Even if it doesn’t take us all the way there, a UBI is an important step towards a socialist world

The universal basic income, I would argue, is already beginning to shift our national consciousness in directions that can direct us on the road to socialism. It is bringing issues of class and inequality more into focus and making them part of the national conversation, though in theoretically insufficient ways.

Chris Hughes, for example, the co-founder of Facebook, has argued strenuously for a universal basic income as not necessarily a comprehensive solution but as at least a moderating analgesic for the severity of income inequality and poverty in America, asserting, “We talk about inequality—and the economy in general—in terms that make it seem like these are structural problems that we can’t do anything about. When in reality, we’ve created the rules of the road: the way the economy works now.”

While he might not fully articulate what a different economic structure or system would look like (he doesn’t say the “S” word), he does unsettle the notion that capitalism is a fixed and unchangeable thing. He raises the specter that another economy is possible and makes the important point that people control and build the economy, which means we can, in fact, change it and create it anew.

As a culture and in our political discourse, we tend to talk about “the economy” in ways that de-historicize it and make it seem permanent, as if capitalism is the only game in town. We don’t hear many people in talking about our economy say “the capitalist economy” to distinguish it, say, from feudal or socialist economies. As a culture, this makes it a lot harder for us to entertain different kinds of economic arrangements.

While Hughes, I’m guessing, does not identify as a Marxist, his intervention in this debate does begin to offer a different language for talking about our economy and the fact that poverty is not simply the fault or just desert of lazy or feckless people, but rather a product of capitalist economy. This language opens and orients the national consciousness to a potentially imaginative conversation about what a socially just and humane economy might look like. It’s an opener, anyway.

Billionaire Mark Zuckerburg, similarly provokes thinking about both the effectiveness and fairness of class society—and by extension capitalism—in his advocacy for a universal basic income. In a commencement address he delivered at Harvard, he indicated how growing up with financial security allowed him the freedom to pursue his inventions, explaining, “If I had to support my family instead of having time to code, if I didn’t know I’d be fine if Facebook didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be standing here today.”

These capitalists point not just to the unfairness, even inhumanity, of capitalism, but they even hint at what Marx stressed in his analysis of the history of class society: Capitalism, while it unleashed the creativity feudalism had constrained, it also fetters human creativity and the forces of production overall, leading to an economy at once inhumane and inefficient.