https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_...The ‘capitalist road to communism’—Philippe Van ParijsSome UBI proposals are unashamedly utopian. For example, Robert van der Veen and Philippe Van Parijs envisage a UBI as part of a much broader project of social transformation that ends with full communism and the abolition of alienated wage labour. In a 1986 paper, van der Veen and Van Parijs proposed that a basic income could be a step along ‘a capitalist road to communism.’ According to van Parijs and van der Veen, communism:
... is defined by the distribution principle “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” - which implies at least that the social product is distributed in such a way (1) that everyone's basic needs are adequately met, and (2) that each individual's share is entirely independent of his or her (freely provided) labor contribution.
Full communism is achieved when people’s contribution to production has no influence at all over the distribution. In this kind of society people freely choose the kind of work they do based on how intrinsically rewarding it is, rather than on how much it pays. In this way alienation is overcome.
According to this view, a UBI helps move society towards full communism by pushing up the price of intrinsically unrewarding work while making it possible for people to take low-paid work that they find rewarding. As American writer Peter Frase explains:
If you extrapolate this trend forward, you reach a situation where all wage labor is gradually eliminated. Undesirable work is fully automated, as employers feel increasing pressure to automate because labor is no longer too cheap. Meanwhile, the wage for desirable work eventually falls to zero, because people are both willing to do it for free, and able to do so due to the existence of a basic income to supply their essential needs.
... The long-run trajectory, therefore, is one in which people come to depend less and less on the basic income, because the things they want and need do not have to be purchased for money. Some things can be produced costlessly and automatically, as 3-D printing and digital copying technologies evolve into something like Star Trek’s replicator. Other things have become the product of voluntary cooperative activity, rather than waged work. It therefore comes to pass that the tax base for the basic income is undermined—but rather than a crisis, as in the hands of basic income critics, this becomes the path to utopia.
Forum
Pages: 1 
