Universal Basic Income & Common Good: Lessons From The Covid19 Pandemia.

Laburpena

The global COVID19 pandemic has caused at least three interrelated crises. The first, a socio-health crisis with millions of infected people and deaths around the world. Only in Spain, official statistics refer to over 100,000 deaths due to the pandemic. Incidence that varies significantly according to the social stratum of people, affecting more seriously the most vulnerable social sectors, the subaltern social classes and the immigrant population. A second crisis, the economic one, which has put on the table the falsehoods and mirages of the neoliberal capitalist discourse, by crudely showing, on the one hand, the limitations of the privatization of central pillars of the social welfare state; and on the other hand, the limitations of the strategy of precariousness of the labor market and the degradation of essential jobs for society such as those related to the care of people, education, health, but also those related to the supply and distribution of products and goods. And a third crisis, related to the periods of paralysis of the productive process and therefore of the circulatory process of capital, which pose a potential systemic risk for the survival of capitalism itself. In any case, the different facets and dimensions of the crisis generated by COVID19 have forced us to rethink how we should organize the distribution of wealth and employment, the social utility of jobs, and the organization and goals of education.It is in the crises of capitalism where it is possible to see the real operation of the logics that sustain it, and it is in the capitalist crises where it is possible to glimpse potentially antagonistic proposals -such as the Universal Basic Income-. Thus, it is in the crises of the old dominant social order, where it is possible to glimpse the cracks and spaces for the generation of antagonistic and emancipatory alternatives to capitalism.