The AFF solves and spills over. UBI engages a form of modest statecraft, relieving the biopolitical conditionality of the modern welfare state. This catalyzes new relationships to economics and the state broadly which deconstructs the coercive state.

Critiques of modern statecraft reviewed above have often been used to justify working beyond the state to create political economic change. This is a reasonable response. While in agreement with critiques of the ills of modern statecraft, crucial to our argument is that states operate in many ways and that there is analytical and political utility to differentiating modes of statecraft. Here, we lightly describe ‘modest’ statecraft, a mode that does not presume to know what citizens ought to want and be, but is instead focused on enabling possibilities (see Lawhonet al., 2021,2023). It is, thus, based on, and produces, a fundamentally different relationship between the citizen and the state than conventional welfare. In what follows, we explain why providing cash, and providing unconditionally, exemplify modest statecraft.

Welfare has typically provided material goods rather than cash because recipients are, explicitly or implicitly, framed as morally delinquent and, therefore, not trusted to spend money appropriately. Arguments for giving cash, rather than providing material welfare, invert this frame. Many cash transfer pro-grammes in the global south explicitly refuse the label of moral delinquency: poverty is instead seen to result from a grossly unequal (neo)colonial political economic system (Hanlonet al., 2010). There is, thus, no longer a need for a paternalistic state to guide recipients towards the right material goods. In stark contrast to colonial, developmentalist and orthodox socialist positions that reify the authority of experts to direct economic activity, the politics of cash transfers assumes that recipients are better able to assess their needs than the state and responsible enough to adjudicate how best to meet their own needs with available resources (Ferguson,2015; Hanlonet al., 2010).This position, on both counts, forms a sharp contrast to Marx’s derogation of surplus populations (Ferguson,2019).

In other words, cash transfers are a mode of economic redistribution rooted in a recognition of the limits of the labour market, the value of citizens and the diverse and unknowable needs of people–and trusts citizens to make decisions about their own welfare. This is neither a fundamentally neoliberal nor a conservative position, but accords with an anti-essentialist, non-universalizing radical politics. Some, like Zamora (2017), claim that the belief that individuals know their needs better than the state is inherently conservative. Such claims can only be made with a practiced ignorance to the long histories of state paternalism, suppression and violence towards the needs and aspirations of marginalized and counter-hegemonic populations. Cash transfers, instead, can harness the power of the state for redistribution without determining what material forms well-being ought to take.

As noted above, cash transfers are, thus far in practice, always conditional. Conditionality is often deemed to be culturally important as a means to separate the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving poor’(see Steensland,2008, on the failure of proposals for a guaranteed income in the United States). A shift to unconditionality can also function as a form of modest statecraft, undoing such normative judgments. The conditionalities of other cash transfers here can be distinguished into two broad types: as an inducement for ‘good behaviour’ and as an income for those deemed unable to work. Both are underpinned by deeply problematic modernist assumptions.

In the case of payments for certain behaviours, the state retains biopolitical power to induce ‘improvements’. We on the left might well agree with some of these behaviours. (Schooling is good! Health clinic visits are good!) Our point here is not whether some of these behaviours might be good or not. Instead, it is a fundamental rejection of the ethics of an ‘enlightened’ vanguard state with-holding access to basic material needs in order to induce ‘good behaviour’. In other words, coercive and paternalistic means (making access to basic material needs dependent on particular behaviours) are not justified by ends we believe are good (e.g. school attendance and health clinic visits). Instead, the position we develop here advocates for a world that ensures the accessibility of services and reduces the economic constraints that are part of what prevents some people from schooling and using health services. It also means recognizing the imperfections of the world we have, and that sometimes there are good reasons for avoiding state facilities.2

Conditionality-linked workfare or a jobs guarantee operates on a different set of assumptions. We are not opposed to state employment where there is a need for such labour. Yet a UBI differs notably from workfare and guarantees in which work is created so as to justify providing people with an income. The unconditionality of basic income pushes back against the modernist idea that work is inherently good (see Barchiesi,2007; Lawhon et al., 2018; Weeks,2011).

Universal and unconditional basic income, therefore, embodies a modest approach to statecraft. Like conditional cash transfers, it enables people to spend their money as they see fit. A UBI takes an additional step in removing the conditionality of these cash transfers, meaning a centralized state apparatus does not rationally determine who deserve basic incomes (whether based on labour contributions, demographics or right behaviours). It also recognizes that ‘unemployment’ can be a product of an unjust political economy rather than an individual failing. A UBI may be understood as ‘modest’, then, for not assuming the ability of the state to know what recipients need nor to limit who is deemed worthy of receipt.

