Money for everything? Universal basic income in a crisis

Capital & Class, 2019

Proponents recommend Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to a trifold crisis of work, wage and social democracy. Synthesising Marxian form analysis with Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory, this paper suggests that these crises relate to historically-specific capitalist social forms: labour, money, and the state. These separate but interlocking crises of social form are temporary and contingent expressions of an underlying, permanent crisis of social reproduction. Mistaking the pervasive crisis of social reproduction in its totality for a temporary or contingent trifold crisis of work, wage or social democracy, UBI proposals seek to solve it by moving through the same social forms through which they take effect, rather than confronting the social relations that constitute their antagonistic undertow and generate the crisis of social reproduction. The paper considers two other solutions proposed to handle the deeper-rooted crisis with which UBI grapples: Universal Basic Services (UBS) and Universal Basic Infrastructure (UBIS) Both propose non-monetary ways past the impasses of the UBI, addressing much more directly the constrained basis of individual and collective reproduction that characterises capitalist social relations. But they retain a link with capitalist social forms of money and state that may serve to close rather than open the path to real alternatives. The paper concludes that the contradictions these 'abstract universals' touch upon are best mediated through more bottom-up and struggle-based 'concrete universals' that address the manifold crises of work, wage and social democracy that undergird them. Such alternatives would leave open dynamic tensions around work and welfare in contemporary capitalism without promise of their incomplete resolution in the name of a false universality unattainable in a world characterised by antagonism, domination and crisis.

Journal of Labor and Society, 2018

This article contests the suggestion that the automation of production and the provision of a basic income potentiate the transition from a post-work to a postcapitalist society. This vista-mainly represented by the work of Paul Mason and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams misses how capitalist work is both preconditioned by a historically-specific set of antagonistic social relations of constrained social reproduction, and, determined by the specific social forms its results assume in commodity exchange and the constituted form of the nation-state. We argue that the transitional demands of automation and a basic income may serve to stem postcapitalist transformation, stopping short at a post-work society characterized by the continuation of capitalist social relations and forms. Retaining money under the rule of the nation-state, the proposed transition between post-work and postcapitalist society breaks insufficiently with the present, in some ways making it worse by replacing a wage over which workers can lawfully bargain with a state-administered monetary payment that creates a direct relationship of power between citizen and state, liquidating labor struggles. We show how the Unemployed Workers Organizations in Argentina offer a 'concrete utopian' alternative that creates the capacity to reshape the relationship between individuals, society and the rule of money, value and the capitalist state rather than reinforce it.

Estudios críticos del desarrollo, 2013

Bath Papers in International Development and Wellbeing, 2017

This paper critiques popular academic understandings of development towards a post-capitalist, post-work society based around the automation of production and the provision of a basic income to those displaced by its effects. By focusing on work and its escape as the central issue at stake in the transition to a postcapitalist society, these accounts miss how, at one end, capitalist work is preconditioned by a historically-specific set of antagonistic social relations of constrained social reproduction, and, at the other, by the specific social forms assumed by the results of that work in commodity exchange and the constituted form of the nation-state. Retaining money, commodities and the rule of value under the auspices of a national state, postcapitalist and post-work vistas represent abstract ‘bad utopias’ that break insufficiently with the present, and in some ways make it worse, replacing a wage over which workers can lawfully struggle with a state administered monetary payment that creates a direct relationship of power between citizen and state. This is highlighted in the potential adoption of basic income as part of authoritarian nationalist policy platforms including that of Nerendra Modi in India. Suggesting that struggles over the contradictory forms assumed by social reproduction in capitalist society are themselves labour struggles and not external to them, we pose a ‘concrete utopian’ alternative that creates the capacity to reshape the relationship between individuals, society and the rule of money, value and the state rather than reinforce it. To illustrate this we examine the Unemployed Workers Organisations instituted in Argentina. This poses one potential means of devolving monetary and non monetary resources and power rather than centralising them in the hands of an all-powerful ‘postcapitalist’ state that would carry all the scars of the society it sets out to surpass. Such a 'concrete utopia' would create space for, and not liquidate or falsely resolve, class struggle in, against and beyond capitalist development.

