There Is No Such Thing As A Left-Wing Universal Basic Income (UBI#2)
In Part One of this article (see LINK), I offered this conclusion:
"Many people on the left contend that we should support a Universal Basic Income (UBI). They say this because we/they believe that there is such a thing as a left-wing version of UBI, a 'High Floor UBI' or 'Generous UBI'.
This is wishful thinking. That kind of UBI does not exist anywhere. One can imagine UBI as one tool among others in a post-capitalist economy, but there are no post-capitalist economies anywhere, nor are we anywhere close to building one. As I have intimated above, UBI is an idea that needs to be evaluated as a policy within real existing economies, that may be post-industrial and post-Fordist and post all sorts of other things, but are definitely not post-capitalist.
The UBI policies that actually exist are part of the toolkit for a neoliberal economy that minimizes intervention by the State if it strengthens labour more than capital within the labour market. It is State and taxpayer funded charity that is cash or credit money and nothing else. It is set at the lowest level that one might imagine possible to select. That level is enough to meet very short term survival needs and nothing more. This 'charity level' UBI maintains the need and desire to seek work. It keeps as many people as possible alive and well to be a reserve army of labour available to undercut the leverage of other workers.
The Left should not be supporting UBI. We should be critiquing UBI and arguing for a set of policy ideas based on a positive freedom approach. That necessarily involves a left-leaning State that intervenes on the side of Labour, and above all mass campaigns and struggles waged by working people themselves. “
IS THERE A LEFT-WING VERSION OF UBI THAT WE SHOULD ADVOCATE?
In this concluding Part Two, I will do two things. I will consider the possibility that there is a left-wing version of UBI, and evaluate the two most likely versions. But mostly I will draw on the brilliantly concise and well sourced history of changes in left thinking that have made many on the left open to neoliberal ideas like UBI presented by Anton Jager and Daniel Zamora Vargas in Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income (henceforth JZV). I say 'draw on' because I will list changes in left thinking that go beyond JZV. I urge you again to read their book to get their list.
Surely a left-wing government could introduce a more 'generous' or 'high floor' version of UBI. Not really. Let's look at the two most likely higher basic income levels that might be set, at the level of a high minimum wage, and at the level of a lower minimum wage closer to the level we see legislated in some rich countries today.
LEFT-WING UBI OPTION #1: AT THE LEVEL OF A HIGH MINIMUM WAGE
The first possibility is a UBI that tops up income to a floor that is set much higher than either the second option I will consider (a floor that is set at the level of legislated minimum wages that we see in some sectors of some countries today) or the survival level charity version of UBI (the version that actually exists).
A High Floor UBI is a libertarian (socialist) fantasy, even if it were confined to the richest states. It would be a policy that dictated to all employers and to capital as a whole that they must raise the wages that they pay to all workers by a considerable amount. You cannot do this by taking the sum total of all wages and salaries actually paid to workers and middle class people and redividing it so that lower wage workers get more -- you cannot do this without people higher up getting less. A High Floor UBI would require taking money from capital. It would require mandated lower profit margins and rents, likely achieved by higher taxation on businesses and all forms of property and plenty of close monitoring.
The only way that you can even imagine capital and businesses and rent-extracters funding a High Floor UBI in the richest states is if the working and middle classes in those countries joined them in extracting significantly higher profits and rents from working people in the Majority World.
LEFT-WING UBI OPTION #2: AT THE LEVEL OF CURRENT MINIMUM WAGES
The second possibility is a UBI that tops up income to a floor that is set at the level of minimum wages that are currently actually legislated. How is this different from what already exists? It would be universal. (It would also mean that employers could actually pay wages below the minimum level and have the taxpayer funded UBI subsidize them, but that is a secondary issue).
Real existing legislated minimum wages are not set at a single rate for all wage and salary earners in all industries and occupations and in all parts of the country.
There are often different levels set for workers who are considered to be inexperienced newbies whose presumed lower labour productivity in the new job justifies paying them less. There are usually different minimum wage levels legislated in different jurisdictions, in different provinces or states, in jobs that are deemed to be federal, in some countries in different cities. Above all, there are usually no minimum wages legislated at all for many industries and occupations.
The list of industries and occupations that are exempted, or are technically included but enforcement is so lax that they might as well be formally exempted, is too long to list, but that is not necessary because the exemptions are not random. They are industries and occupations that keep the cost of the reproduction of labour power (and therefore the level of wage that employers have to pay for the average worker to meet basic necessities without going into debt or getting sick) as low as possible -- food, clothing, domestic services (cooking and cleaning and parenting and home fixing), furniture, toys etc
It is very unlikely that any government, even a left-leaning one, would ever legislate a universal minimum wage, an actual floor that applied to all workers. A large part of the work force is paid lower wages than other workers (or not paid at all, e.g. housewives) in order to keep the price of food, clothing, domestic services, store clerks, restaurant workers etc as low as possible. A universal minimum wage would mean an immediate jump in prices for all of those basic necessity items, and this would force capital and employers to raise the floor wages they actually pay to all workers. This would cut into profits, but it would also make the goods and services significantly less price competitive vis a vis their competitors in other countries. A minimum wage UBI that is truly universal would also make it harder for employers to pay different types of workers different wages for doing essentially the same job (new or less experienced workers, part time or on call workers, youth, women, racial minorities, people in different regions etc) once they are all paid the same at the start.
