The “UBI” ideas being thrown around as a response to the coronavirus are, in many cases, neither universal, basic, nor an income. But they do show how much the Left has shifted what’s considered possible over the past decade.
the government should just mail checks to people, my friends
For the originators of the UBI idea, it was crucial that cash payments be conceived as universal rights not tied to work or
any other condition. Yet a recent
Time magazine
article, on the surge in interest in UBI, slips immediately from discussing Yang’s proposal to one by Congressmen Tim Ryan and Ro Khanna which “would give Americans who earned less than $65,000 in 2019 a check between $1,000 and $6,000.”
Universality is meant to challenge the stigma that often prevents people from seeking or receiving targeted welfare checks. Moreover, the theory is that universal programs are politically easier to defend and expand than those which help only a minority, which can then be portrayed as undeserving and parasitic on the hard-working majority. that's why Yang wanted to give UBI to every single American...And anyhow, anybody who really doesn’t need the money is still free to give the check to their favorite charity or out-of-work bartender.
It couldn’t be more urgent to demand that the response to the crisis take the form of universal social rights, rather than moves that intensify the authoritarian and paternalist tendencies that are already accelerating in response to fear of the pandemic.
Romney and Trump's actions shows us a ruling class and a political order that is desperately trying to find a stopgap measure to prevent social collapse, in the vain hope of returning to “normal” in short order. It’s up to those of us who rejected that normality, and who know that it’s unrecoverable anyway, to take whatever immediate forms of economic life support we can, as we look for new ways to organize.
So in the end, the “UBI” ideas being thrown around are, in many cases, neither Universal, Basic, nor an Income. Temporary income supports aren’t socialism, and aren’t a solution to capitalist crisis. Even a true Universal Basic Income, for its socialist advocates, was never meant to be that. But at this moment, the working class has to grasp on to the immediate means of survival as we try to get control of this moment of crisis which is going to radically transform global capitalism one way or the other.
