A basic income eliminates the “coercion to work” and guarantees successful socialist transition – other “progressive” action divides the working class

The coercion to work is the core aspect of alienation. BI at a sustainable level is a step beyond alienation because it gives more workers the option to say no, and thus will exert some pressure on employers - whether capitalists or collectives of workers - to make the conditions of work more palatable. As work becomes more humane, the worker works more freely, and thus can become interdependent in a non-alienated way. It is worth noting also that wage workers often depend on others for the relatively high wages they enjoy, and this dependence is masked by too tight an allocation of income in proportion to work. For example, particularly in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, the male wage earner implicitly was being paid for his own reproduction through the labour of a wife who was not remunerated, and who was economically dependent on the male in an invidious way. A basic income enabling homemakers to stay out of the wage labour market, and to be less economically dependent upon a male wage earner, is one way to acknowledge this unpaid labour and call attention to a kind of interdependence that has been masked, without turning housework into wage labour (the household wage idea). Important here also is the dependence of the money economy and its agents on informal, household, and other economies that cannot easily survive transformation into commodity form. Becoming aware of this sort of interdependence is also a step beyond alienation. (I’m a market socialist. But the only way the “socialist” in market socialism can be sustained against the alienating forces of the market is if the sphere of the market is clearly limited. The market should not dominate the household, the media, education, health care, or politics).5 “D. Foucauldian: We should distinguish between genuinely progressive features of social democracy - universal free education, universal health care, universal pension coverage, universal provision of child care (or payment to people who want to care for their children at home), and those institutions that have attempted to mitigate the social costs of capitalism: long-term unemployment insurance and “humane” prisons. (Both of the latter can be understood in Foucauldian terms as mechanisms for keeping the working class divided, and for a liberalconservative pseudo-politics to be played out in the electoral arena). BI belongs to the latter category.” First, any of the “genuinely progressive” features of social democracy mitigate the social costs of capitalism, and can divide the working class. See Marx’s comment on Adam Smith’s early proposal for universal free education “in homeopathic doses” as a response to the effects of the division of labour on the moral, intellectual, and martial virtues of workers.6 Within capitalism, at a low (politically) sustainable level, perhaps BI would have a divisive effect - the “basic income apartheid” that Gorz warns against - but in a socialist context, it can be an important pillar of social solidarity, one of the entitlements that a socialist society can sustain more effectively than capitalism.