Should the left nevertheless raise the demand for a strongly enforced minimum wage UBI that is truly universal? It all depends whether you think that it makes sense to fight for unwinnable demands in order to "emphasize the contradiction", in order to be able to say that a capitalist economy will never provide the same minimum living wage to all people.
Maybe, maybe not. The main point is that a truly universal minimum wage UBI is almost certainly never going to be enacted anywhere. A left government that implemented this would be on life support immediately afterward as inflation surged, domestic companies lost out business to foreign competitors, in-person stores and restaurants and small businesses of all kinds announced that they might have to close, and larger employers made major layoffs and accelerated automation etc.
WHY HAVE MANY LEFT THINKERS NEVERTHELESS SUPPORTED UBI?
Jager and Zamora Vargas undoubtedly wrote Welfare for Markets because they wanted to make the case to progressives, who are the most likely to read their book, that UBI is a policy serving the goals of the neoliberal right. But most of the book is actually about the changes in left thinking since the Second World War that made the new left open to supporting this neoliberal policy (with the thought always that they could tweak it and make it serve left-wing goals).
Their book is actually a very thought provoking meditation on the plusses and minusses of what has made the new left new, what has made it different from the old left of socialist and communist parties with mass working class bases fighting to replace capitalist rule with working class rule in the State and the Economy and the Culture (through reform or revolution), and to do this worldwide so that (neo)colonialism would be upended too.
Here are just a few of the changes in thinking that have made the contemporary left different from the old left. Most of these points are my own, or my angle on ones made by JZV. This is not a list of ideas that automatically lead to an embrace of right-wing libertarian policy ideas like UBI. It is simply a list of the ideas that have become shared by most of us in the left today as taken for granted assumptions. Neither JZV nor I are arguing that we need to go back wholesale to some set of much better Old Left ideas. The world has changed, and the left has changed its framing of problems and their causes and its proposals for solutions along with it. Many of these new ideas are an improvement, some of them are not.
** The biggest change that directly relates to being open to a neoliberal solution to poverty is what JZV call the shift to a post-work and post-workerism politics. This shift leads us to accept the neoliberal idea that poverty is a problem of the individual consumer, not an aspect of the exploitation of the worker by capital and (if they are employed at the time) their employer. It allows a shift from what JZV call a "producerist" understanding of poverty, as impoverishment of one class by another, to a consumerist or individualist understanding of poverty as a condition of being without enough money to meet needs as a buyer in consumer markets.
Post work politics is politics that no longer sees organizing workers "at the point of production", in the workplace, around issues that arise directly from their exploitation by capital and their employer as central to building a Left Movement.
Post workerist politics is politics that no longer considers the working class to be the vanguard or leading social group in the fight for liberation of all groups that experience some kind of oppression or disadvantage.
** The most fully argued and influential "producerist" theory of poverty and its causes is Karl Marx's theory, but JZV remind us that it is by no means the only one. In Britain, Fabian socialists and the Welfare Economics economists (whose theories grounded the Beveridge report that was the basis of the welfare state measures introduced by the post-war Labour government) also saw inequality as a relationship between capital and labour.
Marx argued that poverty was created because capital and employers in a capitalist economy could extract most of the new value created by producers (wage labourers, wage slaves). They would only have to pay the worker a wage based on the minimum required in a given place and time to "reproduce their labour power", to afford basic necessities for themselves and their dependents and be able to work another day. Capital and employers could do this because they were able to monopolize ownership and control of the means of production and distribution and deny access of most producers to the same.
Based on this analysis of the problem, the solution was to replace a capitalist economy and culture and state with a socialist one, where a key feature was various forms of public ownership combined with democratic control by workers and their representatives both in the workplace and at higher levels (centralized planning).
It is worth reminding ourselves that this definition of socialism was not confined to revolutionary socialists (communists, Leninists). It was shared, albeit in a looser and weaker version, by parliamentary reformist socialists, even relatively moderate ones, before the end of World War Two. It used to be that the most salient difference between radical and moderate leftists was the means -- gradual winning of elections and adoption of reforms versus militant collective action including popular uprisings -- rather than the definition of the socialist goal.
