On income and pieces of land: basic income, predistribution and decommodification in the frame of popular political economies

Abstract

The debate on predistribution, which already pervades many areas of social sciences, does not seem to be a passing fad. But is it an unproblematic proposal? To be sure, the idea of predistribution —the establishment of regulatory frameworks that allow for broad social participation within a “civilized” economic life— has great potential for democratic thinking. But the most politically promising aspect among predistributionists is anything but new. In fact, transformative or “popular” political economies, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, have always stressed the importance of the ex-ante guarantee of resources of various kinds, in keeping with the main intuitions of the republican tradition. According to this tradition, the extension of freedom and not simply of material well-being was the main reason for predistribution. For this reason, rescuing the predistributive vestiges in republicanism seems something necessary in the light of some of the main approaches to predistribution, which are presented merely as a welfarist alternative to tax and transfers. This article tries to understand basic income as a predistributive tool beyond material welfare, that is, as a tool that makes possible a republican-democratic political economy that may lay the foundations for the collective co-determination of ways of working and living.