 This idea of basic income or an unconditional basic income from both an anti-capitalist perspective but also an anti-stateist perspective, and that's why I call it a pluriversal basic income because it's the idea of giving everybody an unconditional amount of money to live but without the borders of the nation state or outside or beyond them, really. It's also an attempt at trying to rethink or transform what money is and how we conceive money and how we use it because money is nothing but a set of promises that we make to one another. It's sort of an IOU. So, yeah, today's talk is a bit about how do we go about challenging really one of the core elements of the system but also taboo really in society in general and specifically also in the left or whatever is left of the left. Topics of money are often relegated to a domain of just saying, oh, money is evil so we should just not talk about it and we shouldn't do anything about it. It's just bad and we have to deal with it. But at the end of the day, the reality of wage labor, the fact that we need to work for money in order to survive is still there and it's also like it's really a colonizing principle in the sense that you have to rent yourself, you have to rent your work, your body to somebody in order to get a couple of tokens of value of paper or even digital money nowadays so you can pay for the bread that you live on. So the idea of basic income is this really emancipatory proposal of saying what if everybody had enough money to live? What if everybody had a basic amount of money that they could choose what to do with? So without a bureaucrat telling them what to do about it or to prove to them that they're X, Y or Z if they're a specific gender or a specific class of income and so on and so forth. So the proposal of a basic income is quite an important one and especially nowadays that we're living in this in terms of crisis, economic crisis, affective crisis, health crisis, people in the streets are lacking more and more cash because of lack of economic activity, many businesses are closing down, governments in some countries are more richer ones of course are giving some aid, some handouts to people, but in many parts of the world this is impossible so people have to figure out what to do in order to keep things running, the solidarity, create circuits of solidarity or ways in which to keep well circulating. So again just for the sake of definition a basic income is usually defined by the earth network of basic income as the unconditional amount of money or unconditional cash transfer that is given to all or all individuals or all people in a given political community. So it's not given to the head of the household or to the mother but it's given to also the children, the mother, the father and everybody in society basically. Then there's also the question of the way in which that money will come about. Oftentimes this is one of the big questions that people always debate about basic income is like, but where will the money come from? This question, where will the money come from is a really, really interesting question in general because it really challenges us the notions of what money is and where actually it comes from. So today as most of you may know already money is actually produced by banks, mostly private banks, but also of course state money, central banks when they give you a loan or when they issue a debt to you. So from the perspective of banks they issue money outwards as a debt and then you get it as something that then you have to pay back eventually. So the way it works is in like some sort of expansionary way where like the central government or the central bank gives money, issues money into being with a specific interest rate that has to be paid back at two banks, two private banks, which then issue credit to businesses, to people, to institutions in order to make the economy run as they say. So the whole even notion of things that we take for granted like economic growth, GDP, growth domestic part of all these concepts are actually rooted in money. So like the way that we think nations today or imagine them to sort of grow their economic output is really just by looking at the change in the interest rate year per year that the money had to return over. So when the central bank says we want to grow by 3%, that's basically the rate at which countries more or less grow. So it's really a statistical fiction that has real, real ecological and economic consequences on people because when money is issued at an interest that a positive interest as a form of debt with an interest, then you're basically saying that the resources of other people or more people will have to be used in order to pay back this debt. So when a bank gives somebody a loan, so let's say I give a loan to Paolo and I tell him, hey Paolo, here's 100,000 and I'm a bank, I'm an evil bank. And I tell him, you have to pay me 200,000 back. Where will that other 100,000 come from? It comes from other people's debts. It comes from other people's money. So you essentially have a system that is designed as a vacuum cleaner as a pyramid for the purposes of extracting value from the central state that also taxes people, but also issues money into biennium and then taxes it away to then the private banks that put money in orbit, so to speak. That's my friend, Brett Skolak, to call it. And then people basically have to give it back so the extraction of value happens in all aspects of society and then we're always scrambling about where to get money. So structurally, we are always competing against each other even if we don't want to for a money that is made scarce. Money is evil in the sense that it is produced by the nation state institutions of today and capitalism as a system where this money lives somehow. So, okay, so having said that, where will the money for basic income come from? So when most people, more serious people talk about proposals or making a basic income happen, usually they point to this idea of sovereign wealth fund. So what the hell is a sovereign wealth fund? A sovereign wealth fund is basically when a country say Norway finds a bunch of oil in their land. Oh my God, there's a bunch of oil. And then they say, okay, we shouldn't just sell it. We should make an industry and then sell this oil. But then we can also, from the process of that, invest in other industries and then create more investment and buy stocks in companies and then the returns of that investment will go to people back as a basic income. So effectively today Norway has a sovereign wealth fund which would basically make all the regions a millionaire. The fact that everybody would get a million dollars if the money of that fund would be distributed equally by the people of Norway. Of course it's not, but it's based on the logic of a capital investment. So I invested in an industry and then the dividends of that will not go to capitalists, but it will go to people, which is like in today's terms where inequality is so horrible. It is a progressive