** Is socialism still the goal of today's left? Does the left still have a producerist understanding of the problem, more specifically of the causes of poverty? If we are talking about what the left says publicly -- what actual demands are raised in protests by social movement organizations and what policies are promised in electoral programmes by left parties -- the answer is clearly no and no.
If the left has any shared vision of an alternative to our capitalist etc social system, it is that we seek a "Democracy of Individual Participation" (a quote from the 1960 SDS Port Huron Manifesto). JZV do not make this claim (although it is implicit in their critique of the politics of "technocratic populism" that they see as hegemonic in today's European left), and it is too big an issue to discuss further here. Let me just say that democracy of individual participation as a goal could be seen as the short form definition of old left socialism, public ownership and both local and centralized workers control, with everything but local [individual] control subtracted from the definition of the goal. This is a place holder that masks the fact that we no longer can agree on a goal, on an alternative to capitalism.
** The rejection of a politics centered on organizing working people based on their exploitation by capital and their employer at the point of production (post work politics) and on building a Movement led by working class socialist parties and mass organizations (post workerism) is partly the result of the left recognizing that capitalism has moved from the stage of industrial capitalism to the stage of post-industrial and post-Fordist capitalism. (I regard cybernetic and then digital and for some the impending AI technological revolutions as phases of post-Fordist post-industrialization but this is a tangent). The class structure has changed, and the consciousness and collective action of the post-industrial era working class is seen to be consequently different.
(And note that industrial capitalism very much still exists. As I will argue in future articles, all of the 'post-'s that we use to describe the existing social system and economy should be understood as adjectives and qualifiers to the basic designation of the still defining logic of the system as capitalist (and patriarchal and colonialist and ethno-racist etc). Our society is not post-industrial in the sense that it is 'after' industrial production or 'instead of' it. Rather post-industrial refers to the increasing prevalence of production of services relative to goods. The same is true for all of the other posts -- post-modern, post-materialist, post-Fordist etc. It may be useful to describe emergent changes in our predominant social system as 'post', but we are decidedly not in a post-capitalist system. Indeed, the increasing commodification of people, activities and things shows that we are becoming more and more capitalist every day.)
Unfortunately, the left has done very little to analyze and theorize what the post-industrial etc working classes are, what their issues and demands and spontaneous class consciousness are, and how they see the relation between their exploitation and all other forms of oppression. The trend to 'intersectional' analysis does suggest a desire to 'bring social class back in' to our framings of problems and their causes, but we have a long way to go to develop an updated and 'practically applicable in organizing' class-plus analysis.
It is almost like we accept the viewpoint of the right that capital only exploits workers in the workplace when it is blue collar industrial proletarian workers in the early industrial capitalism stage that we are talking about. And that consequently only blue collar factory workers can develop an anti-capitalist pro-socialist consciousness and be mobilized on this basis. This is reinforced by the endlessly repeated misattribution to Marx that the working class is only factory workers producing goods for sale at a profit, and that capitalism will deterministically lead to mass immiseration and "proletarianization", where proletarianization is misunderstood to mean 'turned into a factory worker or a lumpenized permanently poor and unemployed'. This has not happened, at least not in rich colonial states, and the false conclusion is drawn that we must be in a post-capitalist system where classes of workers are (increasingly) no longer exploited by capital and employers.
The change in left thinking here is not that we literally think that our economy is no longer capitalist, or that workers of all kinds and circumstances are not disadvantaged by this fact. It is that we do not share an updated analysis of the relations of production, of social classes as dynamic and conflictual relations of unequal wealth, power and status privileges that are produced and reproduced in the process of production and distribution.
As a result, the left does not (sufficiently, centrally) frame problems and their causes in terms of the exploitations, oppressions and hurts that are actively produced and reproduced by the exploitation of labour by capital and employers. This leaves the left open to theories of poverty as issues of unequal distribution and consumption that mostly impact those who are excluded from participation in capitalist production (the solution being to bring them more fully into The Market, meaning to bring them more fully into the reserve army of labour). We know better, but do not have our own theory that explains extreme poverty as a subtype of precarity and impoverishment impacting all workers as the result of exploitation by capital and employers.
-- There are three more changes in left thinking that are highlighted by JZV. I will deal with them very briefly, but you should read their book for an also brief but richly documented and illustrated presentation of these changes. These are major issues in their own right but they are perhaps the ones that require the least argumentation to understand in terms of how they impact the way we see poverty and solutions to poverty.
Change#1 is the change in thinking that results from recognizing that post-war capitalist societies, at the very least colonial rich states like the USA, Western Europe, Japan and white European settler colonies, were Affluent/Abundance societies in which most workers could achieve middle class lifestyles as consumers. Given this, whether or not the ownership and control of the means of production was increasingly concentrated, centralized and financialized was beside the point in discussing poverty, its causes and solutions. Capitalism appeared to be reliably and irreversibly expanding the size of the pie and giving large enough slices of that pie to most workers to make them affluent.
