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If farm subsidies are bad economics, why do they persist? They serve the direct interests of a small group – farmers are less than 1% of the U.S. population -- at the cost to the much more numerous taxpayers. Among agriculture-heavy states and districts, it is well understood that members of Congress will almost always vote against any amendment that scales back farm subsidies. [3][5] Moreover, Congress’s agricultural committees tend to be dominated by lawmakers from farming states and districts. [6]

Farm subsidies continue on as a manifestation of crony capitalism, where politicians implement policies benefitting their narrowly focused constituencies but at the cost of the country as a whole. In exchange, farmers provide support and even campaign donations to keep these politicians in office. The fact that the farm subsidies have persisted for so long indicates just how powerful are the interest groups behind these subsidies. Indeed, years ago President George W. Bush vetoed the 2008 bill due to the cost increase over the previous bill -- a 47% increase – only to see his veto overridden by Congress.[7]

Nearly a century after the Great Depression, why are we still subsidizing farmers? U.S. farm subsidies are designated in the “Farm Bill” that is updated every five years. The latest version of the Farm Bill was signed into law in December 2018, and the federal government is currently paying about $25 billion annually to farmers primarily through price supports and insurance programs. Although the annual amount of farm subsidies has fluctuated over the years, the share of federal subsidies in the net farm income has been significant. In 2019, government payments made up one fifth of all farm income at 20.6%. Moreover, as more small farms are bought out by larger ones, farm subsidies per-farmer have greatly increased. One would think that subsidies of such a scale would be based on sound economics, but this is not the case. To the contrary, farm subsidies are a prime example of crony capitalism, in which businesses earn profits not by solely providing quality products and services at competitive prices, but also by extracting transfer payments from taxpayers through collusion with the political class. Farm subsidies got their start during the Great Depression as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. The original intent was to stabilize farmers’ income amid an excess of crops and livestock accompanied by low prices. The economic environment has drastically changed since then, and continued government involvement in offering minimum price guarantees and subsidizing insurance premiums is no longer justified.[1] Tax dollars are a scarce and valuable resource and will become especially scarce in our current and future economic environment of rising deficits and increasing national debt. The revenues spent on farm subsidies could be used for more productive alternatives. Economists would say there is an opportunity cost to using tax dollars in this way, and this is not even considering the idea of possibly reducing taxes. Farm subsidies are not efficient, as farmers make decisions about operations and crops based on what will take in the most subsidies and not which ones fetch the best price on the open market. First, government provided/subsidized crop insurance encourages farmers to take excessive risk, known as the “moral hazard” problem, since taxpayers pick up much of the tab upon failure. Second, the effective rate of subsidy varies greatly across different crops without clear economic rationale, distorting the decision on what crops to grow. For example, although corn received the largest product-specific assistance in 2016 with $2.2 billion in subsidies, the subsidy rate was only 4.4% as a percent of the $50.4 billion total value in corn production. In contrast, sugar received $1.6 billion in subsidies against a $2.5 billion total production value, amounting to an effective subsidy rate of 63.5%![1] Additionally, the benefits of the farm subsidies represent redistribution in the wrong direction. In 2016, the average (median) income of all farm households was 42% (29%) higher than the average (median) income of all U.S. households.[2] The subsidies are also not evenly distributed among farmers. In recent years, 10% of farmers -- often with more profitable and larger operations -- received about 70% of the subsidy payments.[3][4] If farm subsidies are bad economics, why do they persist? They serve the direct interests of a small group – farmers are less than 1% of the U.S. population -- at the cost to the much more numerous taxpayers. Among agriculture-heavy states and districts, it is well understood that members of Congress will almost always vote against any amendment that scales back farm subsidies. [3][5] Moreover, Congress’s agricultural committees tend to be dominated by lawmakers from farming states and districts. [6] Farm subsidies continue on as a manifestation of crony capitalism, where politicians implement policies benefitting their narrowly focused constituencies but at the cost of the country as a whole. In exchange, farmers provide support and even campaign donations to keep these politicians in office. The fact that the farm subsidies have persisted for so long indicates just how powerful are the interest groups behind these subsidies. Indeed, years ago President George W. Bush vetoed the 2008 bill due to the cost increase over the previous bill -- a 47% increase – only to see his veto overridden by Congress.[7] Farm subsidies in their various formulations may have been well-intended at their start, but over time they have evolved into a prime example of crony capitalism. Their existence encourages “political entrepreneurs” who get ahead through rent-seeking – in this case, the unproductive or even counterproductive effort to extract additional transfers from taxpayers. These efforts come at the expense of innovation and of management based on market incentives. This does not mean that farmers are not innovative or sound managers. Rather, the incentives embedded in the subsidies redirect their efforts and practices toward decisions that are less than optimal from the market perspective. The incentives result in greater transfers and these transfers lead to higher taxes, higher food costs, and economic inefficiency. Farm subsidies represent an inefficient use of the federal tax revenues, cause resource misallocation in the farming sector, and redistribute income in the wrong direction. Perhaps even more importantly, by rewarding rent-seeking, these farm subsidies reduce support for the free enterprise system.

The Saudi bombing of a school bus in Yemen on August 9, 2018 killed 44 children and wounded many more. The attack struck a nerve in the U.S., confronting the American public with the wanton brutality of the Saudi-led war on Yemen. When CNN revealed that the bomb used in the airstrike was made by U.S. weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, the horror of the atrocity hit even closer to home for many Americans.

But the killing and maiming of civilians with U.S.-made weapons in war zones around the world is an all too regular occurrence. U.S. forces are directly responsible for largely uncounted civilian casualties in all America’s wars, and the United States is also the world’s leading arms exporter.

We have documented the influence of an integrated transnational capitalist bloc on U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf over the past four decades. Transnational capital has pooled its efforts in corporate-funded think-tanks that integrate the interests of U.S.-based defense, energy, and financial corporations across a wide network of growing U.S.-Saudi investment ties. It is no longer possible, if it ever was, to neatly separate the interests of a transnational investment bloc, focused on maximizing their own profits, from how the U.S. foreign policy establishment defines “strategic” interests. As we have shown, a transnational investment bloc led by defense contractors, as early as the 1970s, was instrumental in working with U.S. policymakers to identify U.S. military expansion in the Persian Gulf region as central to U.S. national security. They were joined as early as the 1980s by an emerging transnational investment coalition that included U.S. energy and financial corporations. These relationships have expanded dramatically over the decades, as an even wider range of U.S. transnational investors have committed substantial capital in Saudi Arabia as part of the restructuring of the Saudi economy. Furthermore, the substantial growth of Saudi Public Investment funds into a wide range of U.S. investments have further solidified and deepened the lobbying power of this transnational investment bloc, which operates as a two-directional lobbying network that attempts to influence a wide range of policies. Although the broader political goals of this investment bloc are beyond the scope of this paper, there is considerable evidence that this transnational investment bloc linking U.S., Saudi Arabian and GCC investors has been prominent in successfully working to scuttle the Iranian nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration. This bloc has also continued to lobby for increasing U.S. weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and supporting Saudi foreign policy ventures in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. Countering this bloc in U.S. foreign policy would require building a broad coalition that could link the concerns of human rights groups, social welfare organizations, labor unions and peace organizations in a campaign to reverse U.S. militarization abroad and at home. The fact that the U.S. Congress voted in 2019 to cut off U.S. military assistance to Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and, in a separate vote in 2020, to block $23 billion in arms sales to the United Arab Emirates that had been approved by President Trump, indicates that there is some momentum to challenge some aspects of status quo policy (despite President Trump’s successful vetoes). Whether this momentum can continue will be largely dependent on the ability of critics of the U.S. militarization of the Persian Gulf to build a broad enough coalition to challenge the power of the well-financed and deeply entrenched transnational investment bloc. Contrary to accounts that speak of U.S. “strategic interests” without referencing how the transnational investment bloc defines those interest, our account emphasizes the profit-making motives behind those “strategic” choices. We hope this helps to advance a broader politicization about the relationship between this transnational investment bloc, U.S. militarization, and the efforts to build constructive alternative definitions of “security” and human welfare.

The immediate post-Second World War era saw a massive transformation in the politics and economies of Asia and Africa, as states struggled for independence from colonial rule and as US –and to a lesser extent its European allies– facilitated the capitalisation of the new states’ economies. This process of capitalisation depended primarily for its spread on the work of both transnational corporate actors and the local bourgeoisie, whether or not aligned with the Western Bloc or not. Transnational corporations were often backed by the force of former colonial and the new imperial powers. And the primary task in many of these newly capitalising economies was the establishment of physical and virtual infrastructures that would facilitate capitalist production, commodity extraction, and the circulation of goods and capital. The role of the US military in this process is less understood. It is now a truism that wars waged and won by the US and European powers were followed by economic and commercial contracts that benefited those powers. The militaries were seen as paving the way for such business transactions. What has been far less frequently commented upon and has been far less visible is that the peacetime overseas activities of the US military and its infrastructural power were fundamental in establishing a grammar of capitalist relations which introduced new modalities of economic management and administration to the newly capitalising countries. The most dramatic of these geoeconomic interventions has been the work of the US Army Corps of Engineers in the construction of both civilian and military communication and transportation infrastructures and forging a vast military machine in Saudi Arabia. The Corps brought with its construction projects a liberal capitalist dispositif: forms of regulation, contracting and sub-contracting, debt production, property acquisition, and standards of construction that provided an environment conducive to incorporation into capitalist networks and relations. This infrastructural power of militaries within a geoeconomic sphere brings into question our understanding of how power operates globally. Neat separations and conceptual boundaries between public and private, states and corporations, domestic and foreign, or civilian and military are all challenged by the geoeconomic work of the US Army Corps of Engineers in Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. The activities of the Corps –not just in times of war but especially in peacetime– have been adjuncts to the work of corporations in crafting the grammar of global capitalism. This grammar has incorporated racialised regimes of labour, capitalist modalities of property ownership, an assemblage of laws, regulations, engineering standards, contracts and practices, and finally and most significantly a set of physical infrastructures that have facilitated the capitalisation of global economies. This geoeconomic role is distinct precisely because of the inextricability of notions of commerce and security; the co-imbricated relationship of the Corps not only with private firms (contractors, but also the parastatal ARAMCO), but also with the Saudi state itself, and the blurring of foreign/domestic boundaries when the Corps functioned as an agent of the Saudi state. Infrastructures and infrastructural power uniquely shed light on these blurred boundaries between heuristic binaries (public/private; state/corporation; domestic/foreign; civilian/military). Questioning these basic binary separations when studying organisations such as the US Army Corps of Engineer, and the role it has played overseas, will help us better understand how the fundamental scaffolding of our world has been erected; and the ways these often invisible infrastructures reproduce and reinforce a liberal capitalist world order.

