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At its simplest, basic income is a social policy program – a cash transfer like Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, or the Earned Income Tax Credit. Each of these programs is meant to address a particular social and economic problem in an effective and efficient way. But, like each of those programs, basic income also embodies a normative perspective on capitalism, citizenship, and individual and collective responsibility for the basic economic security of individuals and groups. What distinguishes a basic income from other cash transfers is its universality, its unconditionality, and the individual, rather than household, basis of the benefit calculation. Rather than targeting specific demographic groups with different means tests and eligibility requirements, basic income targets economic insecurity through a single program open to all. “Targeting through universalism” is counterintuitive and generates skepticism about the wisdom of sending checks to billionaires like Jeff Bezos. A similar skepticism is found in debates about basic income’s relation to care work, particularly the unpaid care work disproportionately performed by women. How could basic income compensate unpaid carers when it goes to everyone–men and women, carers and non-carers–alike? Wouldn’t it be more effective and efficient to compensate unpaid care work directly through a program specifically for caregivers? Or, alternatively, to institutionalize care for children, elders, and the disabled, thereby replacing unpaid work with paid work? The question of whether basic income can resolve the problem of unpaid care work and the status of care work more generally requires addressing how a basic income is financed, because it is only as a redistributive program that basic income can have an emancipatory effect for those whose work is obscured by the structure of modern capitalist economies and undervalued by the market. It is only by broadening our perspective, for the moment, away from the details of basic income as a social policy, and to basic income as a revolutionary perspective on capitalism, that the emancipatory effect becomes clear. BASIC INCOME AS SOCIAL POLICY If the goal of a social policy is to promote economic security, no other program can beat basic income on effectiveness. Targeted programs cannot ensure that no one falls through the inevitable gaps in program eligibility. In the unprecedented economic crisis caused by the COVID pandemic the US government could not reach even all those eligible for the $1,200 stimulus payments authorized by the CARES Act despite having federal income tax, Social Security, and other policy program records for millions of Americans. Many of those eligible for the payment were not enrolled in existing programs or had incomes too low to owe income tax. The challenges of implementing the CARES Act’s stimulus payments demonstrates the effectiveness of having in place a mechanism for even a modest universal cash transfer that can be scaled up when crises occur. The CARES Act’s stimulus payments also made clear that “universal” cash transfers can be efficient as well as effective. The universality of a basic income does not imply that every single person receives it. Rather, it means that it is not limited to particular demographic groups, such as workers, the unemployed, taxpayers, or parents, nor is it limited to the poor. Any cash transfer program has to be paid for somehow, and the way it is financed determines whether there are net recipients and net contributors, and where the line falls between those groups. The full stimulus payments were limited to individuals and families with income levels up to $75,000 or $150,000, respectively, with phase-outs above those levels–incomes far above the federal poverty threshold. Any income limit could be considered a form of means-testing, but a phase-out threshold this high means that about 90% of households were eligible for at least a partial payment, broadening its reach well beyond that of our other cash transfer programs. These income limits embodied a recognition that the pandemic’s economic effects were broadly but unequally felt and that the payments were meant to address this inequality. The payments were funded out of general revenues, meaning that much of the cost would, at least in theory, be borne disproportionately by higher income taxpayers–including Jeff Bezos–through the progressive federal income tax. The stimulus payments program was imperfect in many ways, but it demonstrated how a “universal” cash transfer can be both effective in reaching those who need it while at the same time efficient in restricting it from those who don’t. CARE WORK: THE “WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK” PERSPECTIVE If we were to articulate the normative principle embedded in the stimulus payments, it would go something like this: during a time of economic crisis, all Americans–whether employed or actively job-seeking or not–should have access to at least some cash with which to meet their needs, and those who are comparatively well-off should be the ones to finance the transfer. If we consider the merits of some sort of compensation for care work, we need to ask not only who should get it and under what conditions, but who should pay for it. A short-lived Marxist-feminist movement in the 1970s offered answers to these questions under the banner of a provocative slogan: Wages for Housework. The Wages for Housework movement was launched in Italy in 1972 by the International Feminist Collective (IFC), a group founded by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, and Brigitte Galtier. In Federici’s words, its goal was “to open a process of international feminist mobilization that would force the state to recognize that domestic work is work” and to remunerate it accordingly (Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 2012). The IFC brought a critical Marxist perspective to the analysis of the place of housework in the larger system of capitalist domination, arguing that the foundation of “productive,” waged, typically male, labor is unpaid, “reproductive,” typically female, labor in the home, and that the emancipation of waged labor could only come through this recognition. The IFC’s slogan offended almost everyone, including the emerging women’s movement, whose leaders saw employment outside the home as the road to women’s emancipation; the labor movement, which saw its constituency as men working in factories; and at least one critic who bemoaned the encroachment of wage relations into the family sphere, which would no longer serve as a respite from capitalism domination. The movement never articulated a clear plan for how wages for housework would be calculated and paid, and Dalla Costa herself expressed ambivalence about the implications of the slogan and the possibility that it would “entrench the condition of institutionalized slavery.” “The demand for a wage for housework is only a basis, a perspective, from which to start, whose merit is essentially to link immediately female oppression, subordination and isolation to their material foundation: female exploitation. At this moment this is perhaps the major function of the demand for wages for housework.” (Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of Community,” 1972) The translation of the slogan into a practical demand–a policy program–was yet to come and could only emerge from those who embraced this perspective and gained consciousness as part of a wider working class movement. Federici and another IFC member, Nicole Cox, later extended the gendered division of labor into divisions by other characteristics–whites vs. blacks, youth vs. adults, First World vs. Third World–and to an underlying opposition of “a ‘working class’ to a ‘non-working’ proletariat, supposedly parasitic on the work of the former.” “Ultimately the social weakness of the wageless has been and is the weakness of the entire working class with respect to capital.” (Federici and Cox, “Counterplanning from the Kitchen Table,” 1975) In this way, they demonstrate that adopting the housewives’ perspective, rather than limiting their analysis to the comparatively narrow question of how women can be compensated for their unpaid labor, expands inevitably to the much broader question of how labor can advance its interests against capital. [N]ot to see women’s work in the home is to be blind to the work and struggles of the overwhelming majority of the world’s population that is wageless. It is to ignore that American capital was built on slave labor as well as waged labor and, up to this day, it thrives on the unwaged labor of millions of women and men in the fields, kitchens, and prisons of the United States and throughout the world. (Federici and Cox, “Counterplanning from the Kitchen Table, 1975) The “Wages for Housework” demand, on this view, is explicitly not a demand for a policy program to compensate housewives–not a “lump of money,” in Federici’s words–but a normative perspective critiquing capitalist domination of all labor–waged and unwaged. Unlike workers’ demands for higher wages, the demand of housewives for wages outside of waged labor “forces capital to restructure social relations in terms more favorable to us and consequently more favorable to the unity of the class.” (Federici, Wages Against Housework, 1975) WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK AND BASIC INCOME If we accept the perspective of the Wages for Housework critique of capitalism, what are the policy implications? Not, certainly, the restriction of compensation to those who perform a prescribed number of hours of state-approved care work. Nor does the answer lie in the outsourcing of care work to state-paid workers outside the home, with the cost socialized across all workers through payroll or income taxes. Rather, the clear implication is that capital must pay for reproductive as well as productive labor. Debates about whether basic income is good for women or not, or whether paid care workers should receive higher wages, or whether care should be provided in or outside the home all detract from this fundamental truth. Women’s emancipation–and indeed the emancipation of all members of the non-capitalist working class, domestically and internationally–requires not an increase in wages but a redistribution of capital. Capital, in the contemporary economies of the world, can mean many things beyond the Marxian “means of production”–we now use the term to refer to immaterial human assets, including education and social networks, in addition to property and financial instruments. Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto, define capital by its social power: it is accumulated labor, the surplus beyond what is required to reproduce labor, which has the power to command the labor of others for their own survival. A hallmark of capitalist societies is their division into those with no assets but their “living labor” power, in Marx and Engels words, and those who have accumulated labor–either their own, because their wages exceed their reproductive needs, or the accumulated labor of those whose labor they command. Just as an unconditional income independent of labor diminishes the power of accumulated labor over living labor, an individual income independent of household income diminishes the power of wage earners over unpaid caregivers. A “lump of money” in the form of a basic income does not resolve the distributional or power inequalities between those with capital and those without, nor does it ensure an equitable distribution of the burdens and rewards of care work. But a basic income financed by taxes on capital has some advantages over both traditional laborist responses to capitalism, which tend to ignore care work, and over institutionalization of care work, which tends to reproduce gendered divisions of labor. A basic income diminishes the division between waged and unwaged labor, providing all recipients with the ability to combine care work with waged labor, rather than choosing one or the other. It makes visible the work that is the foundation of all income and wealth and demands its compensation from those who benefit from it, laying the groundwork for further mobilizations by a united working class against the inequities of capitalist economic systems.

