Universal Basic Income

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https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fa ... desoto.htm

https://www.tbsnews.net/feature/panoram ... ney-136213



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union_debate



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u/ebolaRETURNS avatar
ebolaRETURNS
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5y ago

I think that this is covered more directly in Lenin. In describing monopoly capitalism in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, you can infer that this might be a moment in development of burgeoning preconditions for socialist organization within the history of capitalism. Engels' picture in "Socialism Utopian and Scientific" is similar. Gramsci, on the other hand, would argue that this is a class-concession functioning to stabilize capitalism and win hegemony for the wider capitalist political project, staving revolution.

I don't think that asking whether Marx would support or oppose the policy is really the right question. Instead, Marx would focus on what this would mean causally for continued capitalist development. But overall, Marx had a somewhat naive picture of proletarian struggle, theorizing that victories won through class-struggle would 'snowball' into further proletarian organization and confrontational tactics. It's really with Gramsci that we get the notion that such class-concessions could potentially pacify proletarian movements.
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[deleted]
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5y ago

UBI isn't a single policy. Right-wing versions seek to voucherise public services (Charles Murray), provide cheap labour to the gig economy (Yang), and punish single parents (Murray again). Social democratic versions seek to make the administration of benefits more cost-effective while improving coverage, although most end up looking a lot like the "punish single parents" right-wing versions.

It's possible to make a social democratic version look a lot more like a democratic socialist policy, by introducing UBI for all individuals (children included) and a household UBI (based on housing costs). A lot like universalising the British benefits system. (Which, contra the link at the end of the last paragraph would be extremely affordable: you can't pump an extra X billion into the economy without taxing it back out or inflation would simply destroy the purchasing power of the money. You pay for it with a progressive income tax, so it acts like a tax credit for low earners, a tax rebate for higher earners, while the ultra-rich get soaked.)

I have no idea what Marx would have thought but you can definitely make an argument for a democratic socialist UBI having some distinctly Marxist benefits. Firstly, it's not dependent on the capitalist mode of production; it would be perfectly possible to implement in a worker-run economy and it goes some way towards "to each according to need, from each according to ability". That doesn't mean that it wouldn't collapse into a counter-revolutionary reform if implemented under capitalism (not least because a useful form of UBI is very unlikely to ever be implemented under capitalism). But it's not dependent on capitalism. Distribution matters regardless of who controls the means of production. It would be perfectly possible, and necessary, to implement a UBI in a society with no money (where it would become indistinguishable from universal basic services).

Marx didn't spend a whole lot of time writing about people who aren't part of the workforce, especially women, carers or people who are disabled or elderly. I'm not saying he approved but, in the world he knew, women were the property of their fathers or husbands and the extended family was how people who couldn't earn a living were cared for (or else, the workhouse). You can't just translate everything he said as if it applies wholesale to our world as it is today (the monetary system is another example; completely different from anything he knew or could imagine).

As a reformist path, a well-designed and implemented UBI has a lot going for it. Universal benefits are extremely popular with the middle classes, which is why the NHS, child benefits and state pensions are pretty much the only elements of the Post-War Consensus that have (just about) survived neoliberalism in the UK. Once implemented, if done well, they're very difficult to attack politically because almost everyone really likes them.

If established, a well-designed (reformist) UBI would also force employers to behave themselves. They'd have to compete for workers who would no longer face destitution if they did not like the terms and conditions on offer. If the capitalists are right about the devastating effect of this on their interests, maybe worker buyouts would be more of a thing? Or maybe we'd just end up with a capitalist economy that actually works a lot more like Adam Smith (who Marx admired) intended.

The really big problem is how to deal with immigration under a UBI. Excluding non-citizens would make them extremely exploitable, as they are today, by criminal employers and criminal landlords. But automatically granting UBI to every new arrival, on arrival, would place an impossibly large burden on any country offering it unless extremely harsh immigration controls were introduced (when No Borders should be the aim). Socialism in one country cannot work; a democratic socialist UBI would require a global UBI and global open borders. There are some halfway house options, such as a job guarantee for immigrants with UBI paid based on earnings (to avoid introducing tax loopholes for wealthy immigrants) but they only really work for countries with masses of (physical) space to build more housing and the services that housing requires. Immigrants always pay for themselves (the number of jobs in a country is closely related to the number of people in a country) but there are physical constraints that would make a properly socialist immigration policy difficult under UBI (as it is under every condition, this is a problem that the left has never managed to resolve in hundreds of years of arguing).

