Distraction - A UBI shifts the debate from class struggle to policy details. The only way to achieve dignified work and wages is through class struggle to abolish capitalism.

UBI or the Redistribution of Working Hours? Tens years after the Great Recession, some have proclaimed that the world has turned a corner, even if the turbulence of more the last couple years discredits such claims. The capitalist class is preparing new attacks on the living standards of the working class, which it must do in order to increase accumulation. A key part of this are the labor and pension (counter)-reforms being imposed around the world (from France to Brazil and Argentina). But UBI also has its part to play. The proposal for a UBI shifts debate from the terrain of class conflict to that of public policy and citizenry. This could be of great service to the capitalist class as it continues its attacks on the working class. After all, a dispute about the primary distribution of income always entails the danger that the exploited will question who controls social production and begin to organize. But if the debate is shifted to UBI, it becomes a question of secondary distribution, of income management and social security expenses. Some on the left defend UBI because it will supposedly “empower” the working class in its confrontation with capital. The logic is that an income that can cover the basic cost of living would give the working class greater bargaining power, since all workers would have a credible “exit” strategy. This position is defended by, for example, David Calnitsky in Catalyst. 7 However, this argument has some major weaknesses. All efforts by capital in recent decades have aimed at creating job insecurity, flexibility and fragmentation of the workforce. Calnitsky is right that working class power is today at a historic low. So, can we really expect the government to come up with a proposal for UBI that gets any closer to a livable income? Doing so would be naïve. Then, what we need to focus on is not a policy proposal that shifts the attention away from class struggle, but the task of organizing at workplaces, in the unions, for the working class to become again a force that needs to be reckoned with. Of course, the argument of those who propose a “dignified” basic income is not that it will come from state generosity, but that it must be achieved through struggle. However, as Alex Gourevitch and Lucas Stanczyk argue in Catalyst, There is consequently no prospect of the hoped for policy coming to pass until there is a working-class constituency that is organized and powerful enough to be able to extract it, in spite of the predictable resistance of superbly organized capital.8 Accepting the “end of work” and fighting for remuneration outside of employment does not bode well for a working class that aspires to become such a powerful social force. If anything, it can facilitate the new attacks of the ruling class. The “progressive” proponents of UBI are thus caught in a vicious circle. UBI is not a shortcut to the independent organization of the working class that its progressive proponents imagine. In contrast to these illusions, there is only one response to either neoliberal austerity or miserable handouts: the struggle to reduce the workweek to six hours a day, five days a week, and the redistribution of working hours among all those available to work. Around the world, the workload for those who have a job is increasing, while unemployment and underemployment grow alongside it. Data from the US show that, even though labor productivity has tripled from 1957 to today, the eight-hour day remains unchanged and businesses have found multiple ways to impose even longer hours. In the last decades, the time dedicated to work has increased. The same goes for Europe, and even more so for many dependent countries that have joined the networks of transnational production. Far from being “natural,” this is determined by capital’s need to increase its appropriation of surplus value at the expense of labor. Therefore we must raise the demand for the reduction of the working day by distributing the available work among all those who can work, without any loss in salary, thus guaranteeing all employed people an income based on the cost of living. This proposal seeks to question the seemingly “natural” character of the industrial reserve army. The conditions have been created for everyone to work fewer hours. But while capital is in power, some must continue working as many hours as workers did many decades ago while a growing part of the population is transformed into a “relative surplus population.” Thus, we have to question the private monopoly of the means of production. The IG Metall strike in Germany last year, in which hundreds of thousands of workers fought for the reduction of the working day,9 showed that this is an idea that can resonate deeply in important sectors of the working class (even if in this case the strike was called off by the union bureaucracy after it imposed a salary cut in exchange for a shorter working day). What stands in the way of distributing all available work among all those who want to work, decreasing everyone’s working day? Why should some of us have exhausting working days while others are condemned to unemployment and underemployment (with or without a UBI)? Why can’t we use technological advances to reduce the working day to everyone? Why do the workers who produce all the social wealth have to settle for crumbs from the capitalist state, while eight billionaires own the same wealth as 3.5 billion people? Capitalism has created the conditions for reducing the time required to produce all socially necessary goods. But for the vast majority of the world population to benefit from this enhanced productive capacity, we need to question the mechanisms of exploitation that sustain the current mode of production. Then the only “realistic” thing to do is to fight to abolish the capitalist system. We must clear the path for a mode of production that is no longer based on private profit but rather on meeting the social needs of everyone.