Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle between Carnival and Lent, 1559.
A while back, I wrote an essay critical of the then-recently announced UBI pilot scheme for the arts in Ireland for Art Monthly, published in the June 2022 issue. There was a lot in the piece, but one of the central thrusts was this: the warm excitement for the mainstreaming of UBI amongst progressives and the Left fails to account for where this interest is coming from, and how those interests might guide the future of such policymaking.
At the time, I remember being struck by an article penned in defence of UBI in an art magazine. I was confused. Where is the critical discussion which the author was wading into? The policy was being implemented, meeting a ‘chorus of applause – one more reflective of the arts community's aspirations than the actual details of the scheme.’
I elaborated further:
The proposal for some kind of universal basic income is not new, and brings with it enormously controversial historical baggage. While a variety of utopian projects have conceived of similar ideas, it is largely the infamous neoliberal economists à la Milton Friedman who popularised the policy within economic and political circles. Over time, the image of basic income has softened, and feels more like the views of a forward-looking and progressive tech executive than a ruthless free marketeer. But the problems remain the same.
Unlike the labour movements of the 20th century which pushed for greater democratic control over the economy, basic income does little to address the causes of poverty and precarity, and is often advocated by the same economists and businesses who are allied with existing inequalities. Under a basic income it would still be possible to privatise healthcare, education and transportation, and to see the gap between the rich and poor soar. The threat automation poses to employment is often cited as a rationale, but this is the fundamental problem: proposed as a treatment for the symptoms, basic income allows the causes to continue unchecked. To ignore the gap between these contexts is to be wilfully naive.
I had a lot of interesting conversations with people around the piece. I was grateful to see a response to the piece by Joan Somers Donnelly writing in Rekto Verso, although I think the analysis was partial and characteristic of some faults with the debate around UBI as a whole. There’s a few factual details that seem amiss, even mischaracterizing an Jacobin article they link to, but what is most instructive I think is how they overlook entirely the historical context I outline around the debate – and I think this speaks to a wider failure to fully account for the scope of the Left’s critique of UBI.
While the cost of a UBI, and potential for other policy approaches such as welfare and nationalisation, is part of the argument for some (I find it tiresome how political discussions can often become fixated on technical questions as if the wider societal context will sort itself out once we’ve crunched the data), the bigger question to wrangle with is the role of the market itself. Jacobin’s subtitle gets to the nub quickly: ‘A universal basic income would shore up the market. We need ideas that shrink it.’
A Left advocacy for UBI has to account for the political economy in which the idea is shaped, otherwise it’s hardly a Left perspective at all. Here’s a final quote from Jacobin:
The more social gains seem unreachable, the more UBI makes sense. It’s what botanists would call a “bioindicator”: it indexes neoliberalism’s progress. Support for basic incomes proliferates where neoliberal reforms have been the most devastating.
In this sense, UBI isn’t an alternative to neoliberalism, but an ideological capitulation to it. In fact, the most viable forms of basic income would universalize precarious labor and extend the sphere of the market — just as the gurus of Silicon Valley hope.
Part of the scope of the argument inevitably touches on what role artists might take, what activism by the arts community might achieve and so on. On this point, the history of artist organising is fascinating to consider. Sometimes, this touches on art world specific issues – pay, representation – and at other times, artists find common cause with wider civil society, such as the artist campaigns against the Vietnam War. Part of what I wanted to get at in the original article was this terrain of action that opposition might take:
This history also speaks to another connotation of what it might mean to be ‘against’, a layer of meaning more generative than negative. If the promise of basic income is to provide support to the arts community, I am interested to see how participants might foster a collectivity which pushes back against the politics often lurking behind such schemes. Already we can see seeds of opposition forming. Praxis, the artists union of Ireland, has begun organising for a Living Wage and opposing potential discrimination against those with disabilities and other specific needs. We cannot ignore how artists have been used in the recent past and, as the pilot scheme gets underway, along claims that the trajectory of the contemporary situation is inevitable, it is time to resist.