Do we need another 672 million people in this country? That's the argument advanced in Matt Yglesias's new book . By accepting a great many more immigrants, and increasing the birthrate with pro-family policy, we might roughly triple our population. The billion-person mark is basically a loose framing device for a discussion of several of the Vox writer's favored policies: upzoning cities to allow more housing construction, more public transit, congestion pricing, Matt Bruenig's , and so on. One might quibble here or there with Yglesias' agenda, but the individual elements are defensible on their own terms. (Immigration reform and family policy are particularly welcome.) However, they also don't require a billion people to be worthwhile. No, the actual justification for that particular population mark is mainly nationalist. China is coming back into its own after two centuries of recovering from colonialist meddling, and "against China, we are the little dog: There are more than one billion of them to about 330 million of us," . "America should aspire to be the greatest nation on Earth." I disagree. America's status as global hegemon has been devastating for both ourselves and the world. It is high time the U.S. accustomed itself to normal country status — a great power to be sure, but no longer drastically more powerful than any other. The rise of China as the first peer nation we have had in decades just possibly might remind America of the value of diplomacy, international institutions, and minding our own business. Now, as I have , Yglesias is correct to note that China is a menacing country. It's a ruthless dictatorship in the midst of a against its Uighur minority that may well count as genocide. It is a peaceful pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. It runs an incredibly pervasive surveillance system. It is constantly bullying its smaller neighbors, . Its "Belt and Road" and other initiatives are at establishing a kind of economic empire by roping dozens of poorer nations into a relationship of dependency on Beijing (in a way familiar to students of the British Empire). However, America remaining physically the most powerful single country is not the most important factor in whether China will be able to dominate the globe in future, or continue to roast the biosphere with greenhouse gases. (It currently what the U.S. does.) China is a nuclear-armed power, so physical might has only limited influence on it anyway. What matters is the political character of China's closest competitors — namely the U.S., the E.U., and India — plus the functioning of the global economy, and the broader diplomatic context. Absent some kind of disaster, just the historically close bloc of Western Europe and the U.S. could provide an effective counterweight to China for the rest of the century at least. Unfortunately, America has spent the last two decades tearing at the postwar alliance of Western democratic states by going on an international killing spree. China's authoritarianism is indeed terrible, but its behavior outside its borders has not been even close to as bad as the so-called War on Terror. Indeed, with the rise of Donald Trump and an increasingly extremist Republican Party, there is a real danger the U.S. will abandon ties with democratic Europe altogether and become just another authoritarian kleptocracy — like China, except orders of magnitude more incompetent. I submit that winning the Cold War and emerging as by far the world's most powerful country was one of the worst things that has ever happened to America. We spent the 1990s drunk on our own success and power, believing that neoliberal capitalism marked an "end of history" written on American lines. Then 9/11 happened, and the nation went berserk. As at Foreign Exchanges, it was a terrible tragedy, but as far as actual body count not even in the same time zone as, say, the siege of Leningrad, or indeed the several catastrophes America would go on to inflict on the Middle East in a frothing desire to , never mind who. The Costs of War project at Brown University that the various post-9/11 wars have created 37 million refugees. "The real trauma that America suffered on 9/11 was to its collective self-image, its belief in its own overwhelming power, and control of the rest of the world," Davison writes. When one country is so strong that it can do basically whatever it wants, its internal pathologies or neuroses become the world's problems. It is not a coincidence that the most decent, best-governed countries in the world — places like Taiwan, New Zealand, or the Nordics — do not have the option of flying off the handle at a minor provocation and turning half a subcontinent into a smoking blood-drenched hellscape. It is also likely not a coincidence that as America has torched international treaties banning wars of aggression and torture, Chinese leaders have felt a freer hand to oppress neighbors or their own population. American hypocrisy is too glaring for any kind of values-based criticism to bite anymore, and we have sowed too much disunity with Europe to present any kind of united front against genuine horrors. "Stand with the U.S. against China?" Germany might say. "What, are they not torturing enough people?" It would be a good idea for decent democratic nations to try to check the power of China as it continues to grow and assert itself, and encourage it to behave decently. But the only effective way to do that is through setting a good example, and through the soft power of a united democratic bloc. Internal reform to make U.S. welfare institutions, infrastructure, and climate policy less of an international laughingstock, and restoring ties to alienated European allies, would also be helpful. Rolling back the military-industrial complex would help even more. Let us do that rather than trying to add another digit to the national population clock simply to remain the biggest dog in global politics.

