Beyond the Welfare State: From Wealth to Minimalism in Basic Income

Abstract

The article considers the phenomenon of the welfare state in the conditions of the next stage of the socio-cultural crisis. Having considered the basic provisions of this model, the reasons for the failure of welfare democracy, as well as possi­ble ways to overcome the crisis, the authors analyze the experience of charity in history, the practice of gratuitous assistance and discuss the justification for introducing the concept of an unconditional basic income as a guarantor of stabi­lizing social discordance, overcoming the social crisis, including the labor crisis. The authors base their reasoning on the concepts of Z. Bauman, U. Beck, A. Gortz, K. Polanyi and other thinkers of the turn of the 20th–21st centuries, as well as on the developments of social philosophers of the first decades of the 21st century, who discussed issues of social dependence and moral degrada­tion resulting from uncontrolled social assistance. The authors of the article ad­dress the questions whether this idea is new, whether it returns to the practices of paternalism that did not meet expectations, whether the introduction of a basic income will become a substitute for the policy of the welfare state, an imper­sonal system of payments, are the proposed solutions capable of providing the foundations for a new way of life in a society that has lost labor as a system that determined the basic postulates of life. Answering the question, what did the basic income actually turn out to be, the authors of the article come to the conclusion that the introduction of an unconditional basic income is a consistent and veiled rejection of the model of a social democratic state with its social protection programs, which for many decades has been quite justifiably con­sidered an achievement of mankind.