Disentangling the normative justification of basic income from the structure of the capitalist wage relation and the culture of the work ethic

Abstract

This article contributes to the literature on basic income and work by articulating the case for disentangling the normative justification of basic income from the structural and temporal imperatives of the capitalist wage relation and the work ethic. It begins with a survey of the major normative justifications of basic income and their respective orientations towards capitalist development and labour markets. Next it presents an argument against tying the justification of basic income to posited labour supply responses based on predicted technological change, the extant empirical evidence from pilots or technical policy simulations. It then addresses the politico-cultural barrier to basic income presented by the wage relation and the work ethic, and critically evaluates the ‘exit option’ argument for basic income. The article concludes that asserting a right to an ad vitam basic income is an ethically justified and politically astute step towards a necessary decentring of (capitalist) work in basic income scholarship and advocacy.

Introduction

The relationship between work and basic income animates much of the debate regarding the normative justifications, policy feasibility and political viability of this reform. Freedom from compulsory wage labour is basic income's great utopian promise. Fear of working-age people dropping out of formal labour markets is the principal ground ¹ on which many reject this reform. This article explores the case for demanding the right to an ad vitam ² basic income as part of a process of decentring capitalist labour markets and the culture of the work ethic in basic income theory and advocacy. The first section surveys the main normative justifications of basic income with the aim of highlighting their respective ‘entanglements’ with the historical development of capitalism and the wage relation. The second section cautions against tying any normative justification of basic income to predicted technological change or to empirical evidence and policy simulations that purport to capture the effects of basic income on labour supply. The third section highlights the major structural and cultural barriers to implementing a permanent basic income and interrogates the utility and legitimacy of the ‘exit option’ argument for basic income. The final section concludes that a right to an ad vitam basic income is justified on the bases of the social and evolutionary nature of capitalist wealth and the fact that income (unlike paid work) is a basic need in capitalist society. Finally, the assertion of a right to basic income from birth until death could achieve the politically expedient goal of decentring (capitalist) work in debates regarding basic income and disentangling the normative justification of basic income from labour-supply centred arguments that cannot be decisively won.

Normative justifications of basic income, capitalism and work

Normative justifications of basic income can be demarcated along historical and ideological lines and differentiated in terms of their respective orientations towards capitalist development and labour markets. Early proposals (1790s–1850s) differed with respect to scheme design but generally cohered around the ethic of basic income as a form of socialised rent paid as compensation for the ‘original sin’ of privatisation of the commons (Cunliffe & Erreygers, 2004; King & Marangos, 2006). This traumatic process of ‘enclosure’ was of course integral to the historical development of capitalism in terms of the growth of markets, the intensification of production and the formation of a ‘propertyless’ working class (Wood, 2002). The demand for basic income from this vantage point can be seen as an ‘angry cry’ or ‘wistful lament’ for a retreating, perhaps chimerical world, of propertied independence. Mid-20th-century justifications of basic income centred on moderating class conflict, reducing poverty, fear of the technological displacement of labour and, to a lesser degree, macroeconomic demand management (Cunliffe & Erreygers, 2004; Sloman, 2016; Van Trier, 2018). Poverty eradication, combating precarious work and automation anxiety remain central to 21st-century justifications of basic income, alongside enhanced autonomy and post-work or anti-work imaginaries (Srnicek & Williams, 2015; Standing, 2017; Van Parijs & Vanderborght, 2017; Weeks, 2011).

