Our purpose in this paper is to draw attention to an illusion that, it seems to us, has been working its way into the writings of an increasing number of intellectuals and political leaders on the Left. The illusion is that the legislative introduction of a generous universal basic income program can replace traditional forms of labor organizing, or else that its legislative introduction should be prioritized as an essential stepping stone to more effective labor politics. This attitude is held by all those who spend time studying, piloting, or simply entertaining generous basic income proposals in their writings, while showing much less interest in the timeworn tactical question of how to organize a durable majority of the working classes.

Often, this attitude is accompanied by a second, all-too-common thought: namely, that aside from being the dying remnants of a bygone era, labor unions are at bottom politically too divisive to fuel progress in our modern liberal age. For organized labor to become an engine of generalized progress once again, we are told, would simply require much too radical of a social transformation at this stage. In this regard, basic income proposals are increasingly presented as possessing a major strategic advantage over labor’s traditional wish-list items, such as the rewriting of long-eviscerated labor laws or reversing the fait accomplit that is the global mobility of capital.

The great advantage of concentrating efforts and imagination first and foremost on the legislative introduction of a universal basic income is said to be that — in contrast to these other vehicles of social transformation formerly prioritized by the Left — a generous basic income promises to be both genuinely emancipatory and more realistic. The proposal is said to be genuinely emancipatory because it does not merely “ameliorate” relations of domination and exploitation but, much more fundamentally, affords individuals the power to “exit” from such objectionable relations altogether. ¹ At the same time, a generous basic income is said to be more realistic than all comparably ambitious left-wing ideas because, aside from requiring one or two new pieces of tax-and-transfer legislation, its introduction is compatible with leaving in place most of the rest of the structure of contemporary capitalism. ² In particular, there is no need for large-scale nationalization of industries, public ownership, and central planning, or any similarly disruptive interventions in the capitalist market economy. Accordingly, in the pithy words of its earliest and most important contemporary expositors, the basic income proposal promises to be a truly liberating yet fully “capitalist road to communism.” ³