From post-work to post-capitalism? Discussing the basic income and struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction

Abstract

This article contests the suggestion that the automation of production and the provision of a basic income potentiate the transition from a post-work to a postcapitalist society. This vista-mainly represented by the work of Paul Mason and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams misses how capitalist work is both preconditioned by a historically-specific set of antagonistic social relations of constrained social reproduction, and determined by the specific social forms its results assume in commodity exchange and the constituted form of the nation-state. We argue that the transitional demands of automation and a basic income may serve to stem postcapitalist transformation, stopping short at a post-work society characterized by the continuation of capitalist social relations and forms. Retaining money under the rule of the nationstate, the proposed transition between post-work and postcapitalist society breaks insufficiently with the present, in some ways making it worse by replacing a wage over which workers can lawfully bargain with a state-administered monetary payment that creates a direct relationship of power between citizen and state, liquidating labor struggles. We show how the Unemployed Workers Organizations (UWOs) in Argentina offer a "concrete utopian" alternative that creates the capacity to reshape the relationship between individuals, society and the rule of money, value and the capitalist state rather than reinforce it.

Prefiguring alternatives through the articulation of post- and anti-capitalistic politics: An introduction to three additional papers and a reflection

“…Central to this delineation is the struggle for the de-mediation of social relations. All social relations – not only relations in the workplace – are ‘mediated’ in the sense that they assume objective ‘modes of existence’ (Gunn, 1992; Pitts, 2014) in thought and practice in capitalist society through value, money, the wage and the state (Dinerstein and Pitts, 2018). This key insight is rooted in Marx’s critique of political economy as a critique of capitalist society as a whole , rather than solely or even primarily as a critique of capitalism as a historically specific mode of organizing the economy (Bellofiore and Riva, 2015; Bonefeld, 2014; Pitts, 2017).…”

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

“…Finally, there is a rich strand of critical Marxism (Bonefeld 1993; Bonefield 1987; Clarke 1988a, 1988b, 1992; Holloway 1994; Holloway & Picciotto 1977) that elaborates from Marx’s work a form analysis of the state as itself a form assumed by the antagonistic class relations that constitute capitalist society. Hence the state is not a neutral instrument that can be wielded by this party or that, independent of the reproduction of capitalist society, but the political form of the social relation of capital (Dinerstein & Pitts 2018). It may ‘contain the political impact of th[e] contradictions’ of that social relation (Clarke 1992: 136), but like labour and money acts as a mean for their reproduction along with the ‘domination’ they imply (Holloway & Picciotto 1977).…”

“…More convincing and central to our argument here is a third objection made by critics of UBI, particularly in the labour movement, who point out that workers would lose the capacity to resist capital that is granted by their ability to provide or withdraw labour (Cruddas & Kibasi 2016). Along similar lines, other critics have asserted that it would set up a direct relationship between individuals and the state as wage payer, liquidating the point of conflict between worker and employer in and beyond the sphere of production (Dinerstein & Pitts 2018). Some left-wing advocates suggest that the UBI could have a liberating or decommodifying effect that increased the bargaining power of labour (Torry 2018).…”

“…Indeed, UBS, its proponents claim, overcomes problems associated with other options like the UBI by ‘satisfying differentiated needs’, and garnering political acceptability through its incremental affordability. In this sense, even while ‘preserving the intrinsic value of monetary reward for contribution’ it at least maintains the ‘room to move’ of the antagonistic social relations negative dialectically concealed within the wage as a form of mediation (see Dinerstein & Pitts 2018; Marx 1976: 198; Pitts et al in press).…”

“…Evaluating the problems and possible solutions posed in contemporary UK left policy thinking along these axes, this paper builds on previous work (Dinerstein and Pitts 2018;Warner 2017a, 2017b;Pitts and Dinerstein 2017;Pitts 2018) to subject to scrutiny the 'problem representations' (Bacchi and Beasley 2002) active in proposals for UBI, and the degree to which the latter poses a solution to the deeper-lying factors underpinning them. We examine how the UBI is (mis-)represented as a solution to a series of interlocking problems, represented in a trifold crisis.…”