The German Ideology

"I think what