UBI, first of all, opposes this function of essential subordination, recognizing the possibility of existing with dignity regardless of obtaining an income within the market. Marx previously noted that the absence of other means of survival in addition to that obtained from the sale of one’s own labour was the fundamental condition for the establishment of the capitalist relationship. He states:

For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power. (Marx 2018, p. 120)

Apparent threats to the integrity of proliferate amid a . This has only become more significant during the COVID-19 crisis, to the extent that misinformation has the the most significant public health crisis in over a century. There are many other examples we could point to here: the flat earth movement, the proliferation of conspiracy theories and climate change denial are simply three of the most jarring. Each can seem like an egregious attack on factualness that is pre-modern in its implications. However, we encounter a more nuanced reality if we look slightly further into them. Within the flat earth movement there is a passionate commitment to empirical inquiry, built around . It’s a pre-modern empiricism which distrusts anything which can’t be seen with one’s own eyes but it’s an empiricism nonetheless. Within the alt-right media there is a passionate commitment to investigative journalism, built around an enthusiasm for the . It is a jarring facsimile of what this looks like elsewhere, oscillating between cynicism and childishness in its willingness to draw connections between discrete elements absent any justification for this inference. But, it is a commitment to investigation, nonetheless. It’s a pre-modern empiricism which distrusts anything which can’t be seen with one’s own eyes but it’s an empiricism nonetheless. Within climate change denial there is a on the vested interests of climate scientists lurking beneath their purported objectivity. This doesn’t mean we are refusing to take these seriously as problems. In fact we would suggest that taking them seriously necessitates closer scrutiny, including reflexivity about our instinctive reactions to them and the wider purposes these might unintentionally serve. If we simply dismiss them as pre-modern throwbacks we fail to grapple with the peculiarly modern conditions which have generated them. As Seymour , ‘the “fake news” trope is like a conspiracy theory in that it asserts a huge epistemological gap between the knowledgeable elect, and a mass of deluded “sheeple”’. But the idea that somewhere there was a knowing lie which others have been deceived by evades the more unsettling question: why is there such an enthusiastic embrace of these ideas in the first place? Seymour as a ‘shorthand political sociology, explaining how their lives got so bad, and how official politics became so remote and oppressive’. It would be naive to imagine we could simply meet this need with longhand political sociology, reproducing the deficit model which was embraced by the public engagement agenda in its early years. But it does help explain why we cannot merely hurl facts at our adversaries, as , in the expectation they will eventually acquiesce to the authority of what we are saying. A ready to hand diagnosis for this can be found in the in which being presented with falsifying evidence can actually strengthen belief. However, attributing this to a psychological mechanism fails to do justice to either the empirical variability of its operation or the role of the context in which evidence is presented and accepted or rejected. It also underestimates the difference between laboratory studies with their inevitably contrivances and everyday settings in which debate and discussion occur. Treating these issues through a psychological lens lends credence to approaches which see these problems as expressions of cognitive propensities that can be ameliorated through action leading to better informed individuals. However, in spite of the hopes of the nascent fact checking industry, it seems unlikely that contemporary polarization over matters of fact can be resolved through the provision of more facts. Nor through better facts or a corresponding change in the seriousness with which people treat facts. The problem, as , is the erosion of factfulness itself as an institutional form grounded in trusting disinterested experts. If there’s any meaning to be found in the cliché of post truth, it is surely the increasing awareness among the powerful of the apparent erosion of the capacity to consecrate facts, even if the belief they once could relied at least in part on being . As , ‘Journalism no longer has a monopoly on deciding what’s news’ as a consequence of the direct connections which social media opens up between groups that previously relied on journalists as mediators, though ‘perhaps, it never really did’. The faith in facts as a solution to the problems of factfulness carries the dream of a return to this role, how it was perceived by others and how it felt to be occupying it. If only we can improve the quality of our facts, ensuring we have the best facts, it is hoped that things can return to normal. As , ‘we cannot have our facts back’ and the incessant call for their return leaves us swamped with centrist nostalgia and failing to address the pressing normative questions which now confront us: ‘what ideal of public knowledge should we invoke? What role for facts in the public sphere should we strive towards?’. If there’s any meaning to be found in the cliché of post truth, it is surely the increasing awareness among the powerful of the apparent erosion of the capacity to consecrate facts These are the pressing questions which the epistemological chaos of platform capitalism pose for the social sciences. While media literacy projects undoubtedly have a role to play in addressing these challenges, it’s far too easy for them to take on a technocratic orientation that evades philosophical inquiry by seeking to elevate deficient individuals in order to render them adequate for factfulness. If we see the problem as resolvable through technical intervention, we inevitably miss the deeper underlying shift which is underway. Not only is a renewed commitment to factfulness unlikely to be successful, ignoring as it does the underlying social epistemological changes described previously, it also ‘. Even if social scientists are a minor part of this knowledge apparatus, the ease with which social media encourages the public making of knowledge claims by those with traditional bases of (academic) authority means that we cannot help but become embroiled in the ensuing politics.

