Cooption - A UBI reinforces neoliberalism by hiding the problems of capitalism and encouraging compromise. Any basic income adopted within a capitalist system will be designed to avoid actual change.

This basic income thus aims to be nothing more than a palliative measure. In the United States, for example, there is the SNAP program (“food stamps”) to provide food to people who cannot afford it. Payments such as this ameliorate the situation of the poorest sectors, but they do nothing to reduce income inequality between capitalists and workers, which has particularly exploded in the US since the 1980s. This type of program just allows this unequal income distribution to continue but with a bit less tension. Such a basic income that comes “from above” as a public social security policy will hardly be universal. Capitalist production is dependent on not only an active labor force, but also a pool of unemployed and underemployed that are ready to take up any vacancy. This “reserve army of labor” exerts a constant downward pressure on wages and has a disciplining effect on the employed sector of the working class. A government-provided allowance that enables workers to fully withdraw themselves from the labor market would dismantle this key mechanism of any capitalist system. For this reason, it will be focused only on very low-income sectors and will not even amount to a basic income, but be set at levels below the poverty line. This is the only way that a basic income can be compatible with the continued exploitation of labor in the conditions that modern capitalism in decline requires, especially in backward and dependent countries, but also in the richest imperialist economies. Basic income is a long way from being a progressive reform that ensures a decent income for all citizens. Public policies are caught between the demand for fiscal austerity and the need to contain discontent and make capitalism’s continued social degradation somehow bearable. As Michel Husson states, “Progressive partisans of an income of 1,000 euros per month may well serve as ‘useful idiots’ for the establishment of a universal income of 400 euros, for a final settlement that also advantageously reduces the operating costs of the welfare state.” 6