Adoption of UBI sparks a catalyst that creates a new, unintrusive form of statecraft whilst supporting radical economic change

[Mary and Tyler, “Making UBI radical: On the potential for a universal basic income to underwrite transformative and anti-kyriarchal change,” Taylor and Francis Online, March 6th 2023, Accessed via Georgetown Library, GDS – PL]

A radical position in support of a UBI

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 (Citation2020) 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, Citation2021). 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, Citation2020) and further elaborate below, a UBI might well contribute to enabling such regulation and embedding.