UBIs live in a violent binary of necropolitics that only recreates violent neoliberal structures of choice. Reveley 21 (“Universal basic income revisted: COVID-19, biopoltical trade-offs, and the expropriation of digital academic labour”, James Reveley PhD, January 14th 2021, Faculty of Business and Law at the University of Wollongong, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1478210320987411) HSLA: RP
This health economistic utilitarianism is emblematic of a neoliberal “necropolitics” that is both blasé about preventable deaths and promotes “capital over human needs” (Giroux, 2020). Higher education is a key site for applying the resulting “crude biopolitical calculus” (Rose, 2020: 1). Under neoliberal managerialism, the wellbeing and safety of college and university-based educators is at risk of being traded off against the aim of educational administrators to prevent the flow of students, and associated revenue streams, from being further disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. My article argues, on the one hand, that the pandemic-induced rapid shift of educational activities online has immense potential to heighten the expropriation of digital academic labour. Here this term is stipulatively defined as labour, expended in colleges and universities, which is mediated by digital technologies (Allmer, 2018). On the other hand, I highlight a trade-off between the digitally driven exploitation of academics engaged in online teaching and ensuring their safety as higher education institutions in many countries wind back emergency measures and reopen their gates in order to shore up student enrolments. As Burns (2020) insightfully observes, the notion that digital technologies will protect those who work and study in colleges and universities from catching the novel coronavirus is premised upon techno-utopian thinking that merely papers over the cracks in the neoliberal pandemic response.
My primary purpose is to link this market-driven response, and its specific enactment within higher education, to calls to introduce universal basic income (UBI). These have grown more strident due to the toll that the pandemic is taking on employment across a range of sectors in the capitalist market-guided economies (Green et al., 2020; Prabhakar, 2020). UBI is an inflation-indexed and unconditional monthly payment – neither means-tested nor targeted – received by all citizens throughout their life-course. Of particular importance here is the distinction between emergency and non-emergency UBI (Ståhl and MacEachen, 2020). The former is a short-term measure designed to meet pandemic-induced income shortfalls through income support applied at the level of the entire community. By contrast, non-emergency UBI is explicitly non-contingent and lifelong (Wright, 2004).
As the locus for binaristic trade-offs of a biopolitical nature, I will argue, higher education provides additional reasons to introduce non-emergency UBI – that is, to widen the scope of UBI beyond a short-term response to the external shock caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The discussion is structured as follows. In the following section, two theories of digital capitalism that provide an explicitly compensatory rationale for introducing non-emergency UBI are outlined. The third section deals with the proletarianization of the academic labour force. Through this social process, I maintain, the use of digital technologies to shift teaching, learning and assessment online dovetails with how value is created and expropriated in a digitalized variety of capitalism that exploits knowledge creation. In the fourth section I circle back to non-emergency UBI as a solution to the binaried choice, at a time of Covid-19, between work and life in the neoliberal university and beyond. A brief conclusion rounds out the discussion.
UBI’s radical potential is hampered by its relation to the state and labor – Only communities of care through social and solidarity economies solve. Thompson 22 (“Money for everything? Universal basic income in a crisis”, Matthew Thompson, March 18th 2022, Matthew Thompson, Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03085147.2022.2035930?src=recsys)
From wage slavery to vectoral domination
Even if widespread technological disemployment fails to transpire, UBI should, from a radical ‘labour republican’ perspective (Gourevitch, Citation2013; see also O'Shea, Citation2020), liberate people from the compulsion to work for a wage or else fail to deliver on the freedoms it promises us to pursue more politically-transformative, socially-valuable and ecologically-sustainable endeavours (Lawhon & McCreary, Citation2020; Wright, Citation2005). The (liberal) neo-republican position holds that UBI should be set just high enough to empower people to refuse a particular job and seek better working conditions elsewhere, as the foundation for freedom from domination (Casassas & De Wispelaere, Citation2015). This stops short of seeing the capitalist market itself as a source of more abstract, structural domination in which workers are compelled to sell their labour for a wage in order to survive – the peculiarly capitalist condition of ‘wage slavery’ (Gourevitch, Citation2013; Roberts, Citation2017). Such blindness to structural forms of domination is explicable by neo-republicanism’s formal, liberal view of non-domination as corresponding closely to individual intentionality and strictly limited to freedom from interference from others. Accordingly, the market cannot dominate our actions because it cannot act from intention. But radical republican and Marxist perspectives take a subtler, systemic approach to understanding the impersonal social relations constructed through the global capitalist market as dominating of actions and constraining of choices. Under capitalism, we are driven from necessity to sell our labour, as dispossessed commoners, or to sell commodities as capitalists – a mutual condition of structural domination (Roberts, Citation2017). If UBI is to effect structural transformation, to lead us to a post-capitalist world of de-commodified, non-alienated, meaningful work, it would have to be generous enough to give people a genuine choice not to labour for a wage (Gourevitch, Citation2013).
