The AFF’s UBI is crucial to resolve the gendered hierarchies entrenched in society as a result of capitalism --- by using the UBI as a way to fracture societal ideas about gendered labor we embrace a Marxist Feminist analysis of the political economy and society writ large.

At its core, the debate about UBI isn’t about policy, but the foundations of our society. And similar to the demand for waged housework, one of the obstacles to having a clear discussion of UBI is a tendency to reduce it to a sum of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. In industrialized countries, workplace organization, labor regulation, and welfare policy all developed based on the model of the male breadwinner. Wages are therefore not only the primary mechanism by which income is distributed, but also the basic means by which work is allocated. A Marxist-feminist lens is crucial, therefore, to locating the ways UBI could intensify and exacerbate existing forms of gender oppression by effacing the centrality of gender and sex-based divisions of labor to the allocation of work in capitalist economies. At present, many arguments in favor of UBI operate on the assumption that robots are on the brink of ushering in mass technological unemployment, but as Federici observes: “While production has been restructured through a technological leap in key areas of the world economy, no technological leap has occurred in the sphere of domestic work significantly reducing the labour socially necessary for the reproduction of the workforce.”62 Rather, this work has been partially externalized and waged, as well as shifted onto the immigrant “shock absorbers of economic globalization.”63 The low underlying rate of profitability of the 1970s pushed employers to make difficult decisions about how to survive in a global economy, and service sector employment skyrocketed. These two developments were not unrelated. Women were not only working, but often for less than minimum wage and while shouldering the care burden at home. Meanwhile, traditional avenues of male employment deteriorated. The US is not yet out of this contradiction. Only, it is not service sector employment in general that’s expected to expand in the coming decades, but the already feminized and racialized care sector. Many of these occupations, like home health aides, come with meager wages and are generally hidden away from meaningful regulatory oversight.64 “Women’s work,” in other words, is creeping back into domestic sphere, through a combination of growing demand for low wage health workers (the result of an aging population), as well as growing work from home options, enabled by technology. If automation genuinely does produce something like a jobless economy in other sectors, the demand for alienated care labor may not be as acute as some economists predict. But in that case, that care burden will likely fall to family members, and in all likelihood, those family members will be women. A better UBI is one based on the social dividend, due to its capacity to gradually transfer ownership of the economy to the state, while providing a modest stipend to all citizens. More importantly, though, a social wealth fund cracks open the field of possibility in a way that tax rebate versions of UBI do not, creating a communal war chest of the size and scope needed to transform any late capitalist society, with its massive firms and economies of scale, into a socialist one. Recoiling in horror at Bruenig’s specific proposal for establishing a social wealth fund in the US, liberal pundit Kevin Drum estimates that it would take only around three decades before the federal government would have majority control of all publicly traded companies.65 There are, of course, any number of reasons to prefer a more decentralized system of multiple funds ran by independent boards, or to object to mediating social ownership of the means of production through the equity form at all, but the social dividend offers a far more plausible “capitalist road to communism” than a tax rebate, which is easier to repeal. To the extent that a UBI strikes at the heart of capitalism’s reliance on an ocean of unpaid work, it poses a similar set of provocations as Wages for Housework. Made to pay the costs of reproducing life, capitalism would no longer be viable. But a UBI on the terms envisioned by libertarians should be flatly rejected, as should attempts to reconstruct the welfare state of twentieth century. As far as poverty reduction programs go, UBI may be salvageable. But if socialists wish to pursue a UBI with the power to fundamental alter social property relations, the social dividend remains the most promising because it can transform the state. The classical political economists, up to and including Marx, understood that capital was first and foremost the command over labor. More income to labor, however important it may be in the interim, must be accompanied by a broader vision of wresting control over the command of labor so that workers might one day command their own.