts and differences present in the electoral body (15) There is a process of neutralizing and deprivation of political aspect and character, Tronti writes, which pervades, pushes and establishes the democracy (16) .
The unique will, a juridical oxymoron which realizes the identity between the governed and the governors, between who commands who obeys, (17) quashes any proposal formulated by the antagonist movement. Who could, asks Negri, defend a right of disobedience or resistance before a court? The new claims, according to this theory, must be validated outside of the representative democratic institutions (18) or rather, against the institutions, to overturn them and install “a real participatory democracy.
The existence income, therefore, in the antagonist context, conforms to a radical proposal, a revolutionary measure. Negri rejects the reformist hypothesis of “a periodical subsidy, before which the salary exploitation rapport would be, however, still kept alive. In the Marxist analysis, the capitalist system rests on appropriation by the owners of the means of production, of the plus-value created by the labour force. According to Marx, the workers are given only a quota of the value of the goods which they produce, in the form of a salaried compensation.
The introduction of the citizenship income destined to fully substitute the salary would mark, according to the antagonist theorists, the end of the exploitation of man by man
We know, with Marx Tarì writes, the fight against the salary simply means the fight against property and that when one falls, so the other must fall. The centrality of the citizenship income, in that post-socialist programme we are trying to prepare over these years, is all here. (19) .