Performing Labour’s (Non)Futures

Abstract

Public performances carried out in support of the movement for a universal basic income—such as a massive ‘currency-dump’ of Swiss francs in a public square by a group of Swiss artists and activists, a series of ‘speculative advertisements’ by US artist Josh Kline, and a ‘robot march’ through the streets of Zurich—have tended to establish spectacular equivalencies between bodies and units of currency, and between bodies and machines, to demonstrate that the future of labour is marked by both economic abundance and unprecedented labor-substitutability. Historically, the concept has emerged from points across a wide political spectrum and the movement holds together a set of divergent political ideologies, which share the belief that the future might be simplified and secured by an economic floor. The universal basic income idea is, overall, profoundly performative, in that it attempts to model the ultimate pragmatism of wider social nets of generosity, and does so by representing the embodied conditions that might be brought into being by such generosity. In this way, the utopian heuristic of an unconditional, guaranteed income is said to be, in the words of Belgian political ethicist Philippe Van Parijs, an ‘instrument of freedom’ and a ‘device for economic sanity’. The question is though, as is often the case: freedom and sanity for whom? The movement, in reality, often falls short of its ‘universal’ aim. Nonetheless, its basic aspiration points to a potential transformation in the way social and political claims are made on the global monetary system.