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Other Challenges with Targeted Transfers In choosing between a broader approach like a universal basic income and a more narrowly targeted approach, several other important considerations arise in addition to inclusion and exclusion errors. We consider four issues: breadth of political support, horizontal equity, transparency, and labor market distortions. First, we have focused on the case where the government has a fixed budget available for the transfer program. However, political support for redistribution may be much higher if everyone gets a “piece of the pie” (Gelbach and Pritchett 2002). Thus, as inclusion error increases, the overall amount of funding available for transfers may increase. As the elasticity between the total budget and the number of beneficiaries increases, universal transfers become more attractive (Klasen and Lange 2016). Second, the principle of horizontal equity holds that each person who has the same relevant conditions should be treated the same. Transfer programs using proxy-means tests will have errors in the prediction algorithm—and so they do not treat all people with the same utility of receiving the benefits identically. For programs where the income cutoff for providing benefits is near-zero, horizontal equity violations are (mechanically) close to zero, because almost no households receive the program. Violations of horizontal equity are also mechanically zero for universal basic income: by definition, if all households receive the transfer, then all households are treated the same.

The worst may be yet to come. Every five years, Congress negotiates the Farm Bill, which is the country’s largest agricultural and food policy omnibus. It’s up for negotiation again this fall. In the last go-around in 2018, Republicans tried to gore SNAP benefits during its deliberation, at the behest of President Trump, but failed to do so. It’s no secret that slashing SNAP is yet again on the GOP’s wishlist. SNAP has also come up as a potential hostage in the debt limit fight. After the party’s vocal pledge during Biden’s State of the Union not to cut Social Security or Medicare—and the party’s quasi-religious respect for the largest possible military budget—SNAP remains one of the only major social services that might be cut in the name of a “balanced budget.” For President Biden, the quiet expiration of enhanced SNAP marks yet another disappearing act in his once vaunted welfare state. The Child Tax Credit, a signature Biden policy in the American Rescue Plan Act, halved child poverty. But it expired with relatively little pushback at the end of 2021. Enhanced unemployment benefits expired three months before that. Now, Medicaid is next. The continuous enrollment provision that was added to Medicaid during COVID, which has allowed Americans to remain enrolled in the program without constant eligibility reassessments, is set to expire on March 31. It is estimated that between 5 million and 14 million people will promptly lose Medicaid coverage once that change is effectuated. And despite the fact that these programs are effective and popular, there has been shockingly little vocal opposition from Democrats to the expiration of these benefits. In the first two years of the Biden administration, some very good progress was made in the so-called war on poverty. But those gains are being given back quickly. “This is a steep and precipitous drop in benefit amounts,” said Ellen Vollinger, SNAP director for the Food Research and Action Center. “There would’ve been a smoother offramp if people had had more months to plan. The decision was made at the end of December, and getting the word out was a challenge.”

Universal Basic Income: An Alternative to Asset Means-Testing? The effects of means-testing on households’ behavior can also have broader consequences for macroeconomic inequality and households’ welfare, as shown in our documentation of the disparities between recipients and nonrecipients along the income distribution. Evidence of these disparities raises questions as to whether alternative designs of the transfers system that depart from the means-testing paradigm, such as a UBI, could improve overall economic welfare. An important component of the distributional effects of means-testing is the role of precautionary savings, that is, savings for an emergency. Precautionary savings can be discouraged by the presence of transfers focused on the bottom of the income distribution. In this case, asset-testing can add an extra effect in a household’s consumption and savings decisions to frontload the former by diminishing the latter because households are confronted with the potential loss of benefits prompted by crossing testing thresholds (Hubbard, Skinner, and Zeldes, 1995). For example, in the case of Medicaid’s asset test, Pashchenko and Porapakkarm (2016) find that asset tests that differ depending on the work status of households, with stricter limits to nonworkers, can generate fewer distortionary effects. In a structural model of the economy, Wellschmied (2021) shows that removing all types of asset means-testing in transfer programs decreases by half the share of households that have low wealth and become jobless. The elimination of means-testing leads low-income households to accumulate more savings, an action which improves a household’s financial stability and reduces the potential vulnerability of the nonemployed. Such elimination of means-testing in transfer programs is in similar spirit to a UBI. According to the theoretical model, this reform increases the overall welfare of households. But the reform also means that in the absence of a test, a fixed budget for government spending on transfers decreases the dollar value of transfer per household as transfers are paid to more families. This issue is especially relevant when one expands the analysis to depend on the family composition of households. In another theoretical model of the economy, Ortigueira and Siassi (2022) find that the current system has large distortionary effects on the decisions of working households with children. The authors assess that the main distortions do not stem from the EITC, given the nonbinding nature of the investment income limit, but mainly from SNAP and TANF, further finding that asset-testing thresholds will induce single parents that are dependent on such benefit programs to allocate less money toward savings. Accordingly, these households accumulate less wealth, making them more financially vulnerable.

