InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary

subsidies for automation investment, and raising the cost of labour for capital,¹⁶¹ along with many other options.¹⁶² It means opposing the expulsion of surplus populations and attacking the mechanisms of control over them. Mass incarceration and the racialised system of domination associated with it must be abolished,¹⁶³ and the spatial mechanisms of control – ranging from ghettos to border controls – must be taken apart to ensure the free movement of peoples. And the welfare state must be defended, not as an end in itself, but as a necessary component of a broader post-work society. The future remains open, and which direction the crisis of work takes is precisely the political struggle before us.

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Post-Work Imaginaries

The goal of thefuture isfull unemployment.

Arthur C. Clarke

Whereas the previous chapter analysed the changing social conditions that are making a post-work world increasingly necessary, this chapter will outline what a post-work world might mean in practice.¹ To that end, we advance some broad demands to start building a platform for a post-work society. In asserting the centrality of demands, we are breaking with a widespread tendency of today’s radical left that believes making no demands is the height of radicalism.² These critics often claim that making a demand means giving into the existing order of things by asking, and therefore legitimating, an authority. But these accounts miss the antagonism at the heart of making demands, and the ways in which they are essential for constituting an active agent of change.³ In this light, the rejection of demands is a symptom of theoretical confusion, not practical progress. A politics without demands is simply a collection of aimless bodies. Any meaningful vision of the future will set out proposals and goals, and this chapter is a contribution to that potential discussion. None of the proposals presented will be radically new, but this is part of their strength: it is not a free-floating project, since frameworks and movements already exist and have traction in the world.

Today, revolutionary demands appear naive, while reformist demands appear futile. Too often that is where the debate ends, with each side denouncing the other and the strategic imperative to change our conditions forgotten. The demands we propose are therefore intended as non-reformist reforms. By this we mean three things. First, they have a utopian edge that strains at the limits of what capitalism can concede. This transforms them from polite requests into insistent demands charged with belligerence and antagonism. Such demands combine the futural orientation of utopias with the immediate intervention of the demand, invoking a ‘utopianism without apology’.⁴ Second, these nonreformist proposals are grounded in real tendencies of the world today, giving them a viability that revolutionary dreams lack. Third, and most importantly, such demands shift the current political equilibrium and construct a platform for further development. They project an open-ended escape from the present, rather than a mechanical transition to the next, predetermined stage of history.⁵ The proposals in this chapter will not break us out of capitalism, but they do promise to break us out of neoliberalism, and to establish a new equilibrium of political, economic and social forces. From the social democratic consensus to the neoliberal consensus, our argument is that the left should mobilise around a post-work consensus. With a post-work society, we would have even more potential to launch forward to greater goals. But this is a project that must be carried out over the long term: decades rather than years, cultural shifts rather than electoral cycles. Given the reality of the weakened left today, there is only one way forward: to patiently rebuild its power – a topic that will be covered in the chapters to follow. There simply is no other way to bring about a post-work world. We must therefore attend to these longer-term strategic goals, and rebuild the collective agencies that might eventually bring them about. By directing the left towards a post-work future, not only will significant gains be aimed for – such as the reduction of drudgery and poverty – but political power will be built in the process. In the end, we believe a post-work society is not only achievable, given the material conditions, but also viable and desirable.⁶ This chapter charts a way forward: building a post-work society on the basis of fully automating the economy, reducing the working week, implementing a universal basic income, and achieving a cultural shift in the understanding of work.

Chapter 6

FULL AUTOMATION

Our first demand is for a fully automated economy. Using the latest technological developments, such an economy would aim to liberate humanity from the drudgery of work while simultaneously producing increasing amounts of wealth. Without full automation, postcapitalist futures must necessarily choose between abundance at the expense of freedom (echoing the work-centricity of Soviet Russia) or freedom at the expense of abundance, represented by primitivist dystopias.⁷ With automation, by contrast, machines can increasingly produce all necessary goods and services, while also releasing humanity from the effort of producing them.⁸ For this reason, we argue that the tendencies towards automation and the replacement of human labour should be enthusiastically accelerated and targeted as a political project of the left.⁹ This is a project that takes an existing capitalist tendency and seeks to push it beyond the acceptable parameters of capitalist social relations.

