Garry
Glass discusses how advances in automation are disrupting class
relations.
Part
4 - Universal Basic Income
Universal
Basic Income (UBI) is the proposition of a new social contract
whereby states essentially print money and give it to citizens in
order to keep money circulating through the economy. This is also
known as a negative income tax.
Jobs for all
was a slogan of organised labour yet under Capitalism unemployment is
a necessary part of maintaining an abundance of cheap labour. UBI is
surely an advance on the current system of welfare where people are
forced into the humiliation of pretending to be actively seeking
employment in a labour market where there is often not any meaningful
work.
UBI is being
hailed by many on the left as a progressive measure, which when
compared to workfare and austerity it undoubtedly is, yet UBI
citizenship is little more than an allegiance to a system of
rationing. With higher unemployment comes the loss of the bargaining
power of labour. Whilst UBI may be a valid concession for the left to
aim for, it must not be an end goal.
The power
workers have established through union militancy has been eroded over
the course of the 20th century through Thatcher’s anti-union
policies, globalisation and the restructuring of industry. Automation
and UBI point to what is essentially the planned obsolescence of the
proletarian subject. The Transport for London dispute is a case in
point where driverless trains are being introduced removing what
leverage unions such as the RMT might have had by resorting to
industrial action.
Similarly
the ‘Uberisation’ of the service sector whilst it has lead to
huge profits for those in the business of peer to peer networking of
service users and providers has diminished the power of workers to
demand decent pay and conditions.
The
strategic challenge for the left is to get beyond stop gap measures
such as UBI and advance a critical public discourse around the way
money mediates our lived activity as a society. Prior to 2008 it was
anathema to even discuss the illusory power of money, nowadays it is
commonplace to question it from fundamentals, not least in the
capitalist metropoles themselves. The printing of new money is an
exercise in typing a number into a computer and being confident you
have the correct order of magnitude before pressing enter.
It is
undoubtedly an ethical imperative to remove the drudgery of hard
labour where machines are available to do the heavy work. With this
comes the question of towards what productive ends it is oriented.
Industrial production has been a revolutionising process that results
in the reshaping of our world towards yet more industrial production.
Ultimately industry, left unmitigated, will leave a world littered
with derelict factories.
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