proposal if we're talking about the nation state logic as a whole, in the sense that it wants to be distributed money from one money that is invested in some industry. In this case it was oil or whatever other investment the bureaucrats want to invest on and then give it to people. Now there is another way in which people want to or at least propose to fund a basic income. And it's basically through taxation. So it's basically this imagination of like let's take money from the rich and then give it to everybody. With a basic income, with a universal basic income, it will be really to all society, right? So the net amount that people will be taxed will depend on the level of wealth and then some people will actually get a net benefit out of that taxation. Or some people will get a negative benefit if they're really rich for example, because they already have 100,000 times of basic income, right? So rich people, yes, effectively they already have many times of basic income they do not need one with the idea of giving it to everybody. It's really a social ritual in a way of trying to equalize everybody to say that this is all a common pool. Now the logic of taxation, well, you know, nice in many ways, it's also kind of like it lacks a real critical understanding of actually what taxation even is. And it's role and purpose in society. So this leads me to the third way in which some proposals have come up not so much actually on how to actually finance the basic income, which is through this notion of sovereign money. For this idea that actually governments, as I was saying before, they issue money into being and then they take it away through various means like taxation. So taxation is actually not a way of redistributing wealth, so to speak, it's more a mechanism to control and manage the money, mechanisms, the money supply. So when a government issues money, they want to tax away so much so they can make sure that the amount of power basically that is distributed in the economy can remain stable in some sort of way or directed in certain forms. So some people argue that governments want to balance out the amounts of goods and stuff that is circulating the wealth that is circulating with the amount of money. And in practice I would argue that capital is power. It is a form of organized power. And so when you look at financial markets going up, and you like draw also a line of wages, you can see the index of power being that the more financial markets go up, the more money they make. They make it from somewhere and they make it usually from people's wages. So the lower the wages historically have been, the higher the financial markets have been as it's happening today during the corona crisis. So there is effectively stealing of wealth, if you may, by this process of monetary creation, either by central governments or private banks. But just back to my point, this idea of sovereign money would mean that government could issue money into being as a basic income without a debt, without a positive interest on it, with zero interest, or even negative if you want to be really radical, and then tax it away as they see fit. Now this proposal is actually underpinned by a theory called MMT or Modern Monetary Theory, which is used nowadays in the discourse of the left, the political left mostly in the US. There are also elements of that in Europe, where the Green New Deal is sort of proposed as this mechanism whereby we will invest in jobs, in green jobs, in green industries, and all of that will be done through this mechanism of monetary creation, sovereign money, or MMT. They're made into some sort of strawman by both the left and the right wing, the people that do MMT, but actually their understanding of money is actually quite accurate from a historical and anthropological point of view, because it follows from the logic, which is an ancient logic that states have done for thousands of years, which is, we call it the anthropologist, we call it the military coin-nach slavery complex. So it's basically a king hiring an army in order to enslave a population, a citizens by two days times, and then tax them with the coin of their making for having been slayed. So basically the process of monetary creation and monetary destruction is really just a way in which a sovereign encapsulates the territory, makes it their own, and then starts like, yeah, basically colonizing people's surplus value and their labor by the means of violence and taxation. So by paying their bureaucrats with weapons, and no weapons to do that, right? So the whole government apparatus works in this way, in this military coin-nach slavery complex, and this logic still goes until today, and the modern monetary people know this, like they know that money is underpinned by violence, regardless if you want to make a green new deal or whatever. It's still underpinned by this imperialist machine that today is the military industry complex. So yeah, so to me, when I came to this idea of thinking about basic income, I was thinking, okay, how can we make a basic income happen right now? How can we claim the right to do a basic income by sort of hacking money, by hacking the way that it is made, and also, yeah, what we can do with it somehow. So by taking this principle of monetary creation, like you have also a history of complementary currencies, community currencies, alternative currencies that have tried to not do a basic income, but to give people in local communities, especially in times of crisis, a means in which they can exchange the resources. So communities come together and they say we want to like manage our risk together, so we're going to do a community credit to then exchange positive and negative credits with each other according to, you know, what we give to another. So I can give this mask to Baolo, for example, for, I don't know, 20 pots, and then he can then use those 20 pots to buy food at the store because the store owner accepts this, he's part of the community and he accepts it, right. These sort of systems have existed also for tons of years, as the democratic tradition that I refer from the Kurdish movement or the internationalist movement in Kurdistan was talking about, they're normally referred to as mutual credit. Mutual credit actually has a very interesting history, with even the likes of Proudhon, this French anarchist, giving proposals as a way of sort of reforming money in his time during the party's commune and so on. So what you're saying, let's, let's deal away with the state by just issuing the social credit or social money system, social mutual credit money system, which actually today has become a Chinese dystopia, right. Everybody has heard of the social credit systems in China, how they will be used to survey people even more. Now, this doesn't mean that the systems have to be used by state mechanisms, they can also be used by people democratically in order to actually create something like a currency for the commons. And so this leads me to this idea of a non-state basic