The Universal Basic Income, or UBI, has become a popular demand on the left, but even among some right-wingers as well.
UBI is a proposal for the state to give everyone a set amount of money, irrespective of where you live and your employment status.
The practical specifics of the proposal varies e.g. from what age it is paid, and how it would be funded. And its propoponents differ over what kind of payment it is: is it in place of waged work, is it a wage supplement, is it a new kind of benefit? And over what is its social purpose: is it a useful reform in capitalist society, designed tackle and challenge the realist of stagnant and low wages; or is it an organising took and a step towards a socialist society?
I am immensely sympathetic to the intention. Less poverty is good. The working class asserting itself over living standards is good. Trying to formulate anti-capitalist demands is good. I hope this article can be a contribution to a conversation between serious revolutionaries about how best to advance the class struggle. However, in all of its variants, I don’t think the UBI will succeed.
The idea of a universal basic income can be traced to a 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice, by radical democrat Tom Paine. He called for a “National Fund” which would provide all citizens over 50 and the disabled with a guaranteed income every year, and a lump-sum at the age of 21. The universality of the proposal was intended to contrast with the already widespread idea about the “deserving and undeserving poor”, enshrined in capitalist systems of relief for the poor and destitute, the so-called Poor Laws.
Much more recently, the Green Party has adopted a policy for a Citizens’ Income, (in addition to a £10 an hour minimum wage). In June 2103 some leading Keynesian economists (for example, Paul Krugman) called for a “minimum income” in the New York Times.
And these are not untested theoretical musings. There have been various trial schemes in India and Namibia. A referendum on UBI is due to be held in Switzerland. Estimations of the cost to the Swiss state have been made. A guaranteed income of 2,500 francs per person would, if you transfer the costs of all benefits like pensions, unemployment benefits and so on, only require an extra 20 billion francs a year. That’s about 2% of Switzerland’s GDP. However, we might question whether there is the political will for it in Switzerland. A referendum in May 2014 resoundingly defeated a proposal to set a minimum wage (76% against).
Lots of right-wingers have come out in favour of a basic income. Some call for it on pragmatic grounds. One simplified basic income, to replace 15 different types of benefits would cut bureaucracy (and some civil servants can be sacked). Even ultra-right-wing economists like Hayek advocated a variant, a “certain minimum income for everyone”. Arguably even Friedman’s negative income tax is a variant.
Given the current ascendancy of neoliberalism one could safely assume that, if the UBI were to be introduced now, the “universal” aspect of it would certainly be lost. There would be conditions attached. In the UK it would be restricted to UK nationals only. Presumably all migrants, stateless persons and asylum seekers would be excluded.
It would probably be tied to other eligibility criteria: not available to prisoners, to those with criminal records, to the unemployed who fail to find work etc, etc. Indeed,, in discussions about introducing a guaranteed minimum income system in Cyprus, President Nicos Anastasiades said of unemployed recipients: “The single but absolutely necessary precondition is that they don’t refuse to accept offers for employment and to participate in the policies of continuous employment that are determined by the state”.
The Cyprus scheme seems little different to Iain Duncan Smith’s Universal Credit, in which all benefits are combined, and calculated at a minimum level of subsistence but also subject to sanctioning if you refuse to work for free in Poundland or Tesco for six months. (The whole amount can be sanctioned, compared the current situation, where if you lose your JSA, you can still claim other benefits, like child benefit.)
Advocates of UBI will say that even with conditions the payment would be better than just fighting for higher wages as UBI covers people those out of waged work, the disabled and the unemployed. And advocates would fight against conditions and sanctions.
To that I would say, of course fighting for higher wages has to go alongside an radically better system of benefits, pensions, payments for the disabled, provision for children. Unless you’re a syndicalist, whose focus is purely the workplace and industry, and who eshews all political struggle, the labour movement’s economic struggle for higher wages is also necessarily a political struggle. For a high minimum wage and also for unemployment benefits if you lose your job. For a comprehensive, state-of-the art health service in case you get sick. And take money from the rich to fund better living standards for all.
