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It’s often noted that Milton Friedman as well as Martin Luther King, Jr. supported basic income—and the new generation of advocates is similarly eclectic, running the gamut from Trump-supporting venture capitalists like Thiel to “fully automated luxury communists” like Peter Frase. There are, in short, many different reasons for supporting UBI—and just as many versions of what it could be. One version functions as a kind of noblesse oblige—a handout to the unfortunates being made obsolete by robots smarter and more efficient than they are. Another version aspires to egalitarian universalism and challenges the legitimacy of privately accumulated wealth. There’s a version that sees UBI as the spark for a generation of entrepreneurs, and another that simply attempts to stave off a revolt of the precarious masses. Basic income is therefore often posited as a post-ideological solution suited to a new era of politics: the odd confluence of interest from the left and right tends to be read as a sign that political positions should be eschewed in favor of rational compromise. But UBI’s cross-ideological appeal is the bug, not the feature. Because basic income is politically ambiguous, it also has the potential to act as a Trojan horse for the left or right: left critics fret that it will serve as a vehicle for dissolving the remains of the welfare state, while proponents herald it as the “capitalist road to communism.” The version of basic income we get will depend, more than policies with a clearer ideological valence, on the political forces that shape it. Which is why the prospect of pushing for basic income in the United States right now—when the right controls everything—should be cause for alarm: UBI’s supporters on the left should proceed with caution.

At first blush, universal basic income (UBI) seems a very attractive idea, especially to a progressive. Yet it suffers from two serious problems. First, the odds are very high that an effort to secure UBI would prove quixotic. Second, and more disconcerting, any possibility of overcoming the formidable obstacles to UBI will almost certainly require a left-right coalition that has significant conservative support — and conservative support for UBI rests on an approach that would increase poverty, rather than reduce it. The key issues related to UBI include what it would cost, how it would be paid for, and the risks it poses. Let’s take these one at a time. The Cost There are over 300 million Americans today. Suppose UBI provided everyone with $10,000 a year. That would cost more than $3 trillion a year — and $30 trillion to $40 trillion over ten years. This single-year figure equals more than three-fourths of the entire yearly federal budget — and double the entire budget outside Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest payments. It’s also equal to close to 100 percent of all tax revenue the federal government collects. Or, consider UBI that gives everyone $5,000 a year. That would provide income equal to about two-fifths of the poverty line for an individual (which is a projected $12,700 in 2016) and less than the poverty line for a family of four ($24,800). But it would cost as much as the entire federal budget outside Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest payments. Some UBI proponents respond that policymakers could make the UBI payments taxable. But the savings from doing so would be relatively modest, because the vast bulk of Americans either owe no federal income tax or are in the 10% or 15% tax brackets. For example, if you gave all 328 million Americans a $10,000 UBI and the cost was $3.28 trillion a year (about $33 trillion over ten years) before taxes, then making the UBI payments taxable would reduce that cost only to something like $2.5 trillion or $2.75 trillion (or $25 trillion to $27.5 trillion over ten years). Paying For It Where would the money to finance such a large expenditure come from? That it would come mainly or entirely from new taxes isn’t plausible. We’ll already need substantial new revenues in the coming decades to help keep Social Security and Medicare solvent and avoid large benefit cuts in them. We’ll need further tax increases to help repair a crumbling infrastructure that will otherwise impede economic growth. And if we want to create more opportunity and reduce racial and other barriers and inequities, we’ll also need to raise new revenues to invest more in areas like pre-school education, child care, college affordability, and revitalizing segregated inner-city communities. A UBI that’s financed primarily by tax increases would require the American people to accept a level of taxation that vastly exceeds anything in U.S. history. It’s hard to imagine that such a UBI would advance very far, especially given the tax increases we’ll already need for Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure, and other needs. The Risk UBI’s daunting financing challenges raise fundamental questions about its political feasibility, both now and in coming decades. Proponents often speak of an emerging left-right coalition to support it. But consider what UBI’s supporters on the right advocate. They generally propose UBI as a replacement for the current “welfare state.” That is, they would finance UBI by eliminating all or most programs for people with low or modest incomes. Consider what that would mean. If you take the dollars targeted on people in the bottom fifth or two-fifths of the population and convert them to universal payments to people all the way up the income scale, you’re redistributing income upward. That would increase poverty and inequality rather than reduce them. Yet that’s the platform on which the (limited) support for UBI on the right largely rests. It entails abolishing programs from SNAP (food stamps) — which largely eliminated the severe child malnutrition found in parts of the Southern “black belt” and Appalachia in the late 1960s — to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Section 8 rental vouchers, Medicaid, Head Start, child care assistance, and many others. These programs lift tens of millions of people, including millions of children, out of poverty each year and make tens of millions more less poor.

