Expansion - A UBI increases capitalism because it expands access to participation in the market, which is inherently unequal.

Cash or Decommodification? Beyond arguments of feasibility or the effects on the labor market, we need to ask a more fundamental question: is distributing €1,100 to the whole population the best use of 35 percent of GDP? Isn’t the best way to fight against capitalism to limit the sphere in which it operates? Establishing a base income, by contrast, merely allows everyone to participate in the market. Our current economic crisis goes beyond the problem of income inequality. While inequality garners the most attention, it’s a secondary feature of capitalism. One of capitalism’s most remarkable achievements (but also one of its most violent) is that it made market exchange the nearly exclusive means to acquire the goods necessary for our own reproduction. In doing so, it turned money into almost the only valid medium of exchange and it made the majority of the population dependent on capital, enforcing a fundamentally asymm etric power relation between the boss and the worker. This profoundly unequal relationship not only subordinates people within the sphere of labor, but outside it as well, through the powerful influence economic power exerts on politics, ideology, and culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, leftists understood this problem perfectly well. The welfare state tried to limit the areas in which the market and economic power could operate. If industrialization had made only owners full citizens with real rights, then social security and unemployment insurance established what Robert Castel called “social property,” marking “the emergence of a new function of the state, of a new form of rights, and a new conception of property.” As the British sociologist T. H. Marshall explained, equality isn’t possible “without restricting the freedom of competitive markets,” without opening socialized spaces free from market imperatives. In other words, for the Left, the economic effects of extending the market (as well as the political and cultural effects) were never divorced from a questioning of the logic of the market itself. Though this perspective has suffered enormous setbacks since the early 1970s, it still offers a vision radically different from our current neoliberal consensus. The ultimate aim is not to make competition more “fair,” less “discriminatory,” or less “normative.” Instead, it seeks to curtail the space in which competition exists. In this sense, freedom doesn’t signify the ability to access the market, but rather the ability to reduce the space in which it operates.