Capitalism has long been synonymous with rapid changes in technology: driven by the imperative to accumulate, the means of production are continually transformed.¹⁰ In the nineteenth century, agriculture began to be mechanised, and small plots of land became increasingly centralised under larger and larger industrial farms. Craftwork was transformed too, with machinery appearing as an alien intervention into the production process. Work that had traditionally been undertaken by a skilled labourer was now broken down into its deskilled constituent tasks, and often carried out using machinery.¹¹ Workers became assigned to partial tasks, and tools that had once been governed by workers became machines that rhythmically conducted the labourers.¹² Work became increasingly repetitive, deskilled and ruled by machinery – with greater demand for cheap unskilled labourers (particularly women and children).¹³ In the early twentieth century, this tendency began to shift with the introduction of technologies that eliminated the most routine and mundane of manual tasks (such as hauling and conveying goods). Skilled workers became increasingly necessary in overseeing the new machines, carrying out expanding service work, and managing the increasingly large firms that were emerging.¹⁴ The need for skilled labour was further amplified in the early twentieth century by the rise of office technologies – typewriters, photocopiers, and so on – that required relatively welleducated operators. In other words, technology is not uniformly deskilling, and the increased demand for skilled labour over the past century testifies to that.¹⁵ Over this period, manufacturing employment continued to decline, due to its susceptibility to productivity-enhancing technology.¹⁶ The automation of mass-production manufacturing in the early twentieth century was eventually extended, with the automation of small-batch manufacturing.¹⁷ While the industrial sector employed 1,000 robots in 1970, today it uses over 1.6 million robots.¹⁸ In terms of employment, manufacturing has reached a global saturation point. Even in developing countries, the trend is towards deindustrialisation, with employment growth now confined predominantly to the service sector.¹⁹ Concurrent with the decline of manufacturing, the latter half of the twentieth century oversaw another shift. While earlier office technologies had supplemented workers and increased demand for them, the development of the microprocessor and computing technologies began to replace semiskilled service workers in many areas – for example, telephone operators and secretaries.²⁰ The roboticisation of services is now gathering steam, with over 150,000 professional service robots sold in the past fifteen years.²¹ Under particular threat have been ‘routine’ jobs – jobs that can be codified into a series of steps. These are tasks that computers are perfectly suited to accomplish once a programmer has created the appropriate software, leading to a drastic reduction in the numbers of routine manual and cognitive jobs over the past four decades.²² The result has been a polarisation of the labour market, since many middle-wage, mid-skilled jobs are routine, and therefore subject to automation.²³ Across both North America and Western Europe, the labour market is now characterised by a predominance of workers in low-skilled, low-wage manual and service jobs (for example, fast-food, retail, transport, hospitality and warehouse workers), along with a smaller number of workers in high-skilled, highwage, non-routine cognitive jobs.²⁴

The most recent wave of automation is poised to change this distribution of the labour market drastically, as it comes to encompass every aspect of the economy: data collection (radio-frequency identification, big data); new kinds of production (the flexible production of robots,²⁵ additive manufacturing,²⁶ automated fast food); services (AI customer assistance, care for the elderly); decision-making (computational models, software agents); financial allocation (algorithmic trading); and especially distribution (the logistics revolution, self-driving cars,²⁷ drone container ships and automated warehouses).²⁸ In every single function of the economy – from production to distribution to management to retail – we see large-scale tendencies towards automation.²⁹ This latest wave of automation is predicated upon algorithmic enhancements (particularly in machine learning and deep learning), rapid developments in robotics and exponential growth in computing power (the source of big data) that are coalescing into a ‘second machine age’ that is transforming the range of tasks that machines can fulfil.³⁰ It is creating an era that is historically unique in a number of ways. New pattern-recognition technologies are rendering both routine and non-routine tasks subject to automation: complex communication technologies are making computers better than humans at certain skilled-knowledge tasks, and advances in robotics are rapidly making technology better at a wide variety of manual-labour tasks.³¹ For instance, self-driving cars involve the automation of non-routine manual tasks, and non-routine cognitive tasks such as writing news stories or researching legal precedents are now being accomplished by robots.³² The scope of these developments means that everyone from stock analysts to construction workers to chefs to journalists is vulnerable to being replaced by machines.³³ Workers who move symbols on a screen are as at risk as those moving goods around a warehouse. One report forecasts a ‘depopulation of trading floors’ as robots continue infiltrating the financial world;³⁴ retail jobs – long a bastion of post-industrial employment – are set to be taken over by machines;³⁵ and over 140 million cognitive jobs worldwide are forecast to be eliminated.³⁶ While the last wave of automation led to a polarisation of the labour market, this newest wave looks set to decimate the low-skilled, low-wage end of the labour market.³⁷ And as robots substitute for human labour, workers are likely to face lower wages and increasing immiseration.³⁸ At the very least then, the emerging wave of automation will drastically change the composition of the labour market, and potentially lead to a significant reduction in demand for workers.