There are good reasons for any good progressive to bemoan the presence of the childish, racist, sexist and ecocidal, right-wing plutocrat Donald Trump in the White House. One complaint about Trump that should be held at arm’s-length by anyone on the left, however, is the charge that Trump is contributing to the decline of US global power—to the erosion of the United States’ superpower status and the emergence of a more multipolar world. This criticism of Trump comes from different elite corners. Last October, the leading neoconservative foreign policy intellectual and former George W. Bush administration adviser Eliot Cohen wrote an Atlantic magazine essay titled “How Trump Is Ending the American Era.” Cohen recounted numerous ways in which Trump had reduced “America’s standing and ability to influence global affairs.” He worried that Trump’s presidency would leave “America’s position in the world stunted” and an “America lacking confidence” on the global stage. But it isn’t just the right-wing that writes and speaks in such terms about how Trump is contributing to the decline of US hegemony. A recent Time magazine reflection by the liberal commentator Karl Vick (who wrote in strongly supportive terms about the giant January 2017 Women’s March against Trump) frets that that Trump’s “America First” and authoritarian views have the world “looking for leadership elsewhere.” “Could this be it?” Vick asks. “Might the American Century actually clock out at just 72 years, from 1945 to 2017? No longer than Louis XIV ruled France? Only 36 months more than the Soviet Union lasted, after all that bother?” I recently reviewed a manuscript on the rise of Trump written by a left-liberal American sociologist. Near the end of this forthcoming and mostly excellent and instructive volume, the author finds it “worrisome” that other nations see the US “abdicating its role as the world’s leading policeman” under Trump—and that, “given what we have seen so far from the [Trump] administration, US hegemony appears to be on shakier ground than it has been in a long time.” For the purposes of this report, I’ll leave aside the matter of whether Trump is, in fact, speeding the decline of US global power (he undoubtedly is) and how he’s doing that to focus instead on a very different question: What would be so awful about the end of “the American Era”—the seven-plus decades of US global economic and related military supremacy between 1945 and the present? Why should the world mourn the “premature” end of the “American Century”? It would be interesting to see a reliable opinion poll on how the politically cognizant portion of the 94 percent of humanity that lives outside the US would feel about the end of US global dominance. My guess is that Uncle Sam’s weakening would be just fine with most Earth residents who pay attention to world events. According to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted across 68 countries by the Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research (WINMR) and Gallup International at the end of 2013, Earth’s people see the United States as the leading threat to peace on the planet. The US was voted top threat by a wide margin. There is nothing surprising about that vote for anyone who honestly examines the history of “US foreign affairs,” to use a common elite euphemism for American imperialism. Still, by far and away world history’s most extensive empire, the US has at least 800 military bases spread across more than 80 foreign countries and “troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories.” The US accounts for more than 40 percent of the planet’s military spending and has more than 5,500 strategic nuclear weapons, enough to blow the world up 5 to 50 times over. Last year it increased its “defense” (military empire) spending, which was already three times higher than China’s, and nine times higher than Russia’s. Think it’s all in place to ensure peace and democracy the world over, in accord with the standard boilerplate rhetoric of US presidents, diplomats and senators? Do you know any other good jokes? A Pentagon study released last summer laments the emergence of a planet on which the US no longer controls events. Titled At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primary World, the study warns that competing powers “seek a new distribution of power and authority commensurate with their emergence as legitimate rivals to US dominance” in an increasingly multipolar world. China, Russia and smaller players like Iran and North Korea have dared to “engage,” the Pentagon study reports, “in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of US authority, reach influence and impact.” What chutzpah! This is a problem, the report argues, because the endangered US-managed world order was “favorable” to the interests of US and allied US states and US-based transnational corporations. Any serious efforts to redesign the international status quo so that it favors any other states or people is portrayed in the report as a threat to US interests. To prevent any terrible drifts of the world system away from US control, the report argues, the US and its imperial partners (chiefly its European NATO partners) must maintain and expand “unimpeded access to the air, sea, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum in order to underwrite their security and prosperity.” The report recommends a significant expansion of US military power. The US must maintain “military advantage” over all other states and actors to “preserve maximum freedom of action” and thereby “allow US decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes,” with the “implied promise of unacceptable consequences” for those who defy US wishes. “America First” is an understatement here. The underlying premise is that Uncle Sam owns the world and reserves the right to bomb the hell out of anyone who doesn’t agree with that (to quote President George H.W. Bush after the first Gulf War in 1991: “What we say goes.” It’s nothing new. From the start, the “American Century” had nothing to do with advancing democracy. As numerous key US planning documents reveal over and over, the goal of that policy was to maintain and, if necessary, install governments that “favor[ed] private investment of domestic and foreign capital, production for export, and the right to bring profits out of the country,” according to Noam Chomsky. Given the United States’ remarkable possession of half the world’s capital after World War II, Washington elites had no doubt that US investors and corporations would profit the most. Internally, the basic selfish national and imperial objectives were openly and candidly discussed. As the “liberal” and “dovish” imperialist, top State Department planner, and key Cold War architect George F. Kennan explained in Policy Planning Study 23, a critical 1948 document: We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. … In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. … To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. … We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. The harsh necessity of abandoning “human rights” and other “sentimental” and “unreal objectives” was especially pressing in the global South, what used to be known as the Third World. Washington assigned the vast “undeveloped” periphery of the world capitalist system—Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the energy-rich and thus strategically hyper-significant Middle East—a less than flattering role. It was to “fulfill its major function as a source of raw materials and a market” (actual State Department language) for the great industrial (capitalist) nations (excluding socialist Russia and its satellites, and notwithstanding the recent epic racist-fascist rampages of industrial Germany and Japan). It was to be exploited both for the benefit of US corporations/investors and for the reconstruction of Europe and Japan as prosperous US trading and investment partners organized on capitalist principles and hostile to the Soviet bloc. “Democracy” was fine as a slogan and benevolent, idealistic-sounding mission statement when it came to marketing this imperialist US policy at home and abroad. Since most people in the “third” or “developing” world had no interest in neocolonial subordination to the rich nations and subscribed to what US intelligence officials considered the heretical “idea that government has direct responsibility for the welfare of its people” (what US planners called “communism”), Washington’s real-life commitment to popular governance abroad was strictly qualified, to say the least. “Democracy” was suitable to the US as long as its outcomes comported with the interests of US investors/corporations and related US geopolitical objectives. It had to be abandoned, undermined and/or crushed when it threatened those investors/corporations and the broader imperatives of business rule to any significant degree. As President Richard Nixon’s coldblooded national security adviser Henry Kissinger explained in June 1970, three years before the US sponsored a bloody fascist coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” The US-sponsored coup government that murdered Allende would kill tens of thousands of real and alleged leftists with Washington’s approval. The Yankee superpower sent some of its leading neoliberal economists and policy advisers to help the blood-soaked Pinochet regime turn Chile into a “free market” model and to help Chile write capitalist oligarchy into its national constitution. “Since 1945, by deed and by example,” the great Australian author, commentator and filmmaker John Pilger wrote nearly nine years ago: “The US has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum’s histories). Bombing is apple pie.” Along the way, Washington has crassly interfered in elections in dozens of “sovereign” nations, something curious to note in light of current liberal US outrage over real or alleged Russian interference in “our” supposedly democratic electoral process in 2016. Uncle Sam also has bombed civilians in 30 countries, attempted to assassinate foreign leaders and deployed chemical and biological weapons. If we “consider only Latin America since the 1950s,” writes the sociologist Howard Waitzkin: [T]he United States has used direct military invasion or has supported military coups to overthrow elected governments in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Haiti, Grenada, and Panama. In addition, the United States has intervened with military action to suppress revolutionary movements in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. More recently … the United States has spent tax dollars to finance and help organize opposition groups and media in Honduras, Paraguay, and Brazil, leading to congressional impeachments of democratically elected presidents. Hillary Clinton presided over these efforts as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, which pursued the same pattern of destabilization in Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. The death count resulting from “American Era” US foreign policy runs well into the many millions, including possibly as many as 5 million Indochinese killed by Uncle Sam and his agents and allies between 1962 and 1975. The flat-out barbarism of the American war on Vietnam is widely documented on record. The infamous My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, when US Army soldiers slaughtered more than 350 unarmed civilians—including terrified women holding babies in their arms—in South Vietnam was no isolated incident in the US “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Noam Chomsky’s phrase at the time). US Army Col. Oran Henderson, who was charged with covering up the massacre, candidly told reporters that “every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden somewhere.” It is difficult, sometimes, to wrap one’s mind around the extent of the savagery Uncle Sam has unleashed on the world to advance and maintain its global supremacy. In the early 1950s, the Harry Truman administration responded to an early challenge to US power in Northern Korea with a practically genocidal three-year bombing campaign that was described in soul-numbing terms by the Washington Post years ago: The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. ‘Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—20 percent of the population,’ Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later Secretary of State, said the United States bombed ‘everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.’ After running low on urban targets, US bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops … [T]he US dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, an incendiary liquid that can clear forested areas and cause devastating burns to human skin. Gee, why does North Korea fear and hate Uncle Sam? This ferocious bombardment, which killed 2 million or more civilians, began five years after Truman arch-criminally and unnecessarily ordered the atom bombing of hundreds of thousands pf civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to warn the Soviet Union to stay out of Japan and Western Europe. Some benevolent “world policeman.” The ferocity of US foreign policy in “America Era” did not always require direct US military intervention. Take Indonesia and Chile, for two examples from the “Golden Age” height of the “American Century.” In Indonesia, the US-backed dictator Suharto killed millions of his subjects, targeting communist sympathizers, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists. A senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s later described Suharto’s 1965-66 US-assisted coup as s “the model operation” for the US-backed coup that eliminated the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, seven years later. “The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders,” the officer wrote, “[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965.” As John Pilger noted 10 years ago, “the US embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a ‘zap list’ of Indonesian Communist party members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. … The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called ‘the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia.’ ” “No single American action in the period after 1945,” wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate [Suharto’s] massacre.” Two years and three months after the Chilean coup, Suharto received a green light from Kissinger and the Gerald Ford White House to invade the small island nation of East Timor. With Washington’s approval and backing, Indonesia carried out genocidal massacres and mass rapes and killed at least 100,000 of the island’s residents. Among the countless episodes of mass-murderous US savagery in the oil-rich Middle East over the last generation, few can match for the barbarous ferocity of the “Highway of Death,” where the “global policeman’s” forces massacred tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on Feb. 26 and 27, 1991. Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that: US planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one US pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun … for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. … ‘Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,’ said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. … US pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500-pound bombs. … US forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions. … The victims were not offering resistance. … It was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend. The victims’ crime was having been conscripted into an army controlled by a dictator perceived as a threat to US control of Middle Eastern oil. President George H.W. Bush welcomed the so-called Persian Gulf War as an opportunity to demonstrate America’s unrivaled power and new freedom of action in the post-Cold War world, where the Soviet Union could no longer deter Washington. Bush also heralded the “war” (really a one-sided imperial assault) as marking the end of the “Vietnam Syndrome,” the reigning political culture’s curious term for US citizens’ reluctance to commit US troops to murderous imperial mayhem. As Noam Chomsky observed in 1992, reflecting on US efforts to maximize suffering in Vietnam by blocking economic and humanitarian assistance to the nation it had devastated: “No degree of cruelty is too great for Washington sadists.” But Uncle Sam was only getting warmed up building his Iraqi body count in early 1991. Five years later, Bill Clinton’s US Secretary of State Madeline Albright told CBS News’ Leslie Stahl that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children due to US-led economic sanctions imposed after the first “Persian Gulf War” (a curious term for a one-sided US assault) was a “price … worth paying” for the advancement of inherently noble US goals. “The United States,” Secretary Albright explained three years later, “is good. We try to do our best everywhere.” In the years following the collapse of the counter-hegemonic Soviet empire, however, American neoliberal intellectuals like Thomas Friedman—an advocate of the criminal US bombing of Serbia—felt free to openly state that the real purpose of US foreign policy was to underwrite the profits of US-centered global capitalism. “The hidden hand of the market,” Friedman famously wrote in The New York Times Magazine in March 1999, as US bombs and missiles exploded in Serbia, “will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” In a foreign policy speech Sen. Barack Obama gave to the Chicago Council of Global Affairs on the eve of announcing his candidacy for the US presidency in the fall of 2006, Obama had the audacity to say the following in support of his claim that US citizens supported “victory” in Iraq: “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved. They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah.” It was a spine-chilling selection of locales. In 2004, the ill-fated city was the site of colossal US war atrocities, crimes including the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city by the US military in April and November. By one account, Incoherent Empire, Michael Mann wrote: The US launched two bursts of ferocious assault on the city, in April and November of 2004 … [using] devastating firepower from a distance which minimizes US casualties. In April … military commanders claimed to have precisely targeted … insurgent forces, yet the local hospitals reported that many or most of the casualties were civilians, often women, children, and the elderly… [reflecting an] intention to kill civilians generally. … In November … [US] aerial assault destroyed the only hospital in insurgent territory to ensure that this time no one would be able to document civilian casualties. US forces then went through the city, virtually destroying it. Afterwards, Fallujah looked like the city of Grozny in Chechnya after Putin’s Russian troops had razed it to the ground. The “global policeman’s” deployment of radioactive ordnance (depleted uranium) in Fallujah created an epidemic of infant mortality, birth defects, leukemia and cancer there. Fallujah was just one especially graphic episode in a broader arch-criminal invasion that led to the premature deaths of at least 1 million Iraqi civilians and left Iraq as what Tom Engelhardt called “a disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory.” It reflected the same callous mindset behind the Pentagon’s early computer program name for ordinary Iraqis certain to be killed in the 2003 invasion: “bug-splat.” Uncle Sam’s petro-imperial occupation led to the death of at least 1 million Iraqi “bugs” (human beings). According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in December 2007, “Iraq has been killed. … [T]he American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century.” Along with death came the ruthless and racist torture. In an essay titled “I Helped Create ISIS,” Vincent Emanuele, a former US Marine, recalled his enlistment in an operation that gave him nightmares more than a decade later: I think about the hundreds of prisoners we took captive and tortured in makeshift detention facilities. … I vividly remember the marines telling me about punching, slapping, kicking, elbowing, kneeing and head-butting Iraqis. I remember the tales of sexual torture: forcing Iraqi men to perform sexual acts on each other while marines held knives against their testicles, sometimes sodomizing them with batons. … [T]hose of us in infantry units … round[ed] up Iraqis during night raids, zip-tying their hands, black-bagging their heads and throwing them in the back of HUMVEEs and trucks while their wives and kids collapsed to their knees and wailed. … Some of them would hold hands while marines would butt-stroke the prisoners in the face. … [W]hen they were released, we would drive them from the FOB (Forward Operating Base) to the middle of the desert and release them several miles from their homes. … After we cut their zip-ties and took the black bags off their heads, several of our more deranged marines would fire rounds from their AR-15s into their air or ground, scaring the recently released captives. Always for laughs. Most Iraqis would run, still crying from their long ordeal. The award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the ACLU about the existence of classified Pentagon evidence files containing films of U.S-“global policeman” soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys in front of their mothers behind the walls of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. “You haven’t begun to see [all the] … evil, horrible things done [by US soldiers] to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run,” Hersh told an audience in Chicago in the summer of 2014. It isn’t just Iraq where Washington has wreaked sheer mass murderous havoc in the Middle East, always a region of prime strategic significance to the US thanks to its massive petroleum resources. In a recent Truthdig reflection on Syria, historian Dan Lazare reminds us that: [Syrian President Assad’s] Baathist crimes pale in comparison to those of the US, which since the 1970s has invested trillions in militarizing the Persian Gulf and arming the ultra-reactionary petro-monarchies that are now tearing the region apart. The US has provided Saudi Arabia with crucial assistance in its war on Yemen, it has cheered on the Saudi blockade of Qatar, and it has stood by while the Saudis and United Arab Emirates send in troops to crush democratic protests in neighboring Bahrain. In Syria, Washington has worked hand in glove with Riyadh to organize and finance a Wahhabist holy war that has reduced a once thriving country to ruin. Chomsky has called Barack Obama’s targeted drone assassination program “the most extensive global terrorism campaign the world has yet seen.” The program “officially is aimed at killing people who the administration believes might someday intend to harm the US and killing anyone else who happens to be nearby.” As Chomsky adds, “It is also a terrorism generating campaign—that is well understood by people in high places. When you murder somebody in a Yemen village, and maybe a couple of other people who are standing there, the chances are pretty high that others will want to take revenge.” “We lead the world,” presidential candidate Obama explained, “in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. … America is the last, best hope of earth.” Obama elaborated in his first inaugural address. “Our security,” the president said, “emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint”—a fascinating commentary on Fallujah, Hiroshima, the US crucifixion of Southeast Asia, the “Highway of Death” and more. Within less than half a year of his inauguration, Obama’s rapidly accumulating record of atrocities in the Muslim world would include the bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by US explosives in Bola Boluk were children. “In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament,” the New York Times reported, “the governor of Farah Province … said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed.” According to one Afghan legislator and eyewitness, “the villagers bought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred. Everyone at the governor’s cried, watching that shocking scene.” The administration refused to issue an apology or to acknowledge the “global policeman’s” responsibility. By telling and sickening contrast, Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a White House official because that official had scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people of 9/11. The disparity was extraordinary: Frightening New Yorkers led to a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more than 100 Afghan civilians did not require any apology. Reflecting on such atrocities the following December, an Afghan villager was moved to comment as follows: “Peace prize? He’s a killer. … Obama has only brought war to our country.” The man spoke from the village of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one family from a single home. The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by US Special Forces during a late-night raid. Obama was only warming up his “killer” powers. He would join with France and other NATO powers in the imperial decimation of Libya, which killed more than 25,000 civilians and unleashed mass carnage in North Africa. The US-led assault on Libya was a disaster for black Africans and sparked the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Two years before the war on Libya, the Obama administration helped install a murderous right-wing coup regime in Honduras. Thousands of civilians and activists have been murdered by that regime. The clumsy and stupid Trump has taken the imperial baton from the elegant and silver-tongued “imperial grandmaster” Obama, keeping the superpower’s vast global military machine set on kill. As Newsweek reported last fall, in a news item that went far below the national news radar screen in the age of the endless insane Trump clown show: According to research from the nonprofit monitoring group Airwars … through the first seven months of the Trump administration, coalition air strikes have killed between 2,800 and 4,500 civilians. … Researchers also point to another stunning trend—the ‘frequent killing of entire families in likely coalition airstrikes.’ In May, for example, such actions led to the deaths of at least 57 women and 52 children in Iraq and Syria. … In Afghanistan, the U.N. reports a 67 percent increase in civilian deaths from US airstrikes in the first six months of 2017 compared to the first half of 2016. That Trump murders with less sophistication, outward moral restraint and credible claim to embody enlightened Western values and multilateral commitment than Obama did is perhaps preferable to some degree. It is better for empire to be exposed in its full and ugly nakedness, to speed its overdue demise. The US is not just the top menace only to peace on Earth. It is also the leading threat to personal privacy (as was made clearer than ever by the Edward Snowden revelations), to democracy (the US funds and equips repressive regimes around the world) and to a livable global natural environment (thanks in no small part to its role as headquarters of global greenhouse gassing and petro-capitalist climate denial). The world can be forgiven, perhaps, if it does not join Eliot Cohen and Karl Vick in bemoaning the end of the “American Era,” whatever Trump’s contribution to that decline, which was well underway before he entered the Oval Office. Ordinary Americans, too, can find reasons to welcome the decline of the American empire. As Chomsky noted in the late 1960s: “The costs of empire are in general distributed over the society as a whole, while its profits revert to a few within.” The Pentagon system functions as a great form of domestic corporate welfare for high-tech “defense” (empire) firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon—this while it steals trillions of dollars that might otherwise meet social and environmental needs at home and abroad. It is a significant mode of upward wealth distribution within “the homeland.” The biggest costs have fallen on the many millions killed and maimed by the US military and allied and proxy forces in the last seven decades and before. The victims include the many US military veterans who have killed themselves, many of them haunted by their own participation in sadistic attacks and torture on defenseless people at the distant command of sociopathic imperial masters determined to enforce US hegemony by any and all means deemed necessary.

