A basic income is the best route to communism – improving material conditions make it possible to move beyond divisions of labor, property, and class divisions. Current conditions in communication and knowledge industries make us ready.

In 2011, there can be no doubt that globally we have a achieved a state of advanced capitalism and a level of production that makes possible the elimination of absolute need for all people, while simultaneously rendering the vast majority of the world’s population not only propertyless but abjectly poor—a paradox predicted by Marx in The German Ideology (Marx 1978b: 161). The material condition of abundance has been achieved, but the condition of the working class in developed nations has become more precarious, and the dire conditions of the poor in developing nations have now, with our global communications network, become impossible for the West to ignore. We are also now unable to ignore the West’s complicity in economic and political institutions that have worsened the conditions of the global poor. Poverty can no longer be considered a problem of scarcity, but of the underlying relations of production, class structures, and political institutions generated by our capitalist economic system. A basic income could certainly improve the material conditions of the poor and the working class, but the more interesting question is whether material conditions have paved the way for a basic income instituted now to abolish the division of labor, private property, and class divisions—conditions critical to Marx’s vision of communism. 5I want to suggest that they have, for three reasons. First, advanced capitalism is undergoing a shift to the greater importance of human capital, as opposed to financial capital, in the post-industrial economy, a development that highlights the importance of the basic income’s promotion of human capital investment. This is not to ignore the vast profits that still accrue to the financial industry, nor the need for many enterprises to have access to significant financial capital, but to highlight the shift from manufacturing to knowledge and information industries as the drivers of economic growth and development. This is indicated both by the fact that the financial industry no longer makes the bulk of its profits from providing capital investment funds to industry, but by financial arbitrage, and by the increasing importance of wage disparities over capital income in income inequality today (Saez 2006). 6Second, the global communications network increasingly allows individuals to find each other and groups to associate without the traditional intermediary organizations of firms, states, or NGOs. The economic advantages to those connected to this network and able to manipulate it effectively are high and almost certain to increase. 7Third, digital technologies continue to transform the capitalist economy by undermining existing business models, providing the kind of economic upheaval that just might open the door to new means and relations of production.