This essential condition for realizing UBI’s socialist potential (Wright, Citation2005) is the crux of the problem for critics focused on fiscal, political and bureaucratic barriers to its implementation as a policy: affordability dilemmas stem from a focus on the tax-benefit system, on net versus gross cost (Widerquist, Citation2017); while a political impasse is presented by conservative and progressive ends of the broad coalition required to support legislation on UBI pulling in opposing directions and undermining core elements (De Wispelaere & Stirton, Citation2013). It is for these reasons that Martinelli (Citation2019) highlights the intractable ‘trilemma’ between UBI’s fiscal affordability, material adequacy and administrative simplicity, in which only two of these three fundamental conditions may be met simultaneously. Significantly, this literature assumes that income tax on wage labour would be the principal financial source. Following this logic, UBI is thus caught in a double-bind: if set too low, it fails to free us from wage slavery or the structural domination of the market, acting as a subsidy for continued capital accumulation; if set too high it liberates us from the necessity to work for a wage and therefore undermines the taxable income required to fund it – unless, that is, we can secure alternative funding sources.
In the post-pandemic conjuncture, these pragmatic arguments appear increasingly confounded by fast-moving events and lacking in political-economic imagination to match the policy ambition of UBI. Massive, unprecedented state investments in response to COVID-19 – bailouts to the tune of $17 trillion globally, $5.8 trillion by the United States alone, dwarfing the $3 trillion global total for the 2008 financial crisis – have discredited prevailing beliefs in strict public fiscal limits and neoclassical myths that government spending is like household spending; while the controversial claims of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) are gaining credibility – that tax is a tool of social policy rather than revenue raiser for government expenditure (Baker & Murphy, Citation2020). This highlights the importance of looking beyond tax-benefit system reform to alternative financing mechanisms: from MMT-informed People’s Quantitative Easing (QE) or ‘QE for commoners’ (Standing, Citation2019, p. 37) to the democratization of capital and socialization of production, through municipal enterprise, inclusive ownership funds, stakeholder dividends, state investment banks and public wealth funds, in which the state and labour gain a direct stake in capital (O'Neill & White, Citation2019; White, Citation2009). This suggests that UBI is best conceived as a social dividend – a share in the surpluses produced by capitalism. It also invites us to radically rethink how the state can capture and redistribute the economic surpluses produced by productivity gains driven by technological advances in robotics, AI and big data – especially considering Silicon Valley’s impressive knack at tax avoidance (Fouksman & Klein, Citation2019; Mathers, Citation2020).
From a radical republican perspective concerned with freedom from domination by the state and capital, UBI remains an ambiguous and contentious topic. As articulated by Marxist scholars such as Wright (Citation2005, Citation2010), UBI promises to strengthen labour’s power to contest capital by providing a ‘permanent strike fund’ as well as resources to seed-fund worker-owned cooperative enterprise; to subsidise socially-productive and labour-intensive though largely unprofitable activities in the social and solidarity economy; and to empower citizens to freely associate and shape economic organization, at least locally, and to agitate for political change across scales. Others, however, point to the displacement and mediation by the state of the direct relationship between employer and employee, making it more difficult to challenge the power of capital through strikes and industrial action (Dinerstein & Pitts, Citation2021; Lombardozzi & Pitts, Citation2020). UBI is seen to erode class consciousness formed through the social relations of work and to circumvent the bargaining power of labour; to empower the state as ultimate wage payer for all, centralizing and concentrating power with which citizens have only limited, formal means to democratically control through periodic elections of their political representatives; to simultaneously reduce bureaucracy, liberating welfare claimants from state-imposed conditionalities, while making everyone more dependent on the state for their livelihoods (Lombardozzi & Pitts, Citation2020). By replacing the compulsion to work for a wage with dependence on the state for money and leaving us potentially more vulnerable to the whims of markets to meet our basic needs – that is, unless we can develop alternative, decommodified, cooperative supply chains through a massively expanded social and solidarity economy – UBI may simply strengthen the power of the two fundamental mediators of capitalism: the commodity form (money) and the state (Dinerstein & Pitts, Citation2021). Ultimately, its progressive potential to contest and transform capitalism hinges on how effectively UBI can be harnessed by labour to democratize both capital and the state and create commons-based alternatives.