The U.S. official poverty rate was 11.6% in 2021, while the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) dipped to 7.8%, its lowest point on record, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released today. Each year, the Census Bureau releases two poverty estimates to provide a snapshot of economic well-being in the United States: the official poverty measure and the SPM. In 2021, the official poverty rate was not statistically different from 2020. The 2021 SPM rate, however, was 1.4 percentage points lower. The difference in estimates shows how taxes and noncash government programs can help lift more people out of poverty. The official poverty measure defines resources as pretax money income, which includes income sources such as earnings and social insurance programs like Social Security [PDF], Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and unemployment benefits. The total impact of government assistance using the SPM: 45.4 million fewer people in poverty in 2021. The SPM expands this definition by including income and payroll taxes, tax credits, stimulus payments, other noncash government benefits like the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) and housing subsidies. Necessary expenses such as child support paid, work, child care and medical expenses are deducted. As a result, it is possible to estimate the effect of government programs on each of the measures and compare how different benefits affect poverty rates. The impact of these programs on the number of people in poverty in 2021 varies (Figure 1). Both measures are shown with consistent universes that include unrelated individuals under age 15. When focusing solely on pretax and transfer income prior to social insurance programs like Social Security, 63.7 million people were in poverty using the official poverty measure. But based on the SPM, 64.5 million people were in poverty. This comparison shows the effect of the SPM’s broader family definition and poverty thresholds that vary geographically. This infographic provides full details on the differences between the measures. When Social Security, SSI, and other social insurance programs are added to a family’s resources, the number of people lifted out of poverty using the SPM and official poverty measures is not statistically different: Approximately 25.6 million fewer people were in poverty using the SPM and 25.7 million fewer were in poverty using the official poverty measure. This would bring the number in poverty down to 38.9 million and 38.0 million for SPM and official poverty, respectively. However, when the value of noncash benefits, taxes and tax credits were added to resources measured by SPM, the number in poverty dropped by half to 19.1 million. The total impact of government assistance using the SPM: 45.4 million fewer people in poverty in 2021.

For the LPE community, perhaps the most salient feature of UBI is its capacity to both decommodify and decenter labor. Decommodify by making space for work outside of labor markets, but also decenter by providing income unconditionally without requiring activity articulated as productive, whether inside or outside the market. But this decommodification only goes so far, as evidenced by UBI’s organization around money. Liberation from labor markets is institutionalized as access to the cash necessary for market consumption. It is on this point that Lydia Nicholson’s symposium contribution will enter the fray, in praise of in-kind provision over cash. Delving into the money nexus more structurally, Raúl Carrillo analyzes the risks of embedding programs that pump cash into people’s hands within regressive frameworks of fiscal and monetary policy that naturalize markets and mask the state by treating policies like UBI as redistributive transfers. Notably, these points about monetization apply substantially to variants such as GI but also a job guarantee (JG). Unfortunately, the symposium won’t delve much into the longstanding intra-left debate about UBI vs. JG vs. both. JG arguably pulls back from UBI’s unconditionality but in the name of a richer form of solidarity through partially decommodified work.

Exit as empowerment against employers? But could a basic income nevertheless play a key role in strengthening the bargaining position of workers? If a worker’s exit option is restricted by virtue of facing important challenges to move from one job to another, this unfortunately also has major implications for the bargaining position of workers vis-a-vis employers. Employers who are faced with a vulnerable worker threatening to use her exit option in most cases have very little incentive to accede to any of her demands, for the simple reason that replacing that worker with another one may be the cheaper option. Of course, in some such cases employers may choose to grant a worker a raise or better working hours or whatnot, but this amounts to a privilege being granted by the employer out of the kindness of her heart. This is a far cry from the change in the power relations between employee and employer, or evidence of increased bargaining power of the former over the latter, as argued by many of those who stress the potential of basic income to empower workers in such a way that they are free not to live “at the mercy of another” (Pettit, 2007; Thomas, 2016; White, 2011).

The Impossibility of a Left Basic Income The question of UBI’s economic viability, though basically technical, is vital for determining its political character. That’s because UBI’s effects depend on the amount distributed and the conditions of its implementation. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, in their accelerationist manifesto, Inventing the Future, write that “the real significance of UBI lies in the way it overturns the asymmetry of power that currently exists between labour and capital.” Its establishment would allow workers to have “the option to choose whether to take a job or not.… A UBI therefore unbinds the coercive aspects of wage labour, partially decommodifies labour, and thus transforms the political relationship between labour and capital.” But to do this, the authors insist, it “must provide a sufficient amount of income to live on.” If the payment isn’t high enough to let people to refuse work, UBI might push wages down and create more “bullshit jobs.” Despite the key importance of size and implementation, the countless texts dedicated to establishing a UBI — including Srnicek and Williams’s work — rarely discuss the policy’s concrete details. Many of basic income’s benefits would only arrive if it provided a generous monthly amount, meaning that a moderate or low-amount version could have potentially negative effects.

Focusing on the argument for basic income in support of what we call “strong exit”, meant to enable workers to retain some link with the formal labour market while attempting to use a basic income-induced exit option to improve their job prospects, we have outlined several concerns. In the first place, those most in need of an exit option to escape domination at work may be the least able to effectively use a basic income-induced right to exit. In addition, those who may need exit most are also those least able to present a credible threat of exit and, thus, to improve their bargaining position against employers. Examining the interaction between exit and voice strategies under a basic income, we also identified a plausible scenario where the exit strategy may actually contribute to driving a wedge in between different workers’ factions in ways that would further worsen the bargaining power of the most precarious workers. While these considerations are sketchy, they clearly suggest that the exit-strategy for improving working conditions should not be embraced uncritically, and calls for more systematic attention to the role of exit in discussions of basic income. In this context, it is crucial not to dissociate the case for individual exit from the analysis of how best to support the wider structural empowerment of disadvantaged groups.