PB/DH: One of the most important elements of your book, and your theorization of capitalism more generally, is the central role that you accord to working class struggles in shaping/resisting capitalism. Can you elaborate on some of the ways that working class agency, struggles and institutions (or the lack thereof) have been fundamental in the production of global capitalism? SG: The role of the American state in the making of global capitalism was conditional on containing the American working class as a social force. This was clear after the Second World War when the militancy of American labour was channeled into supporting economic growth and individual consumption as opposed to class conflict over democratizing the workplace and investment. It was also central to the crisis of the 1970s, which was about the negative impact of working class militancy in the context of relatively full employment on both profits and, by way of inflation, confidence in the dollar (i.e. the material and financial base of the empire). In the present crisis, it has, ironically, been the very weakness of the working class – its financial fragility – that has played a role in the financial collapse. Looking ahead, we have argued that the collapse of capitalism will not come from a mechanical law of falling profit rates, interimperial rivalry, splits between financial and industrial fractions of capital, but from contradictions and social conflicts within states. And that takes us back to the creative invention of new forms of working class organization and struggles that address the transformation of national states to the end of democratizing all aspects of society, above all property relations. PB/DH: In contrast to many other theorists of the global economy who understand a renewed American imperialism as accompanied by a decline in the strength of US economic power and dynamism you argue that it has actually been the immense power of both the American state and American capitalism that has made global capitalism possible. Why is this argument analytically important for understanding contemporary capitalism and politically relevant for developing a renewed socialist politics? SG: Differences in the meaning of statistics are common among researchers but the more fundamental issue here is that it is mistaken to focus on national statistics absent a framework that include their international, and in the case of the US, their imperial, context. Consider for example the fact that the US share of capitalist industrial production fell from close to 50% in the post-war period to under 25% by the early 1970s. To argue that this is an indicator of decline misses the fact that the spread of capitalism was central to the American project; the spread of capitalism was a condition for expanding opportunities for American capital. This dispersion of industrial capital is therefore a measure of American success, not failure. Similarly, to focus on US trade imbalances (a constant over the past three decades) as a sign of competitive weakness ignores the fact that the sales of American MNCs abroad – which don’t show up in such statistics – are four times as high as exports from the US. Moreover, US exports have themselves generally done very well (lagging only Germany and China) and the fact that the US can continue to import more than it exports over a long period of time reflects the role of the US dollar and the ability of the US to access and consume a disproportionate share of the value produced by global labour. A final point relates to the “hollowing out” of the American economy. As much as workers experience the reality of lost industrial jobs, from the perspective of capital this is better understood as restructuring: the restructuring of the workplace, introduction of radical new technologies, shifting relations to suppliers, the geographical dispersion and relocation of industry, the move to higher tech production and new services above all business services like engineering, accounting, legal, consultancy and of course finance. That is, such restructuring has placed American capital at the forefront of the “commanding heights” of the international economy. The political significance of all this is a matter of soberly facing up to what we confront: a long-term process of building new capacities that can match a powerful and dynamic, if also destructive, social system.

