Search the archive.

But more recent neoliberals, especially those in the political arena, seem more willing to make exceptions for policy programmes aimed at pulling up previously disadvantaged communities, or at ensuring the most desti- tute do not simply wither and perish. George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act 2001 (Dillon & Rotherham, 2017) is an aptly named (if significantly badly designed) example of this. The law included provisions that would allocate extra resources to schools with significant proportions of disad- vantaged kids (including racial minorities). Tony Blair’s 2003 London Schools Challenge (Kidson & Norris, 2014) was aimed at supporting the improvement of previously underperforming secondary schools, which on the whole tended to be schools with above-average numbers of minority ethnic students, is another such example. This policy was explicitly aimed at narrowing the attainment gap between white and minority ethnic students. Even though they are by no means enthusiastic about them, neoliberal governments have also acquiesced to the need for welfare poli- cies that aid the unemployed, if only for a limited time after they lose their jobs, even though they have also actively cut the sums people receive over time. In many ways, the Universal Credit programme devised by Ian Duncan Smith (the UK’s Secretary for Work and Pensions between 2010 and 2016) is a prime example of this. It reflected an acceptance that the state could help those who are badly off financially, but their approach aimed to make such help as palatable to neoliberalism as possible. It folded together six different welfare benefits into one and placed a cap on what people can receive (in neoliberal shorthand: they ‘simplified’ the welfare programmes and therefore limited the ‘sprawling’ state). The chancellor of the British exchequer Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme that saw the state pay 80% of furloughed workers’ wages during the pandemic is a significant recent example in this connection as well.

The grudging acceptance, displayed by more recent neoliberal politi- cians, of the need for at least some policies that support the “losers” may stem from the knowledge that society’s provenance is in fact much more complicated than the one described in our story above. To recast this character of neoliberal politics vis a vis the story we told at the start, we could say that recent neoliberals recognise, or at the least they believe it is an unalterable feature of the zeitgeist today to hold, that we do not simply show up on a virgin island as individuals without complex backstories and identities, rather we arrive as groups or as individuals whose identities, histories and propensities are inextricably intertwined with groups. The distribution of wealth and incomes we see today is just because some were more ingenious, or harder-working, than others in the marketplace. Rather, we ended up where we are because for centuries some people were forced to take part in the market only as resources to be traded, as opposed to as agents to trade. Or in many cases, they were simply kept out of the market altogether. Or because the rules of the markets have historically been rigged by those with power in ways that benefitted them and produced results heavily skewed towards them and their descendants. Or for a host of other reasons not congruent with the story told by classic neoliberal thought about the equitable origins of inequality. We never all had a chance to make it. We don’t all start at the same spot. Current neoliberal politics has shown itself capable of adapting, of interpreting neoliberal ideology in new ways that make it somewhat relevant to the ways that human understanding in the West has evolved. Regardless of whether such adaptability arose as a result of a sublimated cognitive disso- nance, or from a wily pragmatism, neoliberal policy-makers have shown themselves willing to stray from dogmatic free-market policies.

Periodic fluctuations in the trustees’ estimates of Social Security’s fi- nances are only to be expected, but a systematic and significant under- statement of the program’s financial problems would be much more serious. Unfortunately, the latter appears to be true. The trustees appear to base their conclusions on relatively crude estimation methods— ones that do not take into account important structural features of U.S. demo- graphics, key characteristics of Americans’ economic choices, and inter- relationships between those two elements. Although the trustees’ annual reports contain extensive information on a large number of demographic and economic factors that affect the program’s finances, it is very difficult for outside observers to appreciate the factors— even key ones—that may be missing from the trustees’ estimation methods and procedures. This book’s considerably more detailed, careful, and independent evaluation of the program’s finances shows that Social Security’s financial problems are much bigger than officially acknowledged.

Information about precisely how and why the trustees’ analysis and projections of Social Security’s finances may be inadequate can be ob- tained only through a detailed analysis of all the relevant demographic and economic elements, including their joint evolution in the past and their likely progression through the future. Such an analysis must begin by systematically developing a framework for analyzing and projecting the program’s operations from basic building blocks. Fortunately, those building blocks are publicly available in the form of microdata on U.S. demographic and economic features and organization, Americans’ behav- ior patterns, and detailed rules about how Social Security’s revenues and benefits are determined.

