Elaborations of universal basic income in different societal projects

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Elaborations of Universal Basic Income in

Different Societal Projects

Anastasia Ilieva

12160857

University of Amsterdam

MSc in Sociology

Track: Social Problems and Social Policy

Supervisor: dr. Johan De Deken

Second Reader: dr. Paul Raekstad

August 2019

Amsterdam

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Abstract

This master’s thesis aims to analyse and compare elaborations of universal basic income (UBI) – periodic, unconditional cash payments to everyone – in four societal projects: neoliberalism, feminism,

libertarianism, and socialism. Its research question is to determine to what extent the visions of UBI in these projects are the same, and to what extent they are compatible with each other – not only in terms of justifications, but also with regard to policy specifics, such as level of payment and substitution of other welfare programs.

The method for answering the research question is document analysis of publications on UBI, affiliated with the Basic Income Earth Network: an anthology, “Arguing for Basic Income” (1992), and the first 7 issues of the Basic Income Studies journal (2006-2008). After a selection procedure, 14 short-form contributions were analysed through the lens of justification and of policy details, and classified into one of the four societal projects. Subsequently, an ideal type for each project’s elaboration of UBI was constructed on the basis of the texts classified as belonging to it.

After the analysis, it was concluded that the elaborations in the four projects are substantially dissimilar and in some cases incompatible with each other, as the goals they wish to achieve through UBI are disparate. The neoliberal case for UBI views it as a substitute for welfare programs or as a policy that enables the elimination of employment protections which hamper the operation of markets and production. The feminist case for UBI defends it on the basis of the poverty protection it provides to (mostly female) informal caregivers and single-parent households, while viewing it as insufficient on its own for diminishing the gendered division of labour. The libertarian societal project views UBI either as a policy that enhances autonomy and self-ownership, or as a scheme for redistributing wealth generated through unfair appropriation of common resources. In the socialist societal project, UBI establishes decommodification: providing individuals with the genuine freedom to choose whether to sell their labour power, rather than being forced to do so in order to survive.

The results of the research indicate that the policy of UBI cannot be implemented in a manner that would be considered compatible with the visions of a good society held by all UBI supporters.

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Charles Murray, “Guaranteed Income as a Replacement for the Welfare State” 59 John Baker, “All Things Considered, Should Feminists Embrace Basic Income?” 64 Julieta Elgarte, “Basic Income and the Gendered Division of Labour” 66 Almaz Zelleke, “Institutionalizing the Universal Caretaker Through a Basic Income?” 69

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The Case for UBI in the Neoliberal Societal Project 73

The Case for UBI in the Libertarian Societal Project 74

The Case for UBI in the Feminist Societal Project 75

The Case for UBI in the Socialist Societal Project 77

Discussion 79

Conclusion 80

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Introduction

The point of intellectual curiosity that prompted this master thesis lies in a peculiar experience I have had in the past several years: encountering discussions of universal basic income (UBI) – periodic

unconditional cash payments to everyone, regardless of employment status or accumulated means – as both a socialist idea and a profoundly anti-socialist one; as both just and unjust in a libertarian framework; as both a policy that has the potential to generate higher productivity, and as a tool for managing the negative effects of degrowth. Fascinated by what I perceive as a major disagreement over which societal project would in fact be advanced by the introduction of a UBI, I wanted to research how advocates for different societal projects make the case for the policy, and whether there are significant differences in what they view as its potential beneficial effects. In addition, I was interested in whether most arguments for UBI actually suggest roughly the same policy, or the policy specifications are rather different for each societal project. This thesis is the result of my inquiry.

Although it will be problematised during the course of the pages that follow, a rudimentary definition of universal basic income is “a policy for providing each (adult) person with a periodic cash transfer of some amount of money, regardless of their income, employment status, or other conditions”. The “U” in “UBI” can stand for either “unconditional” or “universal”, with some differences in emphasis on its departure from either conditional benefits or means-tested ones. Regardless of the precise phrasing, there is no single agreed-upon view on how such a policy is to be implemented; how it should be financed; and what its effects would be.

Research questions

The construction of this research follows from the proposition that arguments for the merits of UBI, made from the standpoint of profoundly different ideas of what sort of society should be pursued, would in turn substantially differ from each other. In other words, although the idea of a basic income is relatively simple on its own, different authors would justify it in dissimilar ways on account of what they think the good society is. Similarly, there would be distinctions in the proposed implementations of the policy in terms of financing, eligibility, level of payment, and so on, as authors who support one idea of the good society would want to achieve certain goals with an introduction of UBI, while other advocates of UBI with a different view of the good society would pursue a different set of goals.

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Proceeding from this assumption, the central research question of the thesis – how is UBI elaborated in different societal projects? – has two aspects: one of justifications in terms of what a good society entails, and another of the policy specifics of UBI.

The first aspect pertains to the fundamentals of the given societal project itself: how is UBI expected to advance the realisation of what is considered to be a good society in that context? Do advocates of different projects place an emphasis on different aspects of UBI? Do they envision different effects of distributing unconditional benefits to all? Are there dissimilarities in the identified mechanisms which are expected to lead to the good society?

The second aspect of the research question is concerned with what the details of the proposed policy are for different societal projects: who is actually considered to be eligible for the universal benefit? Are children included? Is the policy envisioned as a substitution of a current system of social security and means-tested income assistance, or as an addition to it? How should it be financed? What is the

recommended level of the payment? Are there any possible negative side effects?

Methodology and data

As the study of UBI elaborations undertaken here is focused on the differentiation of justifications and policy details between disparate societal projects, I elected to examine texts that support the introduction of UBI, written by authors who advocate for dissimilar societal projects. The approach taken is to analyse the arguments and proposals, and subsequently organise them into a set of ideal types of UBI

justifications and policy details in relation to particular societal projects. The aim of this synthesis is to elucidate how UBI fits into, for instance, the libertarian societal project, and how that version of UBI is different – both in terms of justification and policy implementation – from the version elaborated by supporters of, for example, the socialist societal project.

The method chosen in this thesis for pursuing the research questions is that of qualitative document analysis. Following Bowen’s (2009) overview of the method, here I will offer a justification for the source of documents I have chosen and an outline of the selection procedure for each document. As the focus of the thesis is on the variety of justifications, there was a need to identify one or several sources of argumentative cases for UBI from a number of authors who support different societal projects. A preliminary literature review identified several dozens of books written in support of UBI, but a thorough investigation of them would have been impossible in the scope of this master thesis. An approach of selecting several of these books and examining them in detail was considered and rejected, because it would have meant sacrificing a focus on relatively wide variety of justifications for a focus on

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in-depth examination of a very small number of documents (books). Moreover, selecting only a few books from the large number of all which deal with UBI would either have had to be based on a

randomised selection procedure that would have harmed the efforts into final synthesis of the analysis, or would have been a product of my own biases and prevented me from uncovering presentations of UBI that do not fit into my preconceptions.