Today’s labor market is highly stratified: some people enjoy access to good jobs while others, subject to harsh competition, can only find precarious and unstable work. A low or moderate UBI — too low to let people refuse job offers — could relegate the least qualified people to more intensely precarious situations. As Luke Martinelli puts it: The lack of an exit option for such workers, and their weak bargaining position with respect to employers, means that basic income could end up exacerbating poor pay and conditions if other workers were willing to reduce their wage demands as a result of the unconditional payment. Martinelli highlights “the danger that basic income ‘would aggravate the problem of low pay and subsidize inefficient employers,’ leading to a proliferation of ‘lousy’ jobs.” In this scenario, those with good jobs will continue to lead fulfilling lives, now supplemented by universal income, while others will have to combine their UBI with one or more “lousy” jobs, with little gain in income. The proposal makes no attempt to help those without a job today get one tomorrow or improve the job they have. Indeed, everything suggests that the opposite will happen: the UBI will function like a war machine for lowering wages and spreading precarious work.

However, when focused on the most vulnerable in the labour market, the exit argument faces a different objection. Basic income only offers a real exit option for those wanting to escape a bad job by moving to a better one when such better jobs are available. Recall that exit is supposed to compensate a worker while searching for a next job, subsidise taking on a job with a pay cut, or provide temporary insurance while finding more appropriate employment. This works provided a better job is to be found. Yet if we restrict the exit option argument to those most vulnerable in the labour market we are also talking about workers who tend to face structural restrictions everywhere they look for work. Even the argument that basic income may facilitate taking on a better job by allowing for part-time employment or otherwise moving to a low-pay/high-reward job is problematic for many of the precariat, because under current conditions such jobs themselves may be in short supply or the most vulnerable amongst the precarious workers may not have the required skills to compete for such jobs. To put it differently, given realistic assumptions of how the contemporary labour market works, a worker exercising her right to exit provided by a basic income may be more likely to end up in a similar job to the one she escaped from. This concern is especially relevant in the absence of access to services that may help expand her opportunity set, such as free education or other support structures to facilitate job transitions (Haagh, 2011). Alternatively, against her will she may end up fully exiting from the labour market, rather than finding a better job. Some basic income advocates would still argue that this nevertheless constitutes an improvement of freedom – to wit, the freedom to say no (Widerquist, 2013). But that seems far from obvious when considering the case where exit from the labour market is not desired or actively chosen but rather structurally imposed upon the worker by the economic environment. The potential of basic income to serve the objectives associated with strong exit for vulnerable workers are heavily constrained by the structural conditions of tight labour markets, and the fact that those who may need exit most are also those least able to exercise this right.11 Basic income may help some workers to exit employment relationships in which they are dominated, but we should refrain from generalising this point across all workers. Similarly, for some individuals the radical option of leaving the labour market altogether may indeed be an acceptable alternative to being dominated at work, but again we should be careful to overextend this point and take for granted that radical exit is a desirable option for all those who belong to the precariat.

Unlike ‘Traditional Theorists’, who proclaim a scholarly objectivity, critical theorists make no such pretensions towards ‘apolitical’, or value-free, research (Horkheimer, 2002). Critical theorists are explicit about their politics and reflexively acknowledge their research contribution sits as part of a broader political goal: socialistic transition. I have done so here: this paper is explicitly a left-wing critique of UBI. However, for critical theorists, such reflexivity is not merely limited to admitting one’s positionality and political preferences. No investigation of UBI would be complete without reflecting on the political implications of introducing a UBI. A further, obvious question must be considered in conclusion: is it a good idea in the existing political world? To this end, I offer the briefest strategic argument as an addendum to this paper, as to why the implementation of a UBI should be resisted by progressive activists to compliment my critical theoretical rejection of UBI. Because the idea of introducing a UBI enjoys ‘support from the both the left and right’ (Murphy, 2019: 13), a la Brexit, it is possible that a coalition of populist forces could be united to rally to the call. The promise of a left UBI would appeal broadly and the power of the neoliberal media could succeed, again, in obtaining the necessary support to propel the idea. However, once initiated, the proclaimed ‘capitalist road to communism’ could echo post-Brexit developments in the United Kingdom: the policy could be pushed hard right and could actually serve to normalise right-libertarian values (see Dearden, 2020). What may start as a UBI accompanying the welfare state may slowly shift to the idea of UBI enabling expedited privatisation. As Martinelli (2017: 5) notes, for right-libertarian supporters of UBI, crucially the idea is not to supplement the welfare state, but to ‘replace it’. With a dismantled welfare state, the next logical step for the neoliberal elite would be the gradual reduction of the UBI payment. This would likely occur in two ways: one, creeping conditionality, through conduct policing – targeting activists and those who oppose neoliberal norms, and two, reducing the UBI level to the minimum needed to enable repressive desublimation. As the Bank of England sets interest rates in the United Kingdom today, UBI would be similarly adjusted to optimally inculcate public support and repress dissent, while providing only the smallest possible redistribution of wealth. When van Parijs was writing of UBI as the ‘capitalist road to communism’ in 1986, my political-strategic consideration above may rightly have been deemed deeply dystopian. However, in the populist, Trumpian world, with ever-decreasing space for critical judgement (see Thompson, 2022), such a calculated rejection of UBI on this political basis may now appear a more rational and sensible course to adopt.

