AJ

Yeah, I think it depoliticizes needs. This is also why they like the UBI, because this is very much a product of the Left’s anti-normative moment in the 1960s and 1970s where the model of the Fordist wage earner was contested by all these alternative social movements.

What they love about the UBI is that it’s purely a discretionary sum, which you get at the beginning of the month, and there is no sort of, to use a fancy Foucauldian term, there’s no kind of biopolitical imperative inherent in that sum of money. You just go to the market, and if you want to spend it on drugs, if you want to spend it on food, if you want to spend it on actually building something, you can do all of those things. There’s no prescriptive moment in that notion of the UBI.

But if you really want to be that anti-normative, at the same time you have to be highly individualist, so there’s no question of how needs can possibly be social. And at the same time, if you’re completely anti-normative and you still want to regulate social life, I don’t see how you have any institution left but the market, because the market is the primary or the ultimate anti-normative institution. It can cater to any need, as long as you’re structurally coerced into working.

There’s this fantastic book by Melinda Cooper called Family Values, which is also about this moment in the 1960s where you have the rise of the anti-normative left. And she says that there’s an anti-normative notion of welfare that comes about and she relates it to the UBI. But at the same time, I think, well, that’s just contradictory. An anti-normative notion of welfare doesn’t exist. Welfare is always an intrinsically normative notion. I think there’s a big difference between rejecting normativity and contesting certain existing forms of normativity and seeing them as exclusionary.

I think that’s the same thing with the UBI. I think the UBI sees a real problem, namely the sort of false forms of mediation, or false forms of normativity. But instead of seeking to broaden or universalize those norms, it just rejects them as such, and it has to flee to the market, because there is just no other institution that can actually populate regular social life except for the market if you’ve given up on norms.