Postmodernism as Object and Attitude. The idea of postmodernism can be understood in two related but distinct ways: as object and as attitude (Cloke, Philo, and Sadler 1991:170- 201). As object, postmodernism is about ontol- ogy-a description of our world. It claims that "the modern world" has changed qualitatively in the last 25 years. The center has given way to a fragmented world of politics of difference: voices from the margin, pastiche in art and architecture, post-Fordist capital accumulation, rapid information technology, bewildering va- riety in the marketplace, and accelerated con- sumption (Young 1990; Lyotard 1979; Harvey 1989; Xenos 1989; Poster 1990).1 As attitude, postmodernism is a theoretical and repre- sentational mood (Waugh 1992)-a mood of skepticism with modern certainties. As atti- tude, postmodernism is about epistemology- how we know what we know. It questions the nature of reason, objectivity, truth, repre- sentation, and humanism. It questions the auThis content downloaded from 104.28.153.123 on Thu, 29 Jun 2023 19:07:07 +00:00 All use subject to https:/ 708 Yapa thority of social science to diagnose social ills and recommend policy (Roseneau 1992). It is this latter sense of postmodernism that is the concern here. Important and interesting as they are, I do not pursue ontological questions of the postmodern condition in this paper.2 Some may argue that the distinction be- tween postmodernism as object (ontology) and attitude (epistemology) is false because the postmodern mood is a reflection of underlying material changes in society. This is certainly the view of Jameson (1984), who sees postmod- ernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism. For Harvey (1989), too, postmodernity is a cul- tural condition reflecting the new economic logic of flexible accumulation and the disori- enting sense of accelerated compression of space and time. Without contesting the validity of these theses, I contend that postmodern attitudes raise important questions about the nature of signs, representation, language, power, and policy. Their relevance does not depend on the empirical status of postmoder- nity as condition. Postmodernism as epistemology argues that social science cannot serve as "a mirror of so- ciety." Knowledge arises out of embodiment in society; it always has and always will.3 Social science and society bear a codependent and necessary symbiotic relationship to each other. The relation of society to social science occurs as both object and subject-a central issue whose implications have not been sufficiently recognized by social scientists. According to Foucault (1 973b), "Man' provides not only the object of social science but also the conditions under which that knowledge is acquired. Cousins and Hussain (1984:50), commenting on Foucault's thoughts, observe that "this ten- sion cannot be said to be one which can be resolved. No conceptual advance, no empirical finding within the social sciences, can resolve it. The tension is constitutive of the human sciences as such.' My comment is not to say that social science is inferior to natural science in this; it is to say that social science is not, was not, nor need be "value-free" in order to be useful knowledge. Postmodernizing Social Science. Postmod- ern contentions can help us make explicit the codependent relationship between social sci- ence and society. For now I shall describe this as the postmodernizing of social science. We can implement this project: 1) by pointing out the constructivist nature of social processes (Lyotard 1979); 2) by insisting that social sci- ence's epistemology be more reflexive on how it knows (Aronowitz 1988; Proctor 1991); 3) by admitting that "data" do not exist inde- pendent of our social theory (Sayer 1992; Gre- gory 1978); 4) by recognizing language's im- portant role in cognition (Derrida 1978; Sarup 1988:6-62); 5) by working within the bounds defined by semiotics which denies an unam- biguous correspondence between a sign and what it signifies (Gottdiener 1994); 6) by trac- ing the history of disciplines such as sociology, economics, and geography to show that basic categories such as deviancy, social mobility, re- sources, scarcity, and region do not carry uni- versal meanings valid for all cultures and social groups (Foucault 1973a; Livingstone 1992; Smith and Godlewska 1994; Merchant 1983; Sachs 1992); and 7) by acknowledging that power is deeply implicated in the production and use of social-science knowledge (Proctor 1995; Rouse 1987; Foucault 1980).4 But this said, why is the postmodernizing of social sci- ence (and society) relevant for Third World poverty? It is my contention that academic un- derstandings of poverty and their repre- sentations in our textbooks and policy reports lie at the heart of the story. Discourse theory can help us understand why poverty cannot be alleviated within the epistemology of con- ventional social science. Skeptics and Affirmatives. Reading post- modern writers such as Lyotard, Derrida, Fou- cault, and Baudrillard is difficult. The writing is technical, dense, and opaque, and their con- clusions are often divergent and even contra- dictory. According to Roseneau (1992:15), "within this diversity of post-modern pro- nouncements, as far as the social sciences are concerned, two broad, general orientations, the skeptical post-modernists and the affirma- tive post-modernists, can be delineated.' The skeptical postmodernists offer a gloomy, nega- tive assessment of the contemporary world as one of fragmentation, malaise, and meaning- lessness; hence, no political project is worthy of commitment. Roseneau (1992:15) believes that the skeptics are inspired by Continental European philosophers, especially Nietzsche; they practice a form of politics of despair; they speak of the death of the subject and author, This content downloaded from 104.28.153.123 on Thu, 29 Jun 2023 19:07:07 +00:00 All use subject to https:/ What Causes Poverty? 709 the impossibility of knowing truth, and the abolition of social science. The affirmative post- modernists share this sense of disenchantment with modernity and the failed promises of the Enlightenment. Yet, they retain a more hopeful, optimistic view of postmodernism's possibili- ties. They are open to, and participate in, is- sue-specific social movements; they eschew the relativist stance of "anything goes"; they take ethical stands and make normative choices. Roseneau's (1 992) distinction suggests that much of the hostility shown toward post- modern theorizing has arisen from a failure to appreciate the distinction between the affirma- tives and the skeptics. The Nexus of Production Relations The analytical scheme used here is "the nexus of production relations" (Yapa 1996; Yapa and Wisner 1995). Production is an economic activity only in the narrowest sense of the word because it includes far more than technology, goods, and markets. Production is conducted within a network of discursive and nondiscursive relations-technical, social, ecological, cul- tural, political, and academic-whose under- standing is distorted by subject-specific views of reductionist science (Figure 1). I have bor- rowed the term "production relations" from Marx (1989 [1869]). In doing so, I have ex- tended the term's meaning beyond the "so- cial," its original usage. I have consciously tried to avoid the problems of the Marxian scheme of associating social relations with the eco- nomic base, and matters of culture, knowl- edge, and ideology with the superstructure; I explore the interactions among these relations without regard for those that may be more determinate or "essential."5 These relations should not be conceived of as discrete analyti- cal categories; depending on the purpose at hand, any node may be subdivided or a new one added. These relations act and react upon each other constantly to maintain a dynamic system of mutually constituted elements. An entity that appears to be technological from one angle or at one time may be thought of as academic or social from another angle or time, The nexus of production relations of poverty ACADEMIC ECOLOGICAL TECHNICAL POLITICAL SOCIAL LTURAL Figure 1. The nexus of production relations of povThis content downloaded from 104.28.153.123 on Thu, 29 Jun 2023 19:07:07 +00:00 All use subject to https:/ 710 Yapa or what appears to be academic may be better treated with language that is social or cultural, and so on. The diagram of the nexus should not be misconstrued. All nodes are not equally important for a given outcome, but the relative ranking of relations is a matter to be decided on a case-by-case basis. In any event, the nexus of production shown in Figure 1 is not a model of economic reality; it is a discursive device constructed to enable a conversation about poverty. The phrase "technical relations of production" refers to a concept similar to Marx's forces of production, in which he included raw materials, resources, labor, and technology used in production (Marx 1989 [1869]). I prefer the term "technical relations" to call attention to the fact that attrib- utes of production forces are determined in a larger context (i.e., by other relations) in which production occurs. The term "social relations of production" is used in a manner identical to its use in Marxian economics, where it refers to ownership of the means of production, the manner in which the means of production are utilized, and the rules for the social distribution of the final product (Marx 1989 [1869]). Pro- duction requires matter and energy as inputs and a repository to hold waste materials, chemicals, and heat, setting in motion a myriad of interactions with the biophysical environ- ment-"the ecological relations of production." The phrase "cultural relations of production" refers to the interaction of production with "the ways of life" of social groups as embodied in shared meaning, beliefs, values, symbols, signs, and language. "Political relations of pro- duction" include interactions between the state and society in the organization of economic activity. The state plays a key role in resource allocation in both centrally planned and market economies. In Third World economies the state has come to play an all-pervasive role in civil society through its command over the de- velopment project. The concept of "academic relations of production" is central to a post- modern view of poverty. Academic relations are of two kinds: internal and external. Internal relations arise from the understanding science has of itself in the production of knowledge. Mainstream social science claims that its work is neutral, value-free, and nonpolitical (Proctor 1991), and that its norms and standards are self-evident (Aronowitz 1988). The postmod- ern critique of social science arises largely from science's image of itself. External academic re- lations refer to the discourses that are pro- duced at other sites in the nexus: technical, social, cultural, political, and ecological-where our understanding of technology, property, culture, the state, and nature is mediated through social theories produced about these matters (Demeritt 1994). Thus each node of the nexus is the site of both discursive and nondiscursive practices. Language and discourse make us conscious of material processes (practice), but the form of that understanding (how we know) is influenced by both material processes and choice of language. The relation between dis- course and material is not confined to the in- tellectual task of providing an understanding of material; by acting on our understanding, dis- course affects practice (the material). More- over, discourse is not conducted under rules of free inquiry; it is constructed out of, and constrained by, the very material circum- stances that it studies. It is this sense that Fou- cault tries to capture in the couplet "dis- course/practice"; this is also the sense that I wish to communicate through the use of the term "discursive materialism." I shall give a brief example to clarify the use of this term. A given distribution of land ownership is usually thought of as a social relation of production. But the persistence of a specific land distribu- tion is facilitated through a dense network of discursive practices-laws of property, land- use zoning, theories of land rent, efficiency of farm size, and so on. Thus an effort to reform a particular land distribution must overcome objections raised in discursive realms that are not directly connected to land ownership. So is landownership a social relation? a material relation? or a discursive relation? The answer is that it is all of these because it exists in a space of discursive materialism.