The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified interest in alternatives to neoliberalism. One proposal that has been increasingly discussed by both academics and activists is the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). This would typically see all citizens awarded a regular cash payment, without conditionality attached. While UBI thus deserves considerable attention from sociologists, as yet critical theorists have not offered an extended engagement with the proposal. In this paper, I provide exactly such a critical theoretical perspective on UBI, subjecting the approach to an extended critique. When viewed through the perspective of critical theory, UBI emerges as a more problematic approach to social change, failing to offer what its most enthusiastic progressive proponents promise: ‘a capitalist road to communism’. Rather, in this article, I argue that, when viewed through the lens of critical theory, UBI appears likely to further entrench, rather than disturb, the neoliberal social formation. Introduction Since the mid-1980s Universal Basic Income (UBI) has rapidly ‘risen up the policy agenda’ (Martinelli, 2017: i).1 The COVID-19 pandemic has increased interest in UBI further still, both among sociologists and within the wider activist community (see Nwogbo, 2022a). It is clear to theorists studying alternative societies that the idea of UBI is ‘not going away’ any time soon and merits serious consideration (Martell, 2023; Murphy, 2019: 15). For Phillipe Van Parijs (1991, 1992), UBI’s attraction comes from the fact that it is ultimately a ‘disarmingly simple idea’. At its most basic, proponents of UBI call for a regular cash payment to be made to all people above a certain age, without government oversight or conditionality (Lowrey, 2018: 4). The money can be spent however the recipients wish and they do not need to justify or account for their expenditures. Such an approach is increasingly gaining support across the political left (Loft et al., 2020: 2), with prominent advocates including Louise Haagh (2019), Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2015) and Guy Standing (2005, 2017).2 While UBI clearly deserves considerable attention from sociologists, critical theory is yet to offer an extended engagement with the idea. In this paper, I provide exactly such a perspective, presenting a left-wing critique of UBI drawing on central insights from critical theory. When viewed through the perspective of critical theory, I argue that UBI emerges as a problematic approach to social change and submit that it may actually serve to facilitate neoliberalism and entrench the central pathologies of the free market.3 For its contemporary proponents, such as Fraser and Jaeggi (2019) and Thompson (2022), critical theory can offer much needed tools for social research through its fusion of Marxian, Weberian and psychoanalytic insights. The exploration of such themes enables important, and often overlooked concerns, to be explored, such as changing forms of consciousness, rationality, and desire. Yet, to its detractors, the critical theory tradition can be associated with varying shades of Marxist dogma, obscurantism and Eurocentrism (see Allen, 2016; Bhambra, 2021). Conversely, in this paper, I hope to demonstrate the continued relevance of critical theory for accessible, reflexive scholarship, which engages with ideas that are of pressing concern within and beyond the academy.

Critique is typically contrasted with ideal-theory (see Engelstad, 2021). Much of the existing normatively oriented literature on UBI derives from the ‘Ideal-Theory’ tradition (Bidadanure, 2019); from thinkers’ abstract philosophising about ‘just’ societies. For example, Van Parijs (1991) adopts a quasi-Rawlsian methodology to advocate for the normative merits of UBI. In contrast to such ‘god’s eye’, ‘transcendent’ philosophising, critical theorists prefer a sociological analysis anchored within existing social norms and practices (Strydom, 2011). This means that critical theorists seek to explore the relative strengths and weaknesses of an idea on the basis of the purported strengths claimed by its advocates, providing a base in existing political struggles and debates (Horkheimer, 2002; see Delanty, 2020; Schaub, 2015). While such an approach can be formalised in immanent ‘normative reconstructive’ methodologies (see Buchwalter, 2016: 57–88); in this paper, I adopt a less-formulaic perspective, identifying the purported strengths that advocates of UBI claim, which I then subject to interrogation to determine their coherence. The word ‘coherence’ is important here. Critical theory derives from the left-Hegelian tradition and is invested in a dialectical approach to sociological research (Horkheimer, 2002; see Delanty, 2020). The instability of a contradiction is held to be the guiding force for social transition and is invested with normative and pedagogic weight (see Held, 1980). Critical theory is also methodologically distinctive in its negativity; there is an explicit investment in the value of a negative ‘critique’ (Adorno, (1990 [1966]); Freyenhagen, 2013). Contrary to the ‘positivist bias’ of much sociological enquiry,10 for critical theorists one does not need to suggest a ‘solution’ to provide a useful contribution to a debate: simply identifying the limitations of a proposition, or of a form of thought or desire, can be of vital importance (see Delanty, 2020; Marcuse, 1969: 11).11 The approach adopted in this paper is simple: I identify the central claims raised in support of UBI by its left-libertarian advocates and analyse their coherence. I filter the purported benefits of UBI through a conceptual arsenal rooted in critical theory. I shall interrogate the alleged strengths of UBI in light of their ability to challenge ‘reification’ and forms of pathological ‘real abstraction’. This conceptual lexicon enables an analysis which is not merely concerned with distributional justice, or optimal efficiency, but engages a wider range of socio-political pathologies (Harris, 2019; Thompson, 2022). As such, I argue that critical theory provides an important, and underutilised, interdisciplinary-sociological perspective, which can shed new light on UBI.

