Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income

In their new book, Welfare for Mar­kets: A Global History of Basic Income, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas trace the rise in popularity of a basic income. In a much-invoked turn of phrase throughout the book, they describe how basic income became a proposal for “welfare without the welfare state.” Historicizing basic income, Jäger and Zamora Vargas seek to disturb the popular common sense of the idea, exposing the normative teleological assumptions underpinning the arguments of its advocates. Crafting this genealogy, they invoke the spirit of Foucault to dispute a policy that he himself supported. In this, they take up his call, “to short circuit or disqualify systems of power, including even possibly the ones my books come out of, well, all the better” (Foucault quoted in Eribon 1991, 237).

Jäger and Zamora Vargas begin the book by exposing the mythopoetics of the standard historical narratives of basic income. They castigate proponents for presenting basic income as a timeless vision for social justice through invocations of precursors from More (1551) to Paine (1797). Jäger and Zamora Vargas argue that this imagined lineage obscures the context and contingency of earlier historical moments. They argue that the distinct attributes of the modern conception of basic income—as a universal monetary grant to individuals—are distinct from the imaginaries of figures like Paine. Specifically, they suggest Paine belonged to a republican tradition of agrarianism that sought to secure political economic stability through the universal distribution of land. Paine did not envision people simply receiving “free money,” but expected them to be productive on the land based on “the centrality of a work ethic to this republican order” (p. 16).

Eschewing such historical ante­cedents, Jäger and Zamora Vargas root contemporary discussions of basic income in Friedman’s proposals of the early 1940s. They stress the centrality of Friedman’s critique of the New Deal welfare state to this vision. As Jäger and Zamora Vargas describe, “the ruins left by the two world wars had buried the prewar dedication to laissez-faire and removed parts of human life from the market altogether” (p. 4). Friedman was critical of the normative assumptions of welfare economics, including the explicit efforts to control people’s behavior through mechanisms of social security. As an alternative, he posed the market as a mechanism of freedom, permitting the expression of individual preferences and choice. Rather than collective provisioning in kind for particular needs, such as public education, he argued that the state fiscal system could guarantee an income floor. This offered a means of ensuring minimal provision for people’s needs that would not impede the market.

This proposal had little resonance with the collectivist mood of the 1940s but would gain popularity in subsequent decades. Jäger and Zamora Vargas describe the 1940s as a period where labor organizations and mass parties were struggling for the removal of “whole areas of our social life from the tyranny of the market, to be handed over to the state or run by workers themselves” (p. 5). Following Jäger and Zamora Vargas, the basic income idea only began to gain traction in the Cold War climate of the 1950s and 1960s. In this context, Friedman’s (1962) Capitalism and Freedom became a surprise bestseller, selling a half-million copies. His negative income tax became a serious proposal to debate.

Jäger and Zamora Vargas argue that the appeal of basic income in the 1960s reflected the coalescence of a number of factors. The fiscal integration of modern society, with the overwhelming majority integrated into the cash economy and tax system, normalized the notion of monetary transfers. Simultaneously, they suggest “the decline of public sector provision created lasting momentum for cash-based solutions” (p. 5). Across the political spectrum, there was an emerging consensus that paternalist government programs were indirect and expensive but also frequently ineffective and often aggravated suffering. Economists following Friedman had become increasingly critical of “normative economics” that sought to ethically intercede in the market. On the other hand, the New Left became “skeptical of old welfare order, premised on an exclusionary male model of a working breadwinner” (p. 6). Civil rights leaders and feminist activists sought guaranteed individual funds rather than more state programs centered on the white patriarchal family norm. Jäger and Zamora Vargas lament the retreat of the planning state and the idealization of market choice.

Telling the European version of this story, particularly focusing on France and the Netherlands, Jäger and Zamora Vargas largely repeat the same narrative arc for the rise of support in basic income. The spirit of 1968 is the inflection point here. For Jäger and Zamora Vargas, this political current “destabilized the centrality of the ‘producer’ in the socialist traditions … and pitted themselves against the commandeering state” (p. 96). The fall of the traditional organizations of the working class—unions and labor parties—is key to the narrative. Here Jäger and Zamora Vargas are explicit that thinkers such as Foucault and Guattari exemplify the left political abdication of the state and idealization of escape. In this analysis, they strongly echo Dean and Villadsen’s (2016) analysis in State Phobia and Civil Society.

Jäger and Zamora Vargas’s critique of direct cash transfers in the Global South also follows a similar line. They chart a shift in global development discourse to monetized definitions of poverty that abstracts it from the broader political and economic structures that produce inequality. With the neoliberal privatization of the state and abandonment of state-led industrialization efforts, increasingly development initiatives focus less on concrete development goals and more on distributing cash directly to those in need. This amounts, in another of Jäger and Zamora Vargas’s catchphrases, to “development without development.”

The book ends with a brief coda addressing the newest flourish of basic income proposals associated with big tech. Suffice it to say, they interpret this as very much a continuation of the state-phobic approach to welfare that they link to basic income discussions since the 1940s.

In their history of basic income, Jäger and Zamora Vargas are clearly critical of the concept. They espouse a lingering nostalgia for the early twentieth-century politics of labor. Included within this, perhaps unexpectedly, is a lament for the lost transactional politics of social bargaining centralized through mass political parties.

Their historicization has certain critical lapses, particularly with their approach to antiracist and feminist activism, as well as their neglect of Indigenous, queer, and disability rights movements. Although undoubtedly these movements were shaped by the political context of their emergence, they are nonetheless substantive critiques of the capacity of the state to act as a vehicle for justice. Throughout their text, Jäger and Zamora Vargas assume that critiques of the state are unwarranted, and state expansion is normatively preferable for justice.

Their account does not substantively engage broader political concerns around colonialism and the military apparatuses of the state. Situating basic income as primarily a response to late-twentieth-century political concerns, they neglect the relationship between contemporary critiques of the state and longer histories of people contesting modernist hubris and its alienating effects. I would argue (and have argued) that understanding both critiques of modernity and their limits needs to underpin discussions of basic income (Lawhon and McCreary 2023). Advocation for basic income links to a longer critique of not just the effects of automation, but also the alienation of labor (Weekes 2011). The idealization of work neglects the extent to which it is a relation that was forced on people through the suppression of other political economic possibilities.

Jäger and Zamora Vargas aptly point to the extent to which the market becomes naturalized as the vehicle for the expression of choice among some advocates of basic income. They are right to critique the expanding commodification of life. It is possible, however, to imagine both forms of state regulation that could reembed markets within social relationships and ways that basic income could foster life beyond the market. In the end, I found Welfare for Markets an enjoyable read that adroitly pointed to the free-market assumptions of some basic income advocates. For me, though, the lesson remains that basic income cannot be treated as a panacea, not that we can or should return to notions of justice focused on the singular identity of the worker.