Ideological heterogeneity among basic income proponents and their proposals has been cited as both an asset and a liability. Adjudicating this debate is not the aim of this short section. Rather, the focus is on how normative justifications of basic income across the ideological spectrum are oriented towards – or entangled with – capitalist labour markets and the culture of the work ethic. For some libertarians and orthodox economists basic income is justified due to labour market imperfections that generate poverty and labour (under-)supply issues that can be more efficiently corrected for through the mechanism of a something like a flat rate negative income tax (NIT) than via further expansion of the state (Friedman, 1966). For basic income supporters among moderate social democrats the reform is required because there is no assumption of a self-regulating labour market that can automatically sustain or restore full employment and technological change continuously displaces some forms of labour (Sloman, 2016; Steensland, 2006). For many left social democrat and socialist advocates basic income would provide an ‘exit option’ from capitalist labour markets that boosts the bargaining power of labour, especially among low-wage workers (Wright, 2006). More radical perspectives have positioned basic income as ‘utopian demand’ that challenges the legitimacy of capitalist work and assails the work ethic that supports it, while forming part of a process of ending the wage relation and exiting capitalism altogether (Gorz, 1999; Weeks, 2011). Some feminists have centred the justification of basic income on the failure of capitalist labour markets to recognise the value of women's unpaid reproductive work (Mulligan, 2013).

These justifications have all engendered counter-arguments from both supporters and detractors of basic income. Such counter-arguments include the assertion that a canonical basic income with no conditionality would violate the reciprocity principle that underpins the idea that we have an obligation to contribute to a system from which we benefit, and a major way of making said contribution is through paid work (White, 1997). Other counter-arguments include the purported superiority of public goods and services to cash payments (Coote & Yazici, 2019) or that basic income would simply reinforce the sexual division of labour (Orloff, 2013). There have been rejoinders to all of these objections, in particular the idea of a participation income to overcome reciprocity-based objections to an unconditional basic income (Hiillamo, 2022).

The work of Philippe Van Parijs constitutes the most ambitious and sustained attempt to provide basic income with firm ethical foundations and rebuttals to the various critiques (Van Der Veen & Van Parijs, 1986; see also Van Parijs, 1997, 2001, 2013). The full detail of Van Parijs’ imposing and elaborate edifice is beyond the scope of this article, but several aspects of his work remain relevant to the argument developed here. Van Parijs contends that the ‘highest sustainable’ basic income is the best available mechanism to achieve his ethical objective of maximinning ‘real freedom for all’ (Van Parijs, 1997). Elements of Marxian, liberal egalitarian and orthodox economic theory inform his treatment of basic income in relation to capitalism in general, and labour markets in particular. In relation to the former, he argues that ‘the optimal variant of capitalism would perform better … than the optimal variant of socialism’ in relation to the criterion of ‘constrained basic income maximisation’ due the dynamism of capitalist competition (Van Parijs, 1997, pp. 187, 190). Van Parijs addresses the reciprocity objection to basic income by asserting the individual's right to the ‘per capita value of society's external resources’, regardless of their paid employment status (Van Parijs, 2013, pp. 18–19). He also argues that broadly defined ‘external endowments’ form the basis for financing a legitimate basic income from a real-libertarian perspective, including his novel treatment of ‘jobs as assets’ ³ with associated rental flows that would increase the level of the highest sustainable basic income in a given context ⁴ (Van Parijs, 1997, pp. 102–25). The key point of emphasis here is not the persuasiveness of Van Parijs’ framework ⁵ but rather to demonstrate how even the most sophisticated normative justification of basic income is fundamentally ‘entangled’ with the nature, functioning and status of capitalist labour markets. The next two sections point to some of the practical and political issues this entanglement ⁶ generates.

The big problems of economic uncertainty and little experiments

This section focuses on the difficulty in countering labour-supply centred objections to basic income by recourse to economic prediction, technical policy modelling and the extant empirical evidence. J.K. Galbraith famously quipped that the ‘only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable’ (Economist, 2016). The extent to which economic forecasting is routinely unreliable due to the flawed economic theories and/or the complexity of capitalist economies is open to debate. Whatever the case, ‘radical uncertainty’ regarding the future (Kay & King, 2020), and the difficulty of modelling relationships between variables and predicting outcomes in complex dynamic systems are directly relevant to any attempt to justify basic income on the basis of (a) predicted technological and economic change and (b) projected real-world effects of introducing an independent variable (basic income) on a dependent variable (labour supply) using existing econometric techniques.