This basic income thus aims to be nothing more than a palliative measure. In the United States, for example, there is the SNAP program (“food stamps”) to provide food to people who cannot afford it. Payments such as this ameliorate the situation of the poorest sectors, but they do nothing to reduce income inequality between capitalists and workers, which has particularly exploded in the US since the 1980s. This type of program just allows this unequal income distribution to continue but with a bit less tension. Such a basic income that comes “from above” as a public social security policy will hardly be universal. Capitalist production is dependent on not only an active labor force, but also a pool of unemployed and underemployed that are ready to take up any vacancy. This “reserve army of labor” exerts a constant downward pressure on wages and has a disciplining effect on the employed sector of the working class. A government-provided allowance that enables workers to fully withdraw themselves from the labor market would dismantle this key mechanism of any capitalist system. For this reason, it will be focused only on very low-income sectors and will not even amount to a basic income, but be set at levels below the poverty line. This is the only way that a basic income can be compatible with the continued exploitation of labor in the conditions that modern capitalism in decline requires, especially in backward and dependent countries, but also in the richest imperialist economies. Basic income is a long way from being a progressive reform that ensures a decent income for all citizens. Public policies are caught between the demand for fiscal austerity and the need to contain discontent and make capitalism’s continued social degradation somehow bearable. As Michel Husson states, “Progressive partisans of an income of 1,000 euros per month may well serve as ‘useful idiots’ for the establishment of a universal income of 400 euros, for a final settlement that also advantageously reduces the operating costs of the welfare state.” 6

UBI: A Critique Taken together, the arguments above appear to present a powerful progressive case for introducing a UBI. In this section, I subject them to critique, drawing on the concepts of reification and real abstraction. I contend that while the quantitative advantages are undeniable, the qualitative changes UBI could bring are illusory as the implementation of UBI could in fact serve to reinforce the dominant modalities of thought and desire which exist within capitalist society. The adoption of the critical theoretical perspective is particularly valuable here, insofar as it enables a discussion of epistemic and depth-psychological concerns, which are often absent within traditional positivistic social research (see Delanty, 2020). Reification Adorno and Horkheimer (1997) united insights from Weber and Marx, and crucially, from Lukács, in their seminal work on reification. For Lukács (1972), reification chiefly refers to the artificial distanciation between the subject and their external world which is induced by capitalism. The capitalist subject views the world in a disengaged manner, abstracted from their surroundings, viewing others people, and their wider environment, as mere ‘things’, as ‘dead matter’ (Horkheimer, 1993: 81). For Lukács (1972), reification derives from ‘the fetish character of commodities’ and is ‘the subjective stance corresponding to it’ (p. 84). In a world which is governed by the exchange of commodities, a pathological form of consciousness comes to dominate. Reification is furthered by the market’s dependence on logics of false equivalence, what Lukács (1972) calls a ‘phantom objectivity’ (p. 6). The capitalist subject is encouraged to reduce their external world to exchangeable, purposeless matter which can be swapped for equivalent capital. The exchange value of a human liver is now commensurate with the exchange value of a certain weight of turnips, or of plutonium. The qualitative difference between the aforementioned objects is ‘written off as literature’ by the reifying logics of the market (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997: 7). For critical theorists, the hegemony of such reified consciousness is a crucial obstacle to progressive transformation as it prevents the development of critical reason. A fundamental concern for critical theorists, when assessing UBI, therefore, is will it help ameliorate reified consciousness? In this regard, the answer is a resounding negative. Rather than furthering a co-operative approach to all social relations, ever more domains of social life will become controlled by the market. As Van Parijs and Vanderborght (2017: 12) argue, it is ‘fundamental to the concept of a basic income . . . that it is paid in cash’. We would then see an attendant expansion of the commodity form, because we will see an attendant expansion of market actors. The capital relation will now become more, rather than less dominant, as more actors become ‘consumers’, regardless of how their capital is ‘earned’. While the ‘hidden abodes’ of capitalism (Fraser, 2014) were undeniably irrational and inequitable in past social formations, they remained substantially immune from the reifying power of the market. For example, love, esteem and respect can be earned in a manner not mediated by wage-labour (Honneth, 1995). The introduction of a UBI would see ‘recognition’ taking the universal form of capital. Recall that for Van der Veen and Van Parijs (1986) UBI could displace the socialist stage of production in the route to communism as it would enable the development of a community who are socially conditioned to more readily embrace communistic values. However, when viewed through a critical theoretical lens, UBI serves to further entrench and embed reification and false equivalence. By expanding the field of consumers, and reaffirming capital as the fundamental method of affirming social recognition, UBI serves to reinforce a reified atomistic consciousness, rather than serving to enable the transition to a more communistic form of thought and sociality. Critical theory thus offers a warning against the implementation of a UBI: by expanding the market-mediated domains of the social world, the deeply pathological reified form of consciousness associated with capitalistic societies would further proliferate, rather than recede (see Delanty, 2020). This would serve to retard prospects for qualitative socialistic transition as the reified form of thought associated with commodification and the capitalistic relation will be further enshrined, rather than challenged.