 Representations don’t shape subjectivity – plethora of alt causes

Collective bargaining over the implementation of technology is an important part of the solution. But even if we organized the entire U.S. workforce into unions with enough power to negotiate such agreements, we wouldn’t stop mass layoffs. The key source of workers’ leverage over their employer—the ability to withhold labor—is predicated on the employer’s need for their labor in the first place. UBI isn’t a replacement for a union, but it can help fill a gap where labor otherwise has very little power.

And it’s not just about technology. When Marriot workers were negotiating their agreements in 2018, what they likely weren’t expecting was that 98% of their members would be out of work not as a consequence of automation, but rather, a global pandemic. Moreover, mass unemployment has always been endemic to capitalism. Even in the absence of crisis, there will always be millions of Americans without a job.

The demand for a UBI, however, is subject to competing hegemonic forces. It is just as open to being mobilised for a libertarian dystopia as for a post-work society – an ambiguity that has led many to mistakenly conflate the two poles. In demanding a UBI, therefore, three key factors must be articulated in order to make it meaningful: it must provide a sufficient amount of income to live on; it must be universal, provided to everyone unconditionally; and it must be a supplement to the welfare state rather than a replacement of it. The first point is obvious enough: a UBI must provide a materially adequate income. The exact amount will vary between countries and regions, but it can be relatively easily arrived at with existing data. The risk is that, if set too low, UBI becomes just a government subsidy to businesses. In addition, UBI must be universal and given to everyone unconditionally. As there would be no means-testing or other measures required to receive the UBI, it would break free of the disciplinary nature of welfare capitalism.103 Moreover, a universal grant avoids the stigmatisation of welfare, since everyone receives it. As we argued in Chapter 4, the invocation of ‘universalism’ also obliges the continual subversion of any restricted application of a basic income (in terms of individuals’ status as citizens, immigrants or prisoners). The demand for universality provides the basis for a continued struggle to expand the scope and scale of the basic income. Lastly, the UBI must be a supplement to the welfare state. The conservative argument for a basic income – which must be avoided at all costs – is that it should simply replace the welfare state by providing a lump sum of money to every individual. In this scenario, the UBI would just become a vector of increased marketisation, transforming social services into private markets. Rather than being some aberration of neoliberalism, it would simply extend its essential gesture by creating new markets. By contrast, the demand made here is for UBI as a supplement to a revived welfare state.104