After twelve increases to the interest rate since May 2022, Australia’s cost-of-living crisis is reaching a boiling point. According to the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), whose board sets the rate, these increases are to tackle inflation. However, thanks to landlords and banks who have passed on higher interest rates in the form of rent and mortgage repayment increases, renters and mortgage holders are feeling the impact most. Much of the media — not to mention the RBA — justify this, by arguing that rising wages are a key driver of inflation. But this is contradicted by the RBA’s own research, which forecasts a considerable decline in real wages over the coming years. Indeed, while addressing the impact of the rate rises on living standards, RBA governor Philip Lowe may have conceded that their real rationale has less to do with wages or incomes than the bank would like us to believe. As he explained, “If people can cut back spending, or in some cases find additional hours of work, that would put them back into a positive cash flow position.” Ostensibly, the point of increased interest rates is to cut consumer spending. But if the Reserve Bank’s move encourages workers to work longer hours or find a second job, the implication is that the bank’s more genuine concern is to make workers foot the bill for bringing down inflation. Either way, the situation poses an urgent question for the Left: How can we alleviate the cost-of-living crisis and deal with inflation, without forcing workers and the poor to shoulder the burden? Greedflation The current inflation crisis is in part the result of a series of very specific intersection between different world events. Global supply chains are still recovering from the impact of the pandemic on manufacturing, transport, and distribution networks. At the same time, severe weather events have wiped out crops, disrupting food production and driving up prices on some items. And the ongoing war in Ukraine — as well as and the economic sanctions imposed on Russia — have caused significant disruption in Russian gas exports and Ukrainian grain exports. However, there’s another, more important factor underlying inflation: profiteering. A wide range of companies have chosen to raise the price of their goods substantially above any underlying rise in costs. This can be seen in the fact that these companies’ profits have grown substantially above their growth in turnover, which suggests they have used external factors to conceal price gouging. Economist Isabella Weber has described this as “greedflation.” Indeed, the European Central Bank, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, and International Monetary Fund have flagged excessive profits as a cause of inflation. Despite this, central banks around the world have sought to curb inflation by raising interest rates. Ideally, these measures would put the brakes on some sectors, like the stock market and housing market, without necessarily disrupting the economy overall. However, for most working people, these rate rises are potentially catastrophic, as are their impacts on the economy. Many are being forced to skip meals, default on mortgages or face eviction.

My interpretation of oil in late capitalism implies a political ecology reading of the Marxian theory of the falling rate of profit. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is often interpreted as resulting from intercapitalist competition or overproduction of (fixed) capital.147 Here, Jason Moore’s holistic interpretation of underproduction crises is relevant. His model of capitalism as a regime underpinned by cheap nature creates the foundations for a political ecology of the falling rate of profit. This theorization is especially relevant when discussing world accumulation. Moore shows that an ecological surplus—delivering cheap labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials to the core sites of world accumulation—can check the tendency for global profitability to decline. Conversely, a falling ecological surplus can squeeze global accumulation.148 This has implications for theory and history that need to be examined. As noted earlier, time series data for rates of profit and various fossil fuel prices indeed suggest that drastic upswings in fossil energy prices contribute to drops in US and world profitability. The underlying logic of this argument is that—in dialectic with rising fixed capital costs—rising energy costs affect the OCC on the circulating side. To show the deeper theoretical meaning of this tension in the era of climate change, I work through the “materialized” organic composition of capital.149 The organic composition of capital here is defined not as the ratio of constant to variable capital. Rather it is the “ratio of dead to living labor.”150 In other words, the OCC is the ratio of constant capital, c, to all living labor, l, embodied in the commodity, OCC = c/l. In turn, l is the sum of variable capital and surplus value, l = v + s (where v is variable capital and s is surplus value). The rate of exploitation e = s/l is the share of profits in newly created value. The share of wages in all living labor, then, is v/l = 1 − e. The profit rate r is r=ProfitTotal Capital=Rate of ExploitationOrganic Composition+Wage Share=slcl+vl=eOCC+(1−e). Constant capital is composed of both fixed capital (machinery and infrastructure) and circulating capital (raw materials and energy). Unless its effect is negated by decline in fixed capital costs or by a rising rate of exploitation, higher circulating capital costs resulting from rising raw material and energy prices mean higher constant capital costs and lower profit rates.151 In line with the definition used above, constant capital is the sum of fixed (f) and circulating (n) capital c = f + n. An ecologically focused version of the OCC is the ratio of these two components to living labor, OCC = f/l + n/l. Abstracting from the questions of turnover time, unless there is a corresponding decline in the cost of fixed capital or a compensatory rise in the rate of exploitation, an increase in the costs of circulating inputs n that raises the general organic composition will put pressure on the profit rate: ⎡⎣ef+nl+(1−e)⎤⎦t>⎡⎣ef+(n+Δn)l+(1−e)⎤⎦t+1. The most significant insight here is the secular trend that is expected from this tension between circulating capital costs and profitability. The notion of the materialized composition of capital is useful here. First, note that the inverse of the materialized OCC describes the maximum profit rate: rmax=lc. This maximum is the limiting case where all living labor is captured as profits and workers live on air. A core insight, then, is that a tendential rise of the materialized composition—because of disappearing cheap circulating capital sources—implies a secular decline in the maximum rate of profit.152 This is a plausible consequence of all those productivity and yield declines expected to occur if the warming trend continues.153 Those declines will make inputs costlier to produce. In the coming decades, then, a rising materialized composition means that profitability revival would fall mostly on the capacity of capitalists to increase the share of profits in value added. As the system becomes increasingly dominated by primitive accumulation strategies, taking becomes more and more central than making. In some specific places this tendency is already visible.154 In the short run, capital can try to resolve this issue by pushing deeper into high-risk areas to extract more energy, recreating a new ecological surplus. This strategy also confronts limits. First, each increase in petroleum output fuels warming trends. Second, even the lowest annual oil prices of the neoliberal era are higher than the highest prices of the post–World War II.155 Although there might be cycles of relatively low oil prices, the secular trend is for the price floor to move up, just as the maximum profitability of the US economy, to cite one example, is going down. Capital accumulation cannot coexist with these conditions. Capital’s own structural requirement of cheap energy makes it incapable of reducing carbon emissions or confronting the effects of climate change. Marx’s model of the falling rate of profit predicts that—in the absence of significant declines in other input costs—rising costs of a strategic circulating constant capital will contribute to accumulation crises. However, low-priced oil boosts accumulation and CO2 emissions keep on their upward trajectory. As of today, capital is unable to overcome this double bind. Conclusion Examining the historical trajectory of oil in late capitalism shows that the current climate crisis is not an “external shock” on the global ecology. Rather, it is part of historical capitalism’s own internal dynamics. The rise of US-led accumulation in the twentieth century created a systemic demand for a growing ecological surplus. Checking the tendential rise in the OCC in the post–World War II era, massive amounts of oil fed global energy and transportation systems. Oil-fueled accumulation, then, was superimposed on coal-based accumulation to fuel the new boom. The accumulation of systemic contradictions, however, advanced further as this new source of CO2 emissions was added on top of coal. Oil was both an overcoming of the limits of coal and an element in the intensification of the greenhouse effect. The 1970s concatenation of oil price hikes and profitability decline showed the first signs of the contradictory relation between oil and accumulation. The generalized financialization of trade and accumulation combined with a neoliberal attack on workers emerged in the 1980s as a way out of the 1970s slump. But this way out only inaugurated a period of deeper crisis. In this context, historical capitalism is confronting a structural crisis, as oil-fueled accumulation and global warming contribute to a structural squeeze on profitability prospects. Any capitalist response to climate change, moreover, will intensify the system’s crisis tendencies. Even if emissions are brought to zero, there is warming that we would have to confront. If we confront such irreversible changes under a capitalist regime, it will be in a manner that will likely take us to another dangerous situation. A genuine response to the climate dimension of crisis will necessarily have anti-capitalist elements.156 In dialectical fashion, just as capitalist history has shaped Earth’s climate, climate history now implies a transformation of the present world-ecological regime. In that plausible scenario, the best alternative is still one that uses technologies critically and subordinates production to people’s needs, ecological sustainability, and democratic planning.

