Expansion - A UBI reinforces capitalism – it would expand the influence of the market and would concede defeat to neoliberalism which craters workers’ movements

A universal basic income would shore up the market. We need ideas that shrink it. In her campaign memoir What Happened, Hillary Clinton wrote that the idea of a universal basic income (UBI) for all Americans “fascinated” her. Reflecting on her wholly uninspiring campaign, she explained that she wanted to include it in her platform but “couldn’t make the numbers work,” so she dropped the idea. She had planned to call it “Alaska for America,” referring to the Alaska Permanent Fund. Established in 1982, that program gives each of the state’s citizens an annual dividend from oil revenues. The idea gained popularity in the mid-sixties, and Nixon almost implemented it nationwide. American researchers conducted large-scale experiments in New Jersey, and a Canadian study took place in Winnipeg during the mid-seventies. At the time, the proposal produced heated debates in continental Europe and North America, but the decades that followed led to a slow but steady decline in support. The conservative preference for the “workfare” and “activation” policies that characterized welfare reform in the nineties — led by a different Clinton — turned basic income into a utopian fantasy. But as interest in UBI from one of the planet’s most powerful political figures attests, the last ten years have given new life to the idea. Indeed, it’s now on the agenda of many movements and governments. For Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, two of UBI’s leading proponents, “the conjunction of growing inequality, a new wave of automation, and a more acute awareness of the ecological limits to growth has made it the object of unprecedented interest throughout the world.” Finland’s right-wing government is testing the idea, replacing part of its unemployment benefits system with a basic income distributed to all Finnish citizens. In Canada, the government of Ontario has been conducting a large-scale experiment since the summer of 2017. The Netherlands has the most developed UBI program experiment in Europe. Several municipalities are testing the program’s effects on its beneficiaries. And in France, the unfortunate socialist candidate for president, Benoît Hamon, made basic income his key measure. Political parties across the globe are now openly discussing the idea of distributing an unconditional income to every citizen. Each side of the political spectrum points to different supposed benefits: the Right praises UBI for getting rid of outdated state bureaucracies; the Left for eradicating poverty. Appearing at once “liberal” and “social,” basic income, according to a popular view, divides those who still think about class and the industrial revolution in old-fashioned terms from those who recognize that the “knowledge economy” has profoundly transformed our economy and society. For this latter group, full employment is utopian, stable work is an outdated demand, and the old institutions of wage labor — social security, unions, and so on — are obsolete, brakes on progress and individual freedom. For radical left “accelerationist” theorists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, basic income constitutes a “post-capitalist” exit path, while the self-described “entrepreneur” Peter Barnes, whose bestseller With Liberty and Dividends For All inspired Hillary Clinton, sees it as a way to create a “better-balanced capitalism — we would call it everyone-gets-a-share capitalism.” The studies, experiments, and debates are multiplying, making UBI once again an idea “whose time has come.” Paradoxically, then, UBI seems to be a crisis demand, brandished in moments of social retreat and austerity. As politics moves to the right and social movements go on the defensive, UBI gains ground. The more social gains seem unreachable, the more UBI makes sense. It’s what botanists would call a “bioindicator”: it indexes neoliberalism’s progress. Support for basic incomes proliferates where neoliberal reforms have been the most devastating. In this sense, UBI isn’t an alternative to neoliberalism, but an ideological capitulation to it. In fact, the most viable forms of basic income would universalize precarious labor and extend the sphere of the market — just as the gurus of Silicon Valley hope.