UBI gives every person a societal value

Secondly, and more importantly, the universal basic income, in asserting everyone’s right to a material existence, accomplishes some important work in our cultural consciousness, in Marxist directions, in terms of dissociating or de-coupling the work people do from their ability to have their material needs met and, more to the point, to share in the fruits of our collective labor.

In other words, the implementation of a universal basic income can begin to erode the powerful meritocratic ideology that, as I have argued elsewhere in the pages of People’s World, is a centrally insidious ideology sustaining capitalism. As a culture, we are for the most part perfectly happy valuing people’s work unequally, regardless of how essential it is to our lives. Our capitalist culture makes it seem normal and just that the doctor doing the important work of keeping us healthy deserves a lot more money—and hence access to more resources—than the farmworker who does the important and essential work of feeding us. As a culture, we lack a recognition that this very way of valuing work is a product of a capitalist economy, that the way we determine the “merit” of work grows out a capitalist mentality.

Definitive of Marxism for me is the principle made famous in The Communist Manifesto which Marx reiterates in his Critique of the Gotha Program, namely the idea: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” This notion challenges, indeed explodes, the idea that the work people do should bear any relation to their ability to meet their needs or have access to the fruits of our collective labor.

The American dominant culture, however, forcefully insists upon not only differentially valuing work but also linking the work one does to one’s ability to consume or access resources (purchasing power) to live. A vital piece of Marxist thought is precisely this powerful gesture of de-linking the work people do (or not) from their right to a material existence.

The universal basic income, as a policy, does this important cultural work of de-linking people’s merit—people deserving nourishment, housing, healthcare, education, safety, and other basic human rights—from the type of work they do, how much they work, and even from whether they work or not.

Moving to a socialist culture and imagination means we must recognize and eradicate the capitalist values infecting us. Meritocracy is a deeply rooted capitalist value many in America do not even recognize as capitalist.

Mayor Michael Tubbs of Stockton, California, however, has been able to implement a universal basic income in his city, with a plan to be piloted on a small scale beginning in 2019. What motivated him was precisely the socialist imagination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which he has invoked explicitly, recalling reading King’s Where Do We Go From here: Chaos or Community, in which King calls for a guaranteed annual income.

While certainly no remedy for or alternative to capitalism, the universal basic income can address poverty and improve lives while at the same time altering our entrenched thought patterns and inspiring an imagination to ease us on down the road to socialism.