From welfare to emancipation: a Marxist critique of UBI in contemporary governance

This paper critically evaluates the concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI) through a Marxist theoretical framework, addressing whether UBI represents a fundamental shift from traditional welfare towards genuine social emancipation or whether it primarily serves to reinforce existing capitalist structures. Employing classical Marxian concepts alongside contemporary Marxist theoryincluding Althusserian analyses of ideological state apparatuses and Marxist feminist perspectivesthe paper scrutinizes global empirical data from UBI pilot programs and cross-national social spending comparisons. The findings reveal that although UBI experiments can mitigate extreme poverty and provide some degree of worker autonomy, they fail to challenge the underlying capitalist relations of production, exploitation, and class stratification. Instead, in certain neoliberal contexts, UBI potentially functions as a wage subsidy, weakening collective solidarity and shifting welfare responsibilities from capitalists to the state. The paper concludes that the emancipatory potential of UBI is contingent upon its political context, implementation strategy, and associated social reforms rather than inherent within the policy itself.