The recent conversation on UBI and race, as well as the conversation that took place in the 1960s among those resisting racial injustices, have not been sufficiently picked up in the political theory literature. Except for Shelby's (2012, 2017) contributions, little has been written on UBI from a racial justice perspective. And yet there are central issues at the intersection of racial justice and UBI that also happen to resonate with broader issues in the UBI field. One of them is the tension between equality, on the one hand, and universality, on the other. For inequalities to be corrected, we tend to think that reducing the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged is the way forward. Basic income is universal—it is aimed at all, including those well off. Targeting, therefore, seems to be more on the side of equality than universality. This basic issue has led a lot of progressives to disregard the policy as inefficient, at best, or wasteful, at worst. There are reasons to believe universality is on the side of equality and should be preferred to targeting on egalitarian grounds. One is that it enables a delivery of benefits with less stigma for the least well off and therefore with a preserved dignity and social status for recipients. Another approach is to combine universal benefits and targeted reparations—the Universal Plus Basic Income (Warren 2016). Under the new scheme, everyone would receive a basic income, but an additional amount would be allocated to African-Americans. It is unclear whether the program would be politically feasible in a context largely reluctant to even recognize systemic racial injustices. But this leads me to my last question: What should political theorists think about political feasibility in the discussion of targeting versus universality? It could be that in some contexts, universality is easier to advertise than targeting—especially when benefits recipients are vilified and demonized by the media as scroungers and welfare queens. But if indeed universality is more politically feasible, wouldn't we then come to support a policy for the wrong reasons? If we think the disadvantaged deserve assistance and we believe the rejection of public assistance is bigoted and misguided, then shouldn't we challenge that rejection, rather than circumvent it and accept the demonization as a given? As egalitarians, wouldn't we instead advocate the alternative of reparations? Much more needs to be written on universality, and the context of racial inequalities in the United States offers a particularly salient context for such debate.

When discussing social security policy, universalism implies universal entitlement, that is, benefits are available to everyone with no qualifying test such as paid contributions or the demonstration of need. A program of universal benefits would involve the granting of benefit to every citizen, financed from general taxation. The Link between contribution and receipt is indirect, in that although citizens contribute to the program through their individual tax liability, payment of taxes is not a condition of entitlement and subsequently there is no barrier to entitlement for nontaxpayers. Universal programs are therefore based on the notion of common citizenship and the principle of government responsibility in securing independent income guarantees. Universalism is hence associated with comprehensive coverage and ease of delivery. The rationale for universal entitlement is quite distinct from that for contributory entitlement. The principle of universal coverage was the principal reason the Beveridge scheme (in the UK) benefited from widespread public support. The Beveridge model of social insurance based on flat rate benefits, flat rate contributions, and universal coverage encapsulates a particular principle of universalism—selective egalitarian universalism. The other main type of universal provision extant in contemporary western industrial societies could be called categorical universalism—paid to all members of a particular demographic category with no other qualifying test than belonging to the selected category. Noncontributory, non-means-tested benefits paid for children and to the elderly, for example, child benefit in the UK, and, until recently, old age security in Canada, are currently the closest approximation to a universal system of social security. Defining a Citizens Basic Income The characteristics that distinguish a basic income scheme from any existing mechanism of state supported cash transfer are the principles of universal and unconditional entitlement.

There have been numerous experiments that show simply giving money to those living in poverty and letting them figure out what to do with it is more successful than giving them targeted aid. In the ’60s and ’70s, the US ran experiments in five different regions to see if people would quit working (they didn’t), while Canada experimented with a Mincome in Dauphin, Manitoba — for the five years the program existed in Dauphin, poverty was completely eliminated. In general, people’s motivation to work was not impacted, but when people did stop working outside the home, it was mostly women who were staying home with young children or teenagers who stayed in school longer. Mexico started giving impoverished people cash in the ’90s, to replace food subsidies, and found that people ate better and were healthier, and that children stayed in school longer. In 2008, Uganda’s Youth Opportunities Program offered cash to young rural applicants to learn a skilled trade. (Women in these programs fared particularly well because they were so much worse off to begin with.) In 2009, 13 long-term homeless London men (“rough sleepers”) were offered £3,000 each to help them move off the street, with logistical support from a project coordinator. Far more of them moved off the street than was originally expected. And in 2012, GiveDirectly, insipired by Mexico, gave impoverished Kenyan families $1,000 each to see what they would do. The Kenyans did things like upgrade their houses with better materials and start businesses. There have also been recent pilots in Namibia and India.

