The universalization of a basic income creates political will and social acceptance of redistribution – creates support that transitions to stronger socialist alternatives

If the above argument about wage growth is correct, coupled with public support, an insufficient-but-unconditional basic income presents a viable path to a more generous one. While I make this case below, it is first worth laying out an argument leveled against the potential impact of basic income on solidarity: UBI will not only dramatically increase the tax burden on some and redistribute a good amount to others, but it will do so in a way that is immediately socially recognizable as a transfer; unlike, say, health care and housing, transferring actual cash from one party to another is conspicuous. As a consequence, it is easy to imagine a vulnerable group being publicly accused of laziness and dependence. Is it possible that the net-contributors to the program will strongly differentiate themselves from and even begrudge the net-recipients? In response, it is useful to distinguish between different types of income transfer programs. For example, unlike a negative income tax, where some people — those below a given threshold — collect payments and others do not, the universal basic income makes everyone a recipient. The calculation of the net impact of a UBI is far less conspicuous than under a negative income tax where you either physically receive payments or don’t. The UBI computation requires comparing the amount you receive to the portion of your tax contribution allocated to the program. Post-tax-and-transfer winners and losers are far less visible, even if the two schemes achieve the identical post-tax-and-transfer income distribution. It is also worth mentioning that family allowances — in Canada, France, and the UK — are (or were) near-universal cash transfer programs and among the most popular social policies in those countries. Indeed, there are plenty of cash transfers that are robust and popular. Those that are, as I discuss below, tend to avoid distinctions between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, and thus escape the cycle of stigma and victim-blaming that so many social assistance programs are vulnerable to.31 By contrast, traditional welfare policies suffer from inherent limits to political mobilizing: they impact only a small, poor, and marginalized group, and are consistently at the top of the list of the most unpopular social policies. Because so few people are touched by welfare policies targeted at the poorest populations, organizing benefit increases is always an uphill battle and requires disproportionate reliance on moral arguments, rather than material ones. It is for the same reason that such policies are uniquely vulnerable to austerity. Yet even a weak basic income could touch a broad array of people and help build a solid constituency to support its continual growth and expansion. As more people are folded into a program, two things happen. First, quality improves. And second, it becomes a political third rail. Programs with benefits dispersed broadly across diverse social layers tend to become highly popular and can start to be seen as a civic right, making for ratchet effects where gains become irreversible. Indeed, this popularity effect is clear from the qualitative commentary from Mincome participants in Dauphin. Mincome helped blur the usual lines of demarcation between the deserving and undeserving poor. For many, welfare was viewed in moralistic terms; it was a signal of a tarnished moral character and consistently too humiliating for most to consider joining. Mincome, however, was viewed as a neutral, pragmatic program, and its widespread availability meant it was not interpreted as a system for “other” people. People took casual and positive attitudes toward Mincome and participated because they simply “needed money,” while the vast majority despised welfare because, among other things, it was for the “needy and bums.” They often distinguished their own Mincome receipt — which was based simply on needing cash in an economy with precarious employment opportunities — from the circumstances of welfare receipt, which were caused by recipients’ moral failings. Even Mincomers with strong ethics of self-reliance or negative attitudes toward government assistance felt able to collect Mincome payments without a sense of contradiction.32 There is thus a powerful argument that the universalism of UBI would facilitate solidarity that is otherwise obstructed in a highly fragmented and categorical welfare state marked by deep tensions between low-wage workers, unemployed workers, and social assistance recipients. Similar life experiences are critical in facilitating communication and solidarity (for Marx, it was the similarity of life inside the walls of the factory that galvanized solidarity). At minimum, even if a UBI does not actively nurture solidarity, breaking down the categorical nature of social provisioning may reduce the barriers to alliances across otherwise separated groups of poor and working people. However, there are other aspects to consider when thinking through the impact of basic income on collective action and solidarity. Indeed, it may be the case that the overall impact of basic income on solidarity is somewhat indeterminate, with