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Harrop, Andrew; Society, Fabian

doi:10.2307/j.ctt21kk256.35

Cited by 1 publication

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“…It is an idea with increasing uptake on the left (Pearce 2015; Pitts 2018), including in the UK Labour Party, which has committed to including a pilot of the measure in its next manifesto (Pitts & Dinerstein 2017). Centre-left policymakers and think-tanks in the United Kingdom are engaged in modelling exercises around its implementation (Harrop 2016; Painter & Thoung 2016; Reed & Lansley 2016). In the United Kingdom, the idea has recently attracted support from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) (Martinelli 2017: 23).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social form, social reproduction and social policy: Basic income, basic services, basic infrastructure

Lombardozzi

Pitts²

2019

Capital & Class

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Proponents recommend Universal Basic Income as a solution to a trifold crisis of work, wage and social democracy. Synthesising Marxian form analysis with Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory, this article suggests that these crises relate to historically specific capitalist social forms: labour, money and the state. These separate but interlocking crises of social form are temporary and contingent expressions of an underlying, permanent crisis of social reproduction. Mistaking the pervasive crisis of social reproduction in its totality for a temporary or contingent trifold crisis of work, wage or social democracy, Universal Basic Income proposals seek to solve it by moving through the same social forms through which they take effect, rather than confronting the social relations that constitute their antagonistic undertow and generate the crisis of social reproduction. The article considers two other solutions proposed to handle the deeper-rooted crisis with which Universal Basic Income grapples: Universal Basic Services and Universal Basic Infrastructure. Both propose non-monetary ways past the impasses of the Universal Basic Income, addressing much more directly the constrained basis of individual and collective reproduction that characterises capitalist social relations. But they retain a link with capitalist social forms of money and state that may serve to close rather than open the path to real alternatives. The article concludes that the contradictions these ‘abstract universals’ touch upon are best mediated through more bottom-up and struggle-based ‘concrete universals’ that address the manifold crises of work, wage and social democracy that undergird them. Such alternatives would leave open dynamic tensions around work and welfare in contemporary capitalism without promise of their incomplete resolution in the name of a false universality unattainable in a world characterised by antagonism, domination and crisis.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%