UBI fails to solve – results in slashes to welfare programs and becomes a form of reformist capitalism that leaves racialized and colonial structures in place

Given that, why do bosses—at least the ones in Silicon Valley—seem to like UBI so much? Some of their enthusiasm may simply be well-meaning naiveté: as Sam Altman of Y Combinator says, “50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people”—as if this hasn’t been one of the defining features of capitalism all along. Presumably freedom from the need to earn a living will unleash people’s entrepreneurial spirit, their inner innovator—rather than simply give us the chance to fish, hunt, and criticize just as we please. The view of UBI as the foundation of the gig economy, meanwhile, is a tacit acknowledgement that capitalism can’t pay its full costs—a transfer of responsibility for a living wage from private employers to the public. Then there’s an even worse case for UBI as pressure outlet: Stern argues that basic income supporters would do well to convince the anxious rich that it’s their best bet to avoid “the guillotine” amidst growing inequality and desperation. But you don’t need to be Robespierre to be suspicious of a proposal that explicitly announces its intent to protect the rich from working-class rage—particularly when one of the major questions of UBI is where the free money will come from. Stern cautions UBI supporters against advocating a “soak the rich” tax on political grounds: the broad coalition that UBI requires will be impossible if the rich are against it from the start. (Alas, this is already the metric for most policies.) Instead, he proposes to fund UBI by cashing out major welfare programs (food stamps, housing assistance, the earned income tax credit) and charging a value-added tax on consumer goods; more tentatively, he considers a wealth tax, a financial transaction tax, and cuts to military spending. But funding a basic income by cannibalizing existing welfare programs and imposing regressive consumption taxes perversely places the burden of subsidizing low wages on the poor and working-class people making them in the first place. That this is a proposal put forth by a former labor leader is a measure of the left’s weakness. And indeed, Stern’s view of labor’s political prospects is remarkably dim. In fact, UBI is explicitly posed as a solution to the problem of declining union power: “It was time for me to look beyond unions for answers,” Stern declares in the first thirty pages. Instead, he proposes a Basic Income Party that could run candidates in every Congressional district and threaten a tax strike—the weapon of the wealthy—until Congress agrees to vote on a basic income package. It’s obviously a non-starter. But it reveals the limits of Stern-style unionism: start out collaborating with Walmart on healthcare, and soon you’ll hope only for the dwindling state to throw a few bucks at the reserve army of Uber drivers tasked with ferrying the rich from one gentrified enclave to the next. Instead of fighting off the dystopian future, settle into the interregnum of the present, with all its morbid symptoms. But as the writer Ben Tarnoff has pointed out, the places where technological development hasn’t produced a dystopian, jobless future (like Sweden) don’t just have technology, they also have strong unions and a robust welfare state. The kind of starkly unequal society that Stern and other UBI futurists fear wouldn’t just come about because the robots arrived—it would come about because only a few people owned them. Recognizing this, Bregman explicitly advocates “massive redistribution” of money, time, and robots—that is, of income, work, and the means of production. All wealth is socially produced, he argues, and so it should be shared accordingly. It’s not so much that this time is different—it’s that we have the chance to make it so. Though he stops short of inciting us to seize the robots outright, he advocates taxes on the wealthy and on financial transactions as a means to both fund basic income and disincentivize certain activities—like banking—that make money “without creating anything of value.” Though Bregman’s version of UBI is far more appealing on the merits, his political program is disappointing. Ideas change the world, Bregman declares, and UBI is such an obviously good idea that we just need to spread the word. The last line of the book belongs to Keynes, the book’s implicit hero, who famously said of ideas, “indeed, the world is ruled by little else.” But of course, it’s ruled by many other things—money and power chief among them. The fifteen-hour work week Keynes predicted didn’t come to pass because the idea alone wasn’t enough. More importantly, Keynes was talking about ideology rather than ideas per se, about the systems of thought that underpin our assumptions whether or not we know it, not just clever notions. And the problem with basic income is that it tends to be read as an idea without an ideology. Bregman describes the pro-UBI movement in Europe as grassroots and “cross-ideological” in character. At the local level where most programs are proposed, the debate is largely pragmatic. The program in Utrecht, for example, is known as “Weten Wat Werkt” or “Knowing What Works,” in acknowledgment that many see the current welfare system— which even in Europe has ceded more and more ground to workfare—as unaffordable and dysfunctional. But of course, what counts as pragmatic depends on the existing balance of political power. Even Bregman’s own position, though solidly on the left, shifts between advocating for UBI as what the Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs described as the “capitalist road to communism” and the capitalist road to . . . saving capitalism from itself. Stern’s post-ideological stance is even more blatant: at one point he imagines an exchange between the libertarian political thinker Charles Murray, whose 1997 book The Bell Curve famously argued for racial differences in intelligence based on genetics, and