certain forces facilitating it, and others running against the grain. Although we have seen that the impact on wages is likely to be favorable, what can we say about the manner in which those wage gains are made? Put differently, if wage increases can be won through individual or collective strategies, how might UBI play out in this respect? The basic fact of an exit option might mean that individuals use their newfound powers to bargain on their own, not collectively. It might allow them, moreover, to opt out entirely. After all, basic income increases workers’ bargaining power with their bosses, but it also increases their power with respect to their unions. Offering people alternatives to economic dependence on employers also means alternatives to economic dependence on collective solutions.33 The optimistic view proposes that basic income would for the most part facilitate collective action. It is sometimes suggested that a UBI could operate as an inexhaustible strike fund; indeed, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was the first to recognize this in their Congressional testimony on Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, a guaranteed income that nearly passed in Congress in 1970. The business group was willing to support the plan as long as it was a significantly watered-down variant of the original, fairly radical and work-unconditional proposal. In congressional hearings the NAM insisted that they would support the program only “if the basic allowance is a realistic minimum, and if the earnings disregard provides a true incentive to work and advancement and if the work requirement is strong.” Finally, they expressed concern about the link between the guaranteed income and labor upheaval: “We suggest that anyone directly involved in a labor dispute should be ineligible for benefits under the family assistance plan.”34 This worry on their part seems perfectly reasonable. In this vision a UBI aids collective action because it provides the positive resources to facilitate it. Moreover, the policy would reduce the temptation to “defect” from collective action. Desperate workers, individuals with few alternatives, would be less inclined to scab if they had another decent survival option. However, while basic income provides the positive sustenance for collective action, it weakens the negative motivations that spur it on. Much collective action happens because workers have no alternative but to struggle in conjunction with others. Basic income eliminates the external condition of starvation, the condition that forces collective action on people as the only viable path to advancement. Thus, while it undermines the push factor, it strengthens the pull factor by providing the material support that makes collective action more likely to occur and succeed. It is of course perfectly reasonable to imagine that basic income might empower people both as individuals and collective actors, facilitating both solitary and collective struggles against powerful social actors. From the perspective of socialist freedom, this approach to collective action strikes me as desirable. Moreover, as noted in Table 1, survey data on why people were not in the labor force during the Mincome experiment reveals some evidence suggesting that people acted individually and some suggesting collective action. I noted above that survey data showed that care work and education were cited, but the strongest reason for not working was related to dissatisfaction with job or work conditions. One can see answers relating both to workplace struggles and opting out in the data — another common answer, as indicated above, was “did not want to work.” But what if, contrary to my arguments, universalistic income maintenance ultimately hampers solidarity? If basic income enhances some of the positive reasons for collective action and undermines some of the negative reasons, the net effect could still be negative. It may turn out that the only way to nurture solidarity is to leave workers with no exit option, and no alternative to collective action. Perhaps free (or freer) people will not choose solidaristic strategies and prefer to go it alone. Should we decide that it is then preferable to maintain an external starvation constraint in order to better ensure group solidarity? Even in this limiting case, it would be strange for the Left to argue in favor of economic dependence on the capitalist class. Certainly the freedom tradition in socialism would find little in the way of argument to justify an instrumental case against current autonomy in the anticipation of greater autonomy in the faraway future. The intuition that suggests workers ought not have a basic income because they might behave in ways we don’t like is the same intuition recommending that the Garden of Eden ought to be destroyed should it one day be discovered on Earth. A place like Eden, where our subsistence needs can be met by plucking fruit from the trees, where we can make ends meet on our own, might corrupt our other-regarding impulses. But that would be a bad argument against Eden. The issue is best conceived as a socialist wager: we hope and hypothesize that free people would prefer cooperative, collective action, but if they don’t then they don’t. That sad counterfactual is an insufficient reason to limit their freedom.