Accordingly, it was decided that what the corpus for the analysis should consist of is a larger number of short-form contributions, rather than a small number of long-form books. The preliminary literature review identified one anthology which contains short chapters from authors who support different societal projects: “Arguing for Basic Income” (1992), edited by prominent UBI advocate Philippe Van Parijs. This book, whose contributions offer what Van Parijs in his introduction calls “competing justifications for basic income,” comprises a large proportion of the corpus to be analysed in this thesis.

A further source of articles in support of UBI became the Basic Income Studies journal. This academic journal is affiliated with the organisation Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), a network of academics, activists and people interested in basic income, whose goal is to educate about basic income and foster debates on it. BIEN was founded in 1986 by Philippe Van Parijs and has organised international

conferences every two years, with the aforementioned anthology “Arguing for Basic Income” being one of the books published as a result (Basic Income Earth Network, nd). In 2006, the network established the Basic Income Studies (BIS) journal, which publishes articles that engage with the topic of basic income. Since 2006, the journal has had on average two issues a year, with each issue containing approximately 8-12 short-form articles (outside of introductions and book reviews). An appraisal of the whole archive of the journal’s 28 issues so far was unfortunately beyond the limits of this thesis. I elected to limit my research to the first 7 issues of its run, with the other 21 remaining of interest to a future research project. What is analysed in the pages that follow is not, however, all of the chapters of “Arguing for Basic Income” and all of the articles in the first 7 isues of BIS. The selection procedure bears some discussion here.

In order for an article or a chapter to be selected for analysis, it had to meet several conditions. Firstly, it must present a positive case for basic income, rather than a rejection of the policy or a critique of another case for UBI. Arguments against UBI do have a place in consideration of how the policy would or would not advance the establishment of a certain conception of a good society, but they are outside of the scope for the thesis and its focus on the variety of arguments in its defence.

Secondly, in order to be included, an article must contain at least one (though ideally both) of the aspects of UBI proposals under consideration in this thesis: either a justifications of it, or policy details of its

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proposed implementation. Very few of the articles analysed here engage with concrete specifics of UBI, such as its precise level or method of financing.

Thirdly, in case an article is solely concerned with the justification or potential positive effects of UBI, without any specific policy details, it needs to present its case for UBI with an argument or justification that is considerably different from arguments employed by articles already included in the corpus. Although this procedure biases the sample in favour of earlier contributions, this does not represent a significant flaw, as the focus of the research is to present a diversity of justifications, rather than the best existing case for each justification.

Determining whether an article meets these conditions required different levels of engagement with the text. Some contributions whose very title presented them as a rebuttal for a previous argument for UBI were rejected with very superficial reading. Others were rejected on account of the abstract that painted the article as presenting a case against UBI. The contributions that required the most in-depth reading before being rejected were the ones which discussed the philosophical or ethical implications of UBI without any policy specific, while in the end using arguments that I deemed to have already been presented by other contributions in the corpus. In the end, out of the 12 chapters in “Arguing for Basic Income”, 6 were discarded for the analysis. Out of the 63 articles (leaving aside book reviews and introductions) in the first 7 issues of the Basic Income Studies Journal, 8 were chosen for the analysis. Among those which were discarded are, notably, most of the articles in the Debate section of Volume 1, Issue 2 (2006) which argued not for UBI per se, but for launching UBI experiments; most of the articles in the Debate section of Volume 2, Issue 2 (2007), which considered UBI without policy specifics and in relation to the “republican legacy” using arguments that were mostly already considered in White (2006) and Noguera (2006); and an article by Claus Offe (2008) in Volume 3, Issue 1 (2008) which does not present a singular case for UBI from a specified societal project, but rather offers an overview of a large variety of arguments for UBI from many different standpoints.

In the end, the selection procedure yielded a corpus of 14 articles, to be analysed in Chapter 2.

Approach of the analysis

In order to illustrate the diversity of UBI elaborations in relation to a number of societal projects, this thesis proceeds in three general steps, presented as three chapters. Firstly, the societal projects under consideration – neoliberalism, libertarianism, socialism, and feminism – are discussed, as a framework for the subsequent analysis. Secondly, every article in the corpus is classified into one of the projects from the

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framework. Thirdly, on the basis of the classification in the second chapter, ideal types of each of the projects’ cases for UBI are constructed.

The framework in Chapter 1 is a product of an attempt at a more rigorous foundation for differentiating between standpoints of UBI supporters who hold contrasting ideas of what a good society is. This marks the approach taken in this thesis as iterating between deductive and inductive methodology. Preliminary engagement with arguments for UBI from a variety of standpoints led to the inductive construction of an initial set of several contrasting societal projects into which it has been argued it might fit. As part of the work in this research, I then peruse definitions of each of these four societal projects. The precise choice of the four societal projects is inevitably arbitrary to a certain extent. The rationale for it is a prioritisation of contrast: the neoliberal societal project is arguably mutually exclusive with the socialist one. The libertarian project, I will argue, operates with a set of assumptions that are distinct from both. The

feminist societal project has branches that can be regarded as closely aligned with either of the other three projects, but at the same time has its own prime concerns which are often not addressed in therein. The choice of these four projects does not claim to be the best classificatory framework for UBI

proposals, but has some advantages for a thesis that is interested in the “competing justifications” for UBI and the underlying rifts between supporters of nominally the same policy. A more inductive approach, such as that of grounded theory in its objectivist variant of constructing categories from the data rather than from theories and preconceptions (Glaser, Strauss & Strutzel, 1968; Strauss, 1987; Ong, 2012), would have resulted in another set of societal projects. The rationale for constructing the framework before the data analysis, rather than vice versa, lies in the belief that in order to be able to classify defences of UBI into specific societal projects, one needs to have engaged with the foundations of said project in a rigorous manner, beyond one’s preconceptions of what each of them entails.