Money and Real Abstraction While the discussion of reification may seem abstruse in the applied context of the discussion of UBI, Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s (1978) increasingly popular work focusses explicitly on the relationship between money and cognition. In summary, the argument presented by Sohn-Rethel is that a society which is organised around money will inevitably reproduce logics of domination and bondage because money is at core a manifestation of petrified, abstracted labour time (Sohn-Rethel, 1978). While Adorno and Horkheimer’s work focussed on the market and its relationship to instrumental rationality, Sohn-Rethel’s insights enable us to focus explicitly on the relationship between money and impeded cognition. This is of real value to a critical theoretical investigation of UBI, which, as Van Parijs and Vanderborght (2017: 12) argue, must be paid in the form of money. For Sohn-Rethel (1978: 18–23), there is a fundamental pathology embedded within the logics of exchange which are connected to the transfer and holding of money. Importantly, this is not solely a psychological pathology, but a social pathology (see Harris, 2022). As Sohn-Rethel (1978: 20) argues the ‘economic conception of value is a real one’; while it lives only in the ‘human mind . . . it does not spring from it’. Rather, our actions, such as the everyday buying of selling of commodities with money represents a very real ‘social formation’ which induces a particular social synthetic form of cognition (Sohn-Rethel, 1978: 2). The ‘conceptual foundations of the cognitive faculty’ (Sohn-Rethel, 1978: 5) are shaped by the concrete forms of activity we take part in through our quotidian behaviour, such as buying bread or paying for petrol, whenever we hand over a note, or type in our pin. Crucially, the moulding of our cognition to that which is ‘socially necessary’ for capitalism occurs without subjects even ‘being aware of it’ (Sohn-Rethel, 1978: 20). Our use of money naturalises reductive ways of thinking and being, which are fundamentally in keeping with the structurally necessary logics of capitalism (Sohn-Rethel, 1978). Expressed more formally, this means that money (the means through which UBI is to be administered) pathologically shapes the ‘dimensions of private consciousness’ (1978: 26) in a manner that denigrates the individual’s critical-epistemic and phenomenological capacities (see Thompson, 2022). As Sohn-Rethel (1978: 59) words it, ‘[a]nyone who carries coins in his pocket and understands their functions . . . bears in his mind, whether or not he is aware of it, ideas which, no matter how hazily, reflect the postulates of the exchange abstraction’. When we live in a society based on exchange we are forced to acquiesce unknowingly to forms of thought which reinscribe the abstract value of expropriated labour as the base equivalence of all social life. This occurs through cognitive processes that are connected to quotidian material acts, inescapable when living within a money-based economy. Such ‘real abstractions’ not merely serve to naturalise the capitalist system, but serve to impede efforts to disclose its contradictions. UBI is definitionally based around money; having real, accessible money in liquid form. It cannot be operationalised in any form other than through money, and it cannot be presented through extended services, or progressive tax rates. There thus seems no way around Sohn-Rethel’s position; progressive advocates of UBI are forced to either find grounds to reject his claim, relativise it or accept a foundational weakness to the UBI approach. There is no way for UBI to be implemented without recourse to money. Indeed, advocates of UBI have claimed it is a positive that more people are awarded more money; feminists in particular have expressed support that care labour could be rewarded by money through UBI (see Flanigan, 2018). As such, through the implementation of UBI, a dominating and oppressive feature of capitalistic society, money, would not merely be reinforced, but its domain would be expanded (see Martinelli, 2017). Indeed, this expansion itself is heralded as a cause for celebration by some feminist advocates of UBI (see Flanigan, 2018). When viewed through the lens of ‘real abstraction’, the dependence of UBI on money can be seen to further a form of domination which supports the capitalistic ‘social synthesis’ at the cost of the subject’s capacity to truly comprehend their relation to the external world (Sohn and Rethel, 1978: 60). The capitalist subject’s relationship to nature, to the Other, is hidden behind the veil of false equivalences, deeply connected to the money form. In short, UBI would further enforce an impeded cognitive capacity, which would defer the possibility of meaningful qualitative transformation.

A universal basic income would shore up the market. We need ideas that shrink it. In her campaign memoir What Happened, Hillary Clinton wrote that the idea of a universal basic income (UBI) for all Americans “fascinated” her. Reflecting on her wholly uninspiring campaign, she explained that she wanted to include it in her platform but “couldn’t make the numbers work,” so she dropped the idea. She had planned to call it “Alaska for America,” referring to the Alaska Permanent Fund. Established in 1982, that program gives each of the state’s citizens an annual dividend from oil revenues. The idea gained popularity in the mid-sixties, and Nixon almost implemented it nationwide. American researchers conducted large-scale experiments in New Jersey, and a Canadian study took place in Winnipeg during the mid-seventies. At the time, the proposal produced heated debates in continental Europe and North America, but the decades that followed led to a slow but steady decline in support. The conservative preference for the “workfare” and “activation” policies that characterized welfare reform in the nineties — led by a different Clinton — turned basic income into a utopian fantasy. But as interest in UBI from one of the planet’s most powerful political figures attests, the last ten years have given new life to the idea. Indeed, it’s now on the agenda of many movements and governments. For Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, two of UBI’s leading proponents, “the conjunction of growing inequality, a new wave of automation, and a more acute awareness of the ecological limits to growth has made it the object of unprecedented interest throughout the world.” Finland’s right-wing government is testing the idea, replacing part of its unemployment benefits system with a basic income distributed to all Finnish citizens. In Canada, the government of Ontario has been conducting a large-scale experiment since the summer of 2017. The Netherlands has the most developed UBI program experiment in Europe. Several municipalities are testing the program’s effects on its beneficiaries. And in France, the unfortunate socialist candidate for president, Benoît Hamon, made basic income his key measure. Political parties across the globe are now openly discussing the idea of distributing an unconditional income to every citizen. Each side of the political spectrum points to different supposed benefits: the Right praises UBI for getting rid of outdated state bureaucracies; the Left for eradicating poverty. Appearing at once “liberal” and “social,” basic income, according to a popular view, divides those who still think about class and the industrial revolution in old-fashioned terms from those who recognize that the “knowledge economy” has profoundly transformed our economy and society. For this latter group, full employment is utopian, stable work is an outdated demand, and the old institutions of wage labor — social security, unions, and so on — are obsolete, brakes on progress and individual freedom. For radical left “accelerationist” theorists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, basic income constitutes a “post-capitalist” exit path, while the self-described “entrepreneur” Peter Barnes, whose bestseller With Liberty and Dividends For All inspired Hillary Clinton, sees it as a way to create a “better-balanced capitalism — we would call it everyone-gets-a-share capitalism.” The studies, experiments, and debates are multiplying, making UBI once again an idea “whose time has come.” Paradoxically, then, UBI seems to be a crisis demand, brandished in moments of social retreat and austerity. As politics moves to the right and social movements go on the defensive, UBI gains ground. The more social gains seem unreachable, the more UBI makes sense. It’s what botanists would call a “bioindicator”: it indexes neoliberalism’s progress. Support for basic incomes proliferates where neoliberal reforms have been the most devastating. In this sense, UBI isn’t an alternative to neoliberalism, but an ideological capitulation to it. In fact, the most viable forms of basic income would universalize precarious labor and extend the sphere of the market — just as the gurus of Silicon Valley hope.

