Basic income can be the cornerstone of a broader critical project.

As an egalitarian theorist, I find myself in broad agreement with Rogers’s position that, from a progressive perspective, basic income is necessary but not sufficient to tackle growing inequalities. But I object to his lukewarm embrace of basic income as something that might marginally improve workers’ lives, rather than a project with a critical political goal. Indeed, in some places, his lack of enthusiasm makes one wonder why we should push for one at all since it is so hard to win and only achieves so little.

From Rogers’s basic message that a basic income is insufficient, we seem to slip into the view that it is somehow superfluous for progressive change—an avoidable part of a complicated package. Insisting that a basic income is insufficient in this manner often ends up unnecessarily sapping a rising enthusiasm for the policy for no good reason. This is unfortunate, since a basic income has unequalled potential to foster convergence between diverse grassroots movements. Few policies can help such different groups as domestic workers, truck drivers, stay-at-home moms, abused dependent partners, ex-cons, sex workers, starving artists, people who hate their jobs, people who love their jobs but need to reduce hours, volunteers, interns, students, poor pensioners, precarious workers, people who want to start an ecovillage, and so many more.

If the basic income movement is representative of all those voices, including groups that fight for the rights of migrants, we cannot only ensure the proposal is asserted as a right of residency (and avoid the dangerous drifts Rogers worries about), but the movement can also help federate those groups and be the cornerstone of a powerful alternative progressive imaginary, helping us move away from Trump’s divided America.