Universal Basic Income

 I came across a chart that compares the rise in productivity with the rise in workers' wages and overall compensation from 1949 to 2009 in the USA. The graphic clearly shows that while the former and latter were more or less the same till the late 1970s, thereafter from the 1980s there is a rising hiatus between the much higher rise in productivity and the minimal rise in worker's wages and overall compensation. This hiatus must have increased further in the decade and a half since.

This is primarily because technological advancement has made it possible since the 1980s for corporations to outsource manufacturing and service work and so avoid the employment of workers in permanent jobs where they can unionise to increase their wages and benefits. Karl Marx showed that the exchange value of goods and services produced, depended on the socially necessary labour time required to produce them. This social determination of labour time is not simply a function of supply and demand and technological productivity but is also dependent on negotiation between the working class and the capitalists. Thus, over time the proportion of the value created that would be given to the workers in the form of better wages and working conditions, was decided by contestation through trade unions between the workers and capitalists and increasing workers’ power resulted in the State also legislating to provide for regulation of the capitalists. Consequently, the absence of unionisation in the large informal sector and the roll-back of unionisation from the formal sector as has happened since the 1980s all over the world, mean that there is extra-economic extraction of surplus value from workers within the capitalist system. Matters have been compounded by the fact that on the one hand consumerism is being aggressively promoted among the workers also and so they are more interested in working long hours to earn more money to satisfy their consumerist desires rather than organise to improve their wages and limit their exploitation and on the other welfare measures are being curtailed and so the lives of the workers is being made precarious.
This precarity of the working class can be countered only by ensuring that they have a universal basic income from the state. Given the increasing tendency of exploitation by corporations, which is difficult to roll back, the state has to step in and provide a universal basic income to all adults so as to both provide a dignified life to workers and shore up the demand in the economy. The eternal problem for capitalism is that it will face the crisis of over production from time to time as there is not enough demand for the goods and services that are produced due to the poverty of the vast exploited majority and so the only way to counter this is for the state to guarantee a life long universal basic income for all adults.

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