UBIs shift wage control from big corporations to the state to magnify biopolitical power Roche 21 (“Material freedom, citizenship and democracy: the case for Universal Basic Income in post-political societies”, Mario Garcia Roche, Pg. Abstract, 141-142, https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/audens/article/view/36338/35359) HSLA: RP

More concretely, this Marxist standpoint stresses that the UBI will perpetuate, mainly, two social forms: money and the state. Regarding money, UBI will not represent a step towards a “post-capitalist society”. The problem with capitalist society and the possible implementation of UBI is not the work itself, which could represent an individual and social component of recognition (Angella, 2016); but the reproduction of historical social struggles and oppression. Moreover, with the aid of state institutions, such social struggles have transformed the recognitive and ethical character work to a continuous social, economic, and existential struggle for workers and non-workers (Santos, 2012: 82).

In this sense, neither money nor the state are socially “neutral” forces. They are representative of concrete “capitalist social relations” (Dinerstein & Pitts, 2018: 477). Moreover, money needs to be envisioned beyond a mere mean of exchange between two or more agents. In this light, money is a mean of subjection of workers to wage labor. As Dinerstein and Pitts argue, “(...) the wage is not a reward for expended labor but a payment to keep workers in the condition that they can and must labor” (Dinerstein & Pitts, 2018: 476).

Thus, what UBI may do is to shift the origin of this subjection from the enterprises and companies to the state, which would be the main supplier of income for citizens. Concerning this, there is another convergence between Foucauldian studies and the Marxist ones, the one showing the managerial and entrepreneurial nature of state in neoliberalism. In this sense, the state becomes a company that provides income to national citizens in the same way as big companies did in the past, while, at the same time, they maintain the structures of domination present in them.

Additionally, another point of coincidence can be found in the different class and political struggles traditionally addressed inside Marxist studies and the claims made by Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Zizek on post-political societies. Concerning this, if we stick to the paradoxical character of politics inside democracy, there are several reasons for emphasizing a number of negative outcomes coming from the implementation of the UBI. It is true that, as it has been mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, UBI would aid to increase citizens’ participation in the political and public sphere by providing a material income that would permit them to cultivate civic virtue. Nevertheless, the current UBI models and proposals deliver divergent problems. First, despite being conceive as a universally applicable policy, UBI has the danger of becoming a deeply reactionary and exclusionary policy against non-national subjects such as immigrants and stateless people (Dinerstein & Pitts, 2016: 479). Although main scholars on UBI have tried to show that the implementation of the policy will not result in mass migration from poor to richer countries (Boso & Vancea, 2012; Van Parijs & Vanderborght, 2017), the instrumentalization of the proposal by divergent political parties and movements has hindered the foundationalaims of the proposal. Moreover, together with this “strategic” use of the UBI described before, to this day the reality is that UBI is still conceived as a policy for nation-states. With this, UBI could work as a potential supporter of nationalistic and reactionary attitudes. From this, if the UBI is implemented at a national level, it runs the danger of annulling its inherent emancipatory character in order to become a tool for authoritarian regimes (Dinerstein & Pitts, 2017: 479).