As we start getting into the activation work of After Capitalism, it will be necessary to make some choices. Over the last decade or so, I’ve used universal basic income a lot, primarily because it’s more well known than its cousin – universal basic services. I don’t know that a choice is necessary – perhaps it makes sense to have both, or to try both and see.

This work on Universal Basic Services (UBS) by Ana Coote and Andrew Percy is part of “The Case For” series with several other juicy After Capitalism topics including: a Maximum Wage, Universal Basic Income, Carbon Dividends, People’s Quantitative Easing, and Community Wealth Building.

The goal of UBS is that everyone has access to three fundamentals to a successful democracy: security, opportunity, and participation. Breaking it down:

• Universal: everyone is entitled to services that are sufficient to meet their needs, regardless of ability to pay.
• Basic: services that are essential and sufficient (rather than minimal) to enable people to meet their needs.
• Services: collectively generated activities that serve the public interest.

The authors observe that central to their case is the collective ideal, which has been losing out to the politics of individual choice and market competition. Since the 1970s, government policies have chipped away at the social and toward the individual. The essence of capitalism IS the individual. One might say capitalism tends to the social only to stave off criticism or attacks against its worst excesses. It does the social because it has to, not because it wants to.

The authors support the concept of social citizenship, which holds that every member of society has positive economic and social rights as well as the more traditional negative rights (protection from harm, e.g., civil liberties).

They believe that the collective provision of services to meet shared needs is worth as much or more to us than the money we earn through employment.

The authors have no illusions about grafting this proposal onto the status quo. Integral to the idea, as we hope we have made clear, is a new kind of relationship. I was intrigued to see a connection to commoning.  

• Co-production and commoning challenge the very idea of a ‘service’ because they focus on people being part of the action to meet their own needs, rather than simply having services delivered to them.

What’s included

A key challenge is deciding what is and is not included in the scope of UBS. There is a wider range of ideas about how far to extend … food, housing, land, transport, ICT, etc. The idea is that UBS services are accessible and affordable for all, according to need, not ability to pay. There will be meaningful participation in designing and delivering services by residents and service users. There will be clear rules and procedures for fair and inclusive eligibility and entitlement.

Some examples include:

• UK National Health Service (NHS) is more than 70 years old and still going strong. It offers health care to all who need it, free at the point of use and paid for through taxation.
• Finland’s constitution guarantees economic, social and cultural (ESC) rights, such as the right to work, education, indispensable subsistence and care, social security and adequate social, health and medical services, which the authorities are required to guarantee and promote.
• In Barcelona, for example, Barcelona en Comú, described as a ‘citizen platform ’, has led the city government in promoting what it calls a collaborative economy, including many hundreds of cooperatives and other community – led and public interest organizations .
• Cleveland Ohio’s Evergreen Cooperative Initiative works with local businesses, foundations and public sector organizations to transform poor neighborhoods.

Case for UBS over UBI

The term UBS emerged in October 2017 in a report from the Institute for Global Prosperity and offers an alternative to the more well-known Universal Basic Income. The case for UBS over UBI by the authors is:

• We can find no evidence that UBI could ever live up to the more ambitious claims that are made for it.
• If the balance of investment in any country were to swing away from services towards cash payments, the value of the social wage would fall, hitting the poor hardest.
• Giving money to individuals to spend as they wish does nothing to bring them together or build a sense of common purpose.

While there is a rich literature on the ways in which systems based on individualism, choice and competition weaken the values of social citizenship and undermine solidarity, definitive studies of the efficiency of public services are rare. 

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The author’s estimate that the total additional annual expenditure required for the services we propose, if implemented all at once, would be around 4.3 % of GDP in a typical OECD country, “which is peanuts compared to military spending.”

• The main options for generating public funds for UBS are raising existing taxes, creating new taxes, borrowing, and redistributing funds from other areas of government spending.
• For the United Kingdom and similar low-tax countries, there is considerable fiscal space for a UBS costing an additional 4 % of GDP.
• Although UBS is an incremental program, it presents a radical challenge to today’s dominant political and economic paradigm.

They do point out alternatives to direct state control and taxation that look at the role of organizations providing services. These include multinational corporations, small and medium-sized businesses, social enterprises, cooperatives, user-led organizations, charities, and community groups organized around neighborhoods … with mechanisms including partnerships, contracts, grants, investments, philanthropy, and volunteering.

Critiques

The typical objections:

• UBS would lead to big government, centralized power, paternalism and social engineering.
• The state is not competent to realize the vision.
• There is lack of clarity about how decisions would be made. It could lead to further accumulation by big business.
• It would run into strong resistance from those with an interest in the status quo.
• It is incompatible with capitalism and requires radical transformation. [italics mine]
• Last but not least is cost.

In sum

So the basic challenge is where to give people a “social” stipend in the form of free services (UBS). UBS belongs in our “tool kit.” I’m not ready to say UBS is better than UBI or vice versa. The strongest point for UBS is that it does seem to do more for those at the bottom. I would like to explore further how UBS might integrate with communing proposals. The challenge, for both, however, is being caught in the current paradigm, which of course is why the journey to After Capitalism is like to be a long one. – Andy Hines