UBI facilitates a neoliberal takeover of every aspect of life while leaving the apparatuses of wealth production untouched.

The final big idea to gain traction during the pandemic is Universal Basic Income (UBI), a regular guaranteed payment from the state to citizens that would purchase the basic necessities of a decent life. Its popularity was already growing amid the austerity that followed the 2008 crisis and came to a head amid the unemployment, precarity and uncertainty generated by the pandemic and lockdowns and the demonstration effect of the various income support schemes that were laid out by governments (Macqueen 2020). Opinion makers from the left website Democracy Now! to think tanks such as the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), fairly prominent political parties such as the Scottish National Party, public figures and politicians across the political spectrum from left to right and even elements in the Silicon Valley (Morozov 2016) have signalled their support.

The idea had emerged from discussions around the welfare state and its crisis and was well developed by the 1990s (van Parjis 1992). It takes many different forms and, inevitably, shades off into other ideas, such as a guaranteed minimum income or other sorts of income supports. However, as the most serious studies (for instance, Coote and Yazici 2019) point out, if the level of the basic income is to be adequate for citizens to live on and not the sort of derisory payment that at least some of its right-wing supporters advocate, it would cost anywhere between 20% and 30% of GDP.

Moreover, even at this level, it would be no substitute for an adequate welfare state—including quality public health care, education and other public services—and could well draw resources away from them. Indeed, on the right, many support it precisely because it would offer them the chance to dismantle the welfare state, which, they say, is too intrusive but which they really dislike because of the extent to which it affords genuine empowerment to the working classes, making them capable of organising society to produce what they need.

Perhaps the most important argument against UBI is that it leaves the current weakened capitalist productive system intact. This is particularly so in proposals, such as Yanis Varoufakis’s (2016), that it be funded not from taxation but from a ‘dividend’ paid out from profits while the question of its economic feasibility (leaving aside its political feasibility) is evaded. Especially if accompanied by a dismantling of the welfare state, which leaves individuals reliant on purchasing critical services from private, typically corporate producers, it would become the foundation for the rampant commodification of every aspect of social life, for converting the production of everything we need—education, health care, housing, transport—into machines for corporate profit. If our experience with corporate provision so far is anything to go by, we will experience simultaneous declines in the quantity and quality of the relevant goods and services and rises in costs. Even more fundamentally, moreover, UBI takes it for granted that a privately organised economy is capable of handling production at the required pace and in the required pattern. In fact, not only can we not rely on the present capitalist system to deliver the social welfare and environmental protection we need, as we have seen, even in the homelands of capitalism, it is not capable of delivering growth on its own.

Proposals for UBI ignore the real elephants in the room. How shall we reorganise production so that it produces for genuine individual and social need, in an environmentally sustainable fashion and without inflicting low wages and undesirable working conditions on any worker, at home or aboard. And how shall we distribute work among those capable of working and its rewards among all, including those who cannot work because they are too young, too ill or too old?

This involves planning for production as well as distribution. It will have to include plans for taking large private firms that are already vast apparatuses for planned production into public ownership and running them as parts of larger, national plans for social production that also plan the national economy’s relation to regional economies and the world economy. It would have to recognise that the current economic structure is unable to produce what is needed, including high-quality public services, at acceptable wages, in acceptable working conditions and reversals of global warming, pollution and biodiversity loss. Today’s neoliberal economies are increasingly better at producing what is positively harmful to individuals and society if they produce at all, given its inability to invest productively and preference for plunder and speculation.