According to numerous surveys and reports, LGBTQ individuals are significantly more likely to struggle economically than straight people, specifically with regard to issues such as poverty, child poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and food insecurity (see, for example, Center for American Progress 2014; Funders 2019a; 2019b). People of color who identify as noncisgender face additional challenges stemming from the intersection of their racial identity, gender identity, and sexual orientation. These include limited access to medical resources, shorter life expectancy, higher risks of getting infected with HIV and developing mental health issues, and increased risk of workplace discrimination (see, for example, Jefferson, Neilands, and Sevelius 2013; Longman, Bauer, and Scheim 2013; Robinson and Ross 2013; Scheim et al. 2013). For these reasons, I believe that an unconditional in-cash transfer such as basic income could have an enormous effect on the economic well-being of LGBTQ individuals and communities, including individuals and communities of color. A policy of this kind could directly address some of these issues (poverty and child poverty) and reduce the likelihood of others (food insecurity, homelessness, or limited access to medical resources). It would also address the consequences of unemployment and workplace discrimination in an indirect way.

This conjecture has to be qualified, however, by adding that in order to have such effects, basic income would have to be provided on top of, and not instead of, the existing means-tested benefits such as SNAP, Medicaid, or unemployment assistance. According to Caitlin Rooney, Charlie Whittington, and Laura E. Durso, “cuts to benefits such as nutrition assistance, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, and public housing assistance would likely disproportionately harm the LGBTQ community” (Rooney, Whittington, and Durso 2018). If UBI replaced existing benefits and if the level of UBI were lower than the sum of means-tested benefits people in poverty receive, such a policy change would actually harm LGBTQ individuals.

For centuries, American public policy has treated Indigenous Americans as second class citizens—enforcing migration, barring citizenship, and refusing to give them the fundamental rights granted to them by the Constitution. All of this produced large economic disparities that continue to this day. Indigenous Americans are 35 percent more likely to be in poverty than non-Indigenous Americans, and their median income is a third lower. While public policy has historically been used to marginalize Indigenous Americans, it can also be used as a tool to build them up. In this paper, I examine how a tax-funded Universal Basic Income (UBI) would impact Indigenous Americans.

Background

In Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community [2010 (1967)], the last book of Martin Luther King, Jr., the guaranteed income proposal is introduced as the simplest and most effective solution to poverty. MLK welcomes what he sees as a “cultural change” from old times, when we would see poverty as a result of individual inability or immorality, to new times when we understand it as stemming from market failures and discriminatory practices that force people into unemployment. Because of this shift, he hopes that we may come to accept radical proposals like guaranteed income as a response to the poverty endemic to our economic systems. In October 1966, the guaranteed income proposal also appeared in the Black Panther Party ten-point manifesto under the second commitment of the program. It was envisaged as a compensation for involuntary unemployment among African-Americans stemming in part from discriminatory practices by white businessmen. The proposal was radical: If it cannot ensure a decent income to its citizens, the federal government ought to return the means of production to the community to guarantee a good living standard to its members. Decades later, the Movement for Black Lives also endorses a form of UBI as part of the economic justice platform of their manifesto.

If the UBI proposal was relevant for racial equality at the time of MLK and the Black Panther Party and remains relevant today, it is primarily because unemployment, underemployment, precarious employment, and bad jobs disproportionally affect the lives of people of color. This is true because of discriminatory practices, still, and also because of broader inequalities in access to education, training, and opportunities (Shelby 2012). Interestingly, both MLK and the Black Panther Party were arguing for guaranteed income or guaranteed employment. They saw the proposals as interchangeable to some extent. After all, both policies are indeed designed to restore dignity by alleviating poverty. Guaranteed income can also help keep job guarantee proposals in check. This is because, with a high enough UBI, recipients would only be willing to take on “decent” jobs that provide them with more than just an income. If caring for a relative, volunteering in their community, or starting a business seemed like better options, then they will not be compelled to accept the jobs under the guarantee plan. This comment mirrors Standing’s (2013) response to guaranteed-jobs proponents who oppose UBI: The right to an income is a prerequisite of a meaningful right to work.

Finally, a basic income is a fundamentally feminist proposal. Its disregard for the gendered division of labour overcomes some of the biases of the traditional welfare state predicated upon a male breadwinner.118 Equally, it recognises the contributions of unwaged domestic labourers to the reproduction of society and provides them with an income accordingly. The financial independence that comes with a basic income is also crucial to developing the synthetic freedom of women. It enables experimentation with different forms of family and community structure that are no longer bound to the model of the privatised nuclear family.119 And financial independence can reconfigure intimate relationships as well: one of the more unexpected findings of experiments with UBI has been that the divorce rate tended to rise.120 Conservative commentators jumped on this as proof of the demand’s immorality, but higher divorce rates are easily explained as women gaining the financial means to leave dysfunctional relationships.121 A basic income can therefore enable easier experimentation with the family structure, more possibilities for the provision of childcare and an easier transformation of the gendered division of labour. Moreover, unlike the demand for ‘wages for housework’ in the 1970s, the demand for UBI promises to break out of the wage relation rather than reinforce it.