Poverty and immiseration were plausibly believed to be the exception, not the rule, the result of something other than The Market, something other than profit maximization by capital and employers. Post-war mainstream liberal thinkers like Michael Harrington talked about 'pockets of poverty' that persisted despite the overwhelmingly predominant trend to increased consumer affluence. He and others proposed some variation of a 'culture of poverty' theory that blamed the characteristics of the poor for their own poverty.
UBI was one of many policy ideas that aimed to act on the poor themselves to change this. The left did not accept the culture of poverty thesis, but it was seduced by the argument that welfare state programmes were paternalistic/controlling and fostered dependency instead of building up the 'human capital' of the poor to be more autonomous and productive.
Change #2 is the change in thinking that resulted from the belief that cybernetic Automation was in the process of eliminating most jobs and not replacing them with others, or rather that automation was creating the possibility of a Leisure Society in which only a minority of people would be required to work.
Some on the left saw this as a corollary to the trend of capitalism producing Affluence/Abundance for almost everyone as consumers (in a Leisure Economy we would potentially all get high floor UBIs to enable us to engage in creative work/play as autonomous entrepreneurs). Many optimists in the Sixties youth counterculture believed that Puritan Work Ethic capitalists were nevertheless holding this back, but could be pressed to concede it. Or at least we could withdraw into small utopian communities that would prefiguratively practice this work/play.
Others (negative thinkers like myself) were concerned that this would leave a relatively small ruling class of capital-owners, managers, professionals and technicians that were still working in control of automated production and distribution, and thereby of everything else in society. This is certainly the vision of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and all the other Tech Bros in Silicon Valley. They are all strong advocates of UBI.
Change #3 is the change in thinking about the possibility of the previously colonized states of the Global South ever 'catching up' to the colonial rich states through some variant of State-Led Industrialization. Here the issue is whether or not poor countries (countries where a large proportion of people were poor by colonial rich state standards) could develop by increasing their economic and political independence from the rich imperialist states, or whether they should seek to integrate further into a neoliberal globalized supply chain single world capitalist economy.
(China and several other countries are exceptions to the rule that poor countries never catch up. I would argue that it is because they managed to integrate further, but in a way that enabled them to use the State to take capital from the imperialist center countries and make it their own. From 1979 on, China managed to align the development of its domestic economy with the short and medium term economic interests of the dominant imperialist rich countries by allowing foreign capital in to make China the lower cost and higher profit manufacturing center of the world economy. And they used their State to capture the capital, technology and management and production technique expertise of the foreign companies. They actually redistributed some of the capital (in all of these forms) from rich countries to China.)
State-led industrialization (or, in Raul Prebisch's highly influential formulation, Import Substitution Industrialization) was a short form descriptor of a strategy to catch up by duplicating what the colonial states did to get rich, except to do it this time without being colonizers themselves, to do it through self-reliance, through economic and political independence, and through an active and interventionist State.
Up until at least the recent arguable exceptions like China, there were two main examples of the failure of state-led industrialization to result in catching up. The first had the greatest impact on left thinking after World War Two and up to this day, the failure of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary socialist States such as the Soviet Union and Mao-era China. The second was the failure of politically Non-Aligned supposedly 'neither socialist nor capitalist' states like India and Indonesia and Egypt and Ghana and Argentina to catch up either.
Unlike neoliberals, leftists still see these failures to catch up as a consequence of the continuation of colonialism in new forms, of fundamental inequalities in the terms of trade and investment in the imperialist center dominated world capitalist economy. However, these failures have contributed to a diffuse but definite "anti-Statist" attitude on the left, to the idea that these strategies mainly failed because they were too State-led, were too authoritarian State led, were too much State ownership that was inefficient compared to privately owned companies. And, because the left has not yet taken all the academic work done on 'development' in both Marxist and non-Marxist poor countries and developed a detailed analysis of the causes of the failures, we have become more open to 'Less State, More Market' solutions to poverty like UBI in poor countries too. (I highly recommend reading chapter 5 of JZV for an incisive and darkly humorous documentation of all this.)
To sum up, Universal Basic Income is a neoliberal policy solution to one small aspect of poverty, the lack of sufficient cash to meet survival needs in the very short term for the extremely poor. It is a substitute for socialist and liberal semi-socialist welfare state anti-poverty policies that are based on the idea that the goal is to achieve positive freedom, freedom based on guaranteeing equality of condition, on everyone having enough of the means to be able to compete to achieve the ends. UBI is based on the idea of maximizing negative freedom, the absence of external constraints on all individuals, rich and poor alike, the people sleeping under the bridge and the owners of the bridge. Many of the changes in left thinking in the last eighty plus years, for better as well as for worse, have led us to value negative liberty more and positive liberty less.