The ascent of finance has changed not only the economy, but the entire society, which have become more and more dependent on the financial markets, for better or worse. Finance is nowadays crucial for our individual and collective life and it deeply affects several dimensions of our prospects, from our education and working life to our psychological, ethical, epistemic well-being. Thus, this multi-dimensional nature of finance demands a rethinking of its role not only in both theory and practice, but also in society and culture in order to better understand and guide it. In particular, I argue that such a rethinking requires a fresh look at the theories on finance and stock markets—a look that is philosophical in kind, since philosophy can provide us with a proper and fruitful multi-dimensional exploration of them. It is worth recalling the relation between philosophy and economics, from which finance stems, has affected the evolution of both the disciplines. On the one hand, economics provides continual inputs to philosophy. A typical example is the economics’ treatment of concepts of rationality and choice, which have deep impact on the philosophy of mind and cognitive science (see e.g. Ross, 2005). On the other hand, economics was born out of philosophy, as Martha Nussbaum (2016) reminds us. Notwithstanding, the marginalist revolution (Walras, 1900) and the rise of neoclassical economics produced a well-known, gradual departure of economics from philosophy. This departure is considered by Nussbaum as one of the main reasons for a lack of real intellectual progress in economics. For example: accounts of welfare and development that are produced without the active and ongoing participation of philosophy leave a lot to be desired. Embarking on serious work on these foundational questions will not be a picnic because they are foundational, and once an economist has really grappled with them, it may turn out that a good deal that has already been done will need to be redone (Nussbaum, 2016, p: 244). Nussbaum displays several areas in which the study of human development needs continual inputs from philosophy. In these areas, philosophy can act as a foundational tool, that is, as a way to improve, clarify, and understand the system. An important contribution to the relation between the two disciplines comes from the ‘naturalistic turn’ in philosophy.Footnote 1 In a nutshell, naturalism maintains that reality, both existential and cognitive, must be explained in natural terms because there is nothing beyond nature that we can scientifically explore: “Certe ultra naturam nihil [Certainly, nothing beyond nature]” as Francis Bacon state his De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum. So, the naturalistic turn has reshaped the interaction between philosophy and the sciences by strongly assimilating them: they are conceived in continuity, as pursuing essentially the same aims through the same methods. Therefore, on one hand, philosophy employs methods and hypotheses from economics in order to pose and solve problems and, on the other hand, economics benefits from philosophy too. In particular, the naturalistic turn has affected economic methodology by shifting the focus on the economic practice (see McCloskey, 1998). A remarkable example in this sense is the construction and use of economic models (Callon, 1998; MacKenzie, 2006) and the status of choice theory, which are largely influenced by recent advancements in the philosophy of action (see Ross, 2005). In more detail, there are at least two ways of characterizing naturalism in philosophy. The first is the Quine’s way (Quine, 1981), the other one is the Dewey’s way (see Dewey, 1920; Cellucci, 2017). In a nutshell, Quine’s naturalism maintains that: 1. Philosophical issues have to be approached using our present scientific tools, methods and theories. 2. Epistemology is contained in natural science simply as a chapter of psychology. Now, Quine claims that “the only point of view” the naturalist philosopher can offer is “the point of view of our own science” (Quine, 1981, p: 181). In particular, a naturalist philosopher provides the view of the present sciences: he “begins his reasoning within the inherited world theory,” that is, within the niche of theory offered by the present sciences, and “tries to improve, clarify, and understand the system from within” (Cellucci, 2017, p: 72). Therefore, “according to Quine, the task of the naturalist philosopher is to improve, clarify, and understand the world theory of the present sciences from within” (Ibid.). The other version of naturalism (Dewey-Cellucci) maintains that Quinean approach is defective since “improving, clarifying, and understanding the inherited world theory is an integral part of the scientists’ work, and scientists are much more competent to the task than philosophers, who do not have the necessary qualification. Moreover, it is limiting to say that the only point of view the naturalist philosopher can offer is the point of view of the present science” (Ibid.). As a matter of fact, philosophy deals with problems that the present sciences are unable to treat and, when successful, may even produce to new sciences and theories. Thus, this view maintains that: (a) Philosophical problems cannot be approached and solved only by means of the present sciences because, if that were so, philosophy would simply be subservient to the sciences. (b) Philosophy is crucial to dealing with problems at the frontier of knowledge—while in Quine’s approach, philosophy could not generate new sciences since epistemology is simply a chapter of psychology. This form of naturalism seems more appropriate to advance finance and its philosophical investigation, since it conceives of philosophy as a way of approaching problems that these disciplines could not tackle by themselves. In effect, we have remarkable examples of how philosophy helps to create new theories also in finance. Three significant examples are the performative theory (Austin, 1962; Callon, 1998; MacKenzie, 2006), reflexivity theory (Flanagan, 1981; Merton, 1948; Popper, 1957; Soros, 1987), and the philosophical reflection on cryptocurrency (see Sect. 2). Thus, if the departure of economics from philosophy (and history) can be regarded à la Nussbaum as a main reason for the flaws of many economic theories, the flaws of financial theory may be better understood by taking a philosophical perspective that can also provide us with tools to guide them. To this end, in the next sections I examine several issues in finance that require a philosophical exploration, and I will focus on both sides of the relation between philosophy and finance, that is, what philosophy offers to finance that it should take into consideration, and vice versa. Of course, this examination is not exhaustive, Footnote 2 but aims at outlining some fruitful lines of research inspired by the interaction between philosophy and finance. First, I examine the contribution that philosophy offers to finance by analyzing a few critical epistemic and methodological issues Footnote 3 in financial theory-building (Sect. 2.1), financial ontology (Sect. 2.2), financial methodology (Sect. 2.3) and financial mathematics (Sect. 2.4). I argue that philosophy is essential to enable finance to achieve a few goals for which it has been designed, not only as an external valuable addition, but also as an internal one. Then, I examine the contribution that finance can offer to philosophy by analyzing issues like the relation between theory and practice (Sect. 3.1), data and hypothesis (Sect. 3.2), and prediction, description and control (Sect. 3.3) in the light of financial systems. I argue that finance can help us to rethink a few tenets about these issues.

