The minimum living wage has reignited the debate on basic income. But would it be viable in the face of eco-social collapse? A basic land income could be an alternative suited to this scenario.
By Manuel Casal Lodeiro , Coordinator of the Instituto Resiliencia. Originally published in Spanish, in Revista Ecologista No. 108, 01/06/2021 . Translated by Mark H Burton , with input from the author. https://www.15-15-15.org/webzine/en/author/casdeiro/
Some of us supported this type of proposal in the 1980s and 1990s, but then becoming aware of the unsustainability of the system on which it necessarily relies (complex states and financial systems disconnected from biophysical reality), began to think about truly sustainable alternatives that would be more resilient in a foreseeable scenario of collapse and that would be oriented towards the same emancipatory and distributive goal. We gave it the name ‘Leira básica’ in Galician2 and also Basic Land Income [Spanish: Renta Básica de la Tierra]. A few years ago, the idea even became part of the electoral programme of the small Partido da Terra3.
Distributing land instead of money
Basically, what basic land income proposes is to replace the monetary income intended to satisfy basic needs with the usufruct4 of sufficient land to satisfy those needs. In other words, instead of having official money to pay for everything we need (food, water, energy, clothing, housing) in the capitalist market, we would have land where we could provide for ourselves by our own means. It is therefore a commitment to land distribution, in line with the historical demands of the Spanish left5 (‘Land for those who work it’, agrarian reform) and currently of La Vía Campesina or the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil, but it is also a strong commitment to self-management.
Of course, this does not imply that the entire population should be engaged in food production in the countryside (although it would undoubtedly encourage this, promoting a necessary return to our depopulated countryside), but rather that it envisages the possibility of people who continue to live in urban areas having a way to enjoy the benefits of this public (government or communal) cultivation. Such a mechanism could be as simple as a social currency, detached from any currency of the unsustainable official financial system, and linked to the capacity of these areas to generate wealth each year, based on natural productivity and human labour. We envisage lands cultivated organically or traditionally with minimal use of fossil-based inputs to ensure their sustainability. Ideally, these areas would be communal and the management of the Basic Land Income would be diverse and totally decentralised. Thus, for example, a region with several towns and a specific agricultural area could calculate its total annual productivity and thereby issue a maximum amount of this “land currency”, to which everyone would be entitled, although many would be able to enjoy part of the production directly on site and therefore would hardly need to use it. The urban population not directly involved in cultivation would use this currency extensively, to purchase food, clothing made from local natural fabrics, etc. in local shops or agroecological markets. In other words, a highly relocalised economy could be organised based on resilient pillars such as labour, productive land and local renewable energy, driven by the needs of the local population.
Advantages over basic income
In a scenario of degrowth forced by the decline of fossil fuels, not only are the international financial system and its various currencies kaput6, but the state itself, as we know it, is doomed to decline, to collapse — in the sense used by Joseph Tainter7, that is, to sharply reduce its complexity - in the near or medium term future.
In other words, the State needs to obtain euros, pounds or dollars (i.e. official money), usually through taxes or debt, (and in the Eurozone) it no longer has the capacity to issue currency, and in order to sustain a certain level of tax revenue, it needs to maintain a certain level of economic activity. People began to perceive this sustainability problem with furlough [as paid leave from employment was called in the UK – ERTE in Spain], and the minimum living wage during the Covid pandemic: how long will the state be able to pay salaries, provide aid to all kinds of sectors and also pay this pseudo-UBI if economic activity remains at a minimum8?. The deficit, as we know, has skyrocketed, and debts are multiplying astronomically thanks [at the time of writing] to [the EU] Next Generation [programme]. But this makes the system unsustainable, and with it, the very possibility of the State having access to euros on a massive and indefinite basis. A growing debt and an economy doomed to decline are a bad combination, a very unreliable foundation on which to base something as important as basic income. In fact, public services themselves are at risk if we do not know how to navigate with full awareness the ‘rough waters’ of the energy descent that lies ahead.