The technological displacement of labour has been a recurring feature of the basic income debate, in different historical contexts and in the ideas of diverse basic income proponents. That technological change creates and destroys jobs is a basic feature of the dynamics of capitalist development. The ratio of job creation to job destruction, in its aggregate, spatial and temporal dimensions, has clear implications for the material living standards and life opportunities of waged workers and their dependants. There are long-standing and unresolved debates in political economy, orthodox economics and history regarding the question of whether technology-driven job creation or job destruction will prove the more powerful factor in the long run. What we can say, based on the recent historical record, is that dire predictions regarding aggregate permanent job destruction have not been borne out by the empirical evidence. With notable exceptions, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of the early 21st century, conventional measures of unemployment in developed capitalist countries have oscillated in a band between 1% and 15% since the start of the 20th century.

The combination of uncertainty regarding future outcomes and the available historical evidence has not, however, prevented recurring bouts of ‘automation anxiety’, often anchored to ‘this time is different’ proclamations. The contemporary manifestation of this phenomenon centres on the effects of automation and digitisation on aggregate employment opportunities. The argument rests on the central claim that current processes of technological change are both qualitatively and quantitatively different from previous spurts of innovation. Consequently, they have the potential to displace labour across a wide variety of occupations, leading to large-scale permanent job losses. (For arguments for and against this position see Autor, 2015; Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014; Durrant-Whyte et al., 2015; Frey & Osborne, 2013; Gordon, 2016; Reich, 2016; Susskind, 2020). While the ‘this time it's different’ argument regarding the current wave of technological change cannot be dismissed entirely, past experience, combined with the difficulty of accurately predicting future economic outcomes, supports a cautious approach. This is precisely the opposite of the sensationalist headlines regarding ‘47 percent of total US employment’ being ‘at risk’ due to computerisation following the publication of one prominent study, whose authors’ had explicitly stated, ‘we make no attempt to forecast future changes in the occupational composition of the labour market’ (Frey & Osborne, 2013, pp. 1, 36).

The relevance of this debate to the case for basic income is threefold. First, processes of automation and digitisation have been cited as an important, sometimes primary, justification of some form of basic income. These ‘robots are coming’ basic income proponents run the gamut from politicians, venture capitalists and futurists, to economists, trade unionists and radical leftists (Barnes, 2014; Ford, 2015; Mason, 2016; Reich, 2016; Srnicek & Williams, 2015; Stern, 2016; Susskind, 2020; Yang, 2018). These basic income advocates all differ as regards their orientation towards capitalism, and the role accorded to basic income within their respective visions. However, alongside the likes of billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, such prominent advocates are the most likely conduits through which different constituencies first become familiar with the idea. This raises a second concern. If claims regarding the impact of automation and digitisation on net job opportunities and average job quality prove overblown, basic income may be tainted by association and reform in this direction consequently stalled. The final issue raised by tying the case for basic income to the technological displacement of labour is more pragmatic. Even a basic income set above the poverty line in an OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) country, such as Australia, cannot bridge the income gap for a truck driver on a mine site or a junior lawyer whose job is automated out of existence. For these reasons, basic income should only be considered a form of partial social insurance for the loss of paid employment as opposed to a necessary response to the inexorable and inevitable impacts of technological change.

The technological imperative argument for basic income rests on a forced exodus of people from capitalist labour markets due to reduced aggregate employment opportunities caused by dramatic technological change. On the other hand, a common ethico-economic objection to basic income is that giving people ‘money for nothing’ would trigger a voluntary mass exodus from formal labour markets that would reduce prosperity, be unfair to those who chose to remain in paid work and undermine collective capacity to finance basic income due to a shrinking tax base. There are ethical and logical rejoinders to this objection but, absent any contemporary or historical examples of fully implemented and ongoing basic income schemes, ⁷ there are only two main approaches open to those interested in countering the labour-supply shock critique of basic income. Researchers can either (a) measure the labour supply response variable in basic income pilots and evaluate its (in)significance, and/or (b) use econometric techniques to estimate the size and direction of the labour supply response in different basic income policy scenarios. These approaches may yield useful and important information, but both have major limitations.

