A UBI is key to maximize freedom and unconditionalize care

The idea at the heart of proposals for a Universal Basic Income is that the state provides all citizens, regardless of their financial situation, with a guaranteed income on an ongoing basis that they may spend as they wish. The idea of a UBI, or something approximating it, is not new. John Lanchester points towards Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, as offering an early instance, and something like the idea was “very much alive in the early second half of the twentieth century,” in the work of figures as disparate as Martin Luther King Jr. and the Chicago School neoliberal Friedrich Hayek (Lanchester 2019; Bidadanure 2019, 482). It was considered by the Black Panther Party as a way to address racial discrimination in the USA (challenging the power of the “malfare” states Threadcraft describes) and by feminists involved in the Wages for Housework movement who discussed an income separate from labour as a way of challenging the hegemony of the male breadwinner model (Threadcraft 2016, 156; Dalla Costa and James 1975). Normative discussions of 7 The Politics of Holding 207 UBI took shape in the early 1990s, and in recent years, the concept has been of interest to post-Marxist scholars concerned with the futures of work and care (Parijs 1992; Weeks 2011). In recent years, there have been trials of UBI around the world, including recent plans for a pilot scheme in Wales focusing on care leavers (Goodman et al. 2021; Morris 2021). Whilst there are many different arguments for UBI, and debates about the relationship between the provision of UBI and public services (Parijs 1992; Lanchester 2019; Stronge 2020), I want to focus on developing a perspective that centralises the psychosocial meanings and theorises the potential psychic effects of this kind of provision, whilst at the same time keeping the relationship between these factors and political economy, anti-capitalism and social change in view. The idea of a UBI, that all citizens should receive a specific sum of money from the state regardless of their means, may in fact constitute a “holding” form of care very different from contemporary welfare regimes. As was discussed in Chapter 4, the post-war welfare state was designed to offer protection against the “five great evils” of society, namely want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. It recognised the effects of insecurity, acknowledging and meeting needs for dependence and support. As discussed in Chapter 6, in more recent decades, however, under the auspices of neoliberal thinking, the welfare state has been reconceived through the lens of an ideology of personal responsibility, eschewing public responsibility for care and exhibiting a hatred for dependency (Hoggett 2000). There have been hand ups not hand outs, and the production of subjects fit for work. Welfare has been conceived in terms of an exchange; support is given on the expectation that something will be received in return, namely productivity. Help is not provided simply because need exists, and dependence implies the need for care. Contrastingly, Hoggett points to the fact that UBI “is non-conditional.” He continues: There is no means-testing nor any set of obligations attached to it. Van Parijs argues that as such it maximises the possibilities for ‘real freedom,’ a society in which each individual has the greatest opportunity to do whatever she might want to do including, in his by now famous example, the opportunity to spend every day surfing if this is what she wished. In 208 J. Kellond other words a citizen’s income assumes the form of a gift that seeks no return. (2000, 206) Conceptualising UBI in this way, as a gift that seeks no return, evokes the psychosocial meanings of the post-war welfare state described by Steedman, a form of public and collective concern capable of producing confidence in one’s right to exist (1986, 121–22). UBI, like the postwar welfare state, involves the recognition and meeting of need. Richard Norman defines need in terms of “deficiencies in respect to well-being” (1992, 141). UBI provides the means to satisfy the basic needs that most impede well-being, the five great evils identified by the welfare state. Recently, Guy Standing has cast UBI in similar but updated terms, positioning it as a response to Battling Eight Giants of contemporary society: inequality, insecurity, debt, stress, precarity, automation, populism and extinction (2020). As a response to need that seeks nothing in return, UBI constitutes a form of holding-care that evokes, whilst also transcending, the ethos of the post-war welfare state. UBI eschews the responsibilising demands of an insurance or assetbased welfare system, which make care conditional, restricting it to those who have contributed “enough” (an implicitly anti-immigrant position) or dependent on forms of self-management and economic advantage not available to all. It also departs from the punitive and invasive approaches to assessing claims for support that have become the norm since the imposition of austerity policies (Gentleman 2011). Lanchester points to the fact that for Van Parijs, one of the key figures in debates about the normative basis for introducing a UBI, the initiative offers “freedom from anxiety, from the often humiliating and chaotic process of applying for means-tested benefits in a welfare state, from the need to take demeaning or exhausting or damagingly precarious work” (2019). The freedom from anxiety that UBI could offer evokes its capacity to function as a means of holding-care. By providing a form of holding, UBI mitigates the experience of anxiety and facilitates going-on-being. This, in turn, has the capacity to support psychic growth. To restate Groarke’s articulation on this, “growth depends on ‘the actual mother’ being in a position to meet the absolute dependence of ‘the actual infant’ at the beginning; in which case a sense of inner