A number of economists have pointed out, however, that productivity has not increased to the degree that would be expected by a revolution in automation.³⁹ If a machine is replacing half of the workers in a factory, productivity should double if the factory produces the same number of goods. In fact, however, there has been a broad global slowdown in productivity growth over the past decade, particularly following the crisis.⁴⁰ Leaving aside the fact that productivity is a notoriously difficult thing to measure, we believe a few phenomena can help explain this anomaly. First, it is highly likely that low wages are repressing investment in productivity-enhancing technologies. Access to a large reserve of cheap labour means that companies have less incentive to focus on capital investment. Why purchase new machines when cheaper workers will do the same for less? This means that in the effort to bring about full automation, fighting for higher global wages is a crucial complementary task. Second, there is likely a delay factor at work. In the 1990s, the IT revolution took some time to become expressed in productivity figures, as companies had to invest and then adapt to the new capacities of these technologies. Organisations have to be changed, new skills have to be learned, and processes have to be reworked in order to make effective use of these new technologies. In general, it appears that investments in digital technologies face productivity lags of five to fifteen years.⁴¹ Today, many of the technologies under discussion are incredibly new and were unimaginable even a decade ago. This novelty means that we should expect a delay in the response of productivity figures, as the technologies are adopted and then adapted into the way businesses run.⁴² Finally, and most importantly, our argument here relies largely on a normative claim rather than a descriptive one. Full automation is something that can and should be achieved, regardless of whether it is yet being carried out. For instance, out of the US companies that could benefit from incorporating industrial robots, less than 10 per cent have done so.⁴³ This is but one area for full automation to take hold in, and this reiterates the importance of making full automation a political demand, rather than assuming it will come about from economic necessity. A variety of policies can help in this project: more state investment, higher minimum wages and research devoted to technologies that replace rather than augment workers. In the most detailed estimates of the labour market, it is suggested that between 47 and 80 per cent of today’s jobs are capable of being automated.⁴⁴ Let us take this estimate not as a deterministic prediction, but instead as the outer limit of a political project against work. We should take these numbers as a standard against which to measure our success.

While full automation of the economy is presented here as an ideal and a demand, in practice it is unlikely to be fully achieved.⁴⁵ In certain spheres, human labour is likely to continue for technical, economic and ethical reasons. On a technical level, machines today remain worse than humans at jobs involving creative work, highly flexible work, affective work and most tasks relying on tacit rather than explicit knowledge.⁴⁶ The engineering problems involved in automating these tasks appear insurmountable for the next two decades (though similar claims were made about self-driving cars ten years ago), and a programme of full automation would aim to invest research money into overcoming these limits. A second barrier to full automation occurs for economic reasons: certain tasks can already be completed by machines, but the cost of the machines exceeds the cost of the equivalent labour.⁴⁷ Despite the efficiency, accuracy and productivity of machine labour, capitalism prefers to make profits, and therefore uses human labour whenever it is cheaper than capital investment. A programme of full automation would aim to overcome this as well, through measures as simple as raising the minimum wage, supporting labour movements and using state subsidies to incentivise the replacement of human labour.