To illustrate the utility and pitfalls of the first approach, we can examine the labour supply response evidence from various historical and contemporary basic income pilots in comparable countries. Analysis of the US negative income tax (NIT) pilots (1960s–70s), the Manitoba Mincome in Canada (1970s), the Finnish Basic Income Experiment (2017–18) and the aborted Ontario Basic Income Pilot (2017–19) found mostly modest negative labour supply responses (Ferdosi et al., 2020, p. 29; Kangas et al., 2019; Kela, 2020; Widerquist, 2005).

In relation to the US trials, Burtless found an average work reduction of 7% for men and 17% for women, with the most generous scheme producing the biggest work reduction effect (Burtless, 1986). Levine et al. (2005) reported a 13% average fall in family work effort, with ‘one-third of the response coming from the primary earner, one-third from the secondary earner and the final third coming from additional earners in the family’ (Forget, 2011, p. 5). This translated into a relatively small reduction in average working hours for primary earners (typically male full-time workers), and larger reductions for wives and adult children. Analysis of the Canadian Mincome experiment showed smaller average paid working hours reductions than was the case for most of the US trials conducted during this period. The Finnish experiment showed basically no difference between treatment and control groups in 2017, while basic income recipients worked an average of five days more per year (+6.8%) than the control group of unemployed people not receiving basic income in the second year of the trial. The aborted Onatario Basic Income Pilot (2017–19) in Canada has not been fully scrutinised, but Ferdosi et al. (2020, p. 29) found ‘there was a slight reduction in the number employed during the pilot compared to the number employed prior to the pilot’.

These findings can be interpreted as ‘encouraging’, ‘a cause for alarm’ or ‘meaningless’ in relation to the likely impacts of a basic income scheme implemented at scale on a permanent basis. To wit, in a 1986 interdisciplinary symposium reviewing the effects and implications of the US NIT trials, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow (1986, p. 221) concluded: ‘There is a labor supply effect, as every economist thought there would be; but it could hardly be described as large enough to jeopardize the work ethic.’ Burtless (1986, pp. 30–31) interpreted the same results as constituting ‘moderate to large proportional reductions in work effort’ and that ‘On balance, the experiments probably underestimated the permanent response to a negative income tax program with a generous guarantee…and a relatively low tax rate’. Reflecting on the US and Canadian trials, Hum and Simpson (1993, p. S287) provided a pithy assessment: ‘Few adverse effects have been found to date. Those adverse effects found, such as work response, are smaller than would have been expected without experimentation.’

Measuring labour supply responses among treatment groups in different experimental settings is inherently difficult and the interpretation and communication of the results will always be politicised. This task is further complicated – especially in relation to comparing results across pilots – by design, implementation, analysis and duration issues, as well as political-economic circumstances affecting the respective schemes (Ashenfelter, 1986; Burtless, 1986; Calnitsky, 2019; Mendelson, 2019; Widerquist, 2005). Two further points merit emphasis in relation to the argument being developed. First, the ‘will people work?’ question tends to ‘crowd out’ other important considerations, such as ‘what do people do?’ with the additional income and/or time that the basic income provides. Second, the fallacy of composition and the principle of uncertainty militate against drawing any firm conclusions regarding the likely labour supply response to the introduction of a national or regional permanent basic income scheme based on the observed responses in a handful of relatively small-scale trials.