But history demonstrates that work requirements are inherently “racially tinged.” To this day we see that when work requirements are enacted, they are designed to harm Black people most. In the spring of 2018, Michigan’s state legislature unveiled a Medicaid work requirement plan that seemed calculated to harm Black people.141 Under the plan, whether people were subject to the strict work requirement depended on the county in which they lived. People living in counties with high unemployment were exempt from the work requirement—an acknowledgement that work in such areas is likely to be genuinely hard to find. But in practice, this would have meant that people living in largely-White rural counties would be exempt, while people living in diverse urban counties, where low overall unemployment is driven by skilled and salaried workers who are overwhelmingly White, would be subject to the full work requirement. Under the plan, majority African American cities like Detroit and Flint would not have been exempt from the policy despite their high unemployment because they sit in counties where the unemployment is relatively low. Michigan’s work requirement legislation was eventually revised to avoid the appearance of racism, by replacing the county exemption with an individual “grace period” that allows people to not meet the work requirement for up to three months a year and maintain their health coverage.142 Ultimately, however, no work requirement can expunge the reality of racism. This racism has hurt all families by fueling policies that fail them and inhibiting the development of policies that make sense for their lives.143 Most families who can work in formal employment do, but they face a deeply inequitable labor market. Wages at the bottom end of the income distribution have stagnated for decades.144 Eleven years into an economic expansion, wages are finally growing for many low-paid workers, but wage growth for Black workers has lagged behind White and Hispanic workers, and federal inaction in raising the minimum wage has meant that wage growth is geographically uneven, as wages have grown more for workers in states and localities that have raised their minimum wages.145 Low-paid workers are also less likely to have access to paid sick leave or other forms of paid leave, despite being least likely to be able to afford taking unpaid leave, and they experience significant employment volatility, unable to predict the number of hours they will work from day to day and week to week, or whether they will have a job at all.146 As a result, balancing formal employment and caregiving responsibilities is difficult to impossible. Even in a strong economy, moreover, many people have difficulty getting and keeping jobs.147 Persistent and well-documented employment discrimination means that people of color are less likely to be hired and more likely to be fired.148 Limited private and public investment in education and training denies many people the opportunity to develop skills that can lead to higher pay and more stable employment. To the extent that cash assistance, food assistance, and free or low-cost health insurance is available to families today, these programs often work to subsidize the wages and benefits of working families, and substitute for the unemployment insurance, workers compensation, and paid sick and parental leave that their jobs fail to offer.149 Meanwhile, national policy does little to support families in their caregiving work. The United States is the only high-income country that does not have a national policy of paid parental or family leave.150 The federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) protects some workers’ right to jobprotected unpaid leave to care for themselves or a loved one who is ill, or bond with new child, but only if they have worked a minimum number of hours for a covered employer for a year or more.151 National surveys find that many parents do not take unpaid leave, even if they are covered by the FMLA, because they cannot afford it—indeed some researchers have concluded that “unpaid maternity leave may actually increase disparities because it only benefits those mothers who can afford to take it.”152

After twelve increases to the interest rate since May 2022, Australia’s cost-of-living crisis is reaching a boiling point. According to the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), whose board sets the rate, these increases are to tackle inflation. However, thanks to landlords and banks who have passed on higher interest rates in the form of rent and mortgage repayment increases, renters and mortgage holders are feeling the impact most. Much of the media — not to mention the RBA — justify this, by arguing that rising wages are a key driver of inflation. But this is contradicted by the RBA’s own research, which forecasts a considerable decline in real wages over the coming years. Indeed, while addressing the impact of the rate rises on living standards, RBA governor Philip Lowe may have conceded that their real rationale has less to do with wages or incomes than the bank would like us to believe. As he explained, “If people can cut back spending, or in some cases find additional hours of work, that would put them back into a positive cash flow position.” Ostensibly, the point of increased interest rates is to cut consumer spending. But if the Reserve Bank’s move encourages workers to work longer hours or find a second job, the implication is that the bank’s more genuine concern is to make workers foot the bill for bringing down inflation. Either way, the situation poses an urgent question for the Left: How can we alleviate the cost-of-living crisis and deal with inflation, without forcing workers and the poor to shoulder the burden? Greedflation The current inflation crisis is in part the result of a series of very specific intersection between different world events. Global supply chains are still recovering from the impact of the pandemic on manufacturing, transport, and distribution networks. At the same time, severe weather events have wiped out crops, disrupting food production and driving up prices on some items. And the ongoing war in Ukraine — as well as and the economic sanctions imposed on Russia — have caused significant disruption in Russian gas exports and Ukrainian grain exports. However, there’s another, more important factor underlying inflation: profiteering. A wide range of companies have chosen to raise the price of their goods substantially above any underlying rise in costs. This can be seen in the fact that these companies’ profits have grown substantially above their growth in turnover, which suggests they have used external factors to conceal price gouging. Economist Isabella Weber has described this as “greedflation.” Indeed, the European Central Bank, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, and International Monetary Fund have flagged excessive profits as a cause of inflation. Despite this, central banks around the world have sought to curb inflation by raising interest rates. Ideally, these measures would put the brakes on some sectors, like the stock market and housing market, without necessarily disrupting the economy overall. However, for most working people, these rate rises are potentially catastrophic, as are their impacts on the economy. Many are being forced to skip meals, default on mortgages or face eviction.

Governments are scrambling to respond, implementing emergency measures to prop up the economy that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. The United States Senate voted unanimously to approve a $2 trillion package of federal spending in response to the crisis.

In that context, the demand for a basic income has gained new momentum. But the politicians who passed the emergency stimulus bill clearly saw that as a bridge too far. The bill gives most Americans a one-off payment of $1,200 and temporarily extends and increases unemployment benefits for laid-off workers. That falls well short of what’s needed.

Some progressive critics of basic income advance arguments rooted in privilege, with an intent to control the narrative of the oppressed, the poor, the neglected, the forgotten, and the invisible. They encourage intellectual discussions about revolutions to overthrow systems of oppression while allowing piecemeal approaches for addressing poverty to continue. This self-righteous debate is borne on the backs of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC), who have to continue to risk our bodies fighting on the frontlines for minimum human rights.

Even the criticism of neoliberalism is borne on the backs of the poor. John Clarke has referred to the  as an “ongoing project to create an ever more elastic and precarious workforce… basic income leads to a situation where a portion of the wage bill is now covered by general tax revenues.” But basic income is about human rights. Ample research has demonstrated the long-term benefits of a guaranteed income ensures that people have what they need to thrive, not just survive.

The last time I spoke with former guaranteed income guru Michael Tubbs, he was excitedly explaining just how many cities in how many states were clamoring to give a few hundred bucks a month to a few hundred of their residents — no strings attached. “We’re probably at like 20 to 25 states now,” said the former mayor of Stockton and co-founder of . “I’ve got to find some mayors in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming.” Indeed, the have become almost routine, especially in California, where about half a dozen cities have adopted them. But there is nothing routine about what Oakland just announced. On Tuesday, Mayor Libby Schaaf, flanked virtually by Tubbs, said that her Bay Area city would soon start giving out $500 a month to 600 residents for at least 18 months. Like a lot of cities, the recipients must be poor and have at least one child to qualify. Specifically, they must have an annual household income of no more than $59,000 for a family of three — or roughly 50% of the median income — and half of the recipients will be selected from households that pull in less than $30,000 a year. But unlike a lot of cities, the recipients also must be Black, Indigenous or otherwise identify as a person of color to qualify. “Our vision is an Oakland that has closed the racial wealth gap and where all families thrive,” . “We believe that guaranteed income is the most transformative policy that can achieve this vision.” Or : “There are huge gaps between people of color and our white residents. With the limited resources of this pilot, we would like to understand better how we can understand these disparities as well as address overall poverty.” The median income for white households in Oakland is three times higher than it is for Black households, to be exact. That the city is using guaranteed income to address such disparities means its program will be something of a test case — not only to demonstrate the benefits of government providing money to poor Americans in general, but of government providing it to Black people more specifically. In some ways, it’s not that far off from providing Black Americans with financial reparations for slavery — an idea that, until fairly recently, had gone absolutely nowhere politically. Not that paying reparations is a new concept for the U.S. government. In 1988, for example, Congress agreed to pay $20,000 each to the nearly 62,000 survivors of the Japanese American internment camps and residents of the Aleutian Islands who were relocated during World War II. Then-President Reagan signed the bill. But, today, Republicans are more skeptical when it comes for reparations for Black Americans. In the dour words of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2019, “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.” He was commenting on , legislation that Rep. John Conyers of Michigan introduced every year from 1989 until he died in 2019. I can count on one hand the number of times it even had a hearing, although all the bill would do is create a federal commission to study reparations and the harms done to Black Americans over the centuries. Prompted by the inaction at the federal level, Shirley Weber, then an Assembly member from San Diego and now California secretary of state, introduced Assembly Bill 3121 last year. Signed into law after a summer of protests against racial injustice and police brutality, it authorized a new task force to examine the lasting consequences of slavery, including disparities linked to wealth, housing, education, employment, health and incarceration. The task force also will recommend strategies for making amends, whether it’s direct payments to Black people or targeted investments in institutions, and answer the thorniest of question of all: Who should be eligible? “California has come to terms with many of its issues, but it has yet to come to terms with its role in slavery,” . “We’re talking about really addressing the issues of justice and fairness in this country that we have to address.” The task force begins meeting in June. Whatever data are available from Oakland’s guaranteed income program — and hopefully, there will be carefully compiled data — should be considered by the members. Even without taking race into account, research from Stockton’s program showed that those who received monthly payments used the money to meet their basic needs and were generally happier and healthier without the stress of trying to make ends meet while in poverty. So should whatever data become available from Evanston, Ill., which this week approved , available to Black residents who can prove they or their families lived in the city between 1919 and 1969. The Chicago suburb plans to spend $10 million over 10 years, mostly using tax money from cannabis sales. The first $400,000 will be paid as compensation for discriminatory housing practices, with grants of up to $25,000 available for home repairs, down payments, and interest or penalties on property in the city. Thanks to data from Stockton, we’ve already seen what a guaranteed income can do for the poorest Americans. Schaaf is right when she says Oakland’s program can “help undo centuries of economic and racial injustice.” But reparations advocates are also right when they say that poor Black people aren’t the only ones who have been harmed by generations of systemic racism. “The danger is in limiting the scope to Black people who are within a certain financial bracket,” said Brandon Greene, director of the Economic Justice Program for ACLU of Northern California. “Reparations shouldn’t have anything to do with what my financial bracket is.” This is why, with H.R. 40 reintroduced this year by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas and , it’s time to study reparations at the federal level too. California can’t do everything.