The solution is to begin to de-link work from wages. You can see the beginnings of the separation on any business flight. Men and women hunched over laptops and tablets, elbows so close that if it were a factory it would be closed on health and safety grounds.

But it is a factory, and they are working – some of the time. They flip from spreadsheet to a movie to email to solitaire: nobody sets a timer – unless in one of the time-hoarding professions like law. At the high skill end of the workforce we increasingly work to targets, not time.

We argue that a basic income should lead to a rise of the share of wages in the GDP, by significantly improving their bargaining position in various ways. Firstly, the bargaining position of workers would improve due to the macroeconomic consequences of implementing a basic income system. This reform, by redistributing income to the advantage of the poorer groups of the society would increase internal effective demand creating a better ground for profitable investments. That should induce investment, which depends on sales and expected profitability, which may increase employment and decrease the unemployment rate. [8] The existence of a huge group of unemployed or, as Marx puts it, the industrial reserve army, creates a downward pressure on wages, because it plays a role of a scarecrow discouraging the workers from struggling for their rights, better conditions of labour and higher wages. As this role is directly proportional to the level of unemployment, the smaller it is the lesser intimidated the workers are.

Secondly, basic income would increase the wage share, because it would get the workers away from the tight corner – as long as this benefit would exist, they would never have to worry about the survival of themselves and their families. Therefore, in the worst of cases they could resign from some particular job if they perceived it as not satisfactory (in terms of wage or working conditions) and have time to look for a better job (also in a different city or region). In this sense a basic income would obviously improve workers’ bargaining position, especially in the pay negotiations (Vanderborght, 2006, p. 5–6).

Establishing a Theory of Change Around Universal Basic Income

We would benefit from more clarity on the assumed theory of change when advocating for UBI (or arguing against it). In “A Capitalist Road to Communism,” Van der Veen & Van Parijs (1986) attempted to indicate how we might progress to a just society through UBI. There are many potential routes from here to there, so this is an area where more work would be helpful. In an interesting recent contribution to this discussion, Gourevitch & Stanczyk (2018) worry that UBI proponents may be getting things backward—that the kind of UBI we would be able to get without organized labor would be too low. To think that the ruling and business class will simply acquiesce to an ambitious version of the proposal is naïve; it comes down to believing that they will consent to their own expropriation. The left, the authors argue, should refocus its priorities on rebuilding the labor movement.