Introduction Income security programs are an important component of the social safety net in the United States.1 They mostly consist of unemployment insurance and means-tested transfers, the latter being a complex system of benefits distributed to families and individuals based on their qualifying characteristics. The means-tested transfer system plays a critical role in addressing some of the foremost current economic and social challenges such as income inequality, childhood hunger, severe disability that inhibits the ability to work, lack of health insurance, and deep poverty (Moffitt, 2016a, 2016b). There has been a longstanding debate regarding the capacity of means-tested transfers to effectively provide insurance for households in trying times (Chen and Lerman, 2005; Hamilton, 2021). On the one hand, means-testing may allow for the distribution of scarce taxpayer funds to aid those families most in need. On the other hand, there is some discussion about the extent to which the earnings limits and, more notably, asset limits required to maintain eligibility present a disincentive to beneficiaries to save and build the financial means necessary to weather economic shocks. The relevance of this debate becomes more pronounced when considering the increase in job insecurity and financial vulnerability brought about during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, a clear understanding of the trade-off between helping the neediest individuals and potentially compromising their financial security when capping income and assets is essential to inform the current policy debate on benefit program reform and to what extent a universal basic income (UBI), a financial transfer given without any means-testing, may be a feasible alternative. In this Commentary, we shed light on some aspects of this debate with a two-part analysis. In the first part, we examine the structure of the income security system of the United States and its major programs. We use the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to document a contemporary picture of the means of its recipients, with a focus on the role of asset testing. We find that benefit recipients have significantly less accumulated wealth than nonrecipients even when their annual incomes are in the same quintile of the income distribution. By analyzing households’ assets, we find that resources—asset categories that are broadly tested by programs—are unevenly distributed between recipients and nonrecipients, a situation indicating that participants at the very bottom of the income distribution are most likely in asset poverty and have wealth below means-testing thresholds. We take a deeper dive into households’ balance sheets as indicated in the SIPP and find that benefit recipients have a relatively larger share of assets in property and other noncash items when compared to nonrecipients. This fact is in line with surveyed literature that suggests that asset-testing may affect recipients’ decisionmaking regarding savings and asset allocation, that is, where and how they place their money. These findings suggest the need for an examination of the effectiveness of asset-testing in transfer programs, and the second part of our analysis reviews the literature on the effects of asset-testing and discusses how a reduction or even elimination of means-testing, similar to a UBI approach, could present a policy alternative to provide financial support to low-income households. Recent research suggests reforms that depart from strict testing could improve households’ welfare, although not without trade-offs that have broad macroeconomic and fiscal effects.

Incremental adjustments to our capitalist society—such as means-tested welfare benefits, anti-gentrification, and policing reform—are important and should be fought for. But many of these approaches are perceived, sometimes accurately, to pit exploited groups against each other in zero-sum games. Taxpaying people who are not targeted by specific welfare programs represent welfare recipients as being supported by their dime; efforts to protect neighborhoods from newcomers further constrict an increasingly unaffordable housing market for outsiders; and many view the police as necessary to protect them from intimidating populations, especially youth of color. When these ways of generating antagonistic security dominate political discussions, they support the dangerous and mistaken idea that social groups must primarily protect themselves from other groups, This neglects the hidden framework of false choices that seem to constrict the viable possibilities to only various forms of antagonistic security. The result is a political climate that fails to imagine how we might build cooperative security together. UBI- capitulates to exactly these kinds of forces by secretly serving as an offensive against welfare programs and other forms of government-provided security. UBI+ asks instead that we find ways to struggle together for forms of cooperative security—security that does not sacrifice the lives and liberty of vulnerable people. Only when this is our orientation will we be in a position to dismantle racial capitalism.