A final limit of full automation is the moral status we give to certain jobs, such as care work.⁴⁸

These tasks, including the raising of children, are ones that many would argue must be carried out by human beings. We can outline two broad approaches to these sorts of labours. A first approach would agree that such labour has moral value and should be carried out by humans rather than machines. In a post-work society, however, care labour could be given greater value, turning society away from the privileged status bestowed upon profitable labour. The free time that accrues from full automation could also facilitate experimentation with alternative domestic arrangements. There is a long history of utopian experiments that can be drawn upon to rethink how our societies organise domestic, reproductive and care labour.⁴⁹ All of this, it must be stressed, would still require a political movement to achieve; a post-work world may facilitate change, but it cannot guarantee it. A more radical approach, however, argues that automating much of this labour should be a goal for the future.⁵⁰ Indeed, the stereotype that women are naturally nurturing and desiring of this affective labour is often a pernicious cover for their continued exploitation. But what if much of this labour could be eliminated? Traditionally, the household has been a space that featured little technological change: its unpaid nature and lack of productivity norms have given capitalism few incentives to invest in the reduction of household labour.⁵¹ Yet increasingly, domestic tasks like cleaning the house and folding clothes, for example, can be delegated to machines.⁵² Assistive technologies and affective computing are also making inroads in automating some of the highly personal and embarrassing care work that might be better suited to impersonal robots.⁵³ More speculatively, some have argued that the pain and suffering involved in pregnancy is something that should be relegated to the past, rather than mystified as natural and beautiful.⁵⁴ In this vision, synthetic forms of biological reproduction would enable a newfound equality between the sexes. We will not adjudicate on these paths here, but simply set them out as options opened up by a post-work world. Whatever approach is taken, though, the point is that labour will not be immediately or entirely eliminated, but instead progressively reduced. Full automation is a utopian demand that aims to reduce necessary labour as much as possible.

IT’S NOT MONDAYS YOU HATE, IT’S YOUR JOB

A second major demand for building a post-work platform involves a return to classic ideas about reducing the length of the working week with no cut in pay. From the beginning of capitalism, workers have struggled against the imposition of fixed working hours, and the demand for shorter hours was a key component of the early labour movement.⁵⁵ Initial battles saw high levels of resistance in the form of individual absenteeism, numerous holidays and irregular work habits.⁵⁶ This resistance to normal working hours continues today in widespread slacking off, with workers often surfing the internet rather than doing their job.⁵⁷ At every step of the way, then, workers have struggled to escape normal working hours, and many of the labour movement’s earliest successes had to do with reducing work time. The two-day weekend, for example, emerged spontaneously from workers’ predilection for drinking and spending an extra day recovering rather than working .⁵⁸ The weekend’s eventual consolidation as a recognised and bounded period of time off was the product of sustained political struggles (a process that was not completed in the Western world until the 1970s).⁵⁹ Likewise, workers achieved significant success in reducing the working week from sixty hours in 1900 to just below thirty-five hours during the Great Depression.⁶⁰ Such was the speed of success that, over a period of five years in the 1930s, the working week declined by eighteen hours.⁶¹ During the earlier years of the Depression, the idea of a shorter working week enjoyed bipartisan support in the United

States, and legislation for a thirty-hour working week was thought to be imminent.⁶² Simultaneously, intellectuals prophesied even further reductions in work time – imagining worlds where work was reduced to a bare minimum. In a classic statement, Paul Lafargue argued for limiting work to just three hours a day.⁶³ Keynes famously argued for the same outcome, calculating that by 2030 we would all be working fifteen-hour working weeks – though it is less well known that he was simply verbalising what were the broadly held beliefs of the time.⁶⁴ And Marx made the shortening of the working week central to his entire postcapitalist vision, arguing that it represented a ‘basic prerequisite’ to reaching ‘the realm of freedom’.⁶⁵

