We are All Housewives

This paper proposes to orient contemporary debates over universal basic income (UBI) to broader social theory in the Marxist and Marxist-feminist traditions. Drawing on theories of labor decommodi cation, market socialism, and social reproduction, as well as more publicfacing debates over policy, the purpose of this analysis is to better clarify the stakes a burgeoning left politics might have in pursuing the demand for UBI. Following key justi cations put forward by chief proponents of the Wages for Housework movement for pursuing seemingly impractical, impossible, and politically ambiguous demands, I argue that UBI is best treated as a political perspective with both reactionary and revolutionary undercurrents. Urging caution, not dismissal, I refute more conventional economic analysis leading to common refrains against UBI, and suggest possible ways to bend UBI toward more explicitly socialist aims. Socialism seems to be making a comeback in American politics, although no one is quite sure what it means. There is perhaps no document more symptomatic of a general level of confusion surrounding the concept and history of socialism, though, than the recently published White House report, “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism.” Within the rst several pages, the authors give a lengthy explanation on how “spending someone else’s money” (and even spending “your money” on someone else) causes inef ciencies, and then proceed to “show” how inferior growth rates in the Soviet Union and lower cancer survival rates in the EU are both part of the same pernicious phenomenon. These bizarre parallels are accompanied by others, ranging from the implication that Vladimir Lenin and Elizabeth Warren share a similar set of political commitments, to the notion that Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-All come from the same bucket of socialist policy ideas. According to the US Council of Economic Advisors, socialism encompasses everything from Soviet agricultural policies to high taxes on pickup trucks in Finland and other Scandinavian countries. Throughout the report is a repeated emphasis on a particular fetish of economists: gross domestic product (GDP). The authors, for example, predict that GDP would fall by 9 percent, or about $7,000 GDP per capita, if Medicare-for-All were nanced through higher taxes. While GDP tends to be presented as the simplest proxy for the overall health of the economy, this usage tends to obfuscate what GDP measures and what can cause it to go up or down. Many policy analysts have taken to task the profound de ciencies in using GDP as indicator of a nation’s well-being and prosperity. As Mijin Cha at Demos writes, GDP “cannot distinguish between a positive economic indicator, like increased spending due to more disposable income, and a negative economic indicator, like increased spending on credit cards due to loss of wages or declining real value of wages.” Rather, GDP measures “raw economic activity,” without any judgement as to whether that activity is bene cial to society. In the case of Medicare-for-All, a decline in GDP per capita isn’t just likely, but desirable, as it would largely re ect a decline in healthcare costs. 1