There is no clear way to settle those discussions, but I offer three comments to conclude this conversation on gender and UBI. First, it seems that the outcome of this debate now largely depends more on empirics than on values (Robeyns 2008). The feminists discussed in this section roughly agree that gendered social norms must be challenged and that care work must be revalued, but they disagree in their hypotheses about what would happen under UBI. This disagreement sets a research agenda for those experimenting with UBI throughout the world. They must find out, for instance, what the precise combined gender and labor effects of UBI would be in different institutional contexts. Since many jobs are alienating and precarious, it is not clear that finding a drop in employment rate among women would necessarily be regrettable, all things considered. We would need to find out more than just how many women are likely to drop out of the labor market. As Weeks (2011, p. 124) points out, “slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink.” We would need to know precisely which women are likely to give up which jobs, and to do what. To help move this conversation forward, empiricists must also look at the concern that UBI would contribute to the defunding of public goods and find out how reasonable it really is. This would require also studying the framing of various UBI proposals and their reception (to find out whether progressive proposals are more popular than regressive ones, for instance).

A second comment has to do with heterogeneity among women. It is important for this debate to start from an assessment of the situation of the most vulnerable women and whether UBI would benefit them, rather than focusing the debate on whether UBI can further the more abstract goal of gender justice. For many women, lack of formal employment is actually not the main problem. The problem is rather the inability to perform the care work they want to perform without being stigmatized or condemned to a life of poverty or dependence. For some women, the problem is overwork—that they are combining several low-paying jobs to support their children and end up left with too little time to spend with them. Too often socially invisible, many domestic workers are bound to abusive employers by a lack of exit options. Lacking the economic security needed to have exit options also makes sex workers more vulnerable to abuse. The Sex Workers Open University (2017) in fact demands UBI on the basis that “[i]f every person in the UK was entitled to a universal basic income, no one would be pushed by absolute poverty into selling sex.” The conversation on whether UBI should be endorsed on grounds of gender justice should be dependent, at least to some extent, on what UBI would do to empower the women who are currently most economically insecure and most vulnerable to domination.

Proponents of a basic income suggest it has value for women in delinking social security from work given the disadvantages faced by women in the job market.84 Work interruptions to have children and fulfil care roles result in shorter careers, lower wages and smaller accumulation of retirement savings for women, making them more dependent on men and vulnerable in old age. A basic income could enhance women’s freedom to make life choices, including allowing them to live independently of men at different stages of their lives. 85 This is an important consideration given the economic vulnerability facing single mothers and single older women in many countries, worsened by austerity and economic crisis. A basic income would enable women to leave violent relationships if they were assured of income for themselves and their children.86 A basic income has also been supported as a necessary means of enhancing women’s democratic citizenship. 87 By focusing on reciprocity across the society, the debate about a basic income can open up conversations about reciprocity within the household. 88 A basic income recognises unpaid and affiliative work as socially valuable and thus has the potential to change understandings of social citizenship. 89 The shift from work to citizenship as the source of income thus increases the possibility of transformed gender relations. Nancy Fraser’s transformative model of citizenship, ‘the universal care-giver model’, sees all members of society participating in paid work and unpaid care with social institutions restructured to support this.90 A basic income, or some variant of it, might enable this change leading to a more equal division of care and work.91 Cox suggests reframing basic income as a ‘universal social dividend’ since this would ‘redefine such income as produced by valuing wide-ranging unpaid contributions to collective social well-being and counter some of the materialist gender inequities of economic models’.92 The challenge to decommodify human activity so that ‘affiliative’ work is valued must be built into policies aimed at achieving gender equality.93 Pateman points out that a feminist lens reorients the basic income debate away from economic questions to ones related to democratisation since it focuses on issues of citizenship and institutions including the workplace and marriage.94 While the debate is often concerned with ‘free-riding’, those who choose not to work while depending on the income of others, a feminist understanding shifts the examination of free-riding to men who continue to expect women to perform the bulk of social reproductive work within their households even when both partners are in paid employment. The idea of a basic income paid to individual women as a citizenship entitlement rather than to the household where it may not be shared equally is important for feminism and democratisation.95

As an egalitarian theorist, I find myself in broad agreement with Rogers’s position that, from a progressive perspective, basic income is necessary but not sufficient to tackle growing inequalities. But I object to his lukewarm embrace of basic income as something that might marginally improve workers’ lives, rather than a project with a critical political goal. Indeed, in some places, his lack of enthusiasm makes one wonder why we should push for one at all since it is so hard to win and only achieves so little.

From Rogers’s basic message that a basic income is insufficient, we seem to slip into the view that it is somehow superfluous for progressive change—an avoidable part of a complicated package. Insisting that a basic income is insufficient in this manner often ends up unnecessarily sapping a rising enthusiasm for the policy for no good reason. This is unfortunate, since a basic income has unequalled potential to foster convergence between diverse grassroots movements. Few policies can help such different groups as domestic workers, truck drivers, stay-at-home moms, abused dependent partners, ex-cons, sex workers, starving artists, people who hate their jobs, people who love their jobs but need to reduce hours, volunteers, interns, students, poor pensioners, precarious workers, people who want to start an ecovillage, and so many more.

