Blockchain and a New Politics of Distribution
Kate Symons
Recent research suggests that work is not always enough to lift people out of poverty. In Give a Man A Fish, James Ferguson details the economic and political changes in South Africa over the last 20 years which have resulted in hundreds of thousands of jobless people (usually young men). There has been a rapid decline in industrial and laboring opportunities, particularly in mining and agriculture, along with changes in employment due to automation of formerly labour-heavy production lines and agricultural processes. For example, fishing, formerly undertaken by a large workforce organsied into small fishing boats and co-operatives are now unable to compete with highly capitalized and industrialised fishing and aquaculture. In one South African town, there are four applicants for every one fishing permit, with unemployed fishermen struggling to find other occupations.
For the UK, the same systemic changes manifest in slightly different symptoms. Oxfam UK and the London School of Economics have highlighted the steady decline in wages which mean that working is no longer always sufficient to guarantee a decent livelihood. A combination of precarious employment conditions (like zero hours contracts and the online ‘gig economy’), lower wages and rising living costs mean that working does not necessarily provide a route out of poverty. For many parts of the UK, the precarious and often low-paid service economy has replaced an industrial and manufacturing one which often provided well-paid and secure jobs. These trends indicate, for Tania Li, deeper and systemic changes in global production systems, whereby more and more jobs are lost to automation and rationalization, rendering a greater number of people “’surplus’ to the needs of capital”.
While there are clearly contextual and historical differences between the UK and South Africa, there is something important at the core of each case — work, on its own, is increasingly not enough to prevent poverty. For young South African men who could historically expect to be employed in laboring, and for the low-paid, insecure British labour force alike, work no longer necessarily pays. Both cases also indicate a growing focus on the role of the state in supporting those ‘surplus’ labour forces, subverting what Ferguson calls the “productionist premise” at the heart of contemporary economic understandings. Historically, selling labour and skills through a steady job provided income, while the other side of the social contract is that the wider economic system will provide labour opportunities. This productionist assumption is, in turn, bound up with moral and social norms which suggest that laboring in a workforce is the correct and appropriate thing to do, particularly for men of ‘breadwinning’ age. Such commonsense phrases as “an honest day’s work for an honest wage” reproduce the productionist world-view (the same logic that systematically devalues the ‘free’ labour undertaken by slaves, women and non-human nature throughout the history of Western capitalism).
What are the current political responses to this? In South Africa, Ferguson details a social economy built on direct cash transfers from the state, with 44 percent of all households receiving some form of state cash transfer, making South Africa’s spending on social security payments one of the highest in the world (as a percentage of GDP). Crucially, many of these transfers are unconditional and universal (with the costs of paying to higher earners recouped through the tax system). The UK government’s political choice, on the other hand, has been to blend austerity in public service provision with the targeted and means-tested supplementing of the lowest paid families through Working Tax and Universal Credit programs). In each case, the state supplements incomes, making distribution through the state a key element of social support in each context. This suggests that we need to re-examine distribution, rather than production, as a core organizing principle of social and economic life.
Where does blockchain come into this? The technology (explained here) supports secure, peer-to-peer transactions that are recorded on a distributed database (rather than a centralized leger like a bank or a state). As a knowledge technology, it could be seen as a technology of trust and a technology of inclusion which enables collective governance, verified identity and secure payments outwith existing state and banking structures. What kinds of social distribution could it support? What are the potentially progressive features of blockchain technology with regards to distributive politics?
1. It provides trusted documentation. This means that any transfer of money can be recorded on a distributed database which is out of the hands of local or national governments. This avoids undermining support for universal transfers by reducing possibility for corruption.
2. It provides proof of qualification for those excluded from conventional banking or identification services. This means that those schemes that are meant to reach the genuinely poorest can overcome obstacles of lack of access to mainstream finance or government services.
3. It supports collective or distributed governance. This enables people to partake democratically in decisions around wealth distribution, rather than deal with existing systems (which may be undemocratic or which may exclude certain groups). Similarly, it can record distribution histories, providing an immutable record which can be interrogated for fairness.
4. It can reduce the signifiers of stigma, such as social security cards and welfare books. This may be an important part of shifting from claims that one is due a share of wealth as welfare only when one ‘fails’ at waged labour, to something that we all have a rightful claim on.
Of course, a new technology on its own cannot bring about wider political shifts. However, the debate around how society should support those ever-growing numbers of people excluded from well-paid wage labour is an important one. The blockchain provides a new way of making citizens legible and understandable to each other and in a social and economic system. It may also support new ways of sharing societal wealth, and new means of asserting claims about distribution. This could be coupled with a wider politics which recognises that waged labour or conditional welfare is not the only means by which one becomes entitled to a share of socially-produced wealth.