The coercion to work is the core aspect of alienation. BI at a sustainable level is a step beyond alienation because it gives more workers the option to say no, and thus will exert some pressure on employers - whether capitalists or collectives of workers - to make the conditions of work more palatable. As work becomes more humane, the worker works more freely, and thus can become interdependent in a non-alienated way. It is worth noting also that wage workers often depend on others for the relatively high wages they enjoy, and this dependence is masked by too tight an allocation of income in proportion to work. For example, particularly in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, the male wage earner implicitly was being paid for his own reproduction through the labour of a wife who was not remunerated, and who was economically dependent on the male in an invidious way. A basic income enabling homemakers to stay out of the wage labour market, and to be less economically dependent upon a male wage earner, is one way to acknowledge this unpaid labour and call attention to a kind of interdependence that has been masked, without turning housework into wage labour (the household wage idea). Important here also is the dependence of the money economy and its agents on informal, household, and other economies that cannot easily survive transformation into commodity form. Becoming aware of this sort of interdependence is also a step beyond alienation. (I’m a market socialist. But the only way the “socialist” in market socialism can be sustained against the alienating forces of the market is if the sphere of the market is clearly limited. The market should not dominate the household, the media, education, health care, or politics).5 “D. Foucauldian: We should distinguish between genuinely progressive features of social democracy - universal free education, universal health care, universal pension coverage, universal provision of child care (or payment to people who want to care for their children at home), and those institutions that have attempted to mitigate the social costs of capitalism: long-term unemployment insurance and “humane” prisons. (Both of the latter can be understood in Foucauldian terms as mechanisms for keeping the working class divided, and for a liberalconservative pseudo-politics to be played out in the electoral arena). BI belongs to the latter category.” First, any of the “genuinely progressive” features of social democracy mitigate the social costs of capitalism, and can divide the working class. See Marx’s comment on Adam Smith’s early proposal for universal free education “in homeopathic doses” as a response to the effects of the division of labour on the moral, intellectual, and martial virtues of workers.6 Within capitalism, at a low (politically) sustainable level, perhaps BI would have a divisive effect - the “basic income apartheid” that Gorz warns against - but in a socialist context, it can be an important pillar of social solidarity, one of the entitlements that a socialist society can sustain more effectively than capitalism.

Libretti ’18 -Prof of US lit and culture @ Northeastern Illinois  (“Universal Basic Income: Ruling class scam or step toward socialism?”, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/universal-basic-income-ruling-class-scam-or-step-toward-socialism/ //jrc)

The concept—and in some cases actual and already-existing policy—of a universal basic income has generated a provocative debate, fascinating in the fact it has garnered enthusiastic support from both the left and the right while also becoming the target of harsh and anxious critique from both the left and the right. The more mega-capitalists like Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, Elon Musk, and the like support it, the more some on the left grow suspicious. Left-leaning intellectual Chris Hedges, for example, characterizes the universal basic income as an oligarchical plot designed to defuse any call or movement for actual and substantial structural change to the capitalist system, the dynamics of which create the inequity and misery people suffer to begin with. And, of course, we do need to recognize the truth that universal basic income policy is not designed to alter the structure of capitalism but rather provide some basic relief to the misery and poverty capitalism creates. Obviously, we need to keep our eyes on the prize of achieving the end of class society and exploitation and creating a world in which the fruits of our collective labors are shared. Nonetheless, as Daniel Raventós and Julie Wark have pointed out, so far the universal basic income “is the only policy being mooted as a way of universally guaranteeing the most basic right of all: the right to material existence.” And, in response to Hedges’ concerns, they point out that a universal basic income can nonetheless abet revolutionary class struggle, arguing that “while not a universal panacea, is one way of strengthening vulnerable members of society in their struggle against the oligarchs.” And, hey, why not go along with the scam, as long as we don’t fall for it? Take the money and run right down the revolutionary road. Destination: socialism. What is important is that we cultivate and sustain a political and class consciousness rooted in awareness of the fact that our current economic arrangement—capitalism—is precisely what generates the grotesque inequality we need to eliminate. And by extension that same system is responsible for the grotesquely inequitable distributions of political power that deprives the mass of our population the right of self-determination—denies them freedom. The universal basic income, I would argue, is already beginning to shift our national consciousness in directions that can direct us on the road to socialism. It is bringing issues of class and inequality more into focus and making them part of the national conversation, though in theoretically insufficient ways. Chris Hughes, for example, the co-founder of Facebook, has argued strenuously for a universal basic income as not necessarily a comprehensive solution but as at least a moderating analgesic for the severity of income inequality and poverty in America, asserting, “We talk about inequality—and the economy in general—in terms that make it seem like these are structural problems that we can’t do anything about. When in reality, we’ve created the rules of the road: the way the economy works now.” While he might not fully articulate what a different economic structure or system would look like (he doesn’t say the “S” word), he does unsettle the notion that capitalism is a fixed and unchangeable thing. He raises the specter that another economy is possible and makes the important point that people control and build the economy, which means we can, in fact, change it and create it anew. As a culture and in our political discourse, we tend to talk about “the economy” in ways that de-historicize it and make it seem permanent, as if capitalism is the only game in town. We don’t hear many people in talking about our economy say “the capitalist economy” to distinguish it, say, from feudal or socialist economies. As a culture, this makes it a lot harder for us to entertain different kinds of economic arrangements. While Hughes, I’m guessing, does not identify as a Marxist, his intervention in this debate does begin to offer a different language for talking about our economy and the fact that poverty is not simply the fault or just desert of lazy or feckless people, but rather a product of capitalist economy. This language opens and orients the national consciousness to a potentially imaginative conversation about what a socially just and humane economy might look like. It’s an opener, anyway. Billionaire Mark Zuckerburg, similarly provokes thinking about both the effectiveness and fairness of class society—and by extension capitalism—in his advocacy for a universal basic income. In a commencement address he delivered at Harvard, he indicated how growing up with financial security allowed him the freedom to pursue his inventions, explaining, “If I had to support my family instead of having time to code, if I didn’t know I’d be fine if Facebook didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be standing here today.” These capitalists point not just to the unfairness, even inhumanity, of capitalism, but they even hint at what Marx stressed in his analysis of the history of class society: Capitalism, while it unleashed the creativity feudalism had constrained, it also fetters human creativity and the forces of production overall, leading to an economy at once inhumane and inefficient. Secondly, and more importantly, the universal basic income, in asserting everyone’s right to a material existence, accomplishes some important work in our cultural consciousness, in Marxist directions, in terms of dissociating or de-coupling the work people do from their ability to have their material needs met and, more to the point, to share in the fruits of our collective labor. In other words, the implementation of a universal basic income can begin to erode the powerful meritocratic ideology that, as I have argued elsewhere in the pages of People’s World, is a centrally insidious ideology sustaining capitalism. As a culture, we are for the most part perfectly happy valuing people’s work unequally, regardless of how essential it is to our lives. Our capitalist culture makes it seem normal and just that the doctor doing the important work of keeping us healthy deserves a lot more money—and hence access to more resources—than the farmworker who does the important and essential work of feeding us. As a culture, we lack a recognition that this very way of valuing work is a product of a capitalist economy, that the way we determine the “merit” of work grows out a capitalist mentality. Definitive of Marxism for me is the principle made famous in The Communist Manifesto which Marx reiterates in his Critique of the Gotha Program, namely the idea: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” This notion challenges, indeed explodes, the idea that the work people do should bear any relation to their ability to meet their needs or have access to the fruits of our collective labor. The American dominant culture, however, forcefully insists upon not only differentially valuing work but also linking the work one does to one’s ability to consume or access resources (purchasing power) to live. A vital piece of Marxist thought is precisely this powerful gesture of de-linking the work people do (or not) from their right to a material existence. The universal basic income, as a policy, does this important cultural work of de-linking people’s merit—people deserving nourishment, housing, healthcare, education, safety, and other basic human rights—from the type of work they do, how much they work, and even from whether they work or not. Moving to a socialist culture and imagination means we must recognize and eradicate the capitalist values infecting us. Meritocracy is a deeply rooted capitalist value many in America do not even recognize as capitalist.

