The Affirmative improves the alternative to the kritik – our demand for a UBI discursively challenges hateful divisions by offering a positive vision for change. Combined with the policy action of a UBI, it allows us time to participate in radical change.

At a community level, we believe that a UBI can contribute to more rigorous dialogues over development trajectories. We concede that it is likely that traditionally unionised, white, male workers, who receive high remuneration rates and hold privileged social status as producers, may still prefer to keep their jobs or find new highly paid employment. And yet, we suspect that a UBI that enables a dignified life by everyone might well be enough to reconfigure local environmental conflicts. Almost three decades ago, Gould (1991) noted that industry has greater leverage over economically dependent communities, but that sustained economic downturns broke the subjective link between community well-being and corporate interests, increasing local receptivity to environmental regulations. UBI presents a similar opportunity to delink community well-being from extractive activity without the tragedy of a sustained economic decline. Moreover, as technological change displaces increasing numbers of traditional industrial labourers, a UBI could help enroll them in progressive politics instead of inducing a spiral into the politics of resentment and hate. More broadly, these changes create new opportunities for transformative community dialogues about the future, including what types of social and economic opportunities to invest in, what ought to be publicly provided and what level of UBI is needed for dignified lives. In this context, we suggest that UBI as a political demand and actually existing program can help foster the conditions for alternative forms of subjectivity to emerge. The call for a UBI reorients our political horizons, providing a glimpse of the possibility of another world and calling into being subjects that can make that world a reality. UBI is an incitement to discursively reimagine the distribution of wealth as well as our subjectivities and ideas of community. As a demand, it calls into question taken-for-granted principles and truths, including the link between labour and income, opening space for a new vision of emancipation. As a practice, it frees time for participation in the creation of radical democracies, long noted to be time-consuming projects difficult to sustain in the current political economy than demands for extensive labour.