Demand #3: Universal Basic Income

The demand for a Universal Basic Income – a guaranteed income for all citizens (at least) that’s not contingent on employment - is a demand that seems to be gaining traction and catching lots of people’s imagination. The Green Party want to do it, variousliberals including Paul Krugman have advocated it, and a vote is due sometime this year in Switzerland to implement a version of the idea. Autonomist theorists including Kathi Weeks, who writes about the demand in her excellent The Problem with Work, and groups including Plan C’s very own Thames Valley are also advocating the idea. Its supporters envision a world of falling employment with recipients of UBI being able to properly devote time to the unpaid work they’re currently doing - care work or childcare for example - as well as picking up new skills and hobbies, creating art, deepening their social networks (partying), organising for the revolution, finally getting around to volunteering - or just happily lazing around.

Like historical demands for Wages for Housework , or the tongue in cheek demand for Wages for Facebook, the demand for a universal basic income is a political statement about the nature of work and a way of making visible the unpaid (and gendered, classed and raced) work we already do to reproduce society and capital. It is also a demand which seems to be suited to the current phase of production, in which increasing automation has, in part, led to the replacement of mass employment (at least in the Global North) with fewer, more precarious jobs. For radicals, UBI offers the potential to begin de-linking, practically and intellectually, our access to social wealth from the necessity to engage in waged work, as well as attempting to solve the underlying structural reasons for the crisis. For more arguments for UBI check out this article. Meanwhile, liberals support the idea of a UBI to attempt to redirect the large pools of capital currently finding profitable investment in things such as property speculation into stimulating consumer demand to get the economy moving again and alleviate the current crisis of underpaid and scarce waged work. There is the potential for quite an unusual alliance between radicals, progressives and the more liberal wing of the capitalists around the demand of UBI.

Obviously the idea has critics. On the one hand, there are those who point out that UBI doesn’t actually abolish capitalism and may even give it a renewed burst of life. Yet the abolition of the global set of social relations that is capitalist-hetero-patriarchy-white-supremacy (not to mention the state, the nation, ecological destruction and all other forms of domination currently fucking up the world) will be a complicated process. Large scale social change operates over long time periods and at different tempos and, whilst purists might not like it, we will certainly have to get our hands dirty in the process, doing things that we reckon will increase our ability to win other battles, whilst relieving suffering. Other concerns which need to be taken seriously however include the potential for this to lead to tighter border controls - further fuelling global inequality - or for it to facilitate the privatisation of the entire social safety net, as ‘supported consumers’ get to ‘choose’ how to spend the individualized personal budget (for more on that, members of Plan C MCR wrote a short article here). It’s important that UBI is both generous enough to enable real autonomy from employment, and complemented by other elements of the social wage. The social movements needed to win this demand (it won’t just be given to us in the form we want it) need to be alert to the dangers of a reactionary implementation of the demand.

Unlike calls for a wage increase or the creation of more jobs (trade unions take a bow) the demand for UBI is a directional demand, even the struggle for UBI helps to make the current nature of work within capitalism, both waged and unwaged, more visible. A victory for UBI would help to disentangle our access to social wealth from the wage, and provide us with more time, money and headspace to continue abolishing the system of domination we are currently entwined in.

Members of Plan C MCR

To find out more about UBI, check out campaign groups such as UBI Europe (http://basicincome-europe.org/) and BIEN (http://www.basicincome.org/)

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