In this section, we articulate a third position that draws on the critiques of both capitalism and modern statecraft above. It differs, however, in providing a more capacious, less deterministic, reading of the literature on cash transfers. First, we position cash transfers as a different form of statecraft, what we call a ‘modest’ statecraft that enables redistribution without increasing the biopolitical power of the state. Cash transfers do not predetermine needs but allow people (within the constraints of markets) to choose how funds are spent. A UBI takes this modesty a step further by removing conditions on ‘who’ is deemed to be an appropriate recipient of cash transfers. Second, we suggest that cash transfers may well not be palliatives that produce contentment, but the inverse: additional resources which can be used to support radical political economic change. This might entail using funds to support diverse economies, reducing reliance on capitalist economies, and freeing time for participation in democracy. It also may contribute to new imaginaries of what the economy is, and who it belongs to. In this context, we argue that durable, redistributive cash transfers that assure material sufficiency may be used to underwrite radical political economic change.

Importantly, in accordance with southern development scholarship as well as longstanding socialist and social democratic arguments, this third position does not consider cash transfers as a full substitute for the state. We mean this in two vital ways. First, cash transfers are a more just substitute for many, but not all, forms of conditional welfare. Deciding which services ought to be provided by whom and how they are to be funded will be an ongoing subject of political debate and need not have the same answer everywhere, but some form of collective remains necessary to regulate and assure access to collective goods (some of which may be paid for). Generally speaking, what Hickel (2020) calls the ‘welfare purchasing power’ of money is higher in places with greater collective support; a UBI could be proportionately lowered with free or substantially subsidized services. There are good reasons to consider the provision of many collective services and basic income working together (see also Coote & Lawson, 2021). Second, the position here we develop builds on, and is compatible with, radical views that insist on the need for markets to be regulated and embedded, subsuming markets to the needs and desires of the local public, rather than those of global capital. As we have previously argued (Lawhon & McCreary, 2020) and further elaborate below, a UBI might well contribute to enabling such regulation and embedding.