So, I can't really answer your question. But it's a goodun and I'd like to see more Marxists getting to grips with it.
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[deleted]
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5y ago

He would almost certainly think of it as a band-aid, given that a large part of Capital and miscellaneous pamphlets is dedicated to blasting Fabian socialism and incipient forms of European social democracy (from which some kinds of UBI flow).

This is because UBI doesn't fundamentally address the two pillars of exploitation according to Marx. The first is inequity in the wage-labor-capital relationship. The capitalist pays the worker enough for survival (and then some) but below the intrinsic value of their labor, leaving them dependent on the capitalist who continues to scrap off and accumulate the surplus derived from the worker. UBI might allow some workers to extract themselves from this relationship, but only a small proportion, and capitalists would certainly be able to modify practices enough. Inflation from UBI, too, would undercut the gains workers make.

The second is the value-form, where good necessary for survival are assigned exchange value ("prices") so that capitalists can accumulate. This results in commodification. UBI certainly helps workers attain more commodities, but it doesn't abolish the form, and capitalists could adapt, namely by hiking prices to reflect larger UBI-fueled buying power.

Both of these core tenets of Marxism are related. The capitalist makes commodities and sells them for exchange-value by underpaying workers and putting them in a dependent relationship, while deriving surplus from their labor (in the form of selling goods on the open market).

Source

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https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/w ... ge-labour/ (Wage Labor and Capital)

Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/w ... pendix.htm (Value Form)

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u/TheRosi avatar
TheRosi
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5y ago

I think it's a really interesting and relevant question. Most answers here are arguing that he would not agree, and it may make sense, but I think it'd be important to remember that UBI wasn't a thing that was talked about or even conceived in the XIX century (afaik), and it surely wasn't something that Marx explicitly discussed; therefore, we're on the intriguing but always-open field of contrafactual history.

Having said this, if you're interested in left wing perspectives of UBI from a marxist point of view (and not only on Marx himself), perhaps you'd be interested in some more contemporary takes. In the chapter titled Sociological Marxism, from the Handook of Sociological Theory, Erik Olin Wright and Michael Burawoy sketch out the emancipatory possibilities of UBI and also make some criticisms. I think Wright went on and discussed this topic on his books about "real-life utopias", but I haven't read them so I can't say.

Burawoy, M. & Wright, E. O. (2001). Sociological Marxism, on Handbook of Sociological Theory, Turner, J. H. (2001), Springer, Boston, MA.
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u/ebolaRETURNS avatar
ebolaRETURNS
•
5y ago

The "real life utopias" work is a good choice, as it covers similar seeming liberal-left proposals (eg, separate systems for allocation of capital goods versus consumer goods, via different types of markets, also subject to different levels of marketization), and their different roles in ushering in socialism proper.

However, Wright's "analytical Marxism" strays from a lot of other neo-Marxists' work. Though they worked together so closely, Burawoy (incidentally my advisor) had a different focus, on how capitalist hegemony was maintained and dynamics in class-struggle.
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u/ebolaRETURNS avatar
ebolaRETURNS
•
5y ago

The "real life utopias" work is a good choice, as it covers similar seeming liberal-left proposals (eg, separate systems for allocation of capital goods versus consumer goods, via different types of markets, also subject to different levels of marketization), and their different roles in ushering in socialism proper.