The inadvisability of drawing any general conclusions from these basic income trial data, regarding changes in labour supply and demand at the aggregate level, has led researchers in different directions. For some, the evidence suggests the utility of basic income trials in this respect should be altogether dismissed. For others, pilots still provide useful data as part of a positive feedback loop that informs the iterative process of basic income scheme design and administration. Another group has turned to econometric techniques to estimate labour supply responses in different scenarios. Martinelli (2017, p. 51) neatly expresses the nature of the challenge: ‘Basic income has highly ambiguous labour market effects, in terms of overall levels of participation, wage levels and working conditions. This helps to explain why, for some advocates, UBI has the potential to increase labour market participation while, for critics, it is more likely to lead to labour market withdrawal.’

Attempting to measure the labour supply response to the introduction of basic income in different spatio-temporal and political-economic contexts relies on estimates of the strength of the income effect and substitution effect for different cohorts (Martinelli, 2017, p. 51). This is no easy task, especially considering the disjuncture between a smooth, optimising framework of marginal adjustments to incentives and the real-world messiness of regulation, norms and non-pecuniary incentives that structure the realm of paid work. The literature shows there are marked differences in income and substitution effects for different household types, genders and employment categories (Browne & Immervoll, 2017; Hum & Simpson, 1993; Martinelli, 2017). For example, Scutella (2004) and Martinelli (2017) used microsimulation technique to model the labour supply response for different basic income schemes across different cohorts. Both found considerable variation in the strength of the estimated labour supply response, as well as a generally negative effect on work incentives across the board. Scutella (2004, p. 28) concludes her analysis by stating: ‘A system with relatively generous basic income levels and a high marginal tax rate is found to be socially optimal if there is a high aversion to inequality, even after reductions in labour supply are taken into consideration.’ Martinelli, on the other hand, states: ‘Ultimately, a full understanding of the issues discussed here is probably beyond the scope of the microsimulation approach. There are too many complex factors at play to accurately model how individuals would respond to a basic income in reality.’

Here again, formal policy modelling of basic income scenarios could be seen as a useful aid to improving the design of basic income pilots or even permanent schemes. For example, drawing on a combination of the available empirical evidence and policy simulation may support the conclusion that a basic income designed so that effective marginal tax rates (EMTRs) only rose in line with increases in total individual incomes (i.e. wages/salaries plus social transfers) may result in lower labour supply disincentives than a scheme that leaves income and poverty traps in place (see Spies-Butcher et al., 2020). This attribute notwithstanding, formal policy modelling of the effect of basic income on labour supply using static, or even (nominally) dynamic econometric techniques still come up short in the face of radical uncertainty and dynamic complexity. They cannot furnish researchers and supporters with the requisite ammunition to vanquish the negative-supply shock critique of basic income. When used as part of a broader justification of basic income, these methods risk further entanglement with debates regarding the functioning of capitalist labour markets and the politically reinforced cultural status of capitalist work.

From wage slavery to the freedom to exit

This section focuses on capitalist work as an entrenched political and cultural barrier to achieving basic income before addressing the posited role basic income might play in loosening the strictures of the wage relation and the work ethic by providing an ‘exit option’ from paid work.

The nature of capitalist work and the structural function of wage labour, unemployment and precarious work, represent major barriers to the implementation of basic income. From a Marxian perspective, capitalism subordinates labour to capital, use value to exchange value, and heterogeneous human needs and wants to the overriding priority of capital accumulation (Antunes, 2013). Within this framework, the ‘purchase and sale of labour power’ is the key contractual relationship that differentiates capitalism from other economic systems (Braverman, 1998, p. 35). Workers are formally free to sell their labour power to any particular employer but forced in practice to sell their labour power to employers as a group, in order to meet their basic needs and additional wants. Howard and King (2008, pp. 45–6) define this relationship as a ‘contract for obedience’ centred on ‘hierarchy, with unidirectional commands from employer to employees’. This structural inequality allows capitalists to convert labour power into concrete labour and commodities, in the process creating the surplus value that forms the basis of capitalist profit.