With right-wing variants of basic income on the table, it is natural to see a flurry of left criticism. Nonetheless, it should be recognized that the UBI concept dovetails with a normative vision that has deep roots on the Left. The fundamental goals of the socialist left have long been fixed on emancipation, self-realization, and the satisfaction — and even expansion — of human needs. As Adam Przeworski writes, “Socialism was not a movement for full employment but for the abolition of wage slavery … it was not a movement for equality but for freedom.”40 It was only when those goals appeared closed off by political and economic circumstances that we narrowed our horizons and settled for a productivist alternative, characterized by more rather than less work. Having found it unworkable in the medium-run to eradicate exploitation and alienation, socialists set out to universalize them.

Socialism lost something in the reorientation from a vision defined by the abolition of the wage relation to one that fastens us all to it. A generous basic income defined by a genuine exit option from the labor market ultimately has a real affinity with the socialist project. The moral question at the fore is whether or not we wish to retain the coercive and compulsory quality of the capitalist labor market. Fighting for an exit option ought to be a priority because, first, it gives people the power to confront their bosses or their spouses — the possibility of exit facilitates voice — and second, because it gives people real freedom to enact their life plans, unencumbered by the dull compulsion of economic relations.

If the above argument about wage growth is correct, coupled with public support, an insufficient-but-unconditional basic income presents a viable path to a more generous one. While I make this case below, it is first worth laying out an argument leveled against the potential impact of basic income on solidarity: UBI will not only dramatically increase the tax burden on some and redistribute a good amount to others, but it will do so in a way that is immediately socially recognizable as a transfer; unlike, say, health care and housing, transferring actual cash from one party to another is conspicuous. As a consequence, it is easy to imagine a vulnerable group being publicly accused of laziness and dependence. Is it possible that the net-contributors to the program will strongly differentiate themselves from and even begrudge the net-recipients? In response, it is useful to distinguish between different types of income transfer programs. For example, unlike a negative income tax, where some people — those below a given threshold — collect payments and others do not, the universal basic income makes everyone a recipient. The calculation of the net impact of a UBI is far less conspicuous than under a negative income tax where you either physically receive payments or don’t. The UBI computation requires comparing the amount you receive to the portion of your tax contribution allocated to the program. Post-tax-and-transfer winners and losers are far less visible, even if the two schemes achieve the identical post-tax-and-transfer income distribution. It is also worth mentioning that family allowances — in Canada, France, and the UK — are (or were) near-universal cash transfer programs and among the most popular social policies in those countries. Indeed, there are plenty of cash transfers that are robust and popular. Those that are, as I discuss below, tend to avoid distinctions between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, and thus escape the cycle of stigma and victim-blaming that so many social assistance programs are vulnerable to.31 By contrast, traditional welfare policies suffer from inherent limits to political mobilizing: they impact only a small, poor, and marginalized group, and are consistently at the top of the list of the most unpopular social policies. Because so few people are touched by welfare policies targeted at the poorest populations, organizing benefit increases is always an uphill battle and requires disproportionate reliance on moral arguments, rather than material ones. It is for the same reason that such policies are uniquely vulnerable to austerity. Yet even a weak basic income could touch a broad array of people and help build a solid constituency to support its continual growth and expansion. As more people are folded into a program, two things happen. First, quality improves. And second, it becomes a political third rail. Programs with benefits dispersed broadly across diverse social layers tend to become highly popular and can start to be seen as a civic right, making for ratchet effects where gains become irreversible. Indeed, this popularity effect is clear from the qualitative commentary from Mincome participants in Dauphin. Mincome helped blur the usual lines of demarcation between the deserving and undeserving poor. For many, welfare was viewed in moralistic terms; it was a signal of a tarnished moral character and consistently too humiliating for most to consider joining. Mincome, however, was viewed as a neutral, pragmatic program, and its widespread availability meant it was not interpreted as a system for “other” people. People took casual and positive attitudes toward Mincome and participated because they simply “needed money,” while the vast majority despised welfare because, among other things, it was for the “needy and bums.” They often distinguished their own Mincome receipt — which was based simply on needing cash in an economy with precarious employment opportunities — from the circumstances of welfare receipt, which were caused by recipients’ moral failings. Even Mincomers with strong ethics of self-reliance or negative attitudes toward government assistance felt able to collect Mincome payments without a sense of contradiction.32 There is thus a powerful argument that the universalism of UBI would facilitate solidarity that is otherwise obstructed in a highly fragmented and categorical welfare state marked by deep tensions between low-wage workers, unemployed workers, and social assistance recipients. Similar life experiences are critical in facilitating communication and solidarity (for Marx, it was the similarity of life inside the walls of the factory that galvanized solidarity). At minimum, even if a UBI does not actively nurture solidarity, breaking down the categorical nature of social provisioning may reduce the barriers to alliances across otherwise separated groups of poor and working people. However, there are