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2018

This thesis is a critical investigation of the ambivalent relationship between the concept of labour and the concept of value creation in immaterial capitalism. The thesis defines this relationship as the labour-capital relation. The relationship is studied by an examining of the historical developments in the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist mode of production and the transition from a passive to an active labour policy. As a result, the thesis finds four breakdowns between: Life- labour, common-private, right-obligation, and work-labour – that all point to a form of discrepancy in the capital-labour relation. The thesis claims that these four breakdowns consequently result in precarious working conditions for workers and a weakened bargaining power for trade unions expressed in failed identity politics. The thesis claims that former attempts to cope with precarity and identity politics fail to understand the flexible and immaterial characteristics of contemporary labour and value production. The aim is to illustrate how attempts that either call for fixed employment and stable income (welfare) or quantify and standardise value (workfare) are insufficient. As a result, the thesis suggests looking at a basic income as a structural stable compromise in-between the four breakdown as respectively a – remuneration, compensation, stratification, and decommodification – that all point to a form of ‘third way’ in the capital-labour relation. The examination of basic income is approached on a macro level and not as a concrete application model. The focus is to propose how contemporary production and a basic income together share a critical potential to understand capital, labour and identity in a new way benefitting trade unions and worker rights. As such, the thesis suggests unions and Danish labour market policy to take in a broader recognition of labour and employment not only perceiving wage as predetermined for value production. One of the thesis’ central insights is to understand how production not only should be understood economically, but socially and politically as well. The thesis has for the same reason methodologically engaged with fiction, i.e. constructing a fictive case, as an alternative methodological approach to cope with the wider socio-political infrastructure not applicable in quantitative and qualitative inquiries. The thesis asserts that working with fiction as a form of paradigmatic case provides a certain particularity and generality that is able to open up and provide a language for discussing, in this case, precarity and identity not only distinctive for categories such as workers or welfare recipients but as immanent within life itself.

2018

As technological progress, automation, and digital platforms have entered the labour market and are expected to progressively change its dynamics, material and discursive neoliberal practices are directing technology towards the maintenance of the socio-economic status quo. This thesis aims at demonstrating that, albeit technology has the potential to contribute to the building of a post-neoliberal society, the neoliberal narrative has managed to appropriate critical arguments to legitimize exploitative practices aimed at avoiding the shift to an alternative order. The first chapter introduces the issue of automation and the main studies that have been led about the topic, together with an analysis concerning how the conception of a future without work has changed after the neoliberal turn in the late 1970s and 1980s. The second chapter addresses the notion of platform capitalism, notably the practices through which digital platforms are utilized to foster underpaid and unpaid labour as well as surplus value extraction and the narrative utilized to justify those practices. After the analysis of the digital and gig economies, the chapter concludes with a brief outlook of a set of proposals for the future of the digital economy. The third and concluding chapter addresses future perspectives concerning welfare and economic policies, highlighting the risk of neoliberal appropriation of counter arguments and proposals, providing the Universal Basic Income (UBI) as an example.

Across Europe, a crisis of social democracy prevails. Deindustrialisation precipitates a breakdown of the communities, institutions and interests that held the social democratic and labour movements together. A collapse in everyday life passes over into a steady decline in the electoral realm. Elsewhere, a crisis of social reproduction ensues. The relationship between the wage and subsistence weakens, public services face cutbacks and a generalised dispossession of people from the commons continues apace. This triple crisis- of the society of work, social reproduction and social democracy- is a triple crisis of the social. The universal basic income (UBI) is suggested by many as a means by which the social synthesis can be pieced back together. In this paper we explore whether or not UBI lives up to the claims made for its implementation, and to what extent it addresses these three crises. We ultimately pose the question whether UBI offers a solution to the crisis of social democracy, and whether, on this basis, European social democrats should pursue the policy as a central demand of a new electoral offer. We conclude that the policy cannot be suggested as a solution to the crises of work and social reproduction, at least not without being complemented by a range of other measures. A suite of reforms could strengthen its impact and ensure it is used to nurture and preserve positive social relations that reflect social democratic ideas, rather than contrary outcomes implied in alternative visions of the UBI proposed from both right and left of the political spectrum.

LSE Politics and Policy Blog, 2017

This paper critiques popular academic understandings of development towards a post-capitalist, post-work society based around the automation of production and the provision of a basic income to those displaced by its effects. By focusing on work and its escape as the central issue at stake in the transition to a postcapitalist society, these accounts miss how, at one end, capitalist work is preconditioned by a historically-specific set of antagonistic social relations of constrained social reproduction, and, at the other, by the specific social forms assumed by the results of that work in commodity exchange and the constituted form of the nation-state. Retaining money, commodities and the rule of value under the auspices of a national state, postcapitalist and post-work vistas represent abstract ‘bad utopias’ that break insufficiently with the present, and in some ways make it worse, replacing a wage over which workers can lawfully struggle with a state-administered monetary payment that creates a direct relationship of power between citizen and state. This is highlighted in the potential adoption of basic income as part of authoritarian nationalist policy platforms including that of Nerendra Modi in India. Suggesting that struggles over the contradictory forms assumed by social reproduction in capitalist society are themselves labour struggles and not external to them, we pose a ‘concrete utopian’ alternative that creates the capacity to reshape the relationship between individuals, society and the rule of money, value and the state rather than reinforce it. To illustrate this we examine the Unemployed Workers Organisations instituted in Argentina. This poses one potential means of devolving monetary and non-monetary resources and power rather than centralising them in the hands of an all-powerful ‘postcapitalist’ state that would carry all the scars of the society it sets out to surpass. Such a 'concrete utopia' would create space for, and not liquidate or falsely resolve, class struggle in, against and beyond capitalist development.