The aff is a Trojan Horse for neoliberal workfare schemes that defuses resistance.

Throughout British political history, UBI has primarily been an interest of the ‘free-market right’ and the ‘pragmatic centre’ rather than the Left (Sloman, 2015: 9). Despite the idealism of the Enlightenment thinkers who first introduced the concept, the most influential of basic income proposals have been regressive, seeking to resist or weaken the welfare state. For example, Rhys-Williams’ scheme, emerging as it did amidst the post-war consensus, ‘might plausibly be read as an attempt to resist the growth of progressive taxation and the rising bargaining power of the organised working class’ (Sloman, 2018: 629). Such an impression is reinforced by her ‘ambivalence’ regarding the sum that would constitute a basic income and her concerns about ‘conditionality’ (Sloman, 2018: 629).

There is a moralising of work within the Right’s support of UBI, one of the key components that make it antithetical to any Leftist variation. Following the publication of the Beveridge Report which made the key recommendations on which the British welfare state was based Beveridge’s ideas, and the Labour government’s willingness to implement them, inspired an anxiety in Rhys-Williams and her fellow conservatives that ‘[n]ot only will the idle get as much from the State as will the industrious workers, they will get a great deal more’, which would result in an ‘undermining [of] the will to work’ (Rhys-Williams, 2004: 164). In order to combat this, Rhys-Williams argued for a “new social contract”, ‘expressed by the actual signature of a contract between the individual [...] and the State’, in which the recipient of a basic income would be obliged to ‘devote his best efforts’ to societal wealth creation in exchange for a basic safety net (2004: 167). A UBI on these terms would essentially be a form of workfare, and a comparatively timid solution when contrasted with what actually emerged as the post-war consensus.

This concern for protecting “the will to work” is implicit within the UBI pilot scheme carried out in Finland in 2017–2018. The pilot consisted of 2000 unemployed people being given a mere 560 euros a month to live on throughout the trial period, indicative of the moderate sum likely to be introduced (Kela, 2020). In simulating UBI models before the actual trial began, the academics involved found that such a low sum, despite offering more disposable income for social groups such as students and lower paid workers, would mean that ‘individuals with unemployment benefits would be the largest group of losers’, as ‘the basic income would only partially replace their existing benefits’ (Kangas et al., 2017: 90). These benefits would of course be abolished to make way for a UBI, as ‘[d]istributing a basic income to all beneficiaries on top of their current benefits would not be economically sustainable’ (Simanainen and Kangas, 2018: n.p.). Such a narrow conception of UBI should not be surprising, given Finland’s Centre-Right coalition government at the time which included the Right-wing populist Finns Party hoped the trial would help ‘diminish disincentives to working, [...] reduce bureaucracy and [...] simplify the overly complex tax-benefit system’, rather than provide more security for its poorest citizens (Kangas et al., 2017: 87).

Such concerns with efficiency and bureaucracy are central to many conservative interpretations of UBI. Many of its supporters on the Right are ‘attracted to the idea as a pragmatic solution to the failings of the existing safety-net or as a free-market alternative to wage regulation and state welfare provision’ (Sloman, 2018: 627). In other words, this version of UBI represents little more than a continuation of the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state and its attack on workers’ security. American economists Milton and Rose Friedman were key architects of this neoliberal revolution of course, and in Capitalism and Freedom advocated a basic income in order to ‘reduce the need for the social safety net and [...] its expensive, inefficient bureaucracy’ (Friedman and Friedman, 2002; Stern and Kravitz, 2016: 174). The Friedmans saw their “negative income tax” as the most efficient way of ‘dismantling [...] government interferences with the market’, typically positing this anti-welfare stance as one concerned with ‘individual liberty’ (Friedman, 2013: n.p.). Under this system, all state benefits would be abolished and replaced by a mechanism whereby above a certain threshold ‘you pay tax to the Inland Revenue; below it, they pay you’ (Gorz, 1985: 41). This would enable governments to cut off all support for those earning above an arbitrary figure which would ‘bring substantial savings’ and streamline welfare provision in the way the Friedmans and their fellow ideologues wished (Gorz, 1985: 41). The system would also tax those above the threshold at a flat rate rather than through progressive taxation, meaning the plans would also allow inequality to increase.

