The affirmative discourse challenges our current capitalist system – our demand for a basic income is more than a policy – it is an exposure and criticism of the wage system that opens new avenues for change.

As discussed above, the call for a basic income comes from conservatives and progressives alike although their motivations for proposing it and their hopes for its impact differ widely. From the perspective of a left agenda, the call for a basic income offers challenges to the existing understanding of work in the context of our current capitalist system. As Kathi Weeks has expressed:115 The collective political activity of demanding a basic income is as interesting to me as the demand itself. A demand is not just a thing, but something that must be explained, justified, argued for and debated. The practice of demanding is itself productive of critical awareness and new political desires. Demanding a basic income, as I see it, is also a process of making the problems with the wage system of income allocation visible, articulating a critical vocabulary that can help us to understand these problems, opening up a path that might eventually lead us to demand even more changes, and challenging us to imagine a world wherein we had more choices about waged work, non-work, and their relationship to the rest of our lives. By this account, we would judge the success or failure of a movement for basic income not only in terms of whether the policy is implemented, but also in terms of the collective power, organizational forms, critical consciousness, and new demands that the process of demanding it manages to generate.