Throughout capitalism's history, measures that seek to place workers and employers on a more equal footing have been fiercely resisted by employers. A basic income set at a level adequate to satisfy basic needs threatens to partially sever the link between wage work and income for all working-age individuals. It is therefore to be expected that proposals for an adequate and unconditional basic income will encounter strong political resistance from most employers, as well as their political, intellectual and media allies. The economic fact of persistent unemployment works to reinforce the primacy of the capitalist employment contract in relation to access to the means of subsistence, and to reinforce the centrality of wage labour to human life. The power to ‘hire and fire’ is zealously guarded by employers, particularly as it pertains to capital's ‘prime real estate’ of the working-age population. The persistence of unemployment, underemployment, precarious jobs and informal work buttress this employer prerogative (Burgess & Campbell, 1998; Kalecki, 1943; Nickell et al., 2005; Piketty, 2013; Pollin, 1998). The aggregate growth in precarious employment, and the negative qualitative changes precarity engenders for many workers, have become primary justifications for basic income in the eyes of some of its most prominent advocates (Standing, 2011, 2014, 2017).

The centrality of the capitalist employment contract is not the only work-related barrier to implementing basic income. Circumventing the cultural force of the work ethic and the corresponding stigmatisation of those who do not perform socially recognised forms of work presents as another major obstacle. As Weeks (2011, p. 44) astutely observes, capitalism requires a work ethic as ‘wage incentives do not necessarily function as a stimulus to work longer hours at a more demanding pace’.

The elevated status of paid work is counterposed to the denigrated status of the unemployed, who are defined as ‘incompetents and scroungers’ (Gorz, 1999, pp. 81–2). This distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor was an important factor in the lack of broad-based public support for President Nixon's Guaranteed Annual Income in the early 1970s (Steensland, 2006). This cultural power of the work ethic and the durability of the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor must be greatly diminished, if not altogether dismantled, for basic income to achieve the requisite social backing to become a policy reality. This suggests that basic income must be widely understood as instituting a universal social right, and not as just another form of charity for a stigmatised subgroup of the population.

Could basic income provide the means to achieve the end of a life beyond the iron grip of the wage relation and the work ethic? An unconditional flow of income to all holds out the tantalising prospect of a society in which people have the means to satisfy their basic needs and pursue the end of human flourishing, whatever forms that may take. Further, for prominent basic income advocates across the ideological spectrum, basic income may also provide another type of means, or ‘tool’, for at least reducing the power and importance of the wage relation and the work ethic by affording people an ‘exit option’ from paid work (Calnitsky, 2018; Gorz, 1999; Standing, 2017; Van Parijs & Vanderborght, 2017; Weeks, 2011; Widerquist, 2013; Wright, 2010). The ‘threat of exit’, according to some, could strengthen bargaining power for workers, leading to a corresponding improvement in pay and conditions and tighter labour markets. The exit option can also be interpreted as an ‘entry opportunity’, in terms of the capacity of a continuous and unconditional flow of income to underwrite the pursuit of a vast array of human needs, desires and aspirations. Further, the extent to which basic income instantiates the right – and delivers the resources required – to move smoothly between paid work and other activity could provide partial compensation for unremunerated and under-remunerated forms of work and lower the opportunity cost of participation in this vital, gendered and undervalued form of socially reproductive activity.