A universal basic income, or UBI, is defined as “a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement,” according to the Basic Income Earth Network. The child tax credit isn’t quite the same, because it is only for families with children; it also phases out at higher income levels and essentially still forces people to prove they are “poor enough” to need help—a means test. A more ambitious bill approaching the idea of UBI introduced by Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Mondaire Jones, would eliminate the means test, thereby creating a universal child allowance. Universal benefits have several advantages over means-tested benefits. They avoid divisions between “us” and “them,” removing the stigma associated with targeted benefits. Uptake by the needy, a persistent problem with targeted benefits, is improved when stigma and bureaucratic hurdles are removed. Universal benefits tend to be more popular and hence are more politically secure and better funded. And universal benefits, dispensing with means testing, are easier to administer. The universal child allowance would enroll all children at birth so no child would be excluded.

A number of currents in Marxist thinking, however, have sought to integrate critiques of capitalism with critiques of environmental destruction (e.g. O’Connor 1998; Smith 1984). Combining a critique of the alienation of workers from the products of their labour with a critique of the capitalist estrangement of people from nature, various scholars have proposed ecosocialism as a project to transcend all forms of alienation. Drawing on the labour theory of value, ecosocialists such as Foster (2000:256) make the normative argument for “a world of rational ecology and human freedom with an earthly basis—the society of associated producers”. However, it remains necessary to ask how this imagined free association of workers addresses both the threat of technological disemployment and the need to revalue reproductive spheres. Marxists typically hold that the products of labour should belong to the workers who created its value. In order to bring production in line with ecological limits, ecosocialists aspire for a society in which people work less and fairly distribute the burdens and benefits of labour. However, if only a portion of the population works, how does the remainder of the population access the resources necessary to survive? If there is less work, how do displaced workers sustain themselves? Within Marxist thinking, there are longstanding efforts to rework the centrality of both labour and the labourer, demonstrating the consistency of ideas like UBI with some articulations of Marxism. Gorz (1980, 1982, 1985), in particular, challenged Marxist orthodoxy that privileged the worker as the revolutionary subject, suggesting instead that radical change would come from those who no longer identify themselves with their salaried labour (see also Ferguson and Li 2018). He urged the left to embrace the liberatory potential of automation and mobilise people’s disaffection with undesirable work. Gorz had remarkable prescience, arguing against the valorisation of dehumanising work and for a basic income to counteract the technological bifurcation of the workforce. More recently, Kovel (2007) argues that guaranteed income can serve as an important initiative in a transition beyond capitalism, enabling the revaluation of different fields of economic activity and a reordering of relationships beyond the growth to the logic of capital. As Wright (2004) has argued, a UBI increases the possibility for engaging in decommodified activity, expanding economic practices beyond capitalism, as well as creating a “permanent strike fund” that enables workers to engage on their own terms. Moreover, in redistributing wealth, a UBI provides access to capital for alternative, worker-owned facilities. Thus, a UBI is compatible with free association of producers, but means that participation in production is not the only mode through which to garner livelihoods.

Beyond this, a UBI contributes to the creation of new subjectivities through the political centring of distribution and the provision of economic security. While not a panacea, and necessarily but a supplement to wider political ecological approaches and imaginaries, a UBI provides economic security and creates the conditions of possibility for people to cultivate alternative relations. This security, while never fully provided in practice, has been shown to have significant impacts on the experiences and subjectivities of participants of UBI trials. While a UBI is a redistributive mechanism and not directly an environmental initiative, it enables a further and more radical reimagination of what a community, economy, and democracy might be. This can help nurture and sustain a constituency for other green initiatives, such as reorienting economies away from extractive to renewable resources, expanding public services, transitioning away from a growth economy, and revaluing sustainable community relationships. Finally, UBI presents an affirmative vision of a liveable future, countering the increasing fearful politics proliferating on both the left and right. Where radical environmental politics mobilise a dystopian imaginary of an unliveable future and a melancholic longing for a more sustainable past, and conservative forces continually invoke the fear of further job losses to rationalise the continued erosion of environmental and worker protections, UBI calls forth a new optimism. Rather than calling for a return to dreary labour, UBI points us towards a more auspicious future of material satisfaction and expanded leisure, community and democratic participation.

