Abstraction - A UBI focuses on money, both as the plan and as their solvency claims. Money is labor turned into an abstraction. This ideology creates a mindset that is fundamental to the domination of neoliberalism

Money and Real Abstraction While the discussion of reification may seem abstruse in the applied context of the discussion of UBI, Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s (1978) increasingly popular work focusses explicitly on the relationship between money and cognition. In summary, the argument presented by Sohn-Rethel is that a society which is organised around money will inevitably reproduce logics of domination and bondage because money is at core a manifestation of petrified, abstracted labour time (Sohn-Rethel, 1978). While Adorno and Horkheimer’s work focussed on the market and its relationship to instrumental rationality, Sohn-Rethel’s insights enable us to focus explicitly on the relationship between money and impeded cognition. This is of real value to a critical theoretical investigation of UBI, which, as Van Parijs and Vanderborght (2017: 12) argue, must be paid in the form of money. For Sohn-Rethel (1978: 18–23), there is a fundamental pathology embedded within the logics of exchange which are connected to the transfer and holding of money. Importantly, this is not solely a psychological pathology, but a social pathology (see Harris, 2022). As Sohn-Rethel (1978: 20) argues the ‘economic conception of value is a real one’; while it lives only in the ‘human mind . . . it does not spring from it’. Rather, our actions, such as the everyday buying of selling of commodities with money represents a very real ‘social formation’ which induces a particular social synthetic form of cognition (Sohn-Rethel, 1978: 2). The ‘conceptual foundations of the cognitive faculty’ (Sohn-Rethel, 1978: 5) are shaped by the concrete forms of activity we take part in through our quotidian behaviour, such as buying bread or paying for petrol, whenever we hand over a note, or type in our pin. Crucially, the moulding of our cognition to that which is ‘socially necessary’ for capitalism occurs without subjects even ‘being aware of it’ (Sohn-Rethel, 1978: 20). Our use of money naturalises reductive ways of thinking and being, which are fundamentally in keeping with the structurally necessary logics of capitalism (Sohn-Rethel, 1978). Expressed more formally, this means that money (the means through which UBI is to be administered) pathologically shapes the ‘dimensions of private consciousness’ (1978: 26) in a manner that denigrates the individual’s critical-epistemic and phenomenological capacities (see Thompson, 2022). As Sohn-Rethel (1978: 59) words it, ‘[a]nyone who carries coins in his pocket and understands their functions . . . bears in his mind, whether or not he is aware of it, ideas which, no matter how hazily, reflect the postulates of the exchange abstraction’. When we live in a society based on exchange we are forced to acquiesce unknowingly to forms of thought which reinscribe the abstract value of expropriated labour as the base equivalence of all social life. This occurs through cognitive processes that are connected to quotidian material acts, inescapable when living within a money-based economy. Such ‘real abstractions’ not merely serve to naturalise the capitalist system, but serve to impede efforts to disclose its contradictions. UBI is definitionally based around money; having real, accessible money in liquid form. It cannot be operationalised in any form other than through money, and it cannot be presented through extended services, or progressive tax rates. There thus seems no way around Sohn-Rethel’s position; progressive advocates of UBI are forced to either find grounds to reject his claim, relativise it or accept a foundational weakness to the UBI approach. There is no way for UBI to be implemented without recourse to money. Indeed, advocates of UBI have claimed it is a positive that more people are awarded more money; feminists in particular have expressed support that care labour could be rewarded by money through UBI (see Flanigan, 2018). As such, through the implementation of UBI, a dominating and oppressive feature of capitalistic society, money, would not merely be reinforced, but its domain would be expanded (see Martinelli, 2017). Indeed, this expansion itself is heralded as a cause for celebration by some feminist advocates of UBI (see Flanigan, 2018). When viewed through the lens of ‘real abstraction’, the dependence of UBI on money can be seen to further a form of domination which supports the capitalistic ‘social synthesis’ at the cost of the subject’s capacity to truly comprehend their relation to the external world (Sohn and Rethel, 1978: 60). The capitalist subject’s relationship to nature, to the Other, is hidden behind the veil of false equivalences, deeply connected to the money form. In short, UBI would further enforce an impeded cognitive capacity, which would defer the possibility of meaningful qualitative transformation.