Beyond a Basic Income: the Radical Imagination and the Commons

With Max Haiven.

We are launching Venture Commons with back-to-back workshops with Dario Azzelini (Sept 17th) and Max Haiven (Sept 18th) at Just Us Coffee house.

Venture Commons is an experimental learning community centered around kick-starting collectives, commons and co-ops to create a REAL sharing economy. Balancing theory and practice, we aim to grow our thinking, skills and capacities to create initiatives that support rather than exploit our communities. venturecommons.ca

In the past few years, the idea that all people should be entitled to a basic guaranteed income has travelled from the fringes to the centre of political debate and enjoys support from across the ideological spectrum. But what sort of basic income do we want, and what would it take to get us there? Are there forms of basic income that might be a step backwards for social and ecological justice? And how might a basic income intersect with struggles for gender justice, decolonization, anti-racism and ecological care? Is there a horizon for us beyond a basic income? And what part might a basic income have in more ambitious struggles for a different world?

Max Haiven is a writer, teacher and organizer, and an Assistant Professor in the Division of Art History and Critical Studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in K’jipuktuk in Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, Canada). His research focuses on themes including the financialization of society and culture, social movements and the radical imagination, the politics and economics of culture, critical art practices, and social and cultural theory. He writes articles for both academic and general audiences and has been published in venues including Truth-Out, Dissident Voice, Social Text, Cultural Studies, Cultural Politics and Interface: A Journal For and About Social Movements . He is author of the books Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (Zed Books, 2014), The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (with Alex Khasnabish, Zed Books, 2014) and Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Co-presented with the Radical Imagination project