Does universal basic income have a role to play in a more just political economy? It is by now fairly well appreciated that, on the level of individual countries, much depends on the framing and design of the program: a UBI that replaces social insurance is not the same as one that supplements it. But comparatively little thought has gone into the global perspective. Even the most progressive nation-based approach to basic income faces a fundamental justice challenge in the reality of human mobility. Almost all basic income proposals focus on the country as a unit. (Exceptions include Philippe Van Parijs and Juliana Bidadanure.) Responding to the assertion that nations with UBI programs open to all would be overrun by outsiders seeking to access the benefit, most make citizenship a prerequisite for a grant. A number also call for increased restrictions on immigration (other than of temporary laborers) in order to make such programs politically feasible. Surely advocates of such programs do not envision Qatar as their model society. And yet it is too easy to imagine a version of a Gulf state arising from a basic income initiative that provides cash support to citizens, who no longer need to take work that is unsatisfying, while denying it to noncitizens, who are brought in do the difficult and dangerous jobs that remain. Even if UBI programs include immigrants, it is far from clear that UBI is the right response to concerns about the future of work. The extent of automation and the reconfiguration of traditional employment are policy choices, not inevitabilities, and a critical question is how the exercise of countervailing power by workers and of the regulatory state might result in different outcomes than the replacement of work as we know it with a cash transfer program. Nonetheless, especially in communities and countries where a majority of people are already under- and un-employed, a more universal vision of universal basic income is a demand worth making. On this front, cash transfer programs created in response to Covid-19 may have some insight to offer. In the United States, many of the state and federal government Covid benefit programs restricted access by immigration status. Their implementation illustrated the problems with an exclusionary approach. A few state and local initiatives, however, broke new ground in their incorporation of undocumented people. These suggest pathways to a reconstruction of UBI as an immigrant-inclusive intervention. Among U.S. pandemic relief programs, the federal CARES Act was closest to a traditional UBI proposal. It authorized a one-time payment from the government of $1200 to each adult and $500 to each child, which resembled UBI in being non-needs-based and no-strings-attached. It had something else in common with UBI as well: it excluded all undocumented people and many other noncitizens, as well as the citizen children of undocumented parents and citizens with undocumented spouses. (The exclusion of some citizens in mixed-status households was rectified in a new relief bill passed by Congress in late 2020, but others—including citizen children with two undocumented parents—remain outside the program, as do all undocumented individuals.) In the heightened context of risk brought on by the pandemic, undocumented immigrants—unable to access this stipend, unemployment insurance, or the additional unemployment payments authorized by the CARES Act—have been forced to take on whatever work is available, no matter how great the exposure to infection or how exploitative the terms. Immigrant activists have emphasized the injustice of the demand that undocumented people put themselves at risk for the good of the country during the pandemic while being denied access to the benefits created to address pandemic-related hardships. Some have emblazoned the slogan “Essential and Excluded” on a medical mask. At least four US states and a number of municipal pandemic benefits programs broke ranks with the federal government’s exclusion of undocumented individuals. California, Connecticut, Illinois and Oregon created Covid-related cash benefits programs accessible to immigrants without legal status. Cities and counties, including Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Montgomery County, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York City, and Tucson, did the same. Grant amounts ranged from $250 to $4000. In addition, several private foundations launched local benefit funds for undocumented individuals in places like Washington, DC and Dallas, TX. (My thanks to Susu Zhao for her assistance in mapping these programs.) Most of these initiatives were created following pressure from immigrants’ rights movements and organizations. Their proponents emphasized the local rather than the national community as the relevant unit for assessing who “belongs,” and asserted that undocumented immigrants were full members in that community independent of their legal status. Arguments ranged from the pragmatic (benefits were necessary to avoid the health risk to the broader community if undocumented people were not granted equal access to such programs, because they would show up to work sick or fail to seek necessary health care) to the normative (benefits were due to undocumented immigrants in recognition for their contributions to the community through their labor in “essential” jobs that others shunned, for the risks they were taking on behalf of the community as some continued to work through the pandemic, and for their equal humanity to others in the location). The conceptions of membership based on geographic co-location that emerged from these campaigns resonate with scholarly notions of belonging based on “stakeholder citizenship,” physical proximity or co-location,and “city-zenship,” rather than legally-sanctioned national membership. Together, these ideas help break the straightjacket of traditional citizenship as a measure of entitlement to UBI.