After the establishing of the theoretical framework of societal projects, the next step of the analysis is the classification of the corpus of articles into it. The conceptualisation of how this classification should be performed, in contrast to the subsequent operation of the construction of ideal types, is based on Kees van Kersbergen and Barbara Vis’ discussion (2015, 116) of the differences between a typology and ideal types. A classificatory framework (which, in the context of this thesis, I consider to be the equivalent of a typology in Kersbergen and Vis’ terms) aids in reducing complexity to something more ordered and comprehensible. The set of categories that comprise the framework need to be mutually exclusive and exhaustive, i.e. every instance of the data has to be classifiable to one category. An ideal type, in contrast, is a theoretical construct to which a given instance of the data can correspond to a different extent, or not at all (Kersbergen & Vis, 2015, 117). Thus, the argument for UBI must fit into a category of the

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classificatory framework of societal projects, but it needn’t necessarily correspond to the ideal-typical construction of what this societal project’s case for UBI is.

In Chapter 2, each of the articles from the corpus is summarised and classified into a societal project. In addition, for each article, I attempt to answer a series of predefined policy questions on what the details of UBI should be, according to the explicit description of the author.

In Chapter 3, four ideal types are constructed on the basis of the classification from Chapter 2. Each of these types, linked to the societal projects from Chapter 1, contains a justification, a description of the merits of UBI for said project’s vision of the good society, and policy details.

After these three chapters, there follows a discussion of the findings and their implication for research and advocatism of UBI.

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Chapter 1: Theoretical Framework

The purpose of this chapter is to present some core definitions used throughout the thesis, such as “societal project”, and to discuss what the four societal projects in the classificatory framework entail in general: neoliberalism, libertarianism, feminism, and socialism.

Societal project

To begin with, the term “societal project” warrants some discussion. I utilise it to refer to visions of how society should be organised. This definition encompasses a broad range: from far-future utopianism to near-term incremental reformism. In the same vein, a societal project’s short-term policy proposals might be advanced as a stepping stone towards a more ideal future, in which the conditions that necessitate such policies would be nonexistent. For instance, a version of a feminist societal project might have the short-term goal of putting in place an anti-discriminatory legal framework that protects women from being untreated unfairly, while its long-term goals would be to construct a society that is not organised on the basis of gender. For the purposes of this thesis, both goals would be classified as part of a feminist societal project.

A further consideration is the relationship between terms such as “political movement”, “political standpoint” and “societal project”. The preferred choice of terminology (“societal project”) reflects the focus of my research on the articulations of UBI as they pertain to views of how society should be organised and what policies should be enacted, rather than discussions of the extent to which UBI fits in certain political traditions.

Essentially contested concept

All of the societal projects discussed here, as well as the notion of UBI itself, can be considered as what W. B. Gallie terms “essentially contested concepts”, defined as “concepts the proper use of which

inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users” (Gallie, 1956, 169). The notion does not merely denote vague concepts or concept whose meaning is regularly disputed. In the original definition, Gallie lists four conditions for a concept to be essentially contested: 1) it must be “appraisive” and thus related to value judgements; 2) it must refer to something internally complex; 3) its

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appraisal must therefore be based on a judgement of how its different components contribute to its overall value; 4) significant changes to the concept must be seen as permissible, depending on circumstances. Some of the examples of essentially contested concepts that Gallie provides are “art”, “democracy”, and “the Christian tradition”. In addition to those, I argue that every concept that denotes a societal project fulfills the four requirements. All societal projects contain a value judgement (condition 1), as they articulate what their proponents see as a good society. They are also complex (condition 2), in that any serious elaboration on an ideal or at least better organisation of society contains a multitude of

interconnected features and mechanisms. Different people can consider a different set of features and mechanisms as the most essential or beneficial (condition 3). Lastly, outside of the strictly utopian variety, societal projects have some degree of flexibility in connection to changing circumstances in society (condition 4).

The analytical utility of the idea of an essentially contested concept for the purposes of this research project is the inherent impossibility of exhaustively defining what precisely any given societal project entails, at least if it has more than several advocates. Viewing a project as not merely contested but

essentially so implies that “there is no one clearly definable general use... [of the concept] which can be

set up as the correct or standard use” (Gallie, 1956, 168). Following this insight, the discussions below of what any societal project encompasses are necessarily broad, allowing for different definitions and different perceptions as to what stands at the core of the project. Those outlines are presented here merely in order to provide a foundation for the subsequent classifications of UBI elaborations into one or another societal project.

In addition, UBI is in itself an essentially contested concept. Outlining the arguments in defence of the policy is a consideration of how its value is judged (condition 1). For instance, one might claim that UBI is a worthy policy goal because it increases workers’ bargaining power, or that it is actually harmful, because it would lead to dismantling labour market regulations and thus harm workers – both are value judgements on the

Moreover, although at first glance UBI is a simple concept, it reveals itself to be quite complex, once questions of level of income and funding of it are brought up (condition 2): should children be entitled to it, and what are the mechanisms through which it should be funded? Scrutinising how UBI fits into the goals of a particular project, and what the expected merits of it are, reflects how different proponents consider disparate potential results as the ones that make the policy desirable (condition 3). For the sake of illustration, one advocate can identify the most positive feature of UBI as its abolishment of the dignity-destroying institution of workfare, while another can view its potential to compensate caregivers for their unpaid reproductive labour as its best aspect. Finally, some UBI advocates propose certain

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exploratory experiments in order to determine how it should be implemented, particularly in relation to the income level, thereby allowing for some flexibility (condition 4): Bill Jordan (1992) proposes

instituting it at a certain level of payments, measuring its effects, and then potentially increasing the level. UBI being an essentially contested concept has implications for its advocates, in that although at first glance it might appear they all support the same policy, different proponents in fact hold substantially dissimilar views on what the policy is meant to accomplish and what the details of its implementation should be, as will be discussed in the following chapters.

Neoliberalism

The term neoliberalism is peculiar, in that it is regularly an object of criticism in the social sciences, and yet few scholars identify themselves as advocates for it. Boas and Gans-Morse (2009) explore that asymmetrical usage and argue that while it is an example of Gallie’s essentially contested concept, it is also contested on another level: a similar set of ideas are termed differently in contemporary usage, depending on how the speaker judges their value. Opponents employ “neoliberalism”, proponents refer to “classical liberalism”, “old-style liberalism”, “free market”, “orthodox policies”, “liberalism”, etc. In such circumstances where it is not only the meaning of the term that is debatable, but also what term should be designated as denoting a set of ideas, “one’s use of language invariably expresses a position as to whether free markets are good or bad” (Boas & Gans-Morse, 2009, 155).