If we were in a position to demand a truly universal basic income, with no strings attached, it would be because class struggle and revived and the labour movement was resurgent. How else will trade unionists have gained such confidence and organisation other than by winning their demands for higher wages and improved working conditions? A labour movement strong enough to demand the UBI would have already won equivalent rises in benefits and wages!
I can’t foresee another situation in which the UBI would be won, unless you think it might be granted, from on high, by a generous ruling class. Or else that a weakened labour movement will decide to demand the UBI, a demand with little concrete relation to the immediate concerns of each individual workplace. Even those workers who are in-and-out of work, and there are many such precarious workers now, if they were organised in a workplace would be demanding higher wages.
Another left argument for UBI relates to “anti-work” politics. The idea is that by giving everyone a set amount of money, which does not have to come from wage working, will “decouple” wage work, from the means living.
There is no space here to discuss “anti-work politics”, and, again, while I’m broadly sympathetic such ideas are misplaced. Briefly the main problems are too much emphasis is placed on automation in terms of jobs being cut. We can still demand “full employment” and create jobs by cutting the working week and creating a maximum working work. Instead too many peope working long hours whilst someone else is on the dole or can’t find work which “fits” their disability, everyone could work 25 or 20 hours a week.
Nor does automation negate the labour theory of value. If a robot replaces a worker in a car factory, that doesn’t mean their labour power has been automated out of existence, it just means their job has been automated; they are still free to use their labour power in another job. And the machine that replaced a worker still needs human labour, to design, build and maintain the machine. There will still be human labour in the production process: quality checking, using the machines, and so on.
The idea of fighting for higher wages or full employment is often met with objections relating to ideas about value. The argument here is that all the old industrial jobs have been moved to the global south or automated away; there are only service industry jobs left, and not enough of them, and do we want everyone working in call centres or Costa chains anyway?
Two things to remember here. Manufacturing has not disappeared. It’s a very European view to moan about the loss of manufacturing. There are tens of millions of jobs in manufacturing industries, it’s just that many of these jobs have gone to to the global south. And even in the UK, some manufacturing remains — the ONS statistics for seasonally adjusted workforce jobs in September 2013 show there were 2,668,000 working in administrative and support service activities, but also 2,574,000 people still working in manufacturing.
Whether you work in a textile factory in Birmingham or Kolkata or a call centre in London or Bombay, you produce commodities. These are produced for their exchange value only, to enrich the capitalist. Let’s talk about a future socialist society in which production is geared for use value, for human needs and wants. Arguing about whether it’s better or worse to work in a coffee shop as opposed to a shipyard is meaningless. In both case cases you’re still working for a boss and your labour is still required for the production of commodities, or servicing the conditions under which commodities are produced. No matter whether you’re lifting freight or a latte, no amount of automation will stop human labour from being the central necessity of the global capitalist production process.
Lots of jobs that exist today would not exist in a socialist society geared towards human need, and we would hope to automate large amounts of the production process, and socialise that which we cannot. We would ultimately destroy the commodity form. But there would still be some labour in a communist society. Labour directed towards socially-useful purposes, reduced to one day a week, or an hour a day – but still labour nonetheless. We cannot rely on a sort of technological utopianism to hope that we can 3-D print or automate the entire production process. The point of communism is to seize the means of production, not destroy it. If we want to seize the means of production we need to build up workers’ organisations fit to do that, and focused on doing that.
It seems to me the UBI is a get-rich-quick scheme, a way of overcoming what seems like agonisingly slow work of talking to individuals at work, creating trust, slowly building a union branch, fighting around demands in the workplace, losing fights, talking to people about politics. The connection between that step-by-step process and mass struggles are neither predictable nor guaranteed but there can be no magic shortcuts.
In conclusion I have some questions for the UBI advocates:
1. How would you guarantee the universality of a basic income, given the weakness of the labour movement, and the strength of the state?
2. Why is fighting for full employment, increased wages, and benefits for the unemployed, not achievable? Why is a UBI a more achievable demand?
3. If automation destroys all jobs, how do you explain that the proletariat as a percentage of the world population, is the largest it has ever been? Surely the point is to share the work out more equally?
4. How does UBI challenge capital? How does it link with a programme which can point towards socialism?