But such visions of a three-hour work day have disappeared. The near century-long push for shorter working hours ended abruptly during the Great Depression, when business opinion and government policy decided to use make-work programmes in response to unemployment.⁶⁶ Soon after World War II, the working week stabilised at forty hours across much of the Western world, and there has since been little serious consideration of changing this.⁶⁷ Instead there has been a general expansion of work in the ensuing decades. First, there has been an increase in time spent at jobs throughout society.⁶⁸ As women entered the workforce, the working week remained the same, and the overall amount of time devoted to jobs therefore increased.⁶⁹ Secondly, there has been a progressive elimination of the work–life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of our waking lives. Many of us are now tied to work all the time, with emails, phone calls, texts and job anxieties impinging upon us constantly.⁷⁰ Salaried workers are often compelled to work unrecognised overtime, while many workers feel the social pressure to be seen working long hours. These demands mean that the average full-time US worker in fact logs closer to forty-seven hours a week.⁷¹ On top of this, a vast amount of work is unpaid and therefore uncounted in official data (there is also an ongoing gender divide within this unpaid labour force).⁷² While waged work remains difficult for many to find, unpaid work is proliferating – an entire sphere of ‘shadow work’ is emerging with automation at the point of sale, with work being delegated to users (think self-checkouts and ATMs).⁷³ Moreover, there is the hidden labour required to retain a job: financial management, job searching if unemployed, constant skills training, commuting time, and the all-important (gendered) sphere of the labour involved in caring for children, family members and other dependents.⁷⁴

If work has extended itself into so many areas of our lives, a return to a shorter working week would bring with it a number of benefits. Beyond the most obvious – that it increases free time – it would bring with it a series of more subtle benefits.⁷⁵ In the first place, reducing the working week constitutes a key response to rising automation. In fact, the role of this policy in previous periods of automation is often forgotten. Many commentators have rightly pointed to the history of technological change to show that it need not lead to mass unemployment. However, the primary periods of automation coincided with significant reductions in the working week; employment was often sustained by redistributing the work. A second benefit of this policy is its various environmental advantages. For instance, reductions in the working week would lead to significant reductions in energy consumption and our overall carbon footprint.⁷⁶ Increased free time would also mean a reduction in all the convenience goods bought to fit into our hectic work schedules. More broadly, using productivity improvements for less work, rather than more output, would mean that energy efficiency improvements would go towards reducing environmental impacts.⁷⁷ A reduction in working hours is therefore an essential plank in any response to climate change. Other research suggests that a shorter working week would bring a general reduction in the stress, anxiety and mental health problems fostered by neoliberalism.⁷⁸ But one of the most important reasons for reducing work time is that it is a demand that both consolidates and generates class power. In the first place, reducing work time can be deployed as a temporary tactic in political struggle – working to contract, strikes and other ways of removing labour time are means to exert pressure on capitalists. But secondly – and most importantly – the reduction of the working week also makes the labour movement stronger. By withdrawing labour hours from the market, the total supply of labour goes down and worker power increases. As two commentators recently noted, ‘No other bargaining demand simultaneously enhances bargaining position. Furthermore, no other strategic logic initiates a continuous virtuous cycle in which each victory establishes the conditions for strength in the next struggle.’⁷⁹ For these reasons, the goal of reducing the working week should be an immediate and prominent demand of the twenty-first-century left.

