For those eager to proclaim the radical, disruptive potential of UBI, this severing of payment from work presents a challenge to capitalism itself, undermining its vital disciplinary function over workers who have to sell their labour in order to live. At a minimum, its advocates claim, this would serve to strengthen labour in relation to capital – much as trade unions did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – ofering an immediate social democratic solution within the context of automation and technological unemployment.
This may all prove to be the case. The truth is we don’t really know because UBI has never before been tested at sufficient scale before. What we can be certain of, however, is that its consequences would depend on the broader political environment in which it is introduced. Under a progressive or socialist government, UBI might well prove to be a potent measure empowering ordinary people and giving them the ability to demand higher pay. Alternatively, it may just as easily be the means by which to complete the full marketisation of the welfare state, a capitulation to neoliberalism rather than an alternative to it. It is its range of possibilities, from potentially liberatory to Thatcherism on steroids, which explains why two of the most important thinkers in the history of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek, can be counted among its enthusiasts.
A more immediate criticism of UBI, however, and one that is easier to anticipate in detail, is that it would cost a huge amount while not achieving particularly much. In 2016 the British think tank Compass modelled a UBI that paid £284 (\$380) a month to every working-age adult and smaller payments for others. This would stand alongside, rather than replace, extant social programmes adding £170 billion a year to public spending – equivalent to 6.5 per cent of the country’s GDP and more than is presently given to the NHS.
Reforging the Capitalist State
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