UBI upholds a conventional view of currency that obfuscates responsibility for poverty

My claim, here, is that Srnicek and Williams’s Inventing the Future errs in the way it poses the problem of unemployment under neoliberalism and that this confused formulation generates a desire for UBI that is not only politically wrongheaded, but also contradicts the book’s professed goal of systemic transformation. The UBI may provide relief from some contemporary ills. But I suggest that it cannot bear the weight of the total transformation Srnicek and Williams are after.

At the heart of Srnicek and Williams’s analytical misstep, I argue, lies an unreflected  and . According to this Liberal imaginary, money appears as a finite thing-cum-process, which belongs to the volatile domain of private capital and finance. Upon the basis of this conventional image of money, Srnicek and Williams then presume Liberalism’s other great myth: that unemployment is a direct result of market vagaries and increased automation. To be fair, most critical theorists indebted to Marxist political-economy subordinate the money relation to a totality they term “capitalism” and, from here, envision unemployment as a necessary effect of this totality’s unruly transformations. The difference is that Srnicek and Williams seek a fresh and transformative solution to this seemingly intractable problem; to them, the Universal Basic Income is just what the doctor ordered. Leaving collapsing labor markets behind, while looking forward to a , these authors surmise that UBI is the best solution on offer.

Yet when one turns to the heterodox school of economic thought known as  (MMT), we discover that there is, in fact, nothing necessary about the Liberal vision of money and unemployment upon which Srnicek and Williams predicate their analysis, and that their call for a Universal Basic Income not only misapprehends money’s nature and purpose, but also betrays their wish for a thoroughgoing social transformation.

Contrary to economic orthodoxies on both the Left and Right, MMT economists show that the money relation is irreducible to capitalist production and private finance. Instead, they contend, money is athat can be made to serve every person and environment it encompasses. More important, MMT insists that money is first and foremost a government technology for provisioning labor for the public sector. Or, as MMTer  puts it, “The currency, the money, is a tool to provision the state.”

To accomplish such provisioning, however, is no simple endeavor. Government must first socialize labor by creating unemployment as a generalized condition and thereby turn remunerated employment into a basic social need. It does so, Mosler explains, by simultaneously imposing and enforcing taxes in a currency that the state alone supplies. Such is the primary purpose of taxation, according to MMT. In place of the conventional view that imagines taxation as a source of revenue for the state, MMT shows that, as the currency-issuer, government requires no monetary revenue in order to spend. Instead, taxation is the essential tool whereby government establishes a currency, disemploys a population, and ensures workers are available to serve the public’s social and material aims.

Now, because at base it is the state that is responsible for engendering unemployment in a modern money economy, MMT submits that it is ultimately government’s responsibility to furnish everyone its currency disemploys with a meaningful and adequately-compensated opportunity to participate in the provisioning of public life. Unemployment is a consequence of neither markets nor automation, on MMT’s view. Rather, unemployment results from the regular operations of a currency-issuing government. For this reason, concludes the  Raúl Carillo in : “Your government owes you a job.”