This research project aims to avoid taking a normative position of that kind, to the extent that this is ever possible. The goal is not to criticise societal projects, but to explore how UBI is elaborated in their language and values. Therefore, priority is given to definitions presented by their advocates rather than their critics. Yet, in acknowledging the multiple levels of essential contestation of the concept at hand, one cannot choose a single value-free designation of this societal project. Its proponents don’t use a single term, and people who are not generally familiar with their writing would not recognise what is being referred to, in contrast to using “neoliberalism” – a term that is nowadays much more politically charged than any of the more positively connoted alternatives listed above. Hence, I have decided to refer to this societal project as “neoliberalism” as this term is arguably much more widespread, despite its potentially critical connotation.

The widespread negative connotation to “neoliberal” wasn’t always in place, and the term has shifted its meaning through time. A 1951 essay by Milton Friedman defines it in a positive manner, as a project that inherits from 19th century liberalism the primacy of the individual over the collective, but substitutes its laissez- faire role of the state with a state that would “police the system, establish conditions favorable to

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competition and prevent monopoly, provide a stable monetary framework, and relieve acute misery and distress.” (Friedman, 1951, 92). What Friedman sees as distinguishing neoliberalism from liberalism is therefore the role of the state, which is not only to guard conditions for the operation of free markets, but also provide relief for misery.

For a more contemporary outline of what neoliberalism entails, Colin Crouch distinguishes between three different types (2013, 23-24). “Pure neoliberals” are of the view that the conditions that are best for society are those in which free markets operate in all areas of life, with the state’s role limited to guarding competition and other market-enabling mechanisms such as strong property rights.

A second type of neoliberals also value a market economy over state-owned planned one, however, they believe that markets have deficiencies that cannot be overcome by creating more perfect competition, but must be addressed in other non-market ways (among which is state intervention). They also think that free markets are not suitable for all areas of life.

A third type is what Crouch calls “actually existing neoliberalism,” spanning “corporate lobbying … and the deployment of corporate and other wealth in politics that today usually accompanies introduction of the neoliberal agenda” (Ibid.). To him, this produces an economy that is in many ways radically different from the original project.

According to Crouch, many contemporary political factions belong to the second type of neoliberals – social democrats, environmentalists, religious groups, conservatives. Indeed, the relevant chapter of his book has the title “We Are All (Partly) Neoliberals Now”, as in practice most societal projects that support a non-planned economy can be classified as neoliberals of the second type. This arguably makes the definition too broad to be useful in a comparison of societal projects, but points to a continuum in conceptualisations of the role of the state: although a priority on guarding competition is found in both Friedman’s and Crouch’s first and second type, there seems to be less of a consensus on whether the state is to protect sections of society from the logic of the market and provide relief for “acute misery”.

In an earlier book (2011), Crouch traces the history of neoliberal thought, arguing that at its core, the term signals “fundamental preference for the market over the state as a means of resolving problems and achieving human ends” (Crouch, 2011, 7). The role of the state is elusive in this definition, as Crouch arrives at it after a description of the related term “ordoliberalism” as advocating an economic system in which market competition is guarded by law. As in most definitions of “neoliberalism”, Crouch also uses as a means of contrast to something else – in this case, the demand management of Keynesianism, to which it was historically opposed, and social democracy, which views the utility of markets as limited or harmful in a number of areas.

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“Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit” (Harvey, 2005, 2).

An important point Harvey introduces is that the state is not only to protect competitive conditions in already existing markets, but also to create markets in areas in which they haven’t previously existed. While this is implied in some of the definitions above, Harvey specifically explicates it. Contrast this to a definition by Thorsen & Lie (2006), who arrive at it after a review of what they call “the critical

literature” on neoliberalism:

“Neoliberalism is, as we see it, a loosely demarcated set of political beliefs which most

prominently and prototypically include the conviction that the only legitimate purpose of the state is to safeguard individual, especially commercial, liberty, as well as strong private property rights (cf. especially Mises 1962; Nozick 1974; Hayek 1979). This conviction usually issues, in turn, in a belief that the state ought to be minimal or at least drastically reduced in strength and size, and that any transgression by the state beyond its sole legitimate purpose is unacceptable (ibid.). These beliefs could apply to the international level as well, where a system of free markets and free trade ought to be implemented as well; the only acceptable reason for regulating international trade is to safeguard the same kind of commercial liberty and the same kinds of strong property rights which ought to be realised on a national level (Norberg 2001; Friedman 2006).” (Thorsen & Lie, 2006, 14)

The focus in this definition is not on markets per se, but on liberty and property rights, with markets seen as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, as comes through in other definitions. Moreover, here the language is again limited to “safeguarding” said liberty and rights, with no mention of expanding markets

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into new areas of society. Thorsen & Lies also raise the point that neoliberalism isn’t a thorough political ideology, but a set of loosely related ideas on the relationship between the state and markets (2006, 15). This calls into question any attempt to treat it as a societal project.

In conclusion of this brief review, neoliberalism is 1) an asymmetrical term, more often employed to criticise than in a positive manner; 2) essentially contested, with no consensus as to what it denotes. The operational definition extracted from the review and later applied to the empirical study points to the neoliberal societal project as one that strives for a society organised to maximise individual liberty and property rights through state-managed establishing and safeguarding of free market competition in most areas of social life. Its distinguishing feature is how it views the role of the state – as wielding firm authority in a limited number of spheres, such as establishing market competition in most areas of life and safeguarding individual property rights. Social (economic) rights, as envisioned by T. H. Marshall’s (1950) definition of “the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society” are generally excluded from the purview of the state in the neoliberal project.

Feminism

There is no universal definition of what feminism is, but in contrast to neoliberalism, the term is at least not asymmetric: advocates for feminism do claim to be feminists, the term is not employed solely by its critics. Consequently, there is a plethora of definitions, from Cheris Kramarae’s “the radical notion that women are people”, to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “say[ing] yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better” (2014). Here, I will consider some definitions that gesture at not only what feminism is, but what a feminist societal project entails. I will begin with a general outline of what I recognise as three major currents in Western-based feminism – liberal, socialist, and radical, – before discussing a classification of feminist conceptualisations by Patrick Colm Gogan. Finally, I will review bell hooks’ vision of what sort of society feminism should advocate.