However, Wright's "analytical Marxism" strays from a lot of other neo-Marxists' work. Though they worked together so closely, Burawoy (incidentally my advisor) had a different focus, on how capitalist hegemony was maintained and dynamics in class-struggle.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money

https://ipl.econ.duke.edu/seminars/syst ... _paper.pdf

https://thememorybank.co.uk/book/chapter-3/

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In this book, capitalism is taken to be that form of market economy in which the owners of large amounts of money get to direct the most significant sectors of production. They do so in the interest of adding to the amounts of money they already have. Competitive markets for industrial products meant that, for a time and perhaps also now, the most reliable way of making money with money lay in raising the productivity of labour through investment in machines. This is, roughly speaking, Marx’s position. So let us see how he developed it in the context of an historical analysis of Britain, the particular point of origin for the age of capitalist accumulation.

Writers from Aristotle to Polanyi have identified two distinct orientations to the market. The first is concerned with selling for money what is surplus to requirements in order to buy what one wants. Marx called this the “simple commodity circuit” (C-M-C). [10] The second, M-C-M’, where M’> M, starts with money and has the aim of realising more money through participation in the market as a “capitalist commodity circuit”.

Figure 3.1 Two Circuits of Commodities and Money

1. Simple circuit

Commodities ——— Money ——— Commodities

2. Capitalist Circuit

Money ——— Commodities ——— More Money

According to Marx, there are three main versions of this capitalist circuit. The first two are as old as markets and money: financial capital (M-M’) where profit takes the form of interest on money lent; and merchant capital (M-C-M’) where trade goods are bought cheaply to be sold dear and profit consists in the difference between buying and selling minus handling costs. In both cases the source of the money increase is mysterious, since the contribution of human work is hidden from view. The third form is distinctive to the modern age as a general economic system; and it consists in purchasing human labour for wages with the purpose of getting these workers to produce goods worth more than the cost of their hire. Marx called this industrial capital, not primarily with reference to the factories which were characteristic of the first industrial revolution; but in order to emphasise the penetration of money capital into production, whether that be agriculture, manufacturing or services.

In all agrarian societies markets were peripheral to the organisation of production. Once people routinely sold their labour for a livelihood, however, it undermined the traditional arrangements binding them to the land; more important, it vastly expanded the market since they depended on buying the means of their everyday subsistence. Moreover, only human creativity can produce goods valued at more than it costs to buy. This relationship of surplus value between owners of capital and workers held the key, in Marx’s view, to the dramatic recent increases in the rate of accumulation. At the same time, unlike the case with finance and trading capital, it became clearer that workers generated the increase accruing to the capitalist. For Marx, then, modern capitalism was that form of making money with money in which free capital was exchanged with free wage labour. He sought to account, therefore, for the process whereby people’s capacity to work was freed from the legal encumbrances of feudal agriculture and for the release of funds for investment in new forms of production. He discusses this process of “primitive accumulation” in the last section of Volume I of Capital.

Marx found that British capitalism had its origins in a long drawn-out struggle to displace the peasants from their traditional occupation of the land. The enclosure movement began in Tudor times and was still going strong in the Scottish Highlands during the 19th century. It meant that large sections of the rural poor were forced to seek hire for wages; while the landlords were able to make over privatised land to lucrative activities such as sheep farming. Employment in capitalist textile factories was a natural outcome of this conjuncture. Marx deploys his full range as a writer to depict the brutal criminality of this history. So where did the money come from to finance industrial capitalism? Marx’s answer is unequivocal: the expanded system of colonies, slavery and world trade which followed the explorations around 1500 and after. Here again he stresses villainy, the outrageous exploits of pirates and freebooters who stole the patrimony of people they often reduced to servitude. This is a key question of economic history. Did the industrial revolution rest on loot from the Third World or not? Max Weber thought that it did not; and neither do I. But this is only a secondary aspect of Marx’s argument. [11] [xiv]

Adam Smith had related profit levels to reduced costs achieved through raising the efficiency of workers; and he identified specialisation and division of labour as the best way of doing this. Marx’s great discovery was that this logic led to the introduction of more and better machines to the production process. Capitalists could stay ahead of their competitors by paying proportionately lower wages than were justified by productivity increases. The changing ratio of wage costs to investment in machinery and plant (“the organic composition of capital”) reflected this drive to cheapen unit labour costs: and its result was that centralisation of production which Marx correctly saw as the underlying trend of 19th century capitalism. But he also noticed that there were other trends; and he highlighted the alternative paths of accumulation in a long section of Volume I of Capital on absolute and relative surplus value.