Cash transfers underwriting radical change

The second key distinction we work to make here is that cash transfers, and particularly a durable, redistributive UBI, might well induce much greater political economic change. If cash transfers were merely ameliorative, reducing economic inequality, this might be reason enough to support them. The argument we make here, however, is that the impacts of cash transfers go beyond this, and that a redistributive UBI might well be used to underwrite post capitalist economies. Greater economic security and improved relations with the state and each other might well increase many people’s willingness and ability to participate in political economic change. Further, progressive scholars and activists might well be able to shape practice, highlighting the benefits of using increased funds and time to underwrite radical political economic change.

What might the securing of a state-provided universal, unconditional basic income do? In what ways might embracing modest statecraft, changing relationships between citizens and the state, rework how we see and interact with the state and each other? We point to four interrelated possibilities here: (i) freed time might be used to participate in democracy, (ii) increased incomes might be used to support diverse economies, (iii) reduced reliance on the capitalist economy might enable greater regulation as well as social and ecological re-embedding, and (iv) reconfigured state-citizenship relations might also transform how people collectively understand themselves and the possibilities for change. These impacts are not given, but might be created as part of a radical politics.

First, it is easy to imagine that a UBI might free up time and that this might well enable citizens to be more informed, active and engaged with politics (Fitz-patrick,2004). Further, cash transfers–especially those with limited conditions–have not led to docile populations, but often to more politically engaged citizens who, at the very least, fight to keep these benefits. The position we develop here advances the idea that freeing up time is politically useful, building on this towards understanding the role of a UBI in enabling a different type of politics, and a different type of economy.

Leftist scholarship has suggested that a UBI might enable improved bargaining power for labour by providing a ‘permanent strike fund’; even the threat of striking may increase the overall gains for workers (Calnitsky,2017; Stern,2016). In this version, a UBI is seen as a tool for enabling iterative change towards a more empowered working class: change can be demanded through the threat of labour withdrawal. We see value in such a position, but also emphasize the potential of a basic income as a means for the actual withdrawal from capitalist relations and a resource to be used to build new political economic relations.

Above, we noted that most studies of cash transfers have deployed develop-mentalist lenses, yet there are some exceptions. Exploring the politics of Seminole gaming in which cash is transferred to community members, Cattelino(2008; see also Lewis,2017) observes that money enables a degree of material autonomy. This economic independence has provided the conditions for indigenous cultural revitalization, freeing people from dependency on conditional government programmes. It also enables monetary supports for members to engage in activities, such as language instruction, that remain culturally meaningful although undervalued in the capitalist economy. More broadly, we can also reinterpret existing data through a critical lens. Studies of cash transfers have suggested that money is often spent locally and enables the creation of new businesses (Gertler et al., 2012; Ribas,2020; Yang,2018), and such practices might well shift funds away from corporations towards more embedded enterprises.

In short, people often use the money from cash transfers to do just the kinds of things that many advocates of diverse economies would want to see: end their reliance on capitalism for income, start small businesses, spend money locally, and devote more time to socially valuable practices. There is already a substantial community of practice in and, primarily, beyond the academy devoted to building postcapitalist community economies; a UBI might well underwrite these economies that have proven difficult to sustain and expand in the unequal world we have. It might make it easier both to spend time as scholars and activists working to build these alternative relations and garner increased public participation.

Further, separating incomes from local economies might well subtend particular political economic conflicts, enabling increasing regulation and embed-ding of markets. Elsewhere, we have argued that a UBI might enable a reworking of longstanding conflicts over environment and development by reducing the reliance of particular states and citizens on extractive developments (Lawhon & McCreary,2020). Such reworked spatialities and dependencies might enable new pressures, a point that could be extended for other kinds of political economic conflict.

Finally, while a single policy may not substantively change the state, there is evidence from studies of cash transfers as well as wider social theory to suggest that cash transfers can change how citizens think about and interact with each other and the state. One shift that we find compelling is that cash transfers(sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly) reframe the economy as, at least in part, collective. Ferguson (2015), for example, suggests thinking of cash transfers as ‘shares’ of the economy. Others have argued for cash transfers as a recognition of common ecological inheritance (Ranalli,2020; Standing,2019; Van Parijs,1992). More broadly, it has been demonstrated that recipients feel a greater sense of social trust (Kangaset al., 2019). This enriched sense of collectivism might well shape willingness to participate in social change.