income or a basic income beyond the nation state, a pluriverse of different social relations of different forms of organizing autonomy, autonomous zones, federated in many ways into some sort of democratic confederalism, as our friend was talking about here, or in many different forms like it could be, you know, cyber feminist monies or autonomous monies, but the point of it is to actually claim the wealth. So this is in practice right now, we started a project in October called Circles UPI, which is basically trying to do just that, basically issuing money to people who join the system unconditionally every day. And then the actual work is about, okay, what can I do with this, right? So initially it's interesting because we want it to be a basic income, but it's more like basic pocket money. So when people join, there are a couple of things you can do with it. And then people spend it at the Shpeti here, the local shop for a coffee or for whatever can be sourced from within the network, right? But more than the money itself, this is a tool that people can use to then actually claim wealth or communalize or make commons of wealth in their area. So then people can say, hey, we want to use this to pay our rent or to even take over territories, like actually use it as a way of using it in specific pieces of land, buy food with it, support the local agriculture, we can then use this for the raw materials and also basically to relocalize and really regionalize the economy from the bottom up. So the idea of this sort of pluriversal basic income is really to make money at commons or a credit commons, whatever you want to call it. But basically this idea of the money commons is to say, what if we just took away the private property in money itself and just use it as what it is, which is a promise, a promise to pay for something that you need. And in practice, if we actually were to do that and we were actually say, hey, let's give to each other the things that we need to live in this life. It would mean that you could have effectively radically democratic way in which people can claim wealth from places and then bring it into this sort of commons as a way of living and then managing it together. So it's really a way of challenging this sort of top down monetary state infrastructure systems and use the principles of direct democracy and democratization as a way of achieving this bottom up basic income or really economic democracy. Because what it is is really connecting producers and distributors and coordinating between them in a way where people are no longer alienated from the means of production, but actually can connect with the local people in their areas and see who is doing what, who is producing what. Everybody can take part in this in a democratic cooperative way. So the idea of the money commons is basically underneath it is really an ethos and an idea of care or an ecology of trying to build an ecology of caring relations where we are actually caring for each other around us, making sure that nobody, you know, everybody has this basic livelihood in order to meet their basic needs, but also taking care of the relations with the earth right so it's local economies, the building of local economies that is more territorialized and that can then also be federated because of course not all communities can produce everything, right. We live in a deeply deeply interdependent way of life and we need money systems that can reflect that. So with circles it's a first attempt, it's a first experiment trying to challenge the political imagination of what is possible by adding a territory of defense as we were saying before with the cyber girls, not just the body territory, the land territory, but also the money territory. So to think of money as a territory of defense and to really claim power, because capital is power, but give it to the people and say that we can create a people powered money. That is not backed by the violence of the state or private banks, but by the relationships that are built between people in different from some ways and they can be contested democratically also. So democratize money itself would mean and a beginning of an end of capitalism, I would argue, because it would mean that people could decide where and how is money issued and for what purposes. So if somebody is doing some asshole thing down the line, that could be stopped because the money as a territory, and people say no, we don't want that it doesn't flow with our values so it's really about allowing people to create other monies with other values that escape the cosmology of capitalism or break with the cosmology of capitalism and actually allow the diversity and interdependence of the planet to flourish. I think I will end here. Yeah. Can I ask a question? Yeah. Thank you for that talk because I have a hard time getting my head around economy. Yeah. I've always lately I've been thinking a lot about livelihood factor, you know, like I'm living in a city that basically I'm, I'm forced in the regime of this capitalist euro currency dollar currency, whichever currency is the nation states that are, you know, able to maintain their regime of this currency that functions for a lot of things like. So, I'm excited about the, the, the UBI circles experiment. And then I'm, I'm imagining that it's so hard to escape the regime that I'm in, you know, I do have to pay a landlord, for example, and it's like a time factor almost dominates like I know I have to put so much time into trying to make some, some hard currency for this. You know, I'm doing my rent, my rent master. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And somehow I'm wondering, okay, there was this example of DNA Ringelman was the founder after before kickstarted and her concept around, you know, doing fundraising online now that everybody was so connected online. Oh, I want to try to democratize capital was her phrase. Okay. And so like, I have a project. I'm going to ask $5,000 to make my next music album. And for a lot of people this there was a period where this was really working and people you get enough of your fans, you get people to, to, to pitch in and you raise that money and then you could go to work without having to, you know, go find a label to sponsor you and give you that capital. You could make it DIY. And I'm wondering with the with the UBI, if there's some kind of or the thing on the alternative currency in in some kind of, you know, subversive dance with with the reading of the economy regime that we're forced to play. If there can be some kind of interplay with these economies, you know, like I, who I have, I have a lot of circles this month I haven't used for the, you know, my food space here, whatever. But I have a friend who is in trouble paying her rent. And I, you know, somehow fleshed out, but like, can I somehow subsidize this person for that month to help her out or you can group the community and say, Oh, we will help you in that other currency until you can pay back the community of circles.