Universal Basic Income from a Marxist Point of View
Many people on the Left see a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as an important tool for changing our society to the better but there is also a vocal minority that is opposed to the idea. Usually they have not looked into the idea very much but quickly found their verdict: UBI is "not revolutionary enough" and it is "just a band-aid" and maybe even a "neoliberal idea". And as it is built on "money" it can "not be anti-capitalist".
Usually the superficial arguments demonstrate not only a lack of knowledge about UBI but also some lack of Marxist understanding.
In the following I will not give a full overview of arguments for UBI but focus on refuting the errors in the left-wing critique mentioned above. Nonetheless here is a quick reminder of some of the advantages of UBI
A few good reasons for UBI
Here are just a few reasons for UBI. You can find more at:
Redistribution from top to bottom
A basic income benefits those who have the least. In any case, the reverse would be true for financing a UBI high taxes are necessary and would lead to high taxation of those who now have more.
Fairer and higher wages and better working conditions
With a basic income as a safety net, you have the option to easily terminate any job, that is poorly paid or has bad working conditions. People will only seek jobs that are payed well above the UBI or otherwise will not take the job. Thus it will guarantee good wages.
This, of course, requires for the UBI to be high enough. And of course we all want a high UBI that is sufficient for a decent life.
Democratic Participation in the workplace
Today many people are afraid to speak their mind in their job. Without the fair of getting fired, people will start to participate in the social life their, get a workers council and start democratic organisation within the company.
Fairness
A lot of socially extremely important labor is unpaid today. Think of care work and work in the house hold but also think about people volunteering for various projects. According to estimates the amount of unpaid labor is 30% larger (that is 130%) of the paid labor. It is beyond absurd that any left-wing person would be able to demand that more then half of all labor should be done unpaid.
Improves conditions for collective struggles
Today each company or each section of society has to struggle for their own wage raises. With a UBI we would have a much larger number of people behind the same struggle: The increase of the UBI. So the fight gets easier the more people are dependent on the UBI.
A UBI can help to transform our society away from capitalism
Let's imagine we had a basic income. Many people would prefer to live with a little less money but a lot of free time. How would we use this free time? After a few weeks, the interesting TV series and the computer games have all been watched. The vast majority of people would find meaningful activities for themselves: growing tomatoes, cooking for friends, developing free software, creating art and culture, writing Wikipedia articles, maintaining social contacts. And even if it's not necessarily directly useful for others, it's still much easier to live in an ecologically sustainable way: Instead of an expensive vacation: just ride your bike towards the sea and make the leisure industry obsolete at the same time.
The example of free software is particularly interesting. Even today, a lot of the IT infrastructure is based on Linux and other free software: Because it is simply more efficient if the companies that otherwise often compete with each other develop the software that we all need together. Since Wikipedia was created, the market for commercial encyclopedias has plummeted. Cooperative projects are often significantly superior to commercial ones.
If we now suddenly have a large number of people who have enough time and can afford to work on free, cooperative projects instead of doing pointless wage labor, then we will have a situation in which cooperative, free production is even more superior to commercial production.
Cooperative approaches have so far been superior, especially for immaterial products such as software or an encyclopedia. With increasing automation, material production is also becoming more and more immaterial: once you have a blueprint, you can already make 3D prints or laser cut cuts in the maker center around the corner. Growing tomatoes is also much more relaxed with the open source FarmBot.
The free economy, run by people who often live on a basic income, has the potential to outdo the commercial economy. The prerequisite for this potential to be used appropriately are, of course, appropriate framework conditions for a basic income: the establishment and expansion of community centers, maker centers, community gardens, etc., and legislation to regulate the private appropriation of so-called "intellectual property " is no longer possible via patents and other methods.
UBI helps against climate change
As most of the jobs today are bullshit jobs that do not contribute to society or even cause more harm then good, a UBI would help to reduce this unnecessary labor and also the CO2 emissions related to them.
Now back to the left-wing critics:
Even if it would only be a "band-aid"
Many of the things we fight for on the left are "band-aids" - things that will make our life better without fundamentally challenging capitalism: What if we fight for higher wages? What if we fight for higher pensions? What if we fight against increasing the retirement age?
None on the left would argue that we should not fight for those even if it does not directly help to replace the capitalist system. Once could even argue that: If the fight is successful then life in the capitalist system becomes more bearable and thus give people less motivation to think about changing it.
So this raises the question: Why do the left-wing critics of UBI object to UBI while they do not object against other improvements of our life? Somehow these guys treat UBI different from other social fights. Why is that?
We can only speculate about their motivation for this behavior. I suspect the reason is that UBI indeed offers a path to transforming our society. And they only want to except one path: an armed revolution.
