By Mohammad Ferdosi
Abstract
This article offers a critical political economy analysis of basic income under capitalism, using twelve in-depth interviews with former participants in the Ontario Basic Income Pilot. We theorise basic income as a contradictory social wage that produces conditional decommodification: it loosens the compulsion to accept any job at any wage and partially functions as a wage for social reproduction, yet is tightly circumscribed by low benefit levels, temporariness and an unreformed neoliberal welfare-labour regime. Recipients used basic income to exit the worst jobs, reorganise their participation in wage labour, stabilise housing and care, and engage in community and political activity, while largely orienting these practices toward improved re-entry into paid work. We trace how these trajectories reshaped political subjectivities as mixtures of gratitude, anger and critique. We argue that basic income simultaneously stabilises capitalist accumulation and opens limited but real spaces for refusal, renegotiation and collective contestation.