Universal basic income, a guaranteed, no-strings-attached income for the entire population, is presented as a progressive solution to the “end of work.” But those who promote a UBI are doing one of two things. They either entertain illusions in a top-down palliative measure for the miseries of the capitalist system, or they are searching for an impossible shortcut to the challenges of organizing the working class, the only social force that can overcome capitalism. In either case, they lack any sense of realism. The “end of work” narrative A widely held belief suggests that most jobs today are threatened by the so-called “fourth industrial revolution” which promises to extend robotics throughout production. Unlike previous waves of innovation, according to this line of thought, the fourth revolution will result in fewer replacement jobs. Yet in reality the number of workers exploited by capital around the world has grown as never before. According to the International Labour Organization, over 3.2 billion individuals are employed today. While this supposed “end of work” has escaped serious analysis, the idea that a UBI could secure an income for those who can no longer expect to find gainful employment has become more popular. It is not a new idea. But what gives it a new sense of urgency and more adherents is that, as Paul Mason suggests, it could solve the problem of “the disappearance of work itself.” 1 Talk of the “end of work” is permeated with a fetishism of robotics. But in the conditions of the “secular stagnation” of modern capitalism, the use of robotics does not produce sufficiently high rates of capital accumulation to present a real threat to most people’s jobs. More generally, the idea that capitalism can impose generalized robotization clashes with capital’s need for ever increasing exploitation of the only source of its profits – labor power. Advocates of UBI also assume that growing job insecurity and precarity, faced by a large proportion of the world’s labor force, are irreversible. It is true that accessing formal employment, participating in the social security system, and so on, are unattainable for a growing sector of the working class. The ILO estimates that 42 per cent of workers suffer from “vulnerable employment”, including self-employment, temporary jobs etc., which has increased among young people and especially women. 2 People are working more and earning less than they did decades ago. The length of today’s workday is as long, or even longer, than it was 80 years ago, and in the United States, Germany and France it is being lengthened further. Contrary to what John Maynard Keynes imagined when he considered the economic possibilities of his grandchildren’s generation, we are not even a fraction closer to 15-hour workweek than we were in the 1930s – even though labor productivity has multiplied threefold. But as Leo Panitch points out 3, such generalized job insecurity, seen as inescapable by those who propose UBI, has much more to do with capital’s advance against the historic gains of the working class than it does with supposedly irreversible changes in capitalism’s material processes. Thirty years ago, the most left-wing proponents of UBI, Robert J. van der Veen and Philippe Van Parijs, considered it “A Capitalist Road to Communism.” 4 But what these proponents see as UBI’s “progressive” side is in fact its fatal flaw: accepting the premise of the “end of work” and sidestepping this problem by fighting not for socialism but rather for a UBI. To accept this idea is to accept that the working class has already lost half the battle.

Cash or Decommodification? Beyond arguments of feasibility or the effects on the labor market, we need to ask a more fundamental question: is distributing €1,100 to the whole population the best use of 35 percent of GDP? Isn’t the best way to fight against capitalism to limit the sphere in which it operates? Establishing a base income, by contrast, merely allows everyone to participate in the market. Our current economic crisis goes beyond the problem of income inequality. While inequality garners the most attention, it’s a secondary feature of capitalism. One of capitalism’s most remarkable achievements (but also one of its most violent) is that it made market exchange the nearly exclusive means to acquire the goods necessary for our own reproduction. In doing so, it turned money into almost the only valid medium of exchange and it made the majority of the population dependent on capital, enforcing a fundamentally asymm etric power relation between the boss and the worker. This profoundly unequal relationship not only subordinates people within the sphere of labor, but outside it as well, through the powerful influence economic power exerts on politics, ideology, and culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, leftists understood this problem perfectly well. The welfare state tried to limit the areas in which the market and economic power could operate. If industrialization had made only owners full citizens with real rights, then social security and unemployment insurance established what Robert Castel called “social property,” marking “the emergence of a new function of the state, of a new form of rights, and a new conception of property.” As the British sociologist T. H. Marshall explained, equality isn’t possible “without restricting the freedom of competitive markets,” without opening socialized spaces free from market imperatives. In other words, for the Left, the economic effects of extending the market (as well as the political and cultural effects) were never divorced from a questioning of the logic of the market itself. Though this perspective has suffered enormous setbacks since the early 1970s, it still offers a vision radically different from our current neoliberal consensus. The ultimate aim is not to make competition more “fair,” less “discriminatory,” or less “normative.” Instead, it seeks to curtail the space in which competition exists. In this sense, freedom doesn’t signify the ability to access the market, but rather the ability to reduce the space in which it operates.

