The 1AC rejects the ‘enlightened’ vanguard state, instead demanding that government be ‘modest.’ This enables possibility rather than presuming what individuals ought to be.

In this section, we articulate a third position that draws on the critiques of both capitalism and modern statecraft above. It differs, however, in providing a more capacious, less deterministic, reading of the literature on cash transfers. First, we position cash transfers as a different form of statecraft, what we call a ‘modest’ statecraft that enables redistribution without increasing the biopolitical power of the state. Cash transfers do not predetermine needs but allow people (within the constraints of markets) to choose how funds are spent. A UBI takes this modesty a step further by removing conditions on ‘who’ is deemed to be an appropriate recipient of cash transfers. Second, we suggest that cash transfers may well not be palliatives that produce contentment, but the inverse: additional resources which can be used to support radical political economic change. This might entail using funds to support diverse economies, reducing reliance on capitalist economies, and freeing time for participation in democracy. It also may contribute to new imaginaries of what the economy is, and who it belongs to. In this context, we argue that durable, redistributive cash transfers that assure material sufficiency may be used to underwrite radical political economic change.

Importantly, in accordance with southern development scholarship as well as longstanding socialist and social democratic arguments, this third position does not consider cash transfers as a full substitute for the state. We mean this in two vital ways. First, cash transfers are a more just substitute for many, but not all, forms of conditional welfare. Deciding which services ought to be provided by whom and how they are to be funded will be an ongoing subject of political debate and need not have the same answer everywhere, but some form of collective remains necessary to regulate and assure access to collective goods (some of which may be paid for). Generally speaking, what Hickel (2020) calls the ‘welfare purchasing power’ of money is higher in places with greater collective support; a UBI could be proportionately lowered with free or substantially subsidized services. There are good reasons to consider the provision of many collective services and basic income working together (see also Coote & Lawson, 2021). Second, the position here we develop builds on, and is compatible with, radical views that insist on the need for markets to be regulated and embedded, subsuming markets to the needs and desires of the local public, rather than those of global capital. As we have previously argued (Lawhon & McCreary, 2020) and further elaborate below, a UBI might well contribute to enabling such regulation and embedding.

Cash transfers and UBI as ‘modest’ (not modern) statecraft

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 Lawhon et 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 programmes 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 (Hanlon et 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; Hanlon et 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 withholding 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.