Questions about Universal Care Income and UBI

The idea of Universal Basic Income is now quite old and has been extensively discussed, analyzed, criticized, questioned, and further developed by many people and institutions. In some countries, UBI seems to be on the verge of implementation, while in others, it’s far from becoming a reality. This is often due to political conflicts related to traditional understandings of work, contribution, and capitalism. Work is defined in terms of performance, and performance in terms of competition. However, this has neither led to all genuine contributions being funded or rewarded, nor to equal opportunities in competition. Instead, we have extremely unfair competitions and an unjust distribution of money and wealth, as well as a massive increase in inequality.

The idea of Universal Care Income emerged from my 30-year struggle to survive economically as a cultural worker and from questioning what work and contribution actually are and how capitalism deals with them. Throughout these years, I consistently found that appropriate work is often not rewarded but punished by the market. This is largely because the orientation of work solely towards money and turnover has led to human action becoming disconnected from reality. This and other factors have led to an inability to act appropriately in the face of the many problems of our time.

So what’s the problem with UBI? Well, Universal Basic Income largely ignores the problems of capitalism and disregards that the profits to be redistributed for UBI often rely on exploitation. Western countries that could afford a UBI can often only do so because their economies were massively based on exploitation or because they dispossessed the global South. The justice in UBI is therefore partially naive. There are many other problems, but still, one must say that a UBI is useful as a preliminary stage to compensate for problems of capitalism. But isn’t it better to address the actual problem? Namely, the fact of unfair distribution along discriminated work and contributions?

This is exactly where Universal Care Income comes in. It’s about demanding remuneration for work done but not seen. Because this simultaneously makes visible how we can arrive at a way of working that enables working on reality, instead of conducting simulations to earn money. So instead of following relevances that are unilaterally defined from above to generate high one-sided profits, while other contributions are exploited and artificially devalued as a result.

I believe that the way out of the problems of capitalism cannot be solved by UBI alone, because exploitation is not ended by it. This only happens when all forms of contribution are recognized as valuable. This must automatically lead to an economic system that understands itself more like an ecosystem based on diversity, rather than on one-sided growth.

I developed Universal Care Work as an idea, as a concept, to further develop the concept of work and in the process to overcome capitalism itself. UBI is an important approach, but one must also recognize the problems associated with exploitation and a distortion of relevance. It’s not about people wanting money unconditionally, but the unconditionality arises much more naturally from the fact that many are cheated by capitalism who want justice for contributions we make. It’s about emancipation, about strength from the position of the precariat, to make demands on a society that has played the game of performance, reward, and punishment for far too long. This game leads us away from reality.