These first two proposals equate to the reduction of labour demand through full automation, and the reduction of labour supply through the shortening of the working week.89 The combined outcome of these measures would be the liberation of a significant amount of free time without a reduction in economic output or a significant increase in unemployment. Yet this free time will be of little value if people continue struggling to make ends meet. As Paul Mattick puts it, ‘the leisure of the starving, or the needy, is no leisure at all but a relentless activity aimed at staying alive or improving their situation’.90 The underemployed, for instance, have plenty of free time but lack the means to enjoy it. Underemployed, it turns out, is really just a euphemism for under-waged. This is why an essential demand in a post-work society is for a universal basic income (UBI), giving every citizen a liveable amount of money without any means-testing.91 It is an idea that has periodically popped up throughout history.92 In the early 1940s, a version of it was advanced as an alternative to the Beveridge Report that eventually shaped the UK welfare state.93 In a now largely forgotten period during the 1960s and 1970s, the basic income was central to proposals for US welfare reform. Economists, NGOs and policymakers explored the idea in detail,94 and a number of small-scale experiments were set up in Canada and the United States.95 Such was the influence of UBI that over 1,300 economists signed a petition pushing the US Congress to enact a ‘national system of income guarantees’.96 Three separate administrations gave serious consideration to the proposal, and two presidents – Nixon and Carter – attempted to pass legislation to achieve it.97 In other words, UBI very nearly became a reality in the 1970s.98 While Alaska eventually implemented a basic income funded by its oil wealth, the idea largely disappeared from debate in the wake of neoliberal hegemony.99 But recent years have seen the idea undergo a resurgence in popularity. In both mainstream and critical media, it has gained traction, being taken up by Paul Krugman, Martin Wolf, the New York Times, the Financial Times and the Economist.100 The Swiss are holding a referendum on UBI in 2016, the proposal has been recommended by parliamentary committees in other countries, various political parties have adopted it in their manifestos, and there have been new experiments with it in Namibia and India.101 The idea has global scope, having been promoted forcefully by groups in Brazil, South Africa, Italy and Germany, and by an international network involving over twenty countries.102 The movement for a UBI is thus once again resurgent in the wake of the 2008 crisis and the austerity regimes put in place after it. The demand for a UBI, however, is subject to competing hegemonic forces. It is just as open to being mobilised for a libertarian dystopia as for a post-work society – an ambiguity that has led many to mistakenly conflate the two poles. In demanding a UBI, therefore, three key factors must be articulated in order to make it meaningful: it must provide a sufficient amount of income to live on; it must be universal, provided to everyone unconditionally; and it must be a supplement to the welfare state rather than a replacement of it. The first point is obvious enough: a UBI must provide a materially adequate income. The exact amount will vary between countries and regions, but it can be relatively easily arrived at with existing data. The risk is that, if set too low, UBI becomes just a government subsidy to businesses. In addition, UBI must be universal and given to everyone unconditionally. As there would be no means-testing or other measures required to receive the UBI, it would break free of the disciplinary nature of welfare capitalism.103 Moreover, a universal grant avoids the stigmatisation of welfare, since everyone receives it. As we argued in Chapter 4, the invocation of ‘universalism’ also obliges the continual subversion of any restricted application of a basic income (in terms of individuals’ status as citizens, immigrants or prisoners). The demand for universality provides the basis for a continued struggle to expand the scope and scale of the basic income. Lastly, the UBI must be a supplement to the welfare state. The conservative argument for a basic income – which must be avoided at all costs – is that it should simply replace the welfare state by providing a lump sum of money to every individual. In this scenario, the UBI would just become a vector of increased marketisation, transforming social services into private markets. Rather than being some aberration of neoliberalism, it would simply extend its essential gesture by creating new markets. By contrast, the demand made here is for UBI as a supplement to a revived welfare state.104 Drawing upon moral arguments and empirical research, there are a vast number of reasons to support a UBI: reduced poverty, better public health and reduced health costs, fewer high school dropouts, reductions in petty crime, more time with family and friends, and less state bureaucracy.105 Depending on how UBI is presented, it is capable of generating support from across the political spectrum – from libertarians, conservatives, anarchists, Marxists and feminists, among others. The potency of the demand lies partly in this ambiguity, making it capable of mobilising broad popular support.106 However, for our purposes the significance of UBI as a demand lies in four key interrelated factors. The first point to emphasise is that the demand for UBI is a demand for a political transformation, not just an economic one. It is often thought that UBI is simply a form of redistribution from the rich to the poor, or that it is just a measure to maintain economic growth by stimulating consumer demand. From this perspective, UBI would have impeccable reformist credentials and be little more than a glorified progressive tax system. Yet the real significance of UBI lies in the way it overturns the asymmetry of power that currently exists between labour and capital. As we saw in the discussion of surplus populations, the proletariat is defined by its separation from the means of production and subsistence. The proletariat is thereby forced to sell itself in the job market in order to gain the income necessary to survive. The most fortunate among us have the leisure to choose which job to take, but few of us have the capacity to choose no job. A basic income changes this condition, by giving the proletariat a means of subsistence without dependency on a job.107 Workers, in other words, have the option to choose whether to take a job or not (in many ways, taking neoclassical economics at its word, and making work truly voluntary). A UBI therefore unbinds the coercive aspects of wage labour, partially decommodifies labour, and thus transforms the political relationship between labour and capital. This transformation – making work voluntary rather than coerced – has a number of significant consequences. In the first place, it increases class power by reducing slack in the labour market. Surplus populations show what happens when there are large amounts of slack in the labour market: wages fall, and employers are free to debase workers.108 By contrast, when the labour market is tight, labour gains the political edge. The economist Michał Kalecki recognised this long ago when he argued that it explained why full employment would be resisted at every step.109 If every worker were employed, the threat of being fired would lose its disciplinary character – there would be more than enough jobs waiting just outside. Workers would gain the upper hand, and capital would lose its political power. The same dynamic holds for a basic income: by eliminating the reliance on wage labour, workers gain control over how much labour to supply, giving them significant power in the labour market. Class power is also increased in a variety of other ways. Strikes are easier to mobilise, since workers no longer have to worry about pay being docked or dwindling strike funds. The amount of time spent working for a wage can be modified to one’s own desire, with free time spent building communities and engaging with politics. One can slow down and reflect, safely protected from the constant pressures of neoliberalism. The anxieties that surround work and unemployment are reduced with the safety net of a UBI.110 Moreover, the demand for UBI combines the needs of the employed, the unemployed, the underemployed, migrant labour, temporary workers, students and the disabled.111 It articulates a common interest between these groups and provides a populist orientation for them to mobilise towards. The second related feature of UBI is that it transforms precarity and unemployment from a state of insecurity to a state of voluntary flexibility. It is often forgotten that the initial push for flexible labour came from workers, as a way of demolishing the constraining permanency of traditional Fordist labour.112 The repetitiveness of a nine-to-five job, combined with the tediousness of most work, is hardly an appealing prospect for a life-long career. The demands of care labour often require a flexible approach as well, further undermining the appeal of traditional jobs. Marx himself invokes the liberating aspects of flexible labour in his famous claim that communism ‘makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic’.113 In the face of these desires for flexibility, capital adapted and co-opted them into a new form of exploitation. Today, flexible labour simply presents itself as precarity and insecurity, rather than freedom. The UBI responds to this generalisation of precarity and transforms it from a state to be feared back into a state of liberation. Third, a basic income would necessitate a rethinking of the values attributed to different types of work. Given that workers would no longer be forced to take a job, they could instead simply reject jobs that paid too little, required too much work, offered too few benefits, or were demeaning and undignified. Low-waged work is often crass and disempowering, and under a programme of UBI it is unlikely that many would want to undertake it. The result would be that hazardous, boring and unattractive work would have to be better paid, while more rewarding, invigorating and attractive work would be less well paid. In other words, the nature of work would become a measure of its value, not merely its profitability.114 The outcome of this revaluation would also mean that, as wages for the worst jobs rose, there would be new incentives to automate them. UBI therefore forms a positive-feedback loop with the demand for full automation. On the other hand, a basic income would not only transform the value of the worst jobs, but also go some way towards recognising the unpaid labour of most care work. In the same way that the demand for wages for housework recognised and politicised the domestic labour of women, so too does UBI recognise and politicise the generalised way in which we are all responsible for reproducing society: from informal to formal work, from domestic to public work, from individual to collective work. What is central is not productive labour, defined in either traditional Marxist or neoclassical terms, but rather the more general category of reproductive labour.115 Given that we all contribute to the production and reproduction of capitalism, our activity deserves to be remunerated as well.116 In recognising this, the UBI indicates a shift from remuneration based upon ability to remuneration based upon basic need.117 All the genetic, historical and social variations that make effort a poor measure of a person’s worth are rejected here, and instead people are valued simply for being people. Finally, a basic income is a fundamentally feminist proposal. Its disregard for the gendered division of labour overcomes some of the biases of the traditional welfare state predicated upon a male breadwinner.118 Equally, it recognises the contributions of unwaged domestic labourers to the reproduction of society and provides them with an income accordingly. The financial independence that comes with a basic income is also crucial to developing the synthetic freedom of women. It enables experimentation with different forms of family and community structure that are no longer bound to the model of the privatised nuclear family.119 And financial independence can reconfigure intimate relationships as well: one of the more unexpected findings of experiments with UBI has been that the divorce rate tended to rise.120 Conservative commentators jumped on this as proof of the demand’s immorality, but higher divorce rates are easily explained as women gaining the financial means to leave dysfunctional relationships.121 A basic income can therefore enable easier experimentation with the family structure, more possibilities for the provision of childcare and an easier transformation of the gendered division of labour. Moreover, unlike the demand for ‘wages for housework’ in the 1970s, the demand for UBI promises to break out of the wage relation rather than reinforce it. While a universal basic income may appear economically reformist, its political implications are therefore significant. It transforms precarity, it recognises social labour, it makes class power easier to mobilise, and it extends the space in which to experiment with how we organise communities and families. It is a redistribution mechanism that transforms production relations. It is an economic mechanism that changes the politics of work. And in terms of class struggle, there is little to distinguish full employment from full unemployment: both tighten the labour market, give power to labour, and make it more difficult to exploit workers. Full unemployment has the added advantages of not being reliant upon the gendered division of labour between the household and the formal economy, of not keeping workers chained to the wage relation, and of allowing workers autonomy over their lives. For all of these reasons, the classic social democratic demand for full employment should be replaced with the future-orientated demand for full unemployment.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR POLITICAL THEORY RESEARCH ON UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