security arises based on the 7 The Politics of Holding 209 reliability of ‘holding’” (2014, 18). Though citizens are not babies, UBI would involve the state in meeting needs for dependence both in adult citizens and in the children and others they may care for. Offering a form of non-intrusive support that meets needs for dependence and enables the continuity of being, UBI could well provide a context more amenable to psychological growth than existing forms of provision. As Groarke highlights, spontaneity flourishes when the framework holds up. Lisa Baraitser notes that UBI occupies an important place within a post-work politics that appreciates the disciplinary function of waged work and its historical role in the privatisation of caring and reproductive labour (Baraitser 2016; Weeks 2011). “Postwork,” Baraitser glosses, “undoes the relation between wage and labour through an analysis of social reproduction in neoliberal conditions, calling not just for the common production of value but for a basic income for the common reproduction of ‘life’” (2016, 395). Emphasising that the idea of a UBI “allows care to circulate as everybody’s business,” Baraitser also highlights the psychic dimension of the reproduction of life that such a strategy would foreground (396). “A postwork notion of care requires not just the reorganisation of the social reproduction of ‘life,’” she writes, “but the time it takes to live out the complexities of caring relations, and the development of capacities that may enable the reparation of psychic life” (396). This is a formulation that evokes the holding character of UBI as capable of bringing about psychic change, potentially repairing damaged experience. In a slightly different formulation, Baraitser reiterates the time it takes “for the emergence of the capacity for reparation in psychic life” (406). Here, the emphasis falls on the need to acknowledge the time of unfolding, the time of relationships and intersubjective exchange through which the capacity for what Klein calls reparation, and Winnicott concern, characterised by the spontaneous reparative gesture, develops. This is also the capacity that Hollway describes as central to being able to care, and as key to the cultivation of a form of relational autonomy. Both of these formulations represent avenues for thinking through the psychosocial justification for, and implications of, the kind of holding that provisions like UBI might offer. Certainly, the implementation of UBI would loosen the imperatives of waged work and provide increased opportunities to devote more time to 210 J. Kellond caring. It also has the capacity to shift the balance of power in favour of employees, who would no longer be completely beholden to their employers for the means to sustain their own lives. However, I want to explore the capacity for what could be conceptualised as the holding environment of post-work care, or UBI, to produce psychic change in citizens. The previous chapter explored how the inequalities characteristic of neoliberal capitalism affect the development of capacities, and I emphasised how contemporary social formations erode and distort capacities that are central to psychic resistance and the fending off of compliance—namely the capacities for spontaneity, creativity, care and autonomy. Such an approach is vulnerable to the criticism that it offers no way out because the capacity for resistance is conceived to be so fundamentally eroded by the environments of late capitalism. Winnicott himself draws attention to the potentially catastrophic effects of deprivation and oppression. Thinking freedom in relation to the concepts of health and creativity, he writes that “no one is independent of the environment, and there are environmental conditions which destroy the feeling of freedom even in those who have enjoyed it” (1986b, 232). Though he asserts that “it is probably wrong to think of creativity as something that can be destroyed utterly,” he goes on to discuss the situation of those who are “dominated at home, or spending their lives in concentration camps or under lifelong persecution because of a cruel political régime.” In these situations, he contends, “one feels that it is only a few of the victims who remain creative.” The rest “have lost the characteristic that makes them human, so that they no longer see the world creatively” (1991a, 68). Being able to see the world creatively, a capacity that develops through the experience of intuitive management, means being able to create and recreate the world, to exercise the powers of imagination in order to think up, that is to invent, the phenomena that meet a need. Winnicott suggests that this capacity probably cannot be completely destroyed, but it can be seriously impeded by environmental conditions. This is an idea that evokes Nussbaum’s distinction between the basic capabilities of human existence and the level of capability characteristic of human flourishing, discussed in Chapter 5 (1995). Capitalism does not (necessarily) destroy the human as such, but rather reduces it to a base level of existence that does not constitute flourishing. 7 The Politics of Holding 211 Writing of the relationship between childhood and social reproduction, Susan Ferguson sets out how “the fundamental demands of capital for a renewable supply of labour power exert strong pressures for certain (privatised) forms, (disciplining) practices, and (alienated) states of being to emerge. At the same time, they generate forces that obstruct the likelihood that other (communal, open-ended, integrated) childhoods will develop” (2017, 113). The focus falls here on the reproduction of the worker, rather than the facilitation of healthy, caring forms of subjectivity. However, there are many ways in which the creative capacity might be awoken or maintained: through the experience of holding associated with psychoanalytic psychotherapy, aesthetic experience, or progressive forms of social provision.