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The concept of GSR intends to give an idea of the conditions needed for everyone to lead a life in dignity. Inherent to this is the “right to have rights” (Hannah Arendt). Yet capitalism is characteristically profit-oriented, and therefore incorporates rivalry, competition and commodification. This precludes the aim of a life in solidarity and justice, which every individual should be entitled to in order to enable them to want to, and to be able to contribute to society with their own personal abilities. What conditions does capitalism impose on people by way of the sociability that it has created, and what would be the structure of a sociability that takes unconditional GSR as its starting point instead of, as does capitalism, goods for money or service for return or calculating input and output?
The concept of GSR seeks to offer a perspective that enables the long-maintained crisis of a capitalist society of paid labour to be transformed into a society which replaces the principles of capital usability with the aim of achieving the greatest possible satisfaction for the individual. This must go beyond defending the Keynesian welfare state – and in the end the state itself. Based on the Fordist model of accumulation, the welfare state was linked to the mass production of consumer goods, enabling full employment for a limited period of time. From a left point of view, taking leave of a nation state based on paid labour would not be regrettable for a number of reasons: the nation state was
- an authoritarian state based on forms of bureaucratic control, such as the exclusion of non-usable parts of society;
- patriarchal, as it was bound up with so-called “normal working conditions”, male sole breadwinner with bourgeois nuclear family structures
- thus dependent on the sexual division of labour; linked to many women being reduced to unpaid reproductive work;
- built on the exploitation and exclusion of the global South and in disregard of the conditions needed for a healthy environment, due to the societies of the north.
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