Irreducible Minimum

Description

Noon:

"There are three foundational principles of Library Socialism: usufruct, the irreducible minimum, and complementarity. These terms are all adopted by the Wrong Boys from Murray Bookchin, who advocated a sort of socialism he called Municipalism. The irreducible minimum is probably familiar to most listeners under the name of a Universal Basic Income. However, Moritz and Vulliez suggest a different conceptual framework: rather than having a basic income, they advocate for basic outcomes. The UBI, they argue, is a fundamentally capitalist approach to social welfare. It retains the fundamental bourgeois social relations of profit, personal wealth, purchasing power, commodity production and consumption, and so on, essentially just supplementing wage-labour with a certain amount of wage-non-labour.

The irreducible minimum by contrast is a concept the Wrong Boys develop from Paul Radin, an anthropologist who argued that tribal societies allow all individuals access to communal resources based on their needs, rather than limiting access based on ownership. The irreducible minimum, then, as a component of Library Socialism, is the idea that everyone should have access to the goods and services they need to maintain a high quality of life. On some level, existing libraries are already providing this in certain areas, the most obvious being education (ie, access to reputable information in the form of books), but also increasingly in other areas such as internet access, language learning, childcare, and other goods – my local library has a free cold-weather clothing rack.

If we take the irreducible minimum to a logical conclusion in the context of Library Socialism, we reach conclusions such as: libraries should include kitchens, counselling services, doctors, and have close connections with housing services or homeless shelters. These are ways of providing the irreducible minimum to those without food, shelter, medical care, and so on. It's worth noting that none of these concepts are difficult to imagine: again, one of the most valuable things about Library Socialism is that it involves expanding and centering an existing social relation, which makes it both more accessible conceptually but also pragmatically; and it is well-documented that libraries and librarians are extremely valuable in providing people with this irreducible minimum. For example, Jane Garner (p iv) argues that libraries in prisons:

improve quality of life during incarceration, and reduce the chances of reoffending after leaving prison” and are “means of escape, a means of passing time constructively, a means of staying connected with community, both inside and outside prison, an opportunity to experience autonomy and self-responsibility and, finally, as an inadequate support for their formal and informal education and literacy development”

(https://www.neweconomy.org.au/journal/issues/vol2/iss4/library-socialism/)