The Unbearable Lightness of Money: Universal Basic Income, the State and the Coloniality of the Left (original) (raw)

Political Quarterly, Special Issue POSTCAPITALISM: THE POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY OF A CHANGING WORLD OF WORK

In this intervention, I take on board Stronge and Hester’s suggestion (in this Special Issue), to build ‘more robust critical approaches to post work’. In previous work, I have offered a critique of what one article termed ‘the post work prospectus’ (PWP). As Stronge and Hester suggest, that article limited its account to the critique of ‘just one or two texts at the expense of a far wider – and richer – body of relevant material’. Not without hesitation, the article deployed the term PWP to point to significant problems clearly expressed in the texts included, knowing that indeed, as Stronge and Hester assert, ‘there is no single “PWP” for the PWP involves ‘a wide range of projects looking at the changing circumstances surrounding labour via a range of different lenses (from automation, to the work ethic, to the inequitable distribution of specific forms of remunerated and unremunerated work)’. At the risk of sounding reductionist, the article put forward a very focused theoretical critique and a political provocation, but the aim was in no way to ignore the contribution and the variety of issues and approaches of this important area of work offers. Having said that, and after reflecting on the comradely criticism pointing to the shortcomings of that article, I do believe that full reference to this other work, including that of Kathi Weeks, would have enriched the article immensely, but it would not have affected the essence of our critique for the latter is directed to the general principle of demanding the implementation of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) by the capitalist state for a project of the left. The question stands all the same: What does it mean politically to demand the distribution of money via UBI to sustain the social reproduction of labour as a transitional demand for an hegemonic project of the Left, when money is the most abstract expression of capitalist property, and therefore the real problem that needs to be addressed if we were to fight for dignified forms of life? The focus of this piece, which contains a partial (and individual) response to Stronge and Hester’s critique, but is not limited to it, is twofold. First, I point to the notorious absence of a discussion of money in the debate about work, social reproduction and post-work utopias. Inextricably connected to this is my second aim: to discuss in what ways the overestimation of the UBI as a key element of a hegemonic project of the Left makes the PWP’s advocates neglect or diminish present serious attempts to create what can be broadly defined as alternatives forms of social reproduction at the grassroots and world-wide or, what Srnicek and Williams call ‘folk politics’.