UBI or the Redistribution of Working Hours? Tens years after the Great Recession, some have proclaimed that the world has turned a corner, even if the turbulence of more the last couple years discredits such claims. The capitalist class is preparing new attacks on the living standards of the working class, which it must do in order to increase accumulation. A key part of this are the labor and pension (counter)-reforms being imposed around the world (from France to Brazil and Argentina). But UBI also has its part to play. The proposal for a UBI shifts debate from the terrain of class conflict to that of public policy and citizenry. This could be of great service to the capitalist class as it continues its attacks on the working class. After all, a dispute about the primary distribution of income always entails the danger that the exploited will question who controls social production and begin to organize. But if the debate is shifted to UBI, it becomes a question of secondary distribution, of income management and social security expenses. Some on the left defend UBI because it will supposedly “empower” the working class in its confrontation with capital. The logic is that an income that can cover the basic cost of living would give the working class greater bargaining power, since all workers would have a credible “exit” strategy. This position is defended by, for example, David Calnitsky in Catalyst. 7 However, this argument has some major weaknesses. All efforts by capital in recent decades have aimed at creating job insecurity, flexibility and fragmentation of the workforce. Calnitsky is right that working class power is today at a historic low. So, can we really expect the government to come up with a proposal for UBI that gets any closer to a livable income? Doing so would be naïve. Then, what we need to focus on is not a policy proposal that shifts the attention away from class struggle, but the task of organizing at workplaces, in the unions, for the working class to become again a force that needs to be reckoned with. Of course, the argument of those who propose a “dignified” basic income is not that it will come from state generosity, but that it must be achieved through struggle. However, as Alex Gourevitch and Lucas Stanczyk argue in Catalyst, There is consequently no prospect of the hoped for policy coming to pass until there is a working-class constituency that is organized and powerful enough to be able to extract it, in spite of the predictable resistance of superbly organized capital.8 Accepting the “end of work” and fighting for remuneration outside of employment does not bode well for a working class that aspires to become such a powerful social force. If anything, it can facilitate the new attacks of the ruling class. The “progressive” proponents of UBI are thus caught in a vicious circle. UBI is not a shortcut to the independent organization of the working class that its progressive proponents imagine. In contrast to these illusions, there is only one response to either neoliberal austerity or miserable handouts: the struggle to reduce the workweek to six hours a day, five days a week, and the redistribution of working hours among all those available to work. Around the world, the workload for those who have a job is increasing, while unemployment and underemployment grow alongside it. Data from the US show that, even though labor productivity has tripled from 1957 to today, the eight-hour day remains unchanged and businesses have found multiple ways to impose even longer hours. In the last decades, the time dedicated to work has increased. The same goes for Europe, and even more so for many dependent countries that have joined the networks of transnational production. Far from being “natural,” this is determined by capital’s need to increase its appropriation of surplus value at the expense of labor. Therefore we must raise the demand for the reduction of the working day by distributing the available work among all those who can work, without any loss in salary, thus guaranteeing all employed people an income based on the cost of living. This proposal seeks to question the seemingly “natural” character of the industrial reserve army. The conditions have been created for everyone to work fewer hours. But while capital is in power, some must continue working as many hours as workers did many decades ago while a growing part of the population is transformed into a “relative surplus population.” Thus, we have to question the private monopoly of the means of production. The IG Metall strike in Germany last year, in which hundreds of thousands of workers fought for the reduction of the working day,9 showed that this is an idea that can resonate deeply in important sectors of the working class (even if in this case the strike was called off by the union bureaucracy after it imposed a salary cut in exchange for a shorter working day). What stands in the way of distributing all available work among all those who want to work, decreasing everyone’s working day? Why should some of us have exhausting working days while others are condemned to unemployment and underemployment (with or without a UBI)? Why can’t we use technological advances to reduce the working day to everyone? Why do the workers who produce all the social wealth have to settle for crumbs from the capitalist state, while eight billionaires own the same wealth as 3.5 billion people? Capitalism has created the conditions for reducing the time required to produce all socially necessary goods. But for the vast majority of the world population to benefit from this enhanced productive capacity, we need to question the mechanisms of exploitation that sustain the current mode of production. Then the only “realistic” thing to do is to fight to abolish the capitalist system. We must clear the path for a mode of production that is no longer based on private profit but rather on meeting the social needs of everyone.

Punitive systems Many advocates of UBI are raising extremely important points which should not be ignored: we need to do away with punitive systems of welfare delivery. We need to stop tech billionaires and the mega rich from swindling money away to tax havens. We need to redistribute power, wealth and resources. But a UBI without public services is a neoliberal’s paradise. When we manage to build the political will to raise the substantial extra funds required to fight inequality … then surely funding public health, transport, housing and education would be our key priority? Free and universal, quality public services is a radical demand worth fighting for. To the progressives of the UBI movement: let’s win this struggle first.