It was one of Marx’s aims to demonstrate that wage slavery under capitalism was fundamentally similar to feudal serfdom. In the latter case tied agricultural workers had to hand over a proportion of their product (“surplus labour”) in some form, whether a share of their physical output, labour services or, occasionally, a money equivalent. Marx knew that feudal landlords had every interest in extracting the most they could from these workers by driving down to the limit what they retained for their own subsistence. Surplus labour becomes surplus value when workers are paid wages directly and the surplus retained by the capitalist takes the form of goods whose value is realised in the market as commodities. The most primitive type of industrial capitalism, therefore, is one in which the feudal approach is transferred to the industrial system of wage labour.

In Marx’s terminology, one tendency of capital accumulation is thus concerned with extracting absolute surplus value. This means paying workers as little as possible and making them work as many hours as possible, for example by lengthening the working day without increasing wages. We call this phenomenon “sweat shop” capitalism and it can be found anywhere that unprotected workers (often women, minorities or illegal aliens) are forced to endure low pay, long hours and oppressive conditions. The other tendency is the one we have already identified, marked by what Marx called relative surplus value, the improvement of workers’ efficiency through increased scale of co-operation, division of labour and, above all, mechanisation. This path leads to a high wage, high skill economy which Marx felt sure was the progressive side of capitalism and one which would inevitably win out in competition with the other tendency.

This distinction between absolute and relative surplus value contains one vital key to understanding the uneven development of the world economy. In most sectors of production, but some more than others (textiles, say, more than nuclear submarines), there is direct competition between low-cost and high-cost producers. Thus Britain under the Tories offended its partners in the European Union by pursuing a strategy of attracting international investment with low wage costs; in France the emphasis is on reduced hours of working and improved social benefits, whereas Germany especially is committed to improving the skills and equipment of a high cost labour force. Few doubt which of these countries has the more robust capitalism. The postwar rise of the Southeast Asian “tigers” (Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan) and of Japan before that began on the model of absolute surplus value and has subsequently switched to the relative path. In the meantime, the smokestack heartlands of the first industrial nations, which once led the way in machine production, now offer low-cost investment opportunities for Asian companies in a desperate attempt to regenerate employment. This restlessness of capitalism ensures that the original conditions of growth are always being renewed; there is nothing permanent about it.

It is increasingly commonplace for the two tendencies of modern capital accumulation to exist side by side in the same country. This is where formal and informal institutions dividing the labour force into high- and low-wage sectors are especially needed. Men have traditionally excluded women from better-paid work, with the consequence that the restricted areas available to them are overcrowded and poorly paid. [12] [xv] The same applies to the contrast between citizens and illegal aliens, providing the middle classes with the cheap domestic labour they need in order to pursue an affluent lifestyle. This leads to the embarrassment that President Clinton faced when trying to appoint an Attorney General who wasn’t employing illegal aliens as servants. And, of course, racial discrimination, even after emancipation from slavery, has acted as a colour bar confining black people to menial, low-wage employment. So Marx’s economic analysis, brilliant and far-reaching as it was, would not be complete without a broader framework capable of accounting for the specific ways in which inequality is institutionalised.

Max Weber did not disagree with Marx’s account, although he did think that property relations were less important than most Marxists believed; and some might count such an emphasis consistent with his decision to line up on the side of the capitalist state. He just felt that it did not go far enough. Agrarian societies and their urban enclaves had always relied on traditional certainties when organising their economies; that is, they tended to repeat what they had done in the past. Hence the relative stagnation of society and technology during the agricultural phase of human history. He surmised that a massive cultural revolution must have been necessary to persuade people to place their economic lives in the hands of capitalists whose principal orientation was to the uncertainties of future profit. It followed that capitalism should be conceived of in terms of institutions whose meaning was not just narrowly economic, but political, even religious as well.