Liberal feminism

The designation of ‘liberal feminism’ is the most asymmetric of the currents examined here, as few feminists claim the name for themselves, while self-described radical and socialist feminists define themselves against said liberal feminists, whose concerns are painted as catering to the interests of the most privileged women (Friedman, Metelerkamp & Posel, 1987; hooks, 1984). Liberal feminism is liberal

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in the sense that it centres women as individuals and their equality to men, often in the professional sphere:

“Liberal feminists argue that the liberation of women consists of their freedom to choose their lives, to be able to compete with men on equal terms in the professional and political worlds, and in the labour market. They claim that women, like men, are endowed with reason, and that their capacity, therefore, to choose has the same worth as that of men. But the problem is that there are constraints in society which discriminate against women solely on the basis of their sex, and so prevent the exercise of that free choice. Clearly, therefore, liberal feminism is mobilised against the elimination of these constraints.” (Friedman, Metelerkamp & Posel, 1987, 5-6)

The liberal feminist societal project therefore envisions a world much like the one we have now – capitalist, based on nuclear families – but more fair to women, who would hold a more equal share of wealth and do no more housework and childcare than men, especially where that would involve career sacrifices. It is concerned mainly with women’s success in paid work outside the home, and eradicating the obstacles to it, like unequal wages for equal work, insufficient childcare provisions, the ‘second shift’ of housework women do outside of their paid work (Hochschild & Machung, 2012). This societal project is largely reformist and pragmatist, rather than utopian.

Radical feminism

Radical feminism, by contrast, advocates for a transformation of society, though there is little consensus on what exactly the radically new society would entail, beyond a dismantling of patriarchal norms and conditions in all areas of life (Willis, 1984). In some radical feminist analysis, women’s oppression and the very concepts of femininity and masculinity stem from women’s reproductive role (Atkinson, 2000 [1969]). The associated societal project would then require the destruction of social roles and concepts based on biology; in other words, the abolishment of gender. The view of women’s oppression stemming from biology ties into advocating for women-only spaces free of male supremacy as a near-term project. Because of its fundamental opposition to the patriarchal structure of society, radical feminism generally does not advocate reformism.

Socialist feminism

A chief concern of this current are the material conditions of women. Borrowing from Marxism, socialist (or Marxist) feminists advocate for the recognition of reproductive labour as essential, valued, and done predominantly by women (Federici, 1975). It calls for traditional working-class institutions like trade

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unions to recognise and integrate women’s contributions, instead of making their work invisible by only catering to their male spouses who engage in waged labour, thereby devaluing reproductive labour and making it invisible (Federici, 1985). It views liberal feminism’s focus on women’s career advancement as a strictly individual solution that does nothing to improve the lot of the vast majority of women who are in no position to benefit from it. The socialist feminist societal project is, therefore, anti-capitalist, and against the structure of a nuclear family with a male breadwinner, advocating instead for a dramatic increase in the diversity of human relationships and communal childcare.

As liberal, radical, and socialist feminism differ profoundly in their vision of what a non-patriarchal society looks like, a common societal project of these strands is difficult to define. For this reason, authors like Colm Hogan argue that a different approach is needed for arriving at a general overview of feminism – one that is rooted in what feminists can agree upon.

Colm Hogan’s classifications

Patrick Colm Hogan (1993) contends that a crucial aspect of defining feminism is the delineation of different conceptual varieties of feminism arrived at through more or less empirical grounds, such as what self-declared feminists agree on, and on explicating the foundations from which the disagreements stem, often in binary oppositions. ‘Basic feminism’ thus refers to a loosely defined set of what he calls ‘political goals’, shared by most feminists, such as ending rape and restrictions on reproductive freedom, receiving equal pay for equal work, equal division of housework. However, as there is no agreement on the means to achieve these aims even in the subset of feminists who agree on what those aims should be, Colm Hogan further proposes the term ‘standard feminism’ for the aggregation of the aims of ‘basic feminism’ together with the majoritarian views on the means towards these aims. For instance, while there are empirical disagreements on whether affirmative action is a tool (or the best tool) for ending hiring and promotional discrimination, most feminists, according to Colm Hogan, support it, and thus support for it is part of ‘standard feminism’.

The next level of conceptual variety in feminism concerns the type of societal transformation sought by different advocates. Some merely want achieving the goals of ‘basic feminism’ in current society (‘minimal feminism’), while others envision a wholescale societal transformation (‘utopian feminism’), often on a template associated with another political project such as socialism or anarchism.

Colm Hogan further divides utopian feminism in two categories: ‘feminist separatism’, which argues that men would invariably seek to dominate women and therefore women can have fulfilling lives only when living in communities devoid of men, and ‘feminist integrationism’, which disagrees that the male will to

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power is invariable and immutable. A related, but still distinct delineation to the separatism /

integrationism opposition is one of ‘female supremacism’ / ‘feminist egalitarianism’, with the former advocating for women occupying the positions of power by virtue of being inherently less capable of evil acts, while the latter adopts an outlook of a more ‘equal opportunity’ framework of evil, in which should women be rulers, they would be no less likely to wage war and oppression than men.

Colm Hogan draws further oppositions, but they are less relevant for a discussion of how the boundaries of a feminist societal project are to be sketched. His article is useful for taking the approach that while a theoretical definition of what feminism is will either be too abstract or too little agreed upon, a number of pragmatist definitions and delineations can be utilised to sketch out large sections of feminist ideas and beliefs. The binary oppositions, although necessarily reductive, provide a convenient heuristic for situating feminist political writings in feminism as a whole. For instance, an eco-minded project of instilling female heads of government with the belief that they would pursue environmentally-friendly policies can be classified as feminist, minimalist, integrationist, and female supremacist.

bell hooks

bell hooks is highlighted here because she provides both a clear, succinct definition of feminism and a proposition for what it should strive towards. In Colm Hogan’s terms, she is supportive of integrationist feminism and critical of separatist (bourgeois and white) feminism which is unconcerned with the problems poor, working class and women of colour face. Her definition provides insight into how she envisions a feminist societal project:

“Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to

eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires. Defined in this way, it is unlikely that women would join feminist movement simply because we are biologically the same. A commitment to feminism so defined would demand that each individual participant acquire a critical political consciousness based on ideas and beliefs.” (hooks, 1984, 24)

This vision is devoid of details, but suggests that the feminist utopia will be populated by people whose minds and hearts are different. In that sense, feminist struggle is made up not only of the dismantling of vast (cultural) institutions, but also of changing people’s consciousness to reject oppression, imperialism, material desires. It’s not about having a society which works largely as the one we currently have, with the exception of men and women being equal in whatever meaning of ‘equal’. It’s a society based on an

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entirely different foundation, which precludes oppression in general and sexist oppression in particular. From the currents explored above, her description would fit most aptly into radical feminism.