Political theorists have paid close attention to UBI, and they have done so from a plurality of rich perspectives—libertarian, republican, egalitarian, feminist, racial justice, post-productivist, and Marxist, to name only a few. It is therefore difficult to highlight gaps in the coverage of value-based arguments for and against the policy. Nonetheless, this review of the literature leaves me with four observations about what remains to be explored in the field, in addition to the gaps I have already highlighted.

One last comment concerns the need for all-things-considered judgments in political theory. One is rarely only committed to gender equality, since the egalitarian principles that underpin feminism also underpin racial equality, the fights against ableism, class hierarchies, etc. So it seems important to arrive at an all-things-considered judgment on whether UBI is desirable on egalitarian grounds. UBI may be second or third best as a tool of gender equality, for instance, but it may also be the only safety net that consistently appears at the top of the list of adequate tools to achieve a variety of other egalitarian goals. This should be a central consideration for political theorists who are committed to ending oppression in its various forms.

As discussed above, the call for a basic income comes from conservatives and progressives alike although their motivations for proposing it and their hopes for its impact differ widely. From the perspective of a left agenda, the call for a basic income offers challenges to the existing understanding of work in the context of our current capitalist system. As Kathi Weeks has expressed:115 The collective political activity of demanding a basic income is as interesting to me as the demand itself. A demand is not just a thing, but something that must be explained, justified, argued for and debated. The practice of demanding is itself productive of critical awareness and new political desires. Demanding a basic income, as I see it, is also a process of making the problems with the wage system of income allocation visible, articulating a critical vocabulary that can help us to understand these problems, opening up a path that might eventually lead us to demand even more changes, and challenging us to imagine a world wherein we had more choices about waged work, nonwork, and their relationship to the rest of our lives. By this account, we would judge the success or failure of a movement for basic income not only in terms of whether the policy is implemented, but also in terms of the collective power, organizational forms, critical consciousness, and new demands that the process of demanding it manages to generate. The basic income debate is both a process of claim-making and a means of exposing what is wrong with our existing systems. It is also an opportunity to consider new ideas for social and economic organisation. This has obvious appeal to feminists since the project of feminism is by its nature both critical of what we have, political in demanding change, and utopian in visualising a different way of structuring gender in society.116 This aligns well with aspects of the human rights project, an attempt to progressively realise a fairer world. As Philip Alston puts it:117 … the utopian vision may also provide the much-needed impetus to rethink the optimal shape of social protection explicitly designed to achieve universal realization of the human right to an adequate standard of living in the twenty-first century.

Evidence from elsewhere suggests that if given the means and freedom to make changes to their lives, people are far from lazy.42. Early results concerning the large cash transfer programme run by GiveDirectly in Kenya and Uganda show numerous examples of recipients using the payments for useful purposes, such as starting a business or expanding an existing one.43. Similarly, 72 percent of Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend recipients report using their income for useful things, including education or repayment of prior debt.44. In a 1970s Basic Income experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba, a slight reduction in working hours by recipients was accounted for by use of the income to access educational opportunities, care for relatives and to shift to more manageable working hours among those who were overworked.45. While the UK context is admittedly different, these results offer encouragement that recipients would use the Opportunity Fund to make positive interventions in their lives.

This section discusses UBI’s potential impact on labor supply and individual’s use of time.

A common worry about universal basic income is that it could reduce people’s incentive to work, thus causing a number of domino effects in the economy. The disincentive effect, for instance, could reduce productivity and the number of goods produced and increase the number of individuals who only rely on assistance to survive. The disincentive effect could also lead to inflation as businesses would need to pay higher wages to retain workers, and the higher wages would push production costs up, translating into increased costs for consumers. The evidence from existing UBI related schemes, however, negates many of these concerns and, overall, indicates that UBI-related programs have marginal effects on labor market participation.

Title: What we know about Universal Basic Income: A cross-synthesis of reviews.

LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT