UBI is a critical step in the development of a non-disabling economy

(Steven - Ph.D. student, Centre for Disability Studies University of Leeds, “Access to work or liberation from work? Disabled people, autonomy, and post-work politics,” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 4.2, 2015, https://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/212/398)

However, Silvia Federici, who was among the Italian feminists (associated with the Autonomia movement) who were active in the “wages for housework” campaign, describes “wages for housework” as not so much a concrete demand as a political perspective which could be more accurately described as “wages against housework” (Federici, 1980). The demand for a wage was not an end in itself, but firstly a counter-claim to the ‘naturalization ’ of women's unpaid domestic labour as an ‘act of love’, and thus not really ‘labour’ at all, in patriarchal capitalism; thus, “to want wages for housework means to refuse that work as the expression of our [women’s] nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us” (Federici, 1980, p. 257). For Federici, the demand for wages for housework was therefore not meant to celebrate or glorify either domestic work or the wage relation, but was in reality more about refusal of (unpaid) work and highlighting the importance of the domestic sphere as an essential component of the capitalist system of production, and was ultimately a demand for autonomous personal power rather than for money. This perspective is shared by Kathi Weeks (2011) in her feminist analysis of the refusal of work. In Weeks’ analysis, however, this demand failed because its content did not live up to its “promise as a perspective and provocation” (p. 137). For Weeks (2011) the logical conclusion of the tensions inherent in the demand for wages for housework is to instead demand a universal basic income, which she defines as “an income paid unconditionally to individuals regardless of their family or household relationships, regardless of other incomes, and regardless of their past, present, or future employment status” (p. 138), which must be sufficient to meet all basic survival needs for everyone.xiii As Davis (1982) notes, this was a much more appealing demand than “wages for housework” to women on welfare in the US in the 1960s–70s, and Weeks (2011) points out that a basic income was one of the core demands of the US National Welfare Rights Organization (p. 144). Similarly, I would argue that an unconditional basic income is the logical conclusion of the argument made by Barnes (2012), because several of the categories of activity he includes in his expanded definition of ‘work ’, such as ‘biographical work’ and the activities involved in managing impairment, are either not measurable, or measuring them would involve an unacceptable level of paternalistic intrusion into disabled people’s daily lives.xivAlso, unlike ‘housework’, while these activities do involve expenditure of energy on the part of the disabled individual, they do not either produce or reproduce anything for capital; therefore, it is hard (at least from an administrative point of view) to see a meaningful distinction between paying people for them and paying people for ‘simply existing’. An unconditional basic income would also differ significantly from the ‘disability incomes’ campaigned for by DIG and opposed by UPIAS, because it would be given to everyone, both disabled and non-disabled, and thus would not stigmatize or segregate disabled people as a class considered uniquely dependent or ‘incapable’.xv It can be argued that the concept of unconditional basic income is incoherent, because it is impossible within capitalism (because for a government to grant it would go too far against the capitalist logic of work as definitional of citizenship to be acceptable), and it would be unnecessary without it (as if exchange-value were abolished and a ‘gift economy’ established, then there would be no such thing as ‘income’). However, in view of the broader politics of many of its proponents, it can perhaps best be seen as a transitional demand leading to the ultimate anarchist/autonomist ideal of a gift economy, based on the principle of ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’, which, taking into account both the historical materialist account of the origins of disablement and the impossibility of disabled people participating as equals in a labour market whose foundations were built on their exclusion, is arguably the only truly non-disabling economy.xvi