To synthesise the definitions and approaches considered above, while being mindful of the presence of fundamental disagreements inside feminism, means defining the feminist societal project through the most basic ideas shared by many of its internal currents. Thus, for the pusposes of this thesis, the feminist societal project entails, at a minimum, an end to sexist oppression, gender discrimination, gender-based violence, reproductive injustice, rigid gender roles, unequal division of – and the undervaluing of – reproductive labour.

Libertarianism

Libertarianism has its roots in the liberal primacy of individual freedom and property rights. Consequently, it can be difficult to separate it from the neoliberal project which shares those roots. However, the two projects are substantially dissimilar in their justifications and priorities: while

neoliberalism is concerned primarily with economics and the state, libertarianism is a political philosophy focused on full self-ownership (Mclaverty, 2005, 189) and rejection of non-consensual authority of any kind, not just that of the state.

Peter Vallentyne (2012) distinguishes several currents in libertarianism based on how they view resource appropriation and whether agents are to compensate others if they’ve appropriated more than their fair share of resources. The conceptualisation of ‘fair share’ stems from the Lockean proviso, formulated in the Second Treatise of Government, that an individual’s enclosure of common resources is permissible only to the extent that “enough (and as good) [be] left for others” (Locke, 2014 [1689], 13). In right libertarianism in general, the proviso is interpreted as entailing that at the moment of the enclosure, “no individual be made worse off by the use or appropriation compared with non-use or nonappropriation” (Vallentyne, 2012, 12). In left libertarianism, resources initially belong to everyone, with different sub-divisions on what that means, ranging from ‘joint-ownership left-libertarianism’ (requiring

unanimous or majority consent before resources can be used) to ‘equal-opportunity left-libertarianism’, in which it is required that

“one leave enough for others to have an opportunity for well-being that is at least as good as the opportunity for well-being that one obtained in using or appropriating natural resources.

Individuals who leave less than this are required to pay the full competitive value of their excess share to those deprived of their fair share. Unlike the equal share view, those whose initial

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internal endowments provide less favorable effective opportunities for well-being are entitled to larger shares of natural resources.” (Vallentyne, 2012, 14)

This formulation is significant in that it provides a rationale for a form of redistribution. In that version of libertarianism, resource appropriation does not need to be fair only at the initial point of enclosure – instead, there is a continuous requirement of compensation whose level changes based on the

accumulation of wealth generated from that initial appropriation. Vallentyne, himself a proponent of this current, interprets it to imply a “limited duty to promote equality” (Ibid.) that is in place if one has appropriated “more than one’s equality of opportunity share of natural resources” (Ibid.). That duty does not necessitate the pursuit of complete equality, but of compensatory measures only to the extent that one has exceeded their fair share.

In contrast to Vallentyne’s political philosophy approach, Chandran Kukathas (2015) examines libertarianism as a political doctrine and an American political movement of the latter half of the 20th century (albeit one that traces its roots to much earlier European philosophy). Thus, his description of libertarianism is more sensitive to more concrete manifestations, centred especially on the US context. According to Kukathas, the two fundamental ideas that define libertarianism are that “each individual is entitled to live as he or she chooses, provided he or she does not try to force others to live as he or she thinks right” and that “each individual is entitled to acquire and keep property” (Kukathas, 2015, 39). Kukathas’ historical tracing of libertarianism leads him to consider an important point of its articulation the efforts of Hayek and Mises in the 1930s to differentiate it through a critique of state-planned

organisation of socialist economies. A tenet of their argument is that in the absence of markets, the state would inevitably resort to “coercion to curb people’s natural proclivities to trade” (Kukathas, 2015, 40), hence libertarianism’s positive outlook on capitalism.

However, the doctrine’s relationship to the welfare state (another entity against which it defines itself) is more complicated, with a general agreement that governmental services – which are, in this view, necessarily monopolistic – would be more costly and less effective than services emerging from

conditions of competition, but disagreements over whether governments should provide a basic safety net (Kukathas, 2015, 41). Hayek’s view is summarised as arguing that it should, since “markets and charity would not be able to meet the demand”, while Friedman is presented as supporting a negative income tax in order “to ensure that no one drop[s] below some minimum threshold” (Ibid.).

Relatedly, Kukathas contends that the line that separates the major currents in libertarianism isn’t what is considered a just appropriation of resources, but what is the role of the state: the libertarian anarchist strand holds that “no state is legitimate”, while minimal state libertarianism sees its legitimate role as including “national defense, the protection of individual rights. and the enforcement of contracts”

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(Kukathas, 2015, 39). This conceptualisation of the role of the state is, in my view, an important point of delineation between a (right) libertarian and a neoliberal societal project. In neoliberalism, the state is envisioned as having the indispensable responsibility to create and maintain conditions of free-market competition, regardless of how citizens feel about it, while in a libertarian project, the state either exists solely as a guarantor of the self-ownership of individuals (and their property), or does not exist at all, if there is no consensus among citizens that its authority is needed. A neoliberal state that limits freedom in economic actions that lead to monopoly might therefore be unacceptable to libertarians.

This is, however, not the case with left libertarianism, in which there is an imperative to maximise freedom, including economic freedom, and to provide a continuous just distribution of already

appropriated resources, if the appropriation wasn’t of a fair share. This is a simplification, but I believe it might be useful to draw a distinction here in order to illustrate the criteria of classification between neoliberal and libertarian projects later on.

Coming back to Kukathas’ topology, in addition to the distinctions based on the envisioned role of the state, he also examines varieties of libertarianism differentiated in another manner, including

‘objectivism’ (Ayn Rand), ‘libertarian anarchism’ (Murray Rothbard), and ‘left-wing libertarianism’ (Hillel Steiner). I will only consider the latter here, as it is the most relevant for the research project. The starting point of Steiner’s left-wing libertarianism is that in addition to self-ownership, individuals also have the fundamental right to “an equal share of initially unowned things” (Kukathas, 2015, 43). That implies continuous redistribution of some sort, as new people are born and need to receive their fair share of the value of resources that have been fully distributed before their birth, and as people die and their property must be distributed to the living (the right to an inheritance has no basis, if the initial premise of the two fundamental rights is to be observed): “a just distribution of things must reflect our original rights, and not the accidents of history or geography”, or to whom and where one is born (Ibid.). Citing Van Parijs, Kukathas argues that the challenge in left-wing libertarianism is thus to propose a just

“nonarbitrary criterion of original appropriation”, while recognising that who was able to appropriate it first does not fit these conditions.