The first point to emphasize is that the demand for UBI is a demand for a political transformation, not just an economic one. It is often thought that UBI is simple a form of redistribution from the rich to the poor, or that it is just a measure to maintain economic growth by stimulating consumer demand. From this perspective, UBI would have impeccable reformist credentials and be little more than a glorified progressive tax system. Yet the real significance of UBI lies in the way it overturns the asymmetry of power that currently exists between labour and capital. As we saw in the discussion of surplus populations, the proletariat is defined by its separation from the means of production and subsistence. The proletariat is thereby forced to sell itself in the job market in order to gain the income necessary to survive. The most fortunate among us have the leisure to choose which job to take, but few of us have the capacity to choose no job. A basic income changes this condition, by giving the proletariat a means of subsistence without dependency on a job. 107 Workers, in other words, have the option to choose whether to take a job or not (in many ways, taking neoclassical economics at its word, and making work truly voluntary). A UBI therefore unbinds the coercive aspects of wage labour, partially decommodifies labour, and thus transforms the political relationship between labour and capital. This transformation – making work voluntary rather than coerced – has a number of significant consequences. In the first place, it increases class power by reducing slack in the labour market: wages fall, and employers a free to debates workers. 108 By contrast, when the labour market is tight, labour gains the political edge. The economist Michal Kalecki recognized this long ago when he argued that it explained why full employment would be resisted at every step. 109 If every worker were employed, the threat of being fired would lose its disciplinary character – there would be more than enough jobs waiting just outside. Workers would gain the upper hand, and capital would lose its political power. The same dynamic holds for a basic income: by eliminating the reliance on wage labour, workers gain control over how much labour to supply, giving them significant power in the labour market. Class power is also increased in a variety of ways. Strikes are easier to mobilize, since workers no longer have to worry about pay being docked or dwindling strike funds. The amount of time spent working for a wage can be modified to one’s own desire, with free time spent building communities and engaging with politics. One can slow down and reflect, safely protected from the constant pressures of neoliberalism. The anxieties that surround work and unemployment are reduced with the safety net of a UBI 110 Moreover, the demand for UBI combines the needs of the employed, the unemployed, the underemployed, migrant labour, temporary workers, students and the disabled. 111 It articulates a common interest between these groups and provides a populist orientation for them to mobilize towards. The second related feature of UBI is that it transforms precarity and unemployment from a state of insecurity to a state of voluntary flexibility. It is often forgotten that the initial push for flexible labour came from workers, as a way of demolishing the constraining permanency of traditional Fordist labour. 112 The repetitiveness of a nine-to-five job, combined with the tediousness of most work, is hardly an appealing prospect for a life-long career. The demands of care labour often require a flexible approach as well, further undermining the appeal of traditional jobs. Marx himself invokes the liberating aspects of flexible labour in his famous claim that communism ‘makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.’ 113 In the face of these desires for flexibility, capital adapted and co-opted them into a new form of exploitation. Today, flexible labour simply represents itself as precarity and insecurity, rather than freedom. The UBI responds to this generalization of precarity and transforms it from a state to be feared back into a state of liberation.

At a community level, we believe that a UBI can contribute to more rigorous dialogues over development trajectories. We concede that it is likely that traditionally unionised, white, male workers, who receive high remuneration rates and hold privileged social status as producers, may still prefer to keep their jobs or find new highly paid employment. And yet, we suspect that a UBI that enables a dignified life by everyone might well be enough to reconfigure local environmental conflicts. Almost three decades ago, Gould (1991) noted that industry has greater leverage over economically dependent communities, but that sustained economic downturns broke the subjective link between community well-being and corporate interests, increasing local receptivity to environmental regulations. UBI presents a similar opportunity to delink community well-being from extractive activity without the tragedy of a sustained economic decline. Moreover, as technological change displaces increasing numbers of traditional industrial labourers, a UBI could help enroll them in progressive politics instead of inducing a spiral into the politics of resentment and hate. More broadly, these changes create new opportunities for transformative community dialogues about the future, including what types of social and economic opportunities to invest in, what ought to be publicly provided and what level of UBI is needed for dignified lives. In this context, we suggest that UBI as a political demand and actually existing program can help foster the conditions for alternative forms of subjectivity to emerge. The call for a UBI reorients our political horizons, providing a glimpse of the possibility of another world and calling into being subjects that can make that world a reality. UBI is an incitement to discursively reimagine the distribution of wealth as well as our subjectivities and ideas of community. As a demand, it calls into question taken-for-granted principles and truths, including the link between labour and income, opening space for a new vision of emancipation. As a practice, it frees time for participation in the creation of radical democracies, long noted to be time-consuming projects difficult to sustain in the current political economy than demands for extensive labour.