The real-world utility of the exit option is downplayed or rejected by some basic income policy scholars. Birnbaum and De Wispelaere (2020, p. 1) caution that the exit strategy may prove a ‘hollow threat’ that amounts to an ‘exit trap’, due to the operations of contemporary labour markets. Birnbaum and De Wispelaere (2020, p. 3) argue that ‘exit-based worker empowerment through basic income is at best insufficient for, and in some configurations plainly counterproductive to, improving the bargaining position of precarious workers’. They argue that workers must have: the: ‘legal freedom to sever the employment relation’; ‘a feasible alternative to their current employment’; and access to an ‘additional income support to bridge a gap between leaving one job and moving onto the next’ in order to carry out an exit strategy (2020, p. 6). The authors acknowledge that basic income appears to fulfil the third condition in an automatic, ‘non-intrusive and non-bureaucratic’ manner (Birnbaum & De Wispelaere, 2020, p. 7). However, Birnbaum and De Wispelaere (2020, pp. 8–10) go on to enumerate a range of factors that militate against the case for considering basic income a cornerstone of any credible exit strategy in relation to paid employment, including the need to have a basic income ‘high enough to make an exit option feasible’ but still viable in ‘fiscal and political terms’, alongside the attraction of various non-pecuniary work-related benefits. The authors extend their analysis from the claim that basic income is likely to prove a ‘hollow threat’ of exit to the contention that basic income may constitute an ‘exit trap’. In support of this position, Birnbaum and De Wispelaere (2020, pp. 10–14) point to the disjuncture between precarious work offered on a binary ‘take it or leave it’ basis and the gradual phasing in of a basic income scheme that could lead to basic income operating more as a wage subsidy for ever more precarious jobs and an overall erosion of labour market conditions. They make an important point regarding the tension between the enhanced individual freedom regularly posited as a positive attribute of basic income and the collective organisation historically central to improvements in working conditions and living standards. Finally, in a context in which capital has access to a vast global labour market, the alternative employment option that makes the threat of exit credible may, in many circumstances, simply not exist.

The Birnbaum–De Wispelaere thesis can be critiqued for being overly productivist, conservative or pessimistic. However, their intervention should give pause to those basic income supporters who detour around the problem of the collective action required to achieve basic income and move straight to assuming both the existence of a basic income and a genuine exit option. The fact that few trade unions have exhibited any interest in basic income (see Quiggin & Henderson, 2019) raises the issue of which agent could realistically make winning a basic income that raises workers’ collective power a core labour movement project during an era of (mostly) declining union density and influence.

The formidable barriers to implementing basic income discussed above can be confronted using various strategies that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. For example, time, energy and resources could be directed at challenging normative dominance of capitalist forms of work and work culture while rebuilding trade unions and bolstering broader working-class power. Another option comes at the problem from a very different direction, with the aim of decentring work in debates, scholarship and advocacy regarding the normative justification of basic income. This strategy rests on the instantiation of a right to an ad vitam basic income that precedes and supersedes any individual entanglement with capitalist labour markets.

The right to an ad vitam basic income

This section outlines the case for a right to an ad vitam basic income that is ethically justified and politically useful. In this vision, the right to a universal, unconditional, adequate, continuous and non-withdrawable flow of income would adhere to each individual as they enter the world and remain with them until death. There is nothing new in proposals for basic income that include some form of (mostly indirect) payment for children but this is often treated as an ‘optional extra’ as opposed to the main objective of providing basic income to the adult population. The French peak body for basic income, Mouvement Français pour un Revenu de Base, does, however, include ‘ad vitam’ among its five key criteria for defining basic income (MFRB, 2023) so the principle already occupies a niche in basic income circles.

The right is justified here based on three ethical grounds and one pragmatic judgment. First, we are all subject to the ‘triple accident of birth’ in that we have no control over the time, place and social circumstances into which we are born. Disadvantage, discrimination and inequality are part of human experience from the first moments of life so there is no reason to withhold an antidote like basic income until adulthood. Second, the accumulation of wealth in capitalist society is fundamentally a social and evolutionary process, meaning it is not possible to reasonably posit any precise quantitative relationship between the discrete individual contributions made through paid work, investments and other activities and the material gains received at particular points in time. Excluding anyone, including infants, from the right to benefit from this cumulative social process is, at best, an arbitrary decision. Third, access to regular adequate income (direct or indirect) is a basic need in capitalist society throughout the life course whereas participation in paid work is not. Where they exist, the age pension and child benefits provide clear illustrations of this fact. Fourth, money incomes constitute a flexible claim over heterogeneous sets of goods and services, including leisure. For this reason, at least in a capitalist society, it is difficult to identify any clearly superior alternative to a basic income paid in cash. This does not mean a basic income would render public goods and services redundant. Greater provision of public services, such as housing, healthcare and childcare, would tend to increase the real value of a basic income. Many children may well derive greater welfare outcomes from universal basic LEGO (UBL), but providing basic income in some form of cash affords the LEGO-hating toddlers the freedom to choose alternatives.

