Unpublished

The Unbearable Lightness of Money: Universal Basic

Income, the State and the Coloniality of the Left
Ana Cecilia Dinerstein
Introduction

In this paper, we point to the absence of a discussion of money & the state in the debate about
work, social reproduction and post-work utopias. Inextricably connected to this is a second
aim: to discuss in what ways the overestimation of the UBI as a key element of a hegemonic
project of the Left makes the PWP’s advocates neglect or diminish present serious attempts
to create what can be broadly defined as alternatives forms of social reproduction at the
grassroots and world-wide or, what Srnicek and Williams call ‘folk politics’.1
In Utopia for Realists, a popular post-work text, Rutger Bregman2 advocates a ‘massive
redistribution’ of money, as well as of time, taxation and robots. He pitches it as a slogan, ‘free
money for everyone’, similar in spirit to what others have proposed in the recent past (e.g. Guy
Standing’s ‘less labor, more self-chosen work and more real leisure! Basic income would help
achieve this).3 In Four Futures, Peter Frase also pictures cash transfers as an ‘utopian way to
a utopian destination: the “capitalist road to communism” in which the Universal Basic Income
“lubricates the slide into full communism’.4
Deployed so lightly, money becomes disconnected from its material roots. The
substantial problem of the subordination of human life to the logic of money, sustained by the
separation between the producers and the means of production as the precondition for its
existence, is swept under the carpet. Money as means of exchange existed before capitalism.
Yet, it is only in capitalism that money becomes a form of existence of human practice.
Bonefeld puts is clearly: ‘The social individual, then, subsists as such an individual not in an
“immediate” sense: it is mediated and so subsists through the commodity form. This form
represents the social relationships between people as attributes that belong to things’.5 Money
represents materially a mediation, a relation of subordination and a mode of being.
Marx revealed that in capitalist societies money is not simply the means of exchange
or an innocent mediation, but the concrete expression of value, the substance of which is
abstract labour.6 As Neary highlights, ‘the contradiction in capitalist society is not based on
the relation between labour and some other extraneous social reality, but through the forms in
which human social practice is forced to exist: as concrete and abstract labour. This
contradictory inner-connection between this dual existence of labour provides the dynamic
tension through which labour moves.7
Srnicek and Williams, meanwhile, argue that in a post-work society ‘the labour that
remains will no longer be imposed upon us by an external force - by an employer or by the
imperatives of survival, work will be driven by our own desires …, instead of by demands form
outside’.8 But the social power of money, in which is contained the imperative to work, is not
‘externally imposed’ on us. Money is the material expression of our own alienation, the
alienated expression of our own dispossession, the proof that we are compelled to work in
order to live. No social justice would be possible in a world dominated by the command of
money over the human and where human reproduction depends on money.
This is then, as argued in the abovementioned article, the distinctiveness of capitalist
society: money has freed itself from the state and constitutes the most abstract form of
capitalist property. It is the ‘supreme social power through which social reproduction is
subordinated to the reproduction of capital’.9 In this way, the distribution of free money to all
as it is proposed reproduces the fetishizing effect produced by money which has removed
itself from the state and civil society. In La Violence de la Monaie, Aglietta and Orlean suggest
that the dialectic of the forms of value can be identified with the dialectic of forms of
violence.10M oney fosters, embodies and denies the violence of expropriation. Even if a basic
income is not the final resting point of post-work thinking. the demand is effectively for the
monetisation of class struggle, something usually promoted by the state to control labour
conflict.
Paul Mason rightly recognises that the ‘basic income, as a policy, is not that radical.
Various pilot projects and designs have been touted, often by the right, sometimes by the
centre left, as a replacement for the dole with cheaper administration costs’.11 But my concern
is that he believes that ‘in the post-capitalist project’ this would not be the case because with
the latter, ‘the purpose of the basic income is radical: it is (a) to formalise the separation of
work from wages and (b) to subsidize the transition to a shorter working week, or day, or life.
The effect will be to socialise the costs of automation’ (2015: 284).
What makes the post-work thinkers claim that UBI will have an uplifting rather than sedative
effect on ‘citizens’? This is still a mystery to me. To flirt with the idea of citizenship is
problematic, for it implies we conform to Ailsa McKay and Jo Vanevey’s vision of the Universal
Basic Income as ‘”an implicit recognition that all citizens contribute to society in a variety of
ways” including contributions that “ may and may not have monetary value or even be
measurable”’12 The notion of citizenship, in this case, distorts the real nature of money as a
perverted form of human existence to present it as the means of exchange or as resources or
a form of wealth that everyone has the ‘right’ to possess in a democratic society, and therefore
something to be distributed. While with the UBI work might be separated from wages, this
does not mean that we will ‘free ourselves’ from the wage relation: UBI as a transitional step
toward the abolition of the wage does not tackle the ‘social conditions undergirding the wage
[which] would continue, with or without the wage itself’:

The wage—whether in the form of earnings or benefits, accrued as an individual or as a

household—guarantees that our labor power is reproduced and, in a world where humans
exist as labor power, the reproduction of life itself. Without the abolition of money… the UBI
merely secures the reproduction of humans on this same basis.13

Understanding the capitalist state and ‘society’

For me, the existence of the capitalist state ensures that the society of the free and equal
remains a chimera. The idea of transitional demand relies on the capitalist state to deliver it.
Difficult as it might be for many, it is important to try to imagine the dangers surrounding a
project of the Left relying on the capitalist state’s capacity to pay for the UBI. Andre Gorz, an
inspirator and campaigner for the UBI, defines the state as the sphere of necessity, as the
heteronomous space where we can locate the management of necessities to become
autonomous and free.14To be sure, the state possesses a relative autonomy and therefore the
government can act on behalf of the working class, but the state is ultimately the political form
of capital, whether the government likes it or not. But, as Bonefeld suggests, this should not
be confused with the state as an ‘agent’ of capital, for the state guarantees the general
conditions for accumulation but the latter might not be suitable for every capitalist. The state
‘is a mode of existence of the presence of labour within capital.’15
The distinctive character of the state does not lay in its disciplining powers but in the fact
that it appears above society as a deux ex machina, i.e. as an autonomous institution, when
in fact is the political form of capital. Global capital. Is ‘austerity’ not a national response to
‘monetary terrorism’ that operates at global level? 16 The lack of recognition of the class and
the internationalized character of the capitalist state are two of the most important critiques
of reformism. For example, members of the Conference of Socialist Economists criticized the
Labour Party’s Fabian ideology in the late 1970s as follows:

The expansion of the welfare state is identified with the onward march towards socialism.
Often people make a distinction between two different sides of the state. They think of the
2
 state as having a ‘good’ (i.e. socialist) side, which would include social services, health,
education and nationalised industries; and a ‘bad’ (i.e. capitalist) side, involving such
functions as defence, law and order, and aid to private industry. In this view the struggle for
socialism involves trying to expand the good side and restrict the bad side.17

The state is not a state in a capitalist society but a capitalist state. This is evident in the way
in which ‘it is built into the whole structure of capitalist social relations’ 18In post-work thinking
there is a tendency to ignore the role of the state in processes of prefiguration of alternative
social relations and sociability. It is not a case of simply getting rid of the ‘bad’ state (as
neoliberals and anarchists alike might suggest) as opposed to good civil society. The problem
for autonomous struggles is, following Brissette, how ‘to transcend the differentiation of state
and civil society, to overcome it, overthrow it, and in the process recover a wholeness within
ourselves: refusing to externalize and objectify our capacities outside ourselves and engaging
with one another as particular beings, not abstractions’.19 She reminds us that for Marx
‘‘human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into
himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and
in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and
organized his own powers as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power
from himself as political power’’ (Marx 1978 [1843] 46; emphasis in original)’.
How would post-work demands set the realm of civil society free and reorganise the state
according to a hegemonic project? UBI will intensify what Marx understood as the ‘fracturing
of individuals that accompany[ies] the differentiation between state and civil society’.20 The
problem is that the UBI strategy maintains the separation between civil society and the state
and locates change at the state level via policy. Brissette’s analysis of the meaning of
prefiguration and of the political which makes specific reference to Occupy, contests this view:

Politics as a practice of constituting collective life is not confined to “the state”. To locate
politics only within the state is to make the latter coterminous with collective life; to locate
politics in a state rendered distinct from society is to externalize freedom and alienate us
from one another and our species-being. We should read Occupy’s refusal to make
demands of the state or to organize itself for electoral impact in this light: this refusal was
not because Occupy was fundamentally apolitical or non- strategic, but because to engage
in these narrowly ‘political’ acts would divest participants of their collective power and
reinscribe that of the state.21

Brissette goes on to highlight that

Community in the state is only possible by denying part of ourselves, our particularity and
difference, in order to confront each other as abstractly equal citizens. Divorced from lived
sensuous experience, this form of community can only be illusory…Marx suggests that true
emancipation will entail an unmediated communal life in which we associate as whole
beings, in all our particularity and in full possession of our power.

Social movements and the art of organising hope

Social movements are not discarded in the PWP. The idea is to build power, and it is true to
say that grassroots movements are appreciated and included in the post-work political project
of the Left, but they are not the project. Srnicek and Williams, for instance, do not trust ‘folk
politics’: while their ‘strongest achievement’ is ‘the dissemination of feminist, anti-racist, gay-
rights and anti-bureaucratic demands… they suffer from ‘an inability or lack of desire to turn
the more radical side of these projects into hegemonic ones’.22 ‘Radical’ means here a
universalising, coordinated, state-led hegemonic project, based on directional demands. This
includes the creation of ‘the people’ as the subject for a hegemonic populist project, as
3
suggested by Srnicek and Williams. Such project is far from what I call the art of organising
hope (TAOH). TAOH problematises autonomous struggles, their relationship with the state
and ahistorical and one-dimensional understandings of radical change. It is an art that
flourishes in many occasions in extremely adverse contexts and deploys knowledge creatively
and politically to weave dreams out of misery, against the odds. TAOH means to learn how to
engage with hope and manage setbacks and endure disheartening circumstances. It is about
defying dispossession, governmental mediocrity, and uncertainty about the present and the
future. Organising in the present continuous tense captures the movement, the process and
the open character of autonomous struggles. Organising hope is a prefigurative praxis that
sees hope as a category of struggle. The ‘coordination’ of existing alternatives and the process
of creation of new ones is uncertain, but the redefinition of the political and the political
organisation is part of this process. TAOH shifts focus from the state, policy or the economy
to TAOH, without disengaging with the former and understanding the former as mediations in
the prefigurative process of creating alternatives.
I accept that ‘‘‘welfare state + UBI” is clearly not the final horizon (or ‘abstract utopia’)
of post-work politics, and would require further transformation, built on struggle, campaigning
and proposal’. My disagreement lies instead in the different understanding of utopia and the
future. My notion of ‘concrete utopia’, inspired by Ernst Bloch’s work, is anticipatory.23 A project
of the left should grasp the utopian content of present (class) struggles around social
reproduction, at a time of crisis and destruction as a starting point. Concrete utopia is praxis
and process.24
While the world of resistance is problematising modernity and demanding a departure
from modernity, Srnicek and Williams conceive of ‘left politics as a politics of modernity’. In
this way, the proposal for hegemonic projects continues to minimise, neglect or subsume non-
Western/Eurocentric resistances to a general analysis of the ‘world’ by use of Eurocentric
categories that reproduce the kind of thinking and action that many movements are struggling
against. The critique of Eurocentrism and coloniality is unfolding as a main component of the
critique of capitalism and patriarchy, through a myriad of collective actions that include
indigenous people, but also landless rural workers, women, refugees, immigrants. There are
other non-Eurocentric approaches that are critical, but it is difficult to detect them through a
Eurocentric lens such as that employed in a lot of post-work thinking.
To be sure, these alternative approaches reject the ‘coloniality of power’ 25 that has
survived and flourishes in the post-colonial world. Quijano’s term designates widespread
‘colonial’ practices that penetrate social, cultural, economic, political interactions and relations
in post-colonial times and is maintained alive in culture, politics and common sense. Today’s
struggles are calling into question ‘dominant ways of thinking and ordering of the real’ as well
as the forms in which we understand them 26The point is not to discard Euro-North-centred
way of understanding reality, but to reject its universalisation towards new geographies and
‘ecologies of knowledges’27. Any discussion of the meaning of ‘utopia’ or utopian demands
must be necessarily rooted in the concrete struggles for the affirmation of life. But more
important, it must be recognised that these struggles for the affirmation of life are rooted in a
plurality of knowledges and experiences that are making the improbable possibilities of
rediscovering and realising alternative forms of social reproduction become reality. In this
context, for example, the proposal of ‘the right to be lazy’, initially that of Paul Lafargue but
followed up by several of the current crop of post-work thinkers, may be appealing to some
but may well sound insulting to millions struggling for survival in the Global South.

Conclusion

The direction of change is projected at the grassroots, worldwide. But, of course, all depends
on how ambitious and encompassing we want a project of the Left to be. As Weeks suggests,
perhaps

4
 in light of utopia’s functions and comparison to other utopian forms…the problem with these
utopian demands is not that they are too utopian but that they are not utopian enough, that
their futures are not as richly imagined and their critiques not as fully developed as those of
other utopian forms…perhaps the greater danger is not that we might want too much but
that we don’t want enough.28

Indeed. I remain unconvinced that the distribution of money via UBI (if ever feasible) could be
a good tool to pave the way to a better society. For me, the real theoretical and practical
debate about work and utopia is taking place in the urban neighbourhoods, settlements,
rainforests, jungles, countryside, factories, harbours, ports, devastated places and even in the
middle of the ocean. These struggles for, against, beyond, work are posing fundamental
practical questions about the possibilities of articulating other forms of human social
reproduction beyond the world of money-value-capital. The state permanently intends to
incorporate, silence, domesticate, repress, i.e. translate, the anticipatory and prefigurative
nature of utopia into the grammar of order, via policy, through monetisation and the law.
Concrete utopia is shaped by those relations and dynamics, oppressions and social
forms that the state wants to obliterate. The translation of concrete utopias into policy means
much more than co-optation, recuperation and appropriation by the state. It means the
circumscription of utopia within existing parameters of legibility that modify, exclude and/or
invisibilise the emancipatory dimension of concrete utopia.29 The struggles for alternative
forms of social reproduction amidst a crisis of social reproduction of life, have brought about
concrete utopias already in practice. This means that the discussion of the meaning of utopia
must be necessarily rooted in the concrete struggles for the affirmation of life.30 Then, concrete
utopias can make the improbable possibilities of realising alternative forms of social
reproduction to become reality.
Concrete utopias provide unlimited source of praxis, knowledge and experience that do
not demand a ‘massive distribution of free money’ but navigate the contradictions that we must
face in a world where we need money in order to survive as humans. They are opening many
fronts of political possibility but remain as blind spots of the post work literature. The danger is
that they could be fatally invisibilised by badly mediated utopias such as that proposed as
awaiting beyond the imposition of a UBI.

1
Srnicek, N., & A. Williams (2015) Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a world without work. London:
Verso, p. 15.
2
Bregman, R. (2018) Utopia for realists. And How we can get there. Bloomsbury, London – New York, p. 199.
3
Cited in Dinerstein, A.C. (2014) ‘The dream of dignified work. On good and bad utopias’ Development &
Change 45(5), p. 1051
4
Frase, P. (2016) Four Futures. Life After Capitalism, Verso, London – New York, p. 145)
5
Bonefeld, W. (2002) ‘Capital, Labour and Primitive Accumulation: On class and constitution.’ In Dinerstein,
A.C. and Neary, M. (Eds.) The Labour debate. An investigation into the theory and reality of capitalist work,
Routledge, London – New York, pp. 65-88
6
On this see a classic text: Elson. D. (1979)(Ed.) Value. The Represenatyon of Labour in Capitalism, CSE
Books, Humanities Pres, London-New jersey. For a more recent discussion, see Pitts, F. H (2018) Critiquing
Capitalism Today. New ways to read Marx, Palgrave MacMillan.
7
Neary, M. (2002) ‘Labour Moves: A Critique of the Concept of Social Movement Unionism’ In Dinerstein, A.C.
and Neary, M. (Eds.) The Labour debate. An investigation into the theory and reality of capitalist work,
Routledge, London – New York, p. 174
8
Srnicek and Williams 2015, pp. 176-177
9
Clarke, S. (1988). Keynesianism, monetarism and the crisis of the state. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, p. 13-14
10
Aglietta, M. and Orléan, A. (1984) La violence de la monnaie, PUF, Economie en Liberte, Paris.
11
Mason, P. (2015) Post capitalism. A Guide to the Future, Allen Lane, Penguin, London, p. 284)
12
Cited in Weeks, K. (2011) The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork
Imaginaries, Duke University Press, Durham – London, p. 143
13
Dinerstein, A C and F. H. Pitts (2018) ‘From post-work to post-capitalism? Discussing the basic income and
struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction’. Journal of Labor & society, Vol 21(4), pp. 471-49

5
14
Dinerstein, A.C. (2014) ‘The dream of dignified work. On good and bad utopias’ Development & Change
45(5), pp. 1037-1058.
15
Bonefeld, W. (1995) ‘Social Constitution and the form of the capitalist state’. In Bonefeld, W., Gunn, R, and
K. Psychopedis (Eds.), Open Marxism Vol. I, Pluto Press, London New York, p. 121
16
Marazzi, C. (1996) ‘Money in the World Crisis: The New Basis of Capitalist Power’. In Bonefeld, W. and
Holloway, J. (eds.) Global capital, national state and the politics of money, Macmillan: London, p. 85
17
London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (LEWRG) (1980) In and Against the State. London: Pluto Press.,
p. 56
18
ibid
19
Brissette, E. (2016) ‘The prefigurative is political: on politics beyond “the state”’. In Dinerstein, A.C. (Ed.)
Social Sciences for an Other Politics. Women Theorising without parachutes, Palgrave MacMillan,
Basingstoke, pp. 109-120.
20
Brissette, 2016
21
Brissette, 2016, p. 116.
22
Srnicek and Williams (2015) p. 19
23
According to Levitas, Bloch criticised utopian thought that was not transformative, that is, that was not
anticipatory. (Levitas, R. (2008) ‘Pragmatism, Utopia and Anti-Utopia’, Critical Horizons, 9(1) p. 42-59. Bloch
argues: ‘The only seemingly paradoxical concept of concrete utopia would be appropriate here, ‘that is, of an
anticipatory kind which by no means coincides with abstract utopia dreaminess, nor is directed by the
immaturity of merely abstract utopian socialism’ (Bloch, (1986 [1959]), The Principle of Hope, The Mitt Press,
Cambridge Massachusetts, p. 146.
24
Dinerstein, A.C. (2017) ‘Concrete Utopia: (Re)producing life in, against and beyond the open veins of
capital’, Public Seminar, New School for Social Research, New York. Retrieved from
http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/12/concrete-utopia/
25
Quijano, A. (2008) ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’. In Moraña, M., Dussel, E., and
Jáuregui, C. (Eds.) Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press, 182–22
26
Icaza, R. and Vázquez, R. (2013) ‘Social Struggles as Epistemic Struggles’, Development and Change,
44(3), pp. 683–704.
27
Santos, B. de S. (2014) Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide, Rutledge, London New
York
28
Weeks, K. (2011) The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries,
Duke University Press, Durham – London, pp. 224-225).
29
Dinerstein A.C. (2015) The politics of autonomy in Latin America: The art of organising hope, Palgrave
McMillan, Basingstoke.
30
Zechner, M. and Hansen, B.R. (2015) ‚Building power in a crisis of social reproduction’, ROAR Magazine,
Issue 0, Retrieved from https:// roarmag.org/magazine/building-power-crisis-social-reproduction/