In 2011, there can be no doubt that globally we have a achieved a state of advanced capitalism and a level of production that makes possible the elimination of absolute need for all people, while simultaneously rendering the vast majority of the world’s population not only propertyless but abjectly poor—a paradox predicted by Marx in The German Ideology (Marx 1978b: 161). The material condition of abundance has been achieved, but the condition of the working class in developed nations has become more precarious, and the dire conditions of the poor in developing nations have now, with our global communications network, become impossible for the West to ignore. We are also now unable to ignore the West’s complicity in economic and political institutions that have worsened the conditions of the global poor. Poverty can no longer be considered a problem of scarcity, but of the underlying relations of production, class structures, and political institutions generated by our capitalist economic system. A basic income could certainly improve the material conditions of the poor and the working class, but the more interesting question is whether material conditions have paved the way for a basic income instituted now to abolish the division of labor, private property, and class divisions—conditions critical to Marx’s vision of communism. 5I want to suggest that they have, for three reasons. First, advanced capitalism is undergoing a shift to the greater importance of human capital, as opposed to financial capital, in the post-industrial economy, a development that highlights the importance of the basic income’s promotion of human capital investment. This is not to ignore the vast profits that still accrue to the financial industry, nor the need for many enterprises to have access to significant financial capital, but to highlight the shift from manufacturing to knowledge and information industries as the drivers of economic growth and development. This is indicated both by the fact that the financial industry no longer makes the bulk of its profits from providing capital investment funds to industry, but by financial arbitrage, and by the increasing importance of wage disparities over capital income in income inequality today (Saez 2006). 6Second, the global communications network increasingly allows individuals to find each other and groups to associate without the traditional intermediary organizations of firms, states, or NGOs. The economic advantages to those connected to this network and able to manipulate it effectively are high and almost certain to increase. 7Third, digital technologies continue to transform the capitalist economy by undermining existing business models, providing the kind of economic upheaval that just might open the door to new means and relations of production.

A new vanguard? 12All of these changes hinge on the fact that a new class has emerged since Marx’s time, a class that is neither quite worker nor capitalist, but shares features of both: professional knowledge workers. Like capitalists, they capture some of the social surplus for themselves through the salaries they are able to command for their education and professional skills— undeserved employment rents, in Van Parijs’ terms. As Van Parijs argues in Real Freedom for All, regular, paid employment has become a scare resource whose benefits ought to be subject to redistribution (Van Parijs 1995: 89-132). In fact, the most significant class distinction today is not between workers and capitalists, as in Marx’s time, but between the regularly employed and the chronically un- or underemployed. For the educated and professional class of knowledge workers in Western nations, it may not be too much to say that employment rents already constitute a form of basic income that allows knowledge workers to overcome the imprisoning division of labor and to have multiple identities and play multiple roles, only some of which are for pay. They can take time for education, for parenting, for social relations and civic activities, and also for unpaid activities that may be little different from their paid employment—blogging, contributing to open source projects, and buying, selling, or trading services or products directly with others, with little or no mediation by traditional for-profit firms. Knowledge workers are able to invest their portion of the social surplus in traditional ways, in their and their family’s education and well-being, but also in ways that are disruptive of traditional economic models. 13Despite the leading role these knowledge workers play in the modern capitalist economy, they nevertheless share a degree of economic precariousness with the chronically unemployed. In the end, they remain workers, and globalization and the rise of educated workforces in the developing world have stripped knowledge workers in the West of their monopoly on knowledge-based professions, while retrenchment in the realm of social safety nets and defined pensions leaves even these privileged workers more exposed to economic downturns. Furthermore, the disruption of traditional business models by digital technologies affects the job security of professionals in many fields: it may be easier to become a ”published” author than ever before, for example, but harder to be paid a living wage for it. 14Knowledge workers may not conform to Marx’s idea of the proletariat as the vanguard of the communist revolution—rather, the thought no doubt has him rolling over in his grave—but their experience does provide a roadmap for how a basic income, at this particular stage of economic development, could not only resolve the economic precariousness of all workers, but also abolish the division of labor, class divisions, and private property in the means of production, while not only maintaining but potentially further increasing productivity. 15The salaried knowledge worker with sufficient leisure time to engage in voluntary creative production with like-minded collaborators across the globe has already escaped the imprisoning division of labor Marx described as an essential feature of capitalism, even if she still spends part of her day working for her wages. This is not only because her skills allow her more choice in her waged labor than low-skilled workers, nor only because she has sufficient leisure time to develop her productive capacities as she chooses. She has escaped the division of labor because she owns some of the means of production—her knowledge and skills—and has easy access to other means of production—the global communications network. As long as the advantages enjoyed by knowledge workers are limited to this class alone, the full potential for economic transformation brought about by new technologies will be unrealized. How could the interests of this class align with those of all workers? 16The common resource on which knowledge workers depend for their emancipation is access to the global communications network, and the critical importance of this resource remaining part of the commons is not lost on them. They are likely to resist—and because of their socio-economic standing and networked advantages, likely to successfully resist—privatization of this commons more than of those already lost, such as land, water, clean air, minerals, oil, and gas. Can this class be convinced to advocate for a universal resource dividend in return for the commercial development of the airwaves—and other common resources too? As speculative as that may be, a universal dividend financed by rents on common resources is more likely to win the support of this privileged class of workers than one financed by taxes on resources experienced by them as individual, such as income, employment rents, and personally accumulated wealth. Not only can a resource dividend financed from rents on resources they recognize as common help to preserve those commons for public benefit, it can also serve as a hedge against their own economic precariousness as economic cycles take their inevitable toll, and business plans based on new technologies and models of collaboration succeed or fail in turn. Moreover, a resource-financed dividend avoids the exploitation objection often leveled against an income tax-financed basic income, allowing the interests of this class to align with those of the chronically un or underemployed. Furthermore, the successful capture as a dividend of the rents from this commons might also lead to a new look at previously privatized commons. Is it time, then, for the basic income movement to declare its allegiance to the financing of a basic income via resource dividends, rather than income taxes? Is this the key to mobilizing this new vanguard in support of a basic income for all? Are we there yet?

