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Feminists Responses to Attacks on the Welfare State!
June 13, 2013 @ 7:00 am - 9:00 pm
Feminist Fightback has been thinking about the gendered effects of the benefit cuts, holding ‘Women at the Cutting Edge’ in 2010, authoring ‘Cuts are a feminist issue’ and being involved in the Save Hackney Nurseries Campaign.
We have long wrestled with the dilemma of how to defend services while refusing to be satisfied with the inadequacies of the existing welfare state. In an attempt to think beyond this, we will be hold a discussion on the idea of a basic income and asking what might be the potential benefits of this as a feminist demand.
A basic income is a guaranteed income for all. Unlike the current benefits systems that distinguishes between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ welfare recipients, the basic income is unconditional and breaks the link between income and work. Rather than having to defend flawed institutions, is it now time to make a brave and transformative demand such as this?
There is no need to read anything before the meeting, but you might find the following texts of interest:
Kathi Weeks, ‘Working Demands: From Wages for Housework to Basic Income’, chapter 3 of her book The Problem with Work (2011). An argument for basic income which draws on Marxism, feminism and antiwork politics.
Wildcat, ‘Reforming the Welfare State for Saving Capitalism: The ‘Guaranteed Income’ and ew reformist illusions’, Wildcat-Zirkular No. 48/49 (1999). An argument against basic income as demand written as part of a debate on basic income on the German left in the late 1990s.