The Valencian economist Vicent Cucarella, President of the Regional Audit Chamber, has repeatedly warned that less energy will mean less revenue for the state9. Therefore, if we want to ensure food, housing, and energy for heating and cooking, we had better not gamble on an income provided by a declining state and denominated in a zombie currency.
What’s more, the energy transition will mean a drop in the overall rate of energy return on investment, which is what sustains the complexity of civilisation (the energy sources that deliver higher net energy yields allow us to do more things as a society). To put it simply, we could say that without oil there is no basic income, because it is largely the energy subsidy provided by fossil fuels that has enabled the development of states with very powerful capabilities, extensive and widespread public services and solid sources of income. Therefore, the fall in the global rate of return pushes us to seek simpler and more resilient solutions than the basic income proposals we have been familiar with. That’s because it will always be simpler for everyone to have their own plot of land to live on and feed themselves from, than to maintain a complex, energy-guzzling state that obtains money through taxes and then distributes it among citizens so that they in turn spend it on the private, industrial and fossil fuel-dependent agri-food system. Distribute the real wealth of the land, rather than the ephemeral and inflated wealth of money.
However, ‘simple’ does not necessarily mean easy to implement. But we already know that all aspects of this transition/collapse that we are undergoing will be enormously difficult. To begin with, we could start thinking about setting up a large public land bank, perhaps through a State Agricultural Holdings Company, similar to the (Spanish) State Industrial Holdings Company, or perhaps even better at municipal or regional level. And we could make it easier for anyone who needs it to have access to such land for family use, to participate in some kind of post-capitalist cooperatives backed by the State, which could also serve as a bridge between the usually conflicting ideas of basic income and work guarantee.
Notes
1 See Petrocalipsis by Antonio Turiel, or the new edition of En la espiral de la energía by R. Fernández Durán & L. González Reyes.
Translator’s addition: Heinberg, R. (2007). Peak everything: Waking up to the century of decline in Earth’s resources Forest Row.
2 Translator: The word ‘leira’ in Galician, referring to a cultivated parcel of land, does not have a precise translation. In addition to that meaning, it rhymed with, and had the same number of syllables as, the Spanish for income, ‘renta’, so it was coined as a provocative rewording.
3 https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partido_de_la_Tierra_%28Galicia%29
4 Translator: Usufruct is a land tenure system where a person (or collective) has tenure of land, given certain conditions, e.g. its cultivation. It is the form of tenure used for crofting in the Scottish Highlands and Islands.
5 Translator: And indeed the British radical and socialist movement up until the mid C19th. Predecessors of this idea can also be found in British political history, like Thomas Spence’s Plan for common ownership and social dividend of the land, and G. K. Chesterton distributist slogan ‘Three acres and a cow’.
6 Expression by ecological economist Xoán R. Doldán, the first academic to publicly warn about Peak Oil in Galicia.
7 In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies.
8 I explained some of these issues in my book La izquierda ante el colapso de la civilización industrial (The Left Facing the Collapse of Industrial Civilisation).
Translator: English language references to this issue include,
Büchs, M., & Koch, M. (2019). Challenges for the degrowth transition: The debate about wellbeing. Futures, 105, 155–165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2018.09.002
Koch, M. (2022). Social Policy Without Growth: Moving Towards Sustainable Welfare States. Social Policy and Society, 21(3), 447–459. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746421000361
9 https://www.elsaltodiario.com/saber-sustentar/Vicent-Cucarella-sector-publico-menos-enerxia-menos-ingresos
Teaser image credit: The first Longo Maï agricultural co-operative in Limans. By Comet Photo AG (Zürich) – This image is from the collection of the ETH-Bibliothek and has been published on Wikimedia Commons as part of a cooperation with Wikimedia CH. Corrections and additional information are welcome., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71182182.
Public speaker and writer on Degrowth, Energy Transition and threats to industrial civilization. Author of ‘Las verdades incómodas de la Transición Energética’, ‘La izquierda ante el colapso de la civilización industrial’, ‘We, the detritivores’ and editor of ‘Guía para el descenso energético’. Founder and editor-in-chief of multilingual ’15/15\15 magazine’, and coordinator of weekly radio program ’Vivirmos nun mundo finito’. https://casdeiro.info