other aspects to consider when thinking through the impact of basic income on collective action and solidarity. Indeed, it may be the case that the overall impact of basic income on solidarity is somewhat indeterminate, with certain forces facilitating it, and others running against the grain. Although we have seen that the impact on wages is likely to be favorable, what can we say about the manner in which those wage gains are made? Put differently, if wage increases can be won through individual or collective strategies, how might UBI play out in this respect? The basic fact of an exit option might mean that individuals use their newfound powers to bargain on their own, not collectively. It might allow them, moreover, to opt out entirely. After all, basic income increases workers’ bargaining power with their bosses, but it also increases their power with respect to their unions. Offering people alternatives to economic dependence on employers also means alternatives to economic dependence on collective solutions.33 The optimistic view proposes that basic income would for the most part facilitate collective action. It is sometimes suggested that a UBI could operate as an inexhaustible strike fund; indeed, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was the first to recognize this in their Congressional testimony on Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, a guaranteed income that nearly passed in Congress in 1970. The business group was willing to support the plan as long as it was a significantly watered-down variant of the original, fairly radical and work-unconditional proposal. In congressional hearings the NAM insisted that they would support the program only “if the basic allowance is a realistic minimum, and if the earnings disregard provides a true incentive to work and advancement and if the work requirement is strong.” Finally, they expressed concern about the link between the guaranteed income and labor upheaval: “We suggest that anyone directly involved in a labor dispute should be ineligible for benefits under the family assistance plan.”34 This worry on their part seems perfectly reasonable. In this vision a UBI aids collective action because it provides the positive resources to facilitate it. Moreover, the policy would reduce the temptation to “defect” from collective action. Desperate workers, individuals with few alternatives, would be less inclined to scab if they had another decent survival option. However, while basic income provides the positive sustenance for collective action, it weakens the negative motivations that spur it on. Much collective action happens because workers have no alternative but to struggle in conjunction with others. Basic income eliminates the external condition of starvation, the condition that forces collective action on people as the only viable path to advancement. Thus, while it undermines the push factor, it strengthens the pull factor by providing the material support that makes collective action more likely to occur and succeed. It is of course perfectly reasonable to imagine that basic income might empower people both as individuals and collective actors, facilitating both solitary and collective struggles against powerful social actors. From the perspective of socialist freedom, this approach to collective action strikes me as desirable. Moreover, as noted in Table 1, survey data on why people were not in the labor force during the Mincome experiment reveals some evidence suggesting that people acted individually and some suggesting collective action. I noted above that survey data showed that care work and education were cited, but the strongest reason for not working was related to dissatisfaction with job or work conditions. One can see answers relating both to workplace struggles and opting out in the data — another common answer, as indicated above, was “did not want to work.” But what if, contrary to my arguments, universalistic income maintenance ultimately hampers solidarity? If basic income enhances some of the positive reasons for collective action and undermines some of the negative reasons, the net effect could still be negative. It may turn out that the only way to nurture solidarity is to leave workers with no exit option, and no alternative to collective action. Perhaps free (or freer) people will not choose solidaristic strategies and prefer to go it alone. Should we decide that it is then preferable to maintain an external starvation constraint in order to better ensure group solidarity? Even in this limiting case, it would be strange for the Left to argue in favor of economic dependence on the capitalist class. Certainly the freedom tradition in socialism would find little in the way of argument to justify an instrumental case against current autonomy in the anticipation of greater autonomy in the faraway future. The intuition that suggests workers ought not have a basic income because they might behave in ways we don’t like is the same intuition recommending that the Garden of Eden ought to be destroyed should it one day be discovered on Earth. A place like Eden, where our subsistence needs can be met by plucking fruit from the trees, where we can make ends meet on our own, might corrupt our other-regarding impulses. But that would be a bad argument against Eden. The issue is best conceived as a socialist wager: we hope and hypothesize that free people would prefer cooperative, collective action, but if they don’t then they don’t. That sad counterfactual is an insufficient reason to limit their freedom.

A separate set of critiques from the Left concerns the unintended consequences of basic income on the labor market, employer behavior, and capitalism more broadly. These arguments are often framed in terms of the apparent limits of capitalism and the subterranean economic forces that compromise progressive social transformation. As a general rule, arguments taking the form “a decent basic income is impossible under capitalism” should be treated with the same suspicion we have for claims about capitalism’s fundamental incompatibility with a decent welfare state. History has shown capitalism to be a highly flexible system; what was once said to be impossible under capitalism is later said to be an essential feature of its legitimation. In such arguments it is pro forma to allude to some deep and unmovable economic (rather than political) impasse, but the idea that a decent basic income is impossible under capitalism boils down to the claim that real reform of capitalism is impossible.