The discussion of different varieties of libertarianism here suggests that they might differ substantially and indeed be incompatible with one another – a left libertarian concerned with fair resource

appropriation and redistribution would have a different vision from a right libertarian who disagrees that fair distribution of initially appropriated resources is a continuous requirement. Nevertheless, in this thesis several points will be treated as signalling a relation to libertarain projects, recognised through an

emphasis on self-ownership and the rejection of non-consensual loss of legitimate property rights. It would also recognise as potentially signalling libertarian leanings critiques on paternalistic authority, as

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well as arguments on what is a just redistribution of resources stemming from the initial premise that everyone continuously has a right to an equal share of initially unowned resources.

To sum up, the libertarian societal project entails a strong focus on self-ownership, a rejection of non-consensual authority, a concern with fair redistribution stemming from unequal appropriation of resources, and a view of the state as minimal, potentially including a rejection of the

competition-safeguarding role advocated for the state in the neoliberal project.

Socialism

As with the other societal projects, a precise engagement with the history and various transformations is beyond the scope of this thesis. However, because of the decision to not consider separately the near-term measures and the utopian visions of the same project for a good society, a provisional definition of socialism is particularly difficult to construct, on account of the rich scholarly traditions of both socialist utopias and near-term socialist policies. I will therefore briefly deal with authors from different historical periods, starting with the ‘utopian’ socialists of the 1830s, continuing with Marx, Engels and Lenin, and ending with Stuart Hall’s view of the socialist project after the “actually existing” socialism of the Soviet republics and Esping-Andersen’s essential concept of de-commodification in social democracy.

Jonathan Beecher (2011) discusses the origins of socialism in Europe in the 1830s with a number of authors referred to as ‘romantic’ or ‘utopian’ socialists: Henri Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen. The common thread between them is less a shared vision of what a good society is and more the starting point of their thoughts – a search for a “solution for the social, economic, and cultural dislocations caused by the French and industrial revolutions” (Beecher, 2011, 371). Their proposed solutions dealt with social organisation conceived of as encompassing more than merely the economic system, though they did abhor the misery caused by early capitalism and advocated for a form of “social control of the new productive forces” (Ibid., 372). They were also apprehensive of what they saw as social entropy and moral decay unleashed by the breakdown of traditional societal structures and the encouragement of individualism and egoism.

The three romantic socialist authors engendered intellectual movements that followed their distinct ideas and priorities. Saint-Simonians pondered “the ways in which the powers and resources of the emerging industrial societies might be harnessed so as best to promote human welfare” (Beecher, 2011, 374). Owenites promoted education and cooperative organisation of the workforce and property. Fourier’s followers experimented with new communal organisations that were to engender “economic, social,

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psychic, and sexual liberation” (Beecher, 2011, 375). Flora Tristan, another French utopian socialist, advocated for the creation of an egalitarian “workers’ union” for all manual workers with no hierarchy of skill, in which women – both those who are workers themselves and those who belong to workers’ households – would also be integrated. The dues from union membership and the financial means of supportive clergy and nobility, were to be used for the creation of “palaces”, which would provide a refuge for “physically depleted workers” (Talbot, 1991, 227), and for the education for working class children (Tristan, 2007 [1843]).

It is thus evident that although early socialists shared a common concern for the welfare of workers, they did not share a single vision of an alternative societal organisation, but each had their own elaborations of forms of social cooperation. According to Beecher, it was not until 1848 that romantic socialism and other factions produced a single movement, united in the promotion of universal male suffrage, the right of work, and peaceful democracy (Beecher, 2011, 376). These ideas were the origin of ‘democratic state socialism’, which saw the state as a crucial agent: “socialism required state intervention not merely to regulate industrial activity but actually to organize the conduct of industry through the creation of associations of workers” (Beecher, 2011, 379).

Marx and Engels’ “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848) recognises Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen as part of the same tradition to which it itself belongs, in its Chapter III, “Socialist and Communist Literature”. However, in contrast to the works of earlier thinkers, the manifesto is more explicitly focused on class antagonism and the “formation of the proletariat into a class” that would then “overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy”. In these terms, the earlier socialists are seen as insufficiently class conscious and their followers in particular are singled out as reactionary due to their aim to transcend class antagonisms and their rejection of political and revolutionary actions.

The Manifesto of the Communist Party is more focused on near-term measures than on elucidating the organisation of a future communist society. These measures – to be pursued by communists “in most advanced countries” – are listed as:

“1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

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7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.” (Marx & Engels, 1848, Chapter II. Proletarians and Communists)

Thus, the near-term measures advocate for a social organisation in which land cannot be private property, but is instead common, and there is a centralised state in which several spheres are concentrated, among which communication, finances, the means of production, agriculture, industries, and education. This centralised state is, however, envisioned as radically different from a bourgeois state – it is rather “the proletariat organised as the ruling class” (Marx & Engels, 1848, Chapter II. Proletarians and

Communists). The role and organisation of the state both in the near-term measures and the far-term vision of communism is better elucidated in a much later text by Marx, “Critique of the Gotha

Programme” (1875), which discusses the draft programme of the United Workers' Party of Germany and offers some invaluable glimpses into his views on the socialist societal project. Chief among them is the conceptualisation of the transition from capitalism to communism as consisting of phases with different social organisation. In the first phase, “the individual producer receives back from society … exactly what he gives to it” (Marx & Engels, 1969). Only in the second phase, in which the division of labour and the “antithesis between mental and physical labor” would have vanished and the productive forces would have increased tremendously, is another organisation of labour possible: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (Ibid.). Thus, in the near-term, Marx and Engels advocate for the concentration of production in a proletarian centralised state, as in their view this would lead to dramatic increases in the productive forces and usher in a measure of abundance that is essential for communism. This idea of a first and a second phase is later developed further up by Lenin, who terms the first phase “socialism” and the second “communism” (Lenin, 1965 [1918]). I consider the influence of Lenin’s contribution as a further reason for treating socialism and communism as one societal project. Moreover, there is an argument that even political parties who began as communist in the first half of the 20th century gradually came to support measures typically associated with the first, socialist stage of the project, as a result of the need to build coalitions with other parties. I will discuss this argument in Gøsta

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Esping-Andersen’s study of the trajectory of social democracy in Europe and his concept of de-commodification as an essential part of a socialist societal project.