The idea of UBI helps people to question the Status-Quo
This brings us to another striking inconsistency in their argument: Even if you think a revolution is the only way to fight against capitalism you have one big problem: For a successful revolution you would need enough people who support it: People who not only think that capitalism is bad but there is a possible better alternative. People need to be first aware that the current system is responsible for their problem and that a better system is possible and desirable.
This is exactly the reason why many of us see the idea of an UBI as an important tool to change society: If you ask people to imagine how they would live, when the basic needs would be covered and they could do what they life what they wanted, then they start to imagine a different world and then gradually start to realize many of the absurdities of the capitalist status-quo.
Not only is UBI a tool for change but even the idea of UBI, the propaganda for UBI helps us in our struggle to change the world.
You can ask people: Do if they want a revolution and you will find a few percent at best while a majority of people support the idea of a UBI.
UBI attacks capitalism at its core
One critique often heard from these people is that they think that a UBI does just perpetuate the capitalist economy. This is usually a result of not understanding what capitalism really is, while in reality a UBI attacks capitalism at its core: (Also see: https://andas.cc/s/articles/a00012-24-good-reasons-why-we-need-ubi.html#ubi-attacks-capitalism-at-its-core))
A basic income undermines the most fundamental mechanism of capitalism. What is this mechanism? Many people think it’s the money. But money is just the lubricant. It is more likely capital and capital is usually not present in the form of money but rather in the form of ownership of factories and other so-called means of production. If we look more closely, it is not the capital but the capital relationship: that on the one hand we have the ownership of the means of production and on the other hand we have a lot of people who have nothing else to sell but their labor power. It is precisely this relationship that allows capitalists to buy labor and then transform it into surplus value. This is the core of capitalism and this is exactly where the basic income comes in: It changes the second part of this equation: people are suddenly no longer forced to sell their labor at any price and thus the capitalists’ capital is immediately devalued: it is not so easy to propagate anymore. This is elegantly expressed in a footnote in the first volume of Capital:
"First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River" -- Karl Marx, “Das Kapital”
The fact that the basic income attacks capitalism at its core is both good and bad news: on the one hand, it means that the UBI has the potential to overcome it, but on the other hand, it also means that this will not be possible without resistance: that we will face strong resistance against the introduction of a UBI from the capitalist class. Despite all the lip-service of the rich tech tycoons, these people know very well that this is a real deal. So a basic income will not just come to us. We have to fight for it too. And when a basic income comes along, those in power will try to design it in such a way that it is stripped of all emancipatory elements.
For me the question of UBI is a good indication of whether or not someone has really understood the basics of Marxism.
But isn't UBI it a neoliberal idea?
Sure it was Milton Friedman who cam up with the idea of a negative income tax, which could be seen similar to a UBI, if it was not for the fact that his tax was way to low. No one would have been able to live from that little money. So it was not really a UBI. If we talk about a UBI we mean an amount that is high enough that it allows for a decent life.
Still to this day there are people with some more neoliberal ideas who are also in favor of UBI. If, e.g. some capitalist owns a business which only has moderate expenses on labour but sells product which are typically consumed by people with lower income then it would be in their interest to lobby for a UBI. While it would increase their costs in labor and other taxes they might be able to sell more of their products if people have money in their pockets and might get a comparable advantage compared to other capitalists. So they might support the idea not just because the like but because they think it is in their financial interest.
The capitalist class as a whole understands Marx much better then the average revolutionary and they know that they would have to pay the bill of a UBI. So we can assume there would be much resistance. In Austria we recently had a referendum about UBI and 163000 people signed to support this but 5 out of 5 political parties argued against it in the parliament. So from right-wing extremit to liberal to conservative to social democrat, green all argued against it. No: UBI is NOT a neoliberal idea.
So what about Friedman?
Well if you are professor of economy and with even basic math some student can demonstrate that your theory of pure market economy is unstable and will lead to ever increasing gaps between rich and poor then this is kind of embarrassing. So I would assume that the idea of a negative income tax was indeed a band-aid to cover up the fundamental flaws of his fucked up theory.
But for us a UBI is a real way of transforming society. See above. The important point here is that is has to be high enough. (Which in Friedmans case it was not)
With AGI and ASI the discussion will soon be moot
Whether or not you subscribe to the arguments for a UBI or not, with the current rate of development of AI, we will soon (a few years) where no human labor is needed for almost anything. We will either have UBI or we will all die.
Marx knew well how important is is to keep a look at the current technology:
"Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist." -- Karl Marx, 1847, The Poverty of Philosophy
It seems clear that these "revolutionaries" are too busy with other stuff then to look at the technological development or even read some god damn Marx.
Franz Schaefer (Mond), Jan 5, 2025