UBI and New Socioeconomic Subjectivities Here, we develop the idea that the adoption of a UBI might contribute to more sustainable subjectivities. Scholars have theorised how capitalist relations both produce and rely on particular forms of subjectivity, noting that economic rationality is not singular in time or place, and certainly not the innate or natural logic of human beings. Rather, as Callon (1998:51) elaborates, the economic actor under capitalism is a product of a process of configuration, “formatted, framed and equipped with prostheses, which help him in his calculations”. The economic subjects of capitalism must be understood as the product of historically specific modes of subjectivation. Dominant subjectivities configure the forms of collectivity and community that people consider feasible or even possible, establishing particular political horizons. A major challenge for transformative politics is thus the construction of a new subjectivity that can create new possibilities for coming into just and sustainable relations with a human and more-than-human world. Our argument here starts with the contention that the adoption of a UBI would have effects that go far beyond providing income. A truly universal and unconditional basic income program would be likely to result in new, and potentially profoundly changed, socioeconomic subjectivities. We draw on findings from broader cash transfer experiments—notably again there are no true long-term UBI programs in place—as cautiously suggestive of potential impacts. We focus here on the ways in which UBI might enable new socioeconomic subjectivities and the enactment of more sustainable futures. Briefly, we summarise the findings from previous and ongoing experiments to suggest that the adoption of a UBI: (1) reduces stress; (2) positively impacts health; and (3) increases educational attainment (Arnold 2018; Forget 2011; Ruckert et al. 2017). Each of these social outcomes correlates with likely positive impacts for the environment, such as increasing environmental awareness and reducing impulse purchases. We see this, for example, in the decrease in the purchasing of “temptation goods” such as alcohol in cash transfer studies (Evans and Popova 2017), despite the fact that increases in income correlate with more alcohol consumption in many low-income contexts. Thus, the effects of increasing income from wage labour do not parallel those of cash transfer; a different subject is being called into being. We are equally compelled by findings that cash transfers have a positive impact on “social cohesion”. Owusu-Addo et al.’s (2018) review of the literature suggests that cash transfers “were said to have improved social cohesion in diverse ways through improved security, increased sense of belonging, enhanced social status and state-citizen social contact”. Reports from a recently concluded experiment in Finland concur (Kela 2019).

As discussed above, the call for a basic income comes from conservatives and progressives alike although their motivations for proposing it and their hopes for its impact differ widely. From the perspective of a left agenda, the call for a basic income offers challenges to the existing understanding of work in the context of our current capitalist system. As Kathi Weeks has expressed:115 The collective political activity of demanding a basic income is as interesting to me as the demand itself. A demand is not just a thing, but something that must be explained, justified, argued for and debated. The practice of demanding is itself productive of critical awareness and new political desires. Demanding a basic income, as I see it, is also a process of making the problems with the wage system of income allocation visible, articulating a critical vocabulary that can help us to understand these problems, opening up a path that might eventually lead us to demand even more changes, and challenging us to imagine a world wherein we had more choices about waged work, non-work, and their relationship to the rest of our lives. By this account, we would judge the success or failure of a movement for basic income not only in terms of whether the policy is implemented, but also in terms of the collective power, organizational forms, critical consciousness, and new demands that the process of demanding it manages to generate.