In The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Patricia Williams critiques capitalism for narrowing our demands on the state to monetizable claims, arguing the “purchasing of our liberties; the peonage of our citizenship” situates us in eternal stasis. If “…a change on one side of the equation is always balanced by the algebraically obligatory change on the other” then “[m]oney reflects law and law reflects money, unattached to notions of shared humanity.” For advocates demanding direct deployment of public money, (via a right to guaranteed income, for example), a rigid conception of public finance is a trap. Critical legal scholars persuasively argue rights are abstract, unstable, and indeterminate. But these qualities are not generated merely by courts: indeed, issues of justiciability are downstream from the broader public law of collective governance and monetary design, which shapes our understanding of each other as economic agents and units, and the form and function of rights demands in the first place. In his classic left polemic against rights (to which Williams’ book proved an “unwittingly fatal response”), Mark Tushnet stressed that an affirmative federal right to education “would produce consequences for the tax system, the system of property rights, the balance between central and local direction of education, and so on…”, meaning the courts would never allow plaintiffs to win the right. I agree courts are undemocratic; we shouldn’t look to them for support. But nor should we internalize their institutional limitations as limitations on the deeper politics of rights. If we conceive of rights as social demands that exist before and beyond the courts, as tools that affirmatively express social commitments, then demanding transformation is precisely the point. Indeed, if rights demands are to serve as “non-reformist reforms”, they must definitionally demand contradictions of social reproduction and extraction be resolved or abolished. This means avoiding the “social construction that locks money into an impossible equation…” , a “formula for class war…”, as Williams warns us. We can all enrich our vision of rights and social transformation by dispensing with a neoliberal lens, that sees money as a finite commodity harvested from the market, to be re-distributed, rather than a social technology, grounded in public law, to be pre-distributed or redesigned more equitably in the first place (as the many LPE blog series on money suggest). In essence, neoliberalism reduces public finance to an analytically inaccurate but politically useful algebra. It takes a broad and deep social enterprise — budgeting — and shrinks it to a sacred site of sacrifice, for rationing public money by merit, penny by penny. But one cannot balance complex budgets with dynamic channels of revenue and expenditure simply by symmetrically raising taxes and cutting spending. The Congressional Budget Office’s projections rarely resemble reality, offering an “illusion of control.” Yet Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no such thing as public money, only taxpayer money” is useful politically, as it reinforces the grand message: “there is no society.” Countering this message, we should approach public finance less in terms of “tax-and-transfer” and more in terms of “create and destroy.” As Amna Akbar has written, radical legal imagination creates space for the new. Social movements have long demanded emancipatory public finance: informed not just by abolition, but abundance. If we recognize money as a matter of legal design and a site of governance, which helps to nurture certain social spaces and repress others, we can better see the ideological tensions at play in the rights debate, and more broadly, the discussion of “paying for” rights, Certainly, we cannot avoid the perennial question: “how are we going to pay for it?” But budgetary statecraft often cloaks reactionary politics. We must also ask questions like 1) “How does this payment happen?”, 2) “When does this payment happen?”, and most importantly, 3) “Who is actually making this payment?” or, put another way, “who is the ‘we’ in this question?” For instance, “Whose not-so-basic-outflows would fund our basic income?” As K-Sue Park reminds us, US legal frameworks arise from settler colonialism. Hence, we should assume the fiscal demos in question, as well as the relevant analytical categories, are necessarily racialized, gendered, and otherwise socially constructed. An analysis predicated on these lines helps render some forms of “payment” more visible and legible to further critique. The social construction of US taxpayer identity runs deep. Locke delineated currency usage as a boundary between civilization and savagery; settlers manipulated monetary systems to engage in Indigenous genocide and dispossession (including via “tax foreclosures.)” Ex-Confederates adopted a “new identity as concerned taxpayers” to dismantle Reconstruction. As Mehrsa Baradaran explains, “sound money” concerns shaped the horror of sharecropping. An obsession with white birth rates and tax rates plagues immigration law. The first U.S. immigration restriction law, the Page Law of 1875, nominally excluded Chinese sex workers, but was actually intended to exclude all Chinese women. Although the fear of “anchor babies” has no basis in law or reality — and empirical work by tax scholars has established undocumented immigrants are especially compliant taxpayers — lies permeate the discourse. The Trump Administration drastically expanded criteria for exclusion, deeming inadmissible any immigrants “more likely than not” to become a “public charge.” In his classic essay on “targeted universalism”, john powell identifies perceptions of “costs” of and “contributions” toward universal rights as operating sites of white supremacy. Elsewhere, powell highlights an historical trend within which the “working, white, able-bodied male” won political freedom via “the substitution of taxpaying for property requirements…” as proxies for deservedness. This same freedom is allegedly available to “…any non-white that plays by the rules.” Crucially, powell argues that even liberal concern about racist resentment toward entitlements protects white prerogative. False scarcity sets us “at each other’s throats” instead of bringing classes together as a general (rather than discrete) matter. Neoliberal public finance has reinforced the sexual division of uncompensated reproductive labor and specifically cast women and children of color as parasites. As Khiara Bridges writes, poor Black mothers are not only classified as ‘taxeaters’, but as taxeaters incubating an “embryonic criminal class” of more taxeaters. The Chicana Welfare Rights Organization satirically crystallized a similar characterization in 1968: You’re not taxpayers, you don’t support yourselves. You don’t take good care of your kids; they are hungry, dirty, not clothed properly. You have boyfriends in your homes, and have illegitimate children. You are no good; you should be sterilized; your kids put in homes; you should be made to go to work; you should be ashamed of yourselves for living. As Martha McCluskey has written, neoliberalism suggests an upstanding, uniform class of market participants have won by the rules and welfare policy is compensating losers. Camille Walsh illustrates how the Court invoked the resentment of white-bread-winning taxpayers to defeat the claim for a federal right to education in San Antonio v. Rodriguez, creating what Walsh calls a “shadow doctrine” of racialized budgetary concern. Anthony Infanti argues the U.S. tax code itself envisions a “taxpayer” as a “wealthy and privileged”, implicitly white, cisgender man, who is also “presumptively heterosexual”, “physically and mentally able”, and married. Kyle Wilmott observes that in Canada,”…the Indigenous taxpayer is empowered to shrink the scope of their Nation’s government.” Corinne Blalock notes that neoliberal identity discourses perniciously enable people to incoherently identify as “socially progressive but fiscally conservative.” Like fiscal policy, US monetary policy is foundationally undemocratic. Noah Zatz’s recent essay illustrates how the legal concept of “employment” relies on a fissure between market-based and other forms of labor. Predictably, the Fed’s concept of “full employment” concerns itself with modulating ‘normal’ market-based labor, excluding domestic, agricultural, carceral, and other labor from primary analysis. It then suggests there is a permanent trade-off between full employment and price stability. During the last movement for a Job Guarantee, business reactionaries claimed a rise in Black wages threatened (white) prices. U.S. media linked inflation to Black uprisings and political agitation in the Global South (which the Fed would soon suppress). Unemployed folks were treated as “…pawns to be sacrificed in some economic chess game”, as Coretta Scott King famously charged. Wendy Brown criticizes regressive monetary policy as undemocratic “governance by algorithm.” But the algorithms don’t even succeed on their own terms: according to one former Fed Governor, the Fed lacks a “working theory” of inflation, in part because it lacks a realist analysis of the politics of pricing. The burden of this uncertainty is placed on the backs of marginalized people. Inflation might arise from many sources within an economy; the Fed chooses to suppress employment and wages of marginalized people, concretely, to ostensibly stabilize prices, abstractly. It’s a set-up. Austerity incentivizes predation, as well as household and social dependence on private capital for reproduction. Critically, neoliberals insist what lies beyond “the market” is subject to the state’s plenary power for surveillance and criminalization. US public finance buttresses a cycle of “social extraction” — for instance, labor (a non-renewable resource), is marketized by the state and increasingly concentrated capital (corruption), the unemployed are discarded (waste), and then punished (violence). We can’t win with false scarcity. An income guarantee may aim for new economic activities, but if the Fed clamps down, or firms and local governments engage in racialized price gouging and debt collection, guaranteed income is more likely to entrench a nominal “democracy of consumers” subjugated to an “aristocracy of producers.” An employment guarantee could help transition people away from extractive work. But if the program depends on a pot of jealously guarded “taxpayer money”, the labor will become punitive. I imagine most readers of a symposia on UBI want everyone to have “enough” resources, if not equal resources. I follow Williams, and recently, Angela Harris & Aysha Pamukcu, in arguing universal rights, to basic income and other resources, are insufficient but necessary ingredients for justice. Indeed, I argue for permanent, non-discretionary funding of these rights. No one truly knows how much money the U.S. government spends encoding and encasing private property rights, much less private capital’s rights to coordinate or contract. In many ways, these costs are “baked into” society. So, ultimately, should it be for rights to income, healthcare, housing, education, employment for all.

Nevertheless, despite evidence to the contrary, it may be the case that basic income does drain most workers out of the labor market. Or perhaps these perverse effects would eventually materialize with a massive basic income. If so, the non-sustainability argument has force, and it means that there is some Goldilocks level of basic income, above which people drop out in droves. My own estimation is that if some such level exists, it is considerably higher than the figures posed above: none of the evidence from a wide range of benefit levels in the various experiments comes close to inducing a collapse in the labor market. Because of the benefits of added income, the inherent appeal of work, and its potentially growing attractiveness due to changing power relations, it seems to me that an increasingly generous basic income will face other sustainability problems long before some mass exodus of labor buckles the economy.

Most discussions of Basic Income revolve around two clusters of issues: first, the normative implications of Basic Income for various conceptions of justice, and second, the pragmatic problems of the sustainability of basic income given a range of economic considerations including such things as effects on tax rates, incentives, labor markets, and so on. These are obviously important issues, but I want to explore a different sort of question: In what ways can a guaranteed basic income be considered part of a broad socialist challenge to capitalism?

This may seem to some people a somewhat irrelevant question, perhaps even a stupid question, since the very idea of socialism has lost so much of its intellectual and political appeal in recent years. The idea that there is a feasible systemic alternative to capitalism, either in the sense of a workable design for alternative economic institutions, or in the sense of a politically achievable goal, seems very far-fetched to many people who still share the traditional socialist criticisms of capitalism.

At its core, the debate about UBI isn’t about policy, but the foundations of our society. And similar to the demand for waged housework, one of the obstacles to having a clear discussion of UBI is a tendency to reduce it to a sum of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. In industrialized countries, workplace organization, labor regulation, and welfare policy all developed based on the model of the male breadwinner. Wages are therefore not only the primary mechanism by which income is distributed, but also the basic means by which work is allocated. A Marxist-feminist lens is crucial, therefore, to locating the ways UBI could intensify and exacerbate existing forms of gender oppression by effacing the centrality of gender and sex-based divisions of labor to the allocation of work in capitalist economies. At present, many arguments in favor of UBI operate on the assumption that robots are on the brink of ushering in mass technological unemployment, but as Federici observes: “While production has been restructured through a technological leap in key areas of the world economy, no technological leap has occurred in the sphere of domestic work significantly reducing the labour socially necessary for the reproduction of the workforce.”62 Rather, this work has been partially externalized and waged, as well as shifted onto the immigrant “shock absorbers of economic globalization.”63 The low underlying rate of profitability of the 1970s pushed employers to make difficult decisions about how to survive in a global economy, and service sector employment skyrocketed. These two developments were not unrelated. Women were not only working, but often for less than minimum wage and while shouldering the care burden at home. Meanwhile, traditional avenues of male employment deteriorated. The US is not yet out of this contradiction. Only, it is not service sector employment in general that’s expected to expand in the coming decades, but the already feminized and racialized care sector. Many of these occupations, like home health aides, come with meager wages and are generally hidden away from meaningful regulatory oversight.64 “Women’s work,” in other words, is creeping back into domestic sphere, through a combination of growing demand for low wage health workers (the result of an aging population), as well as growing work from home options, enabled by technology. If automation genuinely does produce something like a jobless economy in other sectors, the demand for alienated care labor may not be as acute as some economists predict. But in that case, that care burden will likely fall to family members, and in all likelihood, those family members will be women. A better UBI is one based on the social dividend, due to its capacity to gradually transfer ownership of the economy to the state, while providing a modest stipend to all citizens. More importantly, though, a social wealth fund cracks open the field of possibility in a way that tax rebate versions of UBI do not, creating a communal war chest of the size and scope needed to transform any late capitalist society, with its massive firms and economies of scale, into a socialist one. Recoiling in horror at Bruenig’s specific proposal for establishing a social wealth fund in the US, liberal pundit Kevin Drum estimates that it would take only around three decades before the federal government would have majority control of all publicly traded companies.65 There are, of course, any number of reasons to prefer a more decentralized system of multiple funds ran by independent boards, or to object to mediating social ownership of the means of production through the equity form at all, but the social dividend offers a far more plausible “capitalist road to communism” than a tax rebate, which is easier to repeal. To the extent that a UBI strikes at the heart of capitalism’s reliance on an ocean of unpaid work, it poses a similar set of provocations as Wages for Housework. Made to pay the costs of reproducing life, capitalism would no longer be viable. But a UBI on the terms envisioned by libertarians should be flatly rejected, as should attempts to reconstruct the welfare state of twentieth century. As far as poverty reduction programs go, UBI may be salvageable. But if socialists wish to pursue a UBI with the power to fundamental alter social property relations, the social dividend remains the most promising because it can transform the state. The classical political economists, up to and including Marx, understood that capital was first and foremost the command over labor. More income to labor, however important it may be in the interim, must be accompanied by a broader vision of wresting control over the command of labor so that workers might one day command their own.