UBI “prunes the edges of industrial capitalism” by exploiting BIPOC communities and utilizing redistributive systems of tax and welfare.

This dynamic recalls Wolfgang Streeck’s argument that the retreat of public goods in EuroAmerica has led to an expansion in private household debt. Due to a combination of fiscal straight-jacketing, financial deregulation, and stagnant wages, people have turned to debt to finance decent standards of living, in effect mortgaging their future incomes to meet present, demanding needs. Debt is a crucial mode to “buy time,” but not all debt is created equally; minoritized persons, female-headed households, and low-income people struggle to access credit at a duration and price that actually works in their favor. Too often efforts to “financially include” working people—whether in Kenya, the United States, or elsewhere—take the form of what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls “predatory inclusion.” Short-term initiatives ultimately undermine long-term flourishing, not least because they do nothing to confront the discriminatory logic embedded in the market and in financial policies. So, what can be done to build economies in which working people are not driven by the short-term capitalist dictates of rent, debt, and commodification? What kind of economy might allow working people to plan their own futures? To begin, we should broaden the scope of contemporary progressivism, which too often looks solely to the North Atlantic for inspiration. Maintaining the late colonial conceits of “welfare for us” and “development for them” blinds Euro-Americans not only to the problems common across the globe, but also to the lessons that might be gained from other counties. Whatever insights the era of Keynesian capitalism might offer progressives today, we should not forget its limits. The political economy manifest in the Treaty of Detroit was racially exclusive, built on the backs of unwaged women, and premised on resource extraction from postcolonial settings; it offered little to those who imagined a life outside of waged work. Instead, it sought to prune the edges of industrial capitalism, securing retirement, vacation time, and a system of relief for those temporarily out of work on a temporary basis. For many, the call for a guaranteed basic income today is an extension of this logic. We must move beyond the idea that economic justice can be achieved through redistribution, and instead move toward a conception of the economy that gives working people productive power. Appreciating the significance of controlling assets, not just income, might produce a more fulsome political imagination. Recall the exoduses from Delhi, Nairobi, and other postcolonial cities as COVID-19 spread and, with it, closures were announced. For many leaving was an act of desperation, but these departures drew on long-standing repertoires for managing uncertainty. In Kenya, the context with which I am most familiar, urban workers remain committed to agrarian lands for both sacred and emotional reasons. But these enduring ties to the land also provide an important a material strategy. Where retirement accounts are rare and urban livelihoods volatile, owning a small farm—or contributing to the upkeep of a family plot—is economically sensible. A piece of land—mostly vegetables, perhaps some crops to market—offers a safety net that the state does not provide. As Lyn Ossome put it, “land forms the primary basis for social reproduction… [so even] as agriculture’s contribution to the GDP of most African countries has steadily declined, the relevance of land and landed resources, especially access to the commons, has continued to rise.” Owning land provides an escape from the commodified world of the city, rental housing, and privatized utilities. It does not depend on a redistributive system of taxes and welfare, rather it provides a productive asset that offers future security. We must move beyond the idea that economic justice can be achieved through redistribution, and instead move toward a conception of the economy that gives working people productive power. While we obviously shouldn’t expect a mass turn to farming among the office workers of Euro-America—and taking into account that demographic, ecological, and economic transformations strain the model around the world—we should consider what alternative types of property and assets might be created or redistributed. Projects that boost popular property ownership carry a bad reputation owing to their role in unmaking mid-century social democracy. Margaret Thatcher’s “popular capitalism,” for instance, undermined councils and public provisioning in the 1980s. More generally, the turn to wider shareholding obliges people to become entrepreneurs, yoked to financial shocks and subject to the market power and manipulations of large financiers.