Creating a Network of Dissent: The Heretical Idea of Basic income

Containing appealing elements to both socialists and liberals the idea of basic income is characterized by its ability to transcend the topography of the established political landscape. Thus, the idea of basic income holds a potentiality only very rarely found among political ideas. However, since the breakthrough of neoliberal hegemony the idea of basic income has increasingly been ostracized to live a life in the periphery of the dominating discourse but has at the same time in the last ten years got an ever stronger foothold in the new global social movements. This means that the idea of basic income is not waning or even dying. The global and expanding organization, basic income Earth Network (BIEN) working for the implementation of basic income all over the world, has endeavoured to show how a basic income would mitigate and perhaps even help to overcome the many negative aspects of the current world economic crisis.
Using the Danish discursive political landscape as an empirical case we aim at disclosing the dissenting potential of the basic income idea for cutting across the poles of the contemporary political topography and manifest itself as a viable and forceful political idea. In order to do this we draw on the theoretical framework of the Norwegian philosopher of law Thomas Mathiesen and the Latin-American philosopher Enrique Dussel.
The research question treated in the paper is: What has characterized the discursive struggle about basic income in Denmark since the publication of “Revolt from the Center” in 1978? And how can the idea of basic income be conceived as a phenomenon of dissent in light of this discursive struggle using the Thomas Mathiesen’s concepts of ‘the unfinished’ between inclusion and exclusion and Enrique Dussel’s concept of ‘analogical hegemon’?