Ferguson's (2015, pp. 183–4) framing of basic income as a key element in a potentially ‘emergent politics’ of the ‘rightful share’ is a useful reference point in terms of the politics of demanding a right to an ad vitam basic income. Ferguson (2015, p. 183) characterises this form of distributive politics as ‘a kind of claim-making that involves neither a compensation for work nor an appeal for “help” but rather a sense of rightful entitlement to an income that is tied neither to labor nor to any sort of disability or incapacity’. Ferguson (2015, p. 184) further asserts that ‘such distributive claims do not take the form of exchanges at all (neither market nor gift) but instead something more like demand sharing – a righteous claim for a due and proper share grounded in nothing more than membership (in a national collectivity) or even simply presence’.

The key point here in relation to the argument developed in this article is Ferguson's call to differentiate basic income from other forms of income based on ‘a reciprocal exchange for labor (wages) or good conduct (the premise of conditional cash transfers)’ or ‘an unreciprocated gift (assistance, charity, a helping hand)’ (Ferguson, 2015, p. 178). For Ferguson (2015, p. 178), the implications of instituting basic income on this basis are profound: ‘At a stroke, many of the most troubling problems of social distribution vanish – stigma, humiliation, shame, the lack of self-worth associated with getting “something for nothing”.’

While these claims may be considered bold, they do at least point towards opportunities for innovation in relation to political imaginaries, normative theory and political strategy once the ethical justification of basic income is disentangled from the world of capitalist work. This does not, it must be stressed, mean that scholars and advocates should cease any and all analysis of basic income in relation to paid work, or that the ‘problems’ of capitalist work for achieving basic income will simply wither away. Rather, the decentring of work in basic income debate through a call for the right to an ad vitam basic income creates the possibility of shifting the terrain on which the ethics of basic income are debated from the peculiar world of capitalist wage labour to broader conceptions of contribution, wealth creation and distribution, and the instantiation of new rights. Finally, this pivot away from capitalist work in relation to normative justifications of basic income may open up the space for devoting greater cognitive and physical resources to the tasks of political strategy and social movement building oriented towards achieving basic income implementation in practice.

Conclusion

Perhaps, the most significant choice you make in life is who your parents are so it's important to choose wisely. Having the right to an ad vitam basic income could moderate the negative effects of making a poor or unlucky choice in utero. This article has explored the potential benefits of disentangling the normative justification of basic income from the structure of the capitalist wage relation and the culture of the work ethic through making the case for a right to an ad vitam basic income. The first section surveyed the major normative justifications of basic income to highlight their respective entanglements with capitalist work at the level of theory. The second section argued that radical uncertainty regarding the future and the limitations of evidence from small-scale and policy-simulation tools make decisively countering labour-supply centred critiques of basic income difficult, if not impossible. The third section described the political and cultural barriers to basic income presented by the wage relation and the work ethic, and advised caution regarding the posited ‘exit option’ attribute of basic income. The fourth section enumerated the ethical criteria that justify a right to an ad vitam basic income and pointed to some more speculative benefits of decentring work in the basic income debate. The core argument hinged on the desirability and utility of anchoring the normative justification of basic income to criteria that precede – in a temporal sense – and supersede – in an ordinal sense – a conceptual entanglement with capital's ‘vampire-like’ lust for ‘living labour’ (Marx, 1991) and the world of capitalist work.