Independent of policy realization, the demand itself is broadly transformative and is a necessary step for full equality

As discussed above, the call for a basic income comes from conservatives and progressives alike although their motivations for proposing it and their hopes for its impact differ widely. From the perspective of a left agenda, the call for a basic income offers challenges to the existing understanding of work in the context of our current capitalist system. As Kathi Weeks has expressed:115 The collective political activity of demanding a basic income is as interesting to me as the demand itself. A demand is not just a thing, but something that must be explained, justified, argued for and debated. The practice of demanding is itself productive of critical awareness and new political desires. Demanding a basic income, as I see it, is also a process of making the problems with the wage system of income allocation visible, articulating a critical vocabulary that can help us to understand these problems, opening up a path that might eventually lead us to demand even more changes, and challenging us to imagine a world wherein we had more choices about waged work, nonwork, and their relationship to the rest of our lives. By this account, we would judge the success or failure of a movement for basic income not only in terms of whether the policy is implemented, but also in terms of the collective power, organizational forms, critical consciousness, and new demands that the process of demanding it manages to generate. The basic income debate is both a process of claim-making and a means of exposing what is wrong with our existing systems. It is also an opportunity to consider new ideas for social and economic organisation. This has obvious appeal to feminists since the project of feminism is by its nature both critical of what we have, political in demanding change, and utopian in visualising a different way of structuring gender in society.116 This aligns well with aspects of the human rights project, an attempt to progressively realise a fairer world. As Philip Alston puts it:117 … the utopian vision may also provide the much-needed impetus to rethink the optimal shape of social protection explicitly designed to achieve universal realization of the human right to an adequate standard of living in the twenty-first century.