Incremental adjustments to our capitalist society—such as means-tested welfare benefits, anti-gentrification, and policing reform—are important and should be fought for. But many of these approaches are perceived, sometimes accurately, to pit exploited groups against each other in zero-sum games. Taxpaying people who are not targeted by specific welfare programs represent welfare recipients as being supported by their dime; efforts to protect neighborhoods from newcomers further constrict an increasingly unaffordable housing market for outsiders; and many view the police as necessary to protect them from intimidating populations, especially youth of color. When these ways of generating antagonistic security dominate political discussions, they support the dangerous and mistaken idea that social groups must primarily protect themselves from other groups, This neglects the hidden framework of false choices that seem to constrict the viable possibilities to only various forms of antagonistic security. The result is a political climate that fails to imagine how we might build cooperative security together. UBI- capitulates to exactly these kinds of forces by secretly serving as an offensive against welfare programs and other forms of government-provided security. UBI+ asks instead that we find ways to struggle together for forms of cooperative security—security that does not sacrifice the lives and liberty of vulnerable people. Only when this is our orientation will we be in a position to dismantle racial capitalism. More radical challenges to racial capitalism are possible. UBI+, by guaranteeing everyone an income sufficient to live on, reframes the way society treats labor and provides security to its citizens. For example, this kind of guarantee recognizes that the labor of raising children and caring for the elderly—work done disproportionately by women—is valued as work. Currently much of this work is uncompensated, and as a result we economically and socially marginalize those who do it. In a capitalist system where economic value and overall value are often conflated, this reinforces the idea that caregiving is not an important contribution to society and penalizes people who try to do this work alongside paid work (e.g., child-unfriendly work policies, expensive child care, lack of clear leave policies for caring for children or elders). UBI- would provide a guaranteed income but eliminate programs that respond to these specific concerns, such as those provided by Social Security that target the needs of elderly and disabled people. This would effectively offer security with one hand while taking it with the other. UBI+ likewise helps provide freedom from exploitation. It contributes to freedom from harmful relationships by helping to eliminate reliance on the income of a partner who does paid work, a dynamic that often plays out in relationships between women and men. A UBI+ that is sufficient to meet basic needs, and supported by social services that strengthen its impact, will allow people to live with dignity, choices, and the kind of freedom that many in the United States seek but routinely fail to achieve. A guaranteed income would also give activists and organizers within marginalized communities more space to work on the myriad problems a basic income would not solve. Many people working for a more just world get little to no pay for their work. In a world with basic income, activists would not have to work a day job or constantly hustle to get by, but would be able to give their lives to agitating for other causes without the anxiety that comes from being financially precarious.

So much for the limitations of what is actually proposed under UBS. But the proponents go further in provocatively presenting UBS as preferable to ‘UBI’ (Universal Basic Income). Before considering this claim, I want to make it clear that sensible advocates of basic income do not or should not use the word ‘universal’, because in practice some people would not be entitled to it – non-resident citizens and short-term or undocumented migrants. Presumably something similar would apply with UBS. That pragmatic matter aside, services and basic income have different objectives and justifications. Therefore, different criteria should be used to assess their desirability.

HB: In addition to the important gender dimension of their critique of welfare programs, an interesting aspect of the NWRO support for guaranteed income is that it was very much a grassroots organization, made up of the working and unemployed poor. This is distinct from the notion that UBI is a purely technocratic policy meant to diminish the political will of workers. A UBI could of course be designed to diminish political will or soften the transition to a more precarious work landscape, but this movement is evidence of basic income being incorporated into a grassroots, multidimensional movement. AZ: We often forget the social movements that lead to policies. We think that these policies just came from the top. For example, we tend to associate Social Security with FDR. While he enacted the law, he did so in the context of a national movement called the Townsend Movement, which argued for a more generous pension, and other “share the wealth” schemes at the time. Social Security is actually a much less generous version of the Townsend Movement’s Proposal. Similarly, the EITC emerged in the wake of the welfare rights movement and was enacted against the backdrop of a lot of agitating about welfare and civil rights. HB: Have grassroots movements had an impact on current discourse about basic income?