Our preference is for the establishment of a three-day weekend, rather than a reduction in the working day, in order to cut down on commuting and to build upon the long holiday weekends already in existence. This demand can be achieved in a number of ways – through trade union struggles, pressure from social movements, and legislative change by political parties. Trade unions building a strategy for the future, rather than accepting the capitalist demand for jobs at all costs, could use collective bargaining to accept automation in return for a shorter working week. Indeed, the historical record suggests that trade unions are often reactive in the face of technological change, and that wage concessions only delay automation, rather than preventing it.⁸⁰ An alternative approach that focused on the reduction and diffusion of work could reduce work without leaving workers out on the streets.⁸¹ Efforts can also be made to gain recognition for unofficial, unpaid labour as part of the working week, reducing it simply by bringing attention to it.⁸² A focus on a shorter working week also requires that unions build links with part-time and precarious workers. But while unions are necessary in this struggle, they are not sufficient, for the simple reason that each sector has different potentials for automation and productivity increases.⁸³ A broader struggle is necessary if there is to be a break with the current logic of neoliberalism. Social movements and ideological institutions must contribute to this struggle by shaping the space of possibility. A number of think tanks, including the New Economics Foundation and the Jimmy Reid Foundation, have started to call openly for a reduction of the working week.⁸⁴ Groups in the UK such as the Precarious Workers Brigade and Plan C are highlighting unpaid work and mobilising around issues concerning the status of work in society today.⁸⁵ But, most significantly, there is already a high level of public desire for the reduction of the working week, with public opinion polls showing a majority of the population support the idea.⁸⁶ There are also a variety of policy approaches to shorten the working week. Interventions can alter labour costs from a per-person basis to a per-hour basis, making it less cost-effective for businesses to enforce long hours.⁸⁷ Countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have given workers the right to demand reduced hours without being discriminated against by employers. The Netherlands has also begun to shorten the working week at each end of the age spectrum. The young and the old are now transitioned into and out of the workforce, respectively, through gradual changes in their work hours.⁸⁸ All of these options can and should be mobilised in pursuit of a project to reduce the working week.

THE WAGE DON’T FIT

These first two proposals equate to the reduction of labour demand through full automation, and the reduction of labour supply through the shortening of the working week.⁸⁹ The combined outcome of these measures would be the liberation of a significant amount of free time without a reduction in economic output or a significant increase in unemployment. Yet this free time will be of little value if people continue struggling to make ends meet. As Paul Mattick puts it, ‘the leisure of the starving, or the needy, is no leisure at all but a relentless activity aimed at staying alive or improving their situation’.⁹⁰ The underemployed, for instance, have plenty of free time but lack the means to enjoy it. Underemployed, it turns out, is really just a euphemism for under-waged. This is why an essential demand in a post-work society is for a universal basic income (UBI), giving every citizen a liveable amount of money without any means-testing.⁹¹ It is an idea that has periodically popped up throughout history.⁹² In the early 1940s, a version of it was advanced as an alternative to the Beveridge Report that eventually shaped the UK welfare state.⁹³ In a now largely forgotten period during the 1960s and 1970s, the basic income was central to proposals for US welfare reform. Economists, NGOs and policymakers explored the idea in detail,⁹⁴ and a number of small-scale experiments were set up in Canada and the United States.⁹⁵ Such was the influence of UBI that over 1,300 economists signed a petition pushing the US Congress to enact a ‘national system of income guarantees’.⁹⁶ Three separate administrations gave serious consideration to the proposal, and two presidents – Nixon and Carter – attempted to pass legislation to achieve it.⁹⁷ In other words, UBI very nearly became a reality in the 1970s.⁹⁸ While Alaska eventually implemented a basic income funded by its oil wealth, the idea largely disappeared from debate in the wake of neoliberal hegemony.⁹⁹ But recent years have seen the idea undergo a resurgence in popularity. In both mainstream and critical media, it has gained traction, being taken up by Paul Krugman, Martin Wolf, the New York Times, the Financial Times and the Economist.¹⁰⁰ The Swiss are holding a referendum on UBI in 2016, the proposal has been recommended by parliamentary committees in other countries, various political parties have adopted it in their manifestos, and there have been new experiments with it in Namibia and India.¹⁰¹ The idea has global scope, having been promoted forcefully by groups in Brazil, South Africa, Italy and Germany, and by an international network involving over twenty countries.¹⁰² The movement for a UBI is thus once again resurgent in the wake of the 2008 crisis and the austerity regimes put in place after it.

