Thus, we Affirm that the United States federal government should provide the gift of a basic income as an act of unproductive expenditure.

DV: And, as you might also know—I made a few reference materials—that actually the topic is quite old, so, it was already discussed after the Second World War, after the New Deal, and from different perspectives, actually, we should be actually careful that the universal basic income is discussed not just among the left but also among conservatives and neoliberals, so it’s so many approaches which we should be really careful about and actually study them carefully, but what I would like to suggest today, it’s just a full—I hope you might read the announcement of this assembly—that I suggest the speculation that the universal basic income as be considered as a form of a gift, and gift is a very heavy concept, also very ambivalent with different approaches—and—but what is important about gift, to just generalize, it’s actually an obvious radical alternative to the capitalist mode of production, because the way, how the economy of the gift—and actually we often speak about the “gift economy”, not about “the gift”—is also part of that very subtle—sometimes very brutal—economic relation between not just individuals but among collectives, so among a group of people, like a tribe—like it was in archaic cultures, or, among possibility—like—I speculate that actually the basic income can be also considered as a kind of—also—a gift. And who provides us with a gift? Society? Or is it just a share in that common economy in which we all create common goods which we all create together? So let's open the issue—for me that's why actually today with us is Oxana Timofeeva, our old comrade from our collective Chto Delat who actually wrote a whole book about Georges Bataille, and actually they did a few seminars on the gift economy in Russia—Moscow—and I hope she will share with us your vision, and at the end of my introduction I also would like to say is that actually, the old kind of dream of emancipation from labor, from that hard, monotone woes—bureaucratic way of making our living—this is really through—and we feel exhausted, collapsing, precarious beings who are really lost, and universal basic income, it sounds like a legitimate answer—“okay, so we get out of that dream of necessity and jump and make a qualitative leap into the room of freedom”. Sounds incredibly great, but at the same time I would feel that there is kind of traps inside of that kind of utopian vision, and to make a true utopia we should be really very sensitive and cautious about that possibility. So, and, all my questions—and ‘specially I'm also speaking outside of so-called afternoon society which actually we have inside of the Institute of Radical Imagination Discussion, it’s actually kind of likely that a lot of affluent countries like Netherlands, Finland, probably Spain already start that experiment in different forms, and if you speak with economists you can see that there is kind of minimal basic income or utopian basic income, and calculations in the article which I shared with you against basic income that was actually quite heavy in economic analysis, what it is, and in our situation I also see that if we consider that maybe some country’s more advanced—so—like with the Industrial Revolution—so—it might create certain global inequalities where art is supported with better possibilities of getting support—it's already there—because you know how Western art is the period with different economies and funds and people who are outside, who have no access to that kind of support, so, and that for me is also a quite serious issue: how we would imagine a certain form of international institution which might redistribute a certain form of global or national support, and transform into some kind of international solidarity.