BY PAOLO PUNX
Milan is a European metropolis like many others, but which are the real mechanisms with which the muscles and the brains of the varied productive multitude become folded to the requirements of the capital? Which are the sufferings, the contradictions, the desires that the various fragments of the multitude animate? These are only some of the questions that we have placed since some years ago, we begun to place the metropolitan research problem. Some of us came from the previous political experiences, from the old cycle of fights of the 70's, and some had begun to make politics in the social centers, but we all understood the insufficiency of both these methods in front of the productive and social transformations that had redefined the structure of the metropolis and particularly the life of its inhabitants. [...]
While during the fordist era the worker had such places and (s)he was in such common conditions, which allowed him to recognize himself as a collective subject, currently - in the era of fragmentation - the multitude is atomized, deconstructed, it is accustomed to live like a singularity, it is unable to exit through the walls of difference and the specifities, incapable to notice the various momentums of the exploitation and consequently the productive cycle in its entirety (at the utmost, the subject understands the exploitation included in the formal job). There is an enourmous disproportion: powerful and dark enemies appropriate your life and you are alone in approving this imperial normality, which is said to be the only and the natural alternative for you. The challenge of research is therefore how to break from this dynamic of control, and how to find common characteristics within the multitude, not through artificial operations of political homogenization, but through the understanding of the various specificities and common elements. Today the research is continuing. Some interviews, narrations and questionnaires can be found in our web pages (www.ecn.org/gruink), but it cannot be asserted that the job is concluded, on the contrary it is open and in a stage of continuous evolution.
How to transform, therefore, the common characteristics found in the multitude into biopolitical paths and social demands? It is not by chance that in the first years of the 1970's the great labour fights demanded salary to be detached from productivity. Today, by estimating the transformations that have occurred in production, it is central to demand livelihood detached from work. [...]
But what exactly is this universal unconditioned citizenship income? It is the amount of money which is enough for living and which is given to everyone: both to those that are at work and to those that aren't. Universal livelihood because it must be given to everyone regardless of where one lives and or where one is born. Unconditioned because it is totally separated from work and some other particular conditions. Although universality as a concept is sufficiently describable, we must stop for a moment to ponder the concept of citizenship, which we are not accustomed to connect to residing in a certain area in a certain moment, but more to the prevailing juridical conception, which is based on the removal of rights through the heritage of blood or through the settling down of long duration (e.g. five years or more) in a certain country.
But what are the factors which make the citizenship income such an important demand? The first is the humanistic factor: everyone has the right to live according to one's value solely for the fact that one exists, regardless of one having a job or one having born in a certain place. The second factor has a syndicalist-demanding character. Today the profit and the exploitation exceed the formal working time and embrace our whole existence, our relations, our affections, our communication, our consumption; simply put we are not paid anything for this time. Therefore the citizenship income is also a particular salary for the extensive and stretching time, which exceeds the formal working time. Moreover to break the bound which makes work the only source of livelihood, means in practise to cut apart, including the roots, what nowadays seems to be the central form of blackmail, with which to force the majority of humanity, in the north and in the south, to approve of smaller and smaller wages and reducing the rights, in order to earn even a little. The effects of citizenship income can stop the global race for diminishing salaries.
The last factor, but not the least important, concerns time. To demand livelihood independent of work is also a part of the anthropological and cultural fight, which - beyond materiality - places the premises in order to liberate free human activity from the slavery of work, liberating our time in order to make us able to do something else. Guaranteed income would enable a shorter working time or no work at all, offering the opportunity to construct something else, without the constant blackmail of livelihood. After all, today, the parasitic character of capital is more evident than ever: it is the material, intellectual, social, relational, communicative and affective work of the multitude which produces wealth. The capital is limited to command, to control, to direct this productive power through choices which are often devastating for the largest part of the humanity and to the planetary ecosystem, survival and the imperial command as its only goals.
To construct something else means to reappropriate this productive power, to place questions of what, how, where, when and how much to produce, also from the perspective of the bio- and ecologic necessities. Therefore it also means to liberate the power of social co-operation from the capitalist power and the imperial command. Therefore citizenship income refers to building this other, by simultaneously opening possibilities for its realization.