Martin Luther King, Jr. He argues that their disagreements about the relationship of basic income to the role of the state in society are simply diversions from their shared idea of giving people money. But these disagreements get to the heart of the matter. The debate about basic income is about the obligations we have to one another, the origins of property, the ends of human life, the shape of our society. And when these broader visions are translated into policy, they don’t simply suggest a shared plan to give people money—they offer drastically different accounts of how much money people should get, where it should come from, and who should get it. The leftist-futurist version of basic income is often described as a nonreformist reform, per Van Parijs’s quip: a goal that’s achievable within capitalism but that has the potential to change the conditions of capitalism enough to lead beyond it. Basic income is the fully automated monorail to luxury communism, where we all own the robots and everyone gets what they need. This UBI isn’t a backstop for bad jobs, but the material condition for human fulfillment. But not just any income will do: for it to be a genuine step toward a post-work society, it has to be genuinely universal and unconditional, provide enough income to actually live on, and supplement rather than replace the welfare state. This UBI is the one that draws from the Marxist feminists who pointed out the unwaged labor of social reproduction in the 1970s, the working-class women of color who fought for the rights of welfare recipients in the 1960s, and the architects of the Freedom Budget who attempted to translate the gains of the civil rights movement into a program for economic justice. They wanted not just a basic income but a sufficient one—one adequate not merely to survive, but to live a decent life, and maybe even a good one. The right-wing version of basic income, by contrast, wherein paltry lumps of cash replace public services and goods, is a UBI not worth having. This version of basic income is a mechanism to streamline—a more accurate word might be “gut”—the welfare state in the name of libertarian ideas of freedom. People know what they need better than the state does, the argument goes; how people will be able to afford healthcare on $12,000 a year is less often addressed. Who exactly should get a basic income is another question. It’s sometimes called a “citizen’s dividend,” explicitly limiting recipients by nationality. More generally the “universal” is aspirational: basic income programs have only seriously been proposed at the national or local levels. So, as with other welfare programs, debates over basic income will undoubtedly be bound up with questions about nationality and migration. In the European context, we should be wary of the deployment of basic income to solidify Fortress Europe as the refugee crisis intensifies. In the debates over the Swiss program, for example, Luzi Stamm, a member of parliament for the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, said he could imagine supporting UBI—but only for the Swiss. “Theoretically, if Switzerland were an island, the answer is yes,” he said at the time. “But with open borders, it’s a total impossibility, especially for Switzerland, with a high living standard.” In the United States, meanwhile, the combination of nativism and libertarianism that makes up the Trump coalition is particularly dangerous: it’s hard to imagine any way a basic income program implemented in the Trump era would be anything but a vehicle for dismantling the remains of the welfare state while simultaneously reinforcing nationalism by excluding non-citizens from shared prosperity. That said, basic income doesn’t seem likely to be on the agenda of the Trump administration anytime soon. Instead of inventing the future, Trump’s move is to borrow from the past via boondoggles like the Carrier deal, which give public money to private companies in an attempt to revive a mid-century imaginary where men had real factory jobs. Welfare programs, meanwhile, are likely to come under renewed attack from a Republican administration ready to slash government spending. The apparent success of Trump’s appeal to mid-century nostalgia, though, has thrown cold water on utopian visions. After a few years of UBI flirtation, the American left seems to be returning to full employment— rather than full unemployment—as a demand, particularly via the idea of a federal job guarantee. There’s plenty of useful work to be done, of course, and like income, jobs should be distributed as evenly as possible. Remaking the ideology of work may be too heavy a lift for the next few years. Still, we shouldn’t stop pushing back against reifying work as the source of both income and social worth. Ongoing expropriation and proletarianization have left billions worldwide in a condition of what historian Michael Denning calls “wageless life,” rendered surplus to capital’s needs and struggling to scrape by in a system that starts “not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living.” And so while basic income sounds like a program for rich countries—a luxury made possible by a certain level of prosperity—it may be even more promising in places where it seems most unaffordable. In recent years UBI pilot programs have rolled out in Namibia, Kenya, and Uganda, mostly funded by NGOs; more generally, cash transfer programs, which aim to diminish poverty by giving poor people money—though often with specific criteria or restrictions—are the latest fad in development. Elsewhere, public support provides more in the way of livelihoods than do private wages: the anthropologist James Ferguson notes that more South Africans receive income from government welfare programs, whether child allowances or disability aid, than from waged labor. Basic income, Ferguson argues, may be the way to achieve social welfare in countries where the prospect of job creation on a scale adequate to the population is little more than a fantasy.