The demand for a UBI, however, is subject to competing hegemonic forces. It is just as open to being mobilised for a libertarian dystopia as for a post-work society – an ambiguity that has led many to mistakenly conflate the two poles. In demanding a UBI, therefore, three key factors must be articulated in order to make it meaningful: it must provide a suf icient amount of income to live on; it must be universal, provided to everyone unconditionally; and it must be a supplement to the welfare state rather than a replacement of it. The first point is obvious enough: a UBI must provide a materially adequate income. The exact amount will vary between countries and regions, but it can be relatively easily arrived at with existing data. The risk is that, if set too low, UBI becomes just a government subsidy to businesses. In addition, UBI must be universal and given to everyone unconditionally. As there would be no means-testing or other measures required to receive the UBI, it would break free of the disciplinary nature of welfare capitalism.¹⁰³ Moreover, a universal grant avoids the stigmatisation of welfare, since everyone receives it. As we argued in Chapter 4, the invocation of ‘universalism’ also obliges the continual subversion of any restricted application of a basic income (in terms of individuals’ status as citizens, immigrants or prisoners). The demand for universality provides the basis for a continued struggle to expand the scope and scale of the basic income. Lastly, the UBI must be a supplement to the welfare state. The conservative argument for a basic income – which must be avoided at all costs – is that it should simply replace the welfare state by providing a lump sum of money to every individual. In this scenario, the UBI would just become a vector of increased marketisation, transforming social services into private markets. Rather than being some aberration of neoliberalism, it would simply extend its essential gesture by creating new markets. By contrast, the demand made here is for UBI as a supplement to a revived welfare state.¹⁰⁴

Drawing upon moral arguments and empirical research, there are a vast number of reasons to support a UBI: reduced poverty, better public health and reduced health costs, fewer high school dropouts, reductions in petty crime, more time with family and friends, and less state bureaucracy.¹⁰⁵ Depending on how UBI is presented, it is capable of generating support from across the political spectrum – from libertarians, conservatives, anarchists, Marxists and feminists, among others. The potency of the demand lies partly in this ambiguity, making it capable of mobilising broad popular support.¹⁰⁶ However, for our purposes the significance of UBI as a demand lies in four key interrelated factors.

The first point to emphasise is that the demand for UBI is a demand for a political transformation, not just an economic one. It is often thought that UBI is simply a form of redistribution from the rich to the poor, or that it is just a measure to maintain economic growth by stimulating consumer demand. From this perspective, UBI would have impeccable reformist credentials and be little more than a glorified progressive tax system. Yet the real significance of UBI lies in the way it overturns the asymmetry of power that currently exists between labour and capital. As we saw in the discussion of surplus populations, the proletariat is defined by its separation from the means of production and subsistence. The proletariat is thereby forced to sell itself in the job market in order to gain the income necessary to survive. The most fortunate among us have the leisure to choose which job to take, but few of us have the capacity to choose no job. A basic income changes this condition, by giving the proletariat a means of subsistence without dependency on a job.¹⁰⁷ Workers, in other words, have the option to choose whether to take a job or not (in many ways, taking neoclassical economics at its word, and making work truly voluntary). A UBI therefore unbinds the coercive aspects of wage labour, partially decommodifies labour, and thus transforms the political relationship between labour and capital.

This transformation – making work voluntary rather than coerced – has a number of significant consequences. In the first place, it increases class power by reducing slack in the labour market. Surplus populations show what happens when there are large amounts of slack in the labour market: wages fall, and employers are free to debase workers.¹⁰⁸ By contrast, when the labour market is tight, labour gains the political edge. The economist Michał Kalecki recognised this long ago when he argued that it explained why full employment would be resisted at every step.¹⁰⁹ If every worker were employed, the threat of being fired would lose its disciplinary character – there would be more than enough jobs waiting just outside. Workers would gain the upper hand, and capital would lose its political power. The same dynamic holds for a basic income: by eliminating the reliance on wage labour, workers gain control over how much labour to supply, giving them significant power in the labour market. Class power is also increased in a variety of other ways. Strikes are easier to mobilise, since workers no longer have to worry about pay being docked or dwindling strike funds. The amount of time spent working for a wage can be modified to one’s own desire, with free time spent building communities and engaging with politics. One can slow down and reflect, safely protected from the constant pressures of neoliberalism. The anxieties that surround work and unemployment are reduced with the safety net of a UBI.¹¹⁰ Moreover, the demand for UBI combines the needs of the employed, the unemployed, the underemployed, migrant labour, temporary workers, students and the disabled.¹¹¹ It articulates a common interest between these groups and provides a populist orientation for them to mobilise towards.