Weber’s General Economic History was written under unusual circumstances. It was just after the first world war, when a defeated Germany was in the throes of revolution and Weber went to teach for a year at Munich. He died shortly afterwards and this book was put together from students’ notes taken on his last lecture course. Weber was a notoriously obscure writer; but this book reads easily. This transparent quality and the somewhat Marxist slant of the text may owe more to the students than to Weber’s original intentions; or it could reflect a genuine change of heart, in the face of Germany’s political calamity. However that may be, this is much the fullest account left of his explanation for the rise of capitalism.

For Weber, capitalism was an economic system based on rational enterprise. Both of these words were carefully chosen. Enterprise is something undertaken with a view to future profit. As such, it is intrinsically uncertain. Weber observed that in most economies known to history innovation was often explicitly discouraged and hedged around with magical deterrents. It was remarkable, therefore, that whole societies would commit their livelihood to the uncertainties of enterprise. As the American economist, Paul Samuelson, used to say in the introduction to his best-selling textbook, [xvi] 10 million New Yorkers go to sleep every night confident that the economy will still be there the next morning; but how do they know?

Enterprise commonly takes two forms. The first is speculative and involves people gambling on a hunch that they will win. Keynes recognised that these “animal spirits” were central to the dynamism of capitalist markets, leading to a cycle of booms and busts as herds of investors chase the latest chance for windfall profit (from the tulip craze and the South Sea bubble of the 17th and 18th centuries onwards). Weber was interested in the second form of enterprise, a form driven by the compulsion to eliminate the risks entailed in reliance on uncertain futures. Rationality is the calculated pursuit of explicit ends by chosen means. Rational enterprise, according to Weber, rests above all on the entrepreneur’s ability to calculate outcomes. For capitalism to take root, uncertainty has to be replaced, if not with certain knowledge, then with reliable calculation of the probabilities.

This explains the paradox that, while capitalists celebrate the risks of competition in their self-promoting ideologies, they will do everything in their power to avoid it in practice. Weber sets out, in the fourth and final part of the General Economic History, to show how the fledgling capitalist economy progressed by instituting the means of more reliable calculation. This meant improvements in book-keeping, working practices and technology. Above all it meant the development of a state alert to the needs of enterprises, securing their property and profits in law, stabilising the conditions of market economy, ultimately at the expense of anyone else who got in the way. Weber did not think that mercantile colonialism was a sufficient explanation for the accumulation of a European capitalist fund, since several commercial empires (such as the Phoenicians) had developed similar systems of extraction without spawning modern industry. Rather, as everyone knows, he believed that capitalist culture owed its specificity to developments in the sphere of religion.

Weber explained the origins of capitalism in Western Europe by the Reformation and before it the rationalist ethos of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. He wrote his famous Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism on a visit to the St. Louis Great Exhibition in 1904. [xvii] It deals specifically with the “elective affinity” (Goethe’s phrase) of protestant religion and rational enterprise, that is with how each gets on partially with the other so as to produce a synergistic effect. But the last chapter of the General Economic History (“The evolution of the capitalist spirit”) covers more ground, reaching back into pre-Reformation Christianity and beyond to the Enlightenment and the secularism of the “Age of Iron”, the 19th century.

The main source of uncertainty we face is death. Traditionally the church placed responsibility for reaching the afterlife in the hands of a specialist class of experts. Protestantism, above all else, restored to individuals the right to make their own relationship with God. Weber held that rationality involved a similar form of means-end calculation, so that protestants would be supported in their economic activities by a compatible religious outlook. Sects which stressed the election of members to the afterlife (Calvinists being the favourite example) provided a measure of certainty, but perhaps also of insecurity which were transferred into the world of enterprise. Whatever the role of this factor in the origins of capitalism, Weber was gloomy about the prospects for a disenchanted world in which exploited workers could no longer fall back on hopes for a better life after death. If Marx successfully linked capital accumulation to mechanisation and the wage-labour system, these considerations of rationality, magic and religion are indispensable to an analysis of the cultural revolution affecting money and exchange in our times, as we will see.
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