Caption: Professors Greg Marston, Mark Western, Erik Olin Wright, and Janeen Baxter.
This article was originally published in April 2018.
Addressing disadvantage and establishing a viable alternative to capitalism go hand-in-hand, argued Professor Erik Olin Wright, Vilas Distinguished Research Professor at University of Wisconsin, during his seminar at UQ on 26 March, 2018. Professor Wright discussed his work on unconditional basic income – the idea that means-tested, targeted welfare programs are replaced by a sufficiently liveable income given to all.
Professor Wright argued that implementing such a system “simply eliminates poverty. We have this persistent problem in market economies that there are people who are winners and losers within the competitive process. Marginalisation tends to get reproduced over time so that there are families that are marginalised economically. Generous unconditional basic income eliminates cash poverty. It solves that piece of the overall problem of marginalisation.”
However, he also acknowledged that implementing an unconditional income is not a catch-all solution. There will still be instances of people making poor decisions about where to spend their money. But one of the strengths of this system is that it improves the chances for children who grow up in troubled families. “Children in those families are going to receive an unconditional basic income and when they become adults…they get an adult basic income so their prospects are still less damaged than they are in a world where their prospects depend so heavily on how the family’s own prospects go,” said Professor Wright.
This form of unconditional basic income, Professor Wright argued, is at its heart an anti-capitalist proposal; it enables people to say no to capitalist employment, and opens up the possibilities for people to engage in productive non-capitalist relations. Ultimately, it gives everybody the freedom of choice. But it’s also an erosion of a key part of the power relations of capitalism, because it provides a viable exit option from the capitalist labour force.
So how do we transcend a system as dominant as capitalism? On the issue of achieving such change, Professor Wright said, “Imagine the world which you would really like to live in and ask are there pieces of that world that can be built in the world as it is, bring the utopian imagination of the future into the present.”
Professor Erik Olin Wright has published a number of books on the topic, including Envisioning Real Utopias (2010); American Society: how it really works (with Joel Rogers 2011 and 2015); Understanding Class (2015); and Alternatives to Capitalism (with Robin Hahnel, 2016).