Although Rhys-Williams’ proposals are probably the most well-known in Britain, Sloman sees those put forward by Arthur Cockfield in the 1970s as ‘the closest any British government has come to introducing UBI’ (2018: 632). Cockfield’s proposals drew heavily on the work of the Friedmans, and like his predecessors he ‘explicitly rejected the notion of welfare rights’, wishing to be selective and exclude from the allowances those he labeled ‘the vagrants, the drifters, the drop-outs, [and] the petty criminals’ (Sloman, 2018: 632; Cockfield, 1971: cited in Sloman). Such plans to streamline welfare and the tax system were popular within the Conservative Party, which would allow them to reduce administrative costs by abolishing the PAYE method of taxation in favour of the flat rate. However, Cockfield’s plans were unable to command the bipartisan support needed to be introduced, and were later abandoned by the subsequent Labour government (Sloman, 2016).

Such emphases on reducing bureaucracy, ‘streamlining’ the welfare state and instilling a “will to work” in lower earners betray the major difference between Left- and Right-wing interpretations of basic income. However, by arguing for a version of the same reform, Leftist advocates risk masking the huge differences between these interpretations, serving as enablers for the introduction of a more regressive variation. This is a particular possibility given how policy-making processes function, and how certain stakeholders within this process are able to shape policy outcomes, which will be explored later in more detail. Milton Friedman himself was aware of this, taking great delight in warning that ‘[t]he Left, if it accepts the programme, will find that it has bought a Trojan Horse’ (2013: n.p.).

Bourgeois support for UBI is not just historic however. In the modern age, support is strong among those Zizek terms the ‘socially conscious billionaire’ (2015: 39). In his estimation, such figures ‘stand for global capital at its most seductive and “progressive” – in short, at its most dangerous’ (Zizek, 2015: 39). This most advanced faction of capital ‘ha[s] embraced UBI as a way of defusing political resistance to automation and technological change’ (Benanav, 2019a: 7). Techno-capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk view such changes as both desirable and inevitable, and indeed both have publicly shared their support for UBI at one time or another.

Marxist political economy shows the importance of technological advances to the accumulation of capital. Marx demonstrates that capitalist growth relies fundamentally on the ‘surplus labour’ of its workers, which is the value produced beyond that which is covered by the worker’s wages. The rate at which this occurs is ‘therefore an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour power by capital’ (Marx, 2013: 151). But capital’s endless search for further growth makes the invention of labour-saving technology vital to the increase in the rate of surplus value relative to the value the worker is paid for. This increase in ‘the productiveness of labour’ therefore means a decrease in the ‘labour-time required for the production of an article’, meaning capital is able to shorten the “necessary labour time” for which the worker is remunerated, and in turn ‘lengthen the other part of the day, during which he [sic] is at liberty to work gratis for the capitalist’ (Marx, 2013: 21; 222).

Just as working hours are not limited to those of necessary labour time, the fact that the labourer is able to produce their “means of subsistence” – the value equivalent to their wages in a shorter space of time as a result of a particular advancement in production does not then lead to a reduction in hours, but rather the opposite. Capital is able to use this new technology to squeeze the wages of those who remain in post following its introduction, as the threat of unemployment now looms large for those ‘rendered superfluous’ by this innovation (Marx, 2013: 297). The work in which this technology is employed is therefore de-valued as “unskilled” for much of it is completed by machinery with human supervision – which again spells wage cuts. In this way, even the very threat of technology – regardless of whether it is actually deployed in production ensures the employer is able to reduce wage costs, while any workplace radicalism is quelled by the insecurity such innovation inspires. For those whose jobs are lost to automation, they either ‘flood[...] all the more easily accessible branches of industry’ or join the ranks of the jobless; what Marx terms the ‘reserve army of labour’. Either way, the result ‘sinks the price of labour below its value’ (Marx, 2013: 297).

A UBI in conjunction with technological advancement is therefore entirely consistent with the demands of capital, which often repurposes reforms for its own development. In assessing the impact of the post-war welfare state, John Saville writes that it emerged not only through ‘the struggle of the working class against their exploitation’, but also as a result of ‘the requirements of industrial capitalism [...] for a more efficient environment’, in other words a healthier and more educated workforce (1957: n.p.). Similarly, UBI serves to create this “more efficient environment” through a liberating of employers from the constraints of paying full wages. Not only does the policy force the state or rather the tax payer to top-up these wages, but it continues to maintain the labour force for a comparatively lower rate. This combination of UBI and automation could well allow capital to continue increasing its profit margins while throwing at least some of its workers now guaranteed a basic income on the scrapheap.