Radically reconceptualizing UBI is good: it serves as a medium to rhetorically foster transformative anti-accumulation initiatives. [retag this card]

As indicated earlier, the affirmative degrowth position exists as a political and academic platform that may gain further support in the face of current developments. At present, however, it is far more common to advocate the conjoint transformation of the economic and the socio-political order—and as the demand for environmental sustainability becomes increasingly urgent, this position could overtake that of affirmative degrowth completely. Across the board, ecologists, anarcho-communists, Marxist-feminists, and other key proponents of degrowth as an underlying principle of social transformation are adopting UBI as a key instrument (see inter alia, Beckford, 2019; Blaschke, 2016; Cabaña, 2019; Flanigan, 2018; Weeks, 2011). Thus, the transformative degrowth logic is gaining intellectual and political momentum as the strongest rationale for UBI.

Full implementation of the ideas inherent to proposals of this type of UBI would entail an ‘extreme makeover’ of society, one that we have yet to see—and with which it is difficult to experiment. The ‘all or nothing’ character of this position does not lend itself easily to pilot testing, but could, potentially, be rolled out incrementally. As examples of existing initiatives that may be associated with this intellectual movement, Mein Grundeinkommen (n.d.) in Germany encourages a ‘focus on our life-goals rather than on existential needs’, and the Swiss initiative Verein Grundeinkommen (n.d.) supports ‘a more liberal way of life’.