Corporate Watch, Consumer Responsibility, and Economic Democracy: Forms of political action in the orbit of Basic Income *
The political power of private corporations has grown in the last decades as much as the inability of the States to interfere in their businesses. The control of the public sphere has shifted to the hands of private factions that deprive citizens of their right to control their rulers, a process that mines, even more, their freedom and autonomy to decide on their own lives. This leads to an inexorably extension of the two great threats to individual liberty and autonomy that have been identified by political theory along its history: the dominium and the imperium. The dominium extends because, with a major force every day, the big private powers impose to actors forms of production and of distribution that leave them with a barely audible voice 1 . The imperium extends because, with the advance of those private powers, the States, far in their captivity from devoting themselves to the task of promoting the public good, do nothing but guarantee the statu quo, embracing the action of big corporations and using their coercive apparatus when called to do so.
Republicanism and Basic Income : the articulation of the public sphere from the repoliticization of the private sphere
The republican tradition revolves around the statement of freedom as non-domination, which must be seen as that freedom enjoyed by those who live in the presence of others and, by virtue of certain social and institutional structures, nobody may interfere arbitrarily in the decisions that they might make. Hence, republicanism promotes the institutional devices by which citizens may obtain material and economic security and, in accomplishing this security, ensuring that formal freedoms become a reality and that individuals may successfully face the task of articulating and carrying out their own life plans. Basic Income thus constitutes an extremely valuable mechanism for achieving these goals because one condition of full citizenship is the universal and unconditional guarantee of the right to existence that it would establish. Republicanism is a longstanding tradition of political thought that first arose from the Socratic ethos and certain political aspects of the Athens of the 5 and the 4 centuries BC after which it was to be the object of successive reformulations. Republicanism, first in Europe and subsequently in America, has always opposed obscurantism, tyranny, oppression and inequalities based on arbitrary interference. From the second half of the 19 century onwards, this tradition became increasingly invisible with the codification of liberal thought. Republican ideals were only present in some of the various manifestations of political socialism of the 19 and the 20 centuries, though the limits and vicissitudes involved ended up eclipsing them. Now, at the beginning of the 21 century, more attention is being paid to republicanism both in the academic milieu and in circles outside academia. The core idea of the republican tradition is to approach the concept of freedom, “republican freedom as non-domination”, without overlooking the ideals of equality and fraternity so that it is a programme of thought and action that opens up fruitful ways of analyzing the economic, political and social challenges now facing mankind. The fact that republicanism promotes the institutional mechanisms by means of which citizens may obtain the material and economic security that ensure that formal freedoms become a reality, and that individuals would thus be equipped to face different forms of domination, must be taken into account. And this is of even greater importance in societies where the logic of the market and private accumulation impose a significant degree of inequality in terms of distribution of income and wealth. Basic Income (henceforth BI) is an extremely valuable instrument for achieving these goals because one condition of full citizenship is the universal and unconditional guarantee of the right to existence that it would establish. It should be noted that any materialization of the republican ideal of freedom, understood as self-government, opposition to tyranny, and more recently conceptualized from the standpoint of the notion of freedom as non-domination, entails certain demands on social and political reality, among which the guarantee of security of income must be emphasized. A BI for everybody may be understood as the guarantee of material sufficiency and therefore of the socioeconomic independence necessary to reduce the levels of domination that affect people belonging to the most significant groups of social vulnerability – wage-earning workers, women, etc. – and thereby to open up greater areas of freedom so that they might carry out their respective life plans. The main aim of this paper is to highlight the importance given by the republican tradition to the role played by property – understood as socioeconomic independence – as the basis of its attempt to construct a robust notion of civic virtue which might then open up the doors to a social and political 1 The notion of “group of social vulnerability” is precisely defined in footnote 19.
Enumeration of total coliforms, fecal coliforms, and Escherichia coli in foods by hydrophobic grid membrane filter: supplementary report.
Raw, comminuted poultry meat was used to determine the specificity of the media and incubation conditions used in the hydrophobic grid membrane filter method. Confirmation rates for target colonies were 100% for total coliforms, 98% for fecal coliforms, and 97-99% for Escherichia coli. The results of total coliform enumeration in 30 pasteurized milk samples by both the hydrophobic grid membrane filter method and AOAC method 46.013-46.016 are also reported.