However, one very real feasibility constraint concerns labor market participation: if basic income pulls most of the workforce out of the labor market, the scheme’s ultimate revenue source will dry up. Yet, as noted above, experimental evidence suggests that basic income payments hovering at half of median family income induce some labor market withdrawal, but not catastrophic levels. To my mind, this result is more or less desirable: no work reduction would mean no expansion of freedom and no lessening of toil, but extreme work reduction in the short-run risks unraveling the program. Contrary to common opinion, basic income should not be understood by itself as a post-work utopia: indeed, if most everyone dropped out of work, there would be no revenue to fund the scheme. The wager is that even though work would be a choice rather than an economic necessity, people would for the most part continue to find work attractive, albeit less so; poorly remunerated jobs would be bid up (itself a process that makes work more appealing, partially compensating for exits elsewhere), and workplaces characterized by the worst forms of domination would be less sustainable.

As the pandemic enters its second year,  to allow them to meet basic expenses while the economy continues to struggle, in part because many people see COVID-19-related economic challenges as the result of external causes and not the fault of individual people.

Yet many families—especially people of color, who have been —were already facing severe economic challenges because of structural barriers preventing them from reaping the benefits of a strong economy. These families sometimes rely on federal safety net programs to access the resources they need to afford food, rent, and other necessities.

I believe one reason the United States is cutting spending on health insurance and safety nets that protect poor and marginalized people is because of American culture, which overemphasizes individual responsibility. Our culture does this to the point that it ignores the effect of root causes shaped by society and beyond the control of the individual. How laypeople define and attribute poverty may not be that much different from the way U.S. policymakers in the Senate see poverty.

As someone who studies  and social and health inequalities, I am convinced by the academic literature that the biggest reason for poverty is how a society is structured. Without structural changes, it may be very  if not impossible to eliminate disparities and poverty.

Universal basic income (UBI) is a system where everyone in a community is given a regular fixed amount of money from government intended to meet basic needs and free from any conditionality. Such a system is cheap and easy to administer as there is no means testing or checks on conditionality. There are a growing number of trials across the world and increasing support for such a scheme in the UK. A decade of austerity policies in the UK followed by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the views of some that UBI would not only address the issue of poverty and low-paid work but would serve as a response to growing automation in the workplace. It might also increase the bargaining power of workers who would be less worried about losing their job if they had the cushion of UBI.

A new universal basic income model could cut poverty by more than half at no net cost, reducing it to its lowest level for 60 years, according to a report co-authored by a University of York academic. On the 80th anniversary of the historic Beveridge Report, the new research by the Basic Income Conversation and Compass represents the most substantive attempt yet to assess the impact of a basic income (UBI) scheme and the greater income security it provides.

The fiscally neutral scheme involves no additional calls on the public finances and no net increase in taxation: the cost of the extra payments would be exactly offset by the extra revenue from internal changes in tax rates and National Insurance Contributions, the report’s authors say.

It is not enough to say what is wrong with US military and foreign policy. We need to present a socialist alternative. Our foreign policy’s primary goal should be to unite workers across borders to limit the power of capitalists. Capitalists gain a huge advantage from their ability to move money around the globe. The threat of a capital strike or of capital flight is used to break unions; force left governments to reduce social benefits; and cancel environmental, financial, and business regulation.

The United States clearly has the leverage to reverse pro-capitalist policies. After all it has used its power, as we noted above, to impose trade treaties and to intimidate or replace foreign governments. We need to demand that our government instead ally with left governments and popular forces around the world to enact very different sorts of treaties: ones that end money laundering and movements of “hot” money by forcing banks around the world to identify the true owners of capital, tax treaties that impose uniform and highly progressive rates so that capitalists can’t park money in tax shelters, and trade treaties that require exporting countries and firms to uphold living wages, strong health and safety regulations, and favor products made by unionized workers.

I have argued during a meeting of the retired UCU members’ branch of Yorkshire and Humber that trade unions should support the introduction of Universal Basic Income (UBI). UBI can be seen as a societal strike fund which strengthens the ability of every citizen to challenge unjust and harmful structures in society.

I have used some concepts of  and  about power and applied them to UBI. The regular and guaranteed basic income is a form of personal capital and this will allow the recipients of UBI to exercise power in society. Power is based on capital and can be defined as the ability to appropriate social energy and determine the interests of other people.

One of the reasons why unions are sceptical is because of uncertainty over the effects on wages. Many advocates expect that degrading jobs or unattractive jobs with low training content or precarious conditions will find fewer takers with a basic income. Bertrand Russell, in a 1918 book called Roads to Freedom, wrote, “One great advantage of making idleness economically possible is that it would afford a powerful motive for making work not disagreeable; and no community where most work is disagreeable can be said to have found a solution of economic problems.”

With basic income, people have the power to say no. When people have the power to say no, you have several solutions: replace the workers with machines, improve working conditions, or pay higher wages. This means that a basic income might create jobs, as the payments can be topped up with other earnings, but it will not create jobs at any cost. Much will depend on the amount. Your power to say no is not very high when you have 200 euros. It’s much higher if it’s 500, 600, or 700 euros. In Belgium, for instance, minimum income through social assistance is quite high. For people who are living alone, it’s 900 euros a month. But it doesn’t give you the power to say no because, at least in principle, you must be available for work.

To this list, I would add a fourth reason, and the focus of this article: There are categories of reforms that can help unify and empower the working class and give it the breathing space it needs to build systemic economic alternatives. I submit that universal basic income (UBI) falls into this category.

What Is Universal Basic Income?