A Capitalist Road to Communism

This article was originally published in Theory and Society 15 (5), 1986, pp. 635–655. The editors of Basic Income Studies are grateful to Springer Verlag for permission to reprint this article as lead piece in this retrospective. A first draft of this text was written in May 1983 by Van Parijs under the title "The Capitalist Transition to Communism: A Radical Alternative" and was circulated for discussion at the third meeting of the September Group (London, September 1983). It aimed to establish a link between Van Parijs's own first formulation of the argument for basic income ("L'allocation universelle," Ecolo-Infos, 16 February 1983) and van der Veen's formal model of the transition from socialism to communism ("From Contribution to Needs," Acta Politica 19, 1984). A significantly expanded version, co authored by van der Veen and Van Parijs, was finalized in the Spring of 1985, and provided the lead piece for the symposium published in Theory and Society 15(5), 1986, with contributions by Johannes Berger, Joseph Carens, Jon Elster, Alec Nove, Adam Przeworski and Erik Olin Wright, and a reply by van der Veen and Van Parijs ("Universal Grants Versus Socialism"). The piece was subsequently republished, in the original or in translation, in Van Parijs's Marxism Recycled (Cambridge, 1993), in Umbau des Sozialstaats (Opielka and Ostner, eds., Essen, 1987,) and in Zona Abierta (46/47, 1988).