In a chapter from a 1987 book, Esping-Andersen offers a historical narrative of the development of the political strategies of European socialist parties during the 20th century, specifically in relation to their strategy for social policy. He argues that the original socialist views on how to ensure the mobilisation of the working class and the socialisation of the means of production came to be transformed when socialist parties actually gained a modicum of political power and had to make decisions about coalitions and governing. Specifically,

“Where it was originally assumed that genuine social improvements would have to await basic institutional transformation, such as the socialization of the means of production, the logic was now reverded and social reform was considered the first necessary step toward the Good Society.” (Esping-Andersen, 1987, 84)

In his view, this was a logical reversal, because “when workers are economically insecure and

individually unable to withstand the pressures of the market, collective unity and solidarity is difficult to nurture” (Ibid.). Hence the need for fostering conditions in which people are not utterly dependent on wage employment in order to survive. Esping-Andersen thus defines de-commodification as “the extent to which individuals and families can maintain a normal and socially acceptable standard of living

regardless of their market performance” (Esping-Andersen, 1987, 86). A degree of de-commodification is a prerequisite for emancipation and political mobilisation of workers, since without it, workers are forced to compete with one another while lacking any collective bargaining power, and solidarity and unity are difficult to foster. If welfare and security is dependent upon membership in an organisation such as a trade union, divisions between the secure workers and the reserve army of non-member workers ensue and solidarity is destroyed (Esping-Andersen, 1987, 89f). In Esping-Andersen’s view, the logical consequence is that “the future of socialism demand[s] therefore that solidarity be universalized” (Esping-Andersen, 1987, 90).

A further current that historically contributed to making the strategies of socialist parties universal, instead of targeted exclusively at workers, was the need to ensure the support of larger sections of society, including “the privileged strata”, for the financing of the welfare state, which provided the needed

modicum of de-commodification (Ibid.). The resultant universalist social policy in principle involved a major trade-off, since it is much less redistributive than measures that specifically target the neediest members of society. However, and especially in relation to justifications of UBI, it should be noted that targeted benefits tend to introduce stigma (Esping-Andersen, 1987, 92) and other effects, such as lower

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take up rates, that undermine the goals of redistribution: see e.g. Korpi & Palme (1998) on the “paradox of redistribution”.

Nevertheless, Esping-Andersen’s concept of de-commodification is a useful cristallisation of an aspect of the socialist societal project which has to do with autonomy, emancipation, and freedom – it makes the point that those are not values to be found in the market, outside of the authority of the state, but are conditions that an organisation like a state must actively carve out from the realm of markets. The justification that underlies de-commodification is that individuals should not be forced to sell their labour power, especially if it is under conditions they would not otherwise accept. In that sense, it is an

enablement of genuine freedom.

This perspective, however, is complicated by the history of self-proclaimed socialist republics like the ones in Eastern Europe, and the ambivalent relationship socialists have with the state apparatus as a result. That is illustrated in an article by Stuart Hall in Marxism Today (the magazine of the British Communist Party at the time), titled “The State – Socialism’s Old Caretaker” (1984). In it, Hall discusses his

contemporaries’ attitude towards a welfare state that is the source both of universalist programs like the National Health Service, and of the safeguarding of capital accumulation and the “exploitative social order” (Hall, 1984, 28). He also critiques the vast bureaucratisation and interventionism of states in the UK and elsewhere, along with its “swallowing up almost the whole of civil society, and imposing itself (sometimes with tanks), in the name of The People, on the backs of the people” (Hall, 1984, 24).

Moreover, he contends that the role of the state in a communist society is not at all well-defined in classic Marxist texts, leading to the need to reevaluate what socialism’s relationship to it must be. Instead of entrenched statism, Hall argues for a recognition of what that has meant in Eastern Europe, and advocates for a socialism organised around the conception of a social revolution with a “deepening of democracy” seen not as

“a formal matter of electoral politics or constitutionalism… [but as] the real passage of power to the powerless, the empowerment of the excluded. The state cannot do this for the powerless, though it can enable it to happen. They have to do it for themselves, by finding the forms in which they can take on the control over an increasingly complex society.” (Hall, 1984, 29) This brings us back to the early socialists and their visions of a different, equal and collective organisation of society, and thus to a conclusion of what this thesis will understand as a socialist societal project. Firstly, socialism is greatly concerned with the welfare of workers and their bargaining power in the labour market, advocating for unions and cooperative or collective arrangements that would provide refuge and increase workers’ social power in relation to employers.

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Secondly, the socialist conception of freedom and autonomy is not envisioned in terms of individual rights to be actualised in the market without state interference, but as something that must be wrenched out of the fundamentally unfair material conditions of capitalism through collective action. A worker forced to sell their labour power in order to survive is not free.

Thirdly, the socialist project is fundamentally egalitarian, advocating for the increase of the welfare of all, rather than a select few organised in an unequal hierarchy.

Finally, socialism’s relationship to the state is complicated, and it’s near-term view of it might conflict with its far-term vision. The actions of a democratic state can be legitimate, as long as they promote an increase of the productive forces for the benefit of all, empower the powerless, and provide the conditions for genuine freedom.

This qualified mandate of the state, albeit conditional and not uncontroversial, is, in my view, the clearest departure of socialism from two of the other societal projects considered above. Libertarianism is

concerned with limiting the state’s authority to encroach on the self-ownership of individuals. Neoliberalism holds that the best society is one in which market mechanisms determine as much as possible, and the state guarantees their operation and creation through the enforcing of conditions of competition and a stable monetary policy. Most of feminism, similarly to socialism, does view the state as legitimate for certain goals, such as the organisation of a legal code and social services which promote gender egalitarianism.

Mutually exclusive criteria for classification to societal projects

In light of the discussion in this chapter, here is an overview of the sufficient and mutually exclusive criteria for classifying a case for UBI into the four societal projects. Its purpose is to provide a clear summary of what I consider to be essential for each of these projects. These summaries are meant to exclude each other as classificatory criteria, but a defense of UBI might nevertheless employ arguments that indicate it supports the goals of more than one of these projects. In those cases, it receives a

secondary classification in addition to its primary one. Neoliberalism

A case for UBI will be classified into the neoliberal project if: it views market mechanisms as delivering superior outcomes than public management and regulation, and/or advocates for the role of the state being minimal outside of its purview of creating and enabling markets and competition; and/or conceptualises individual rights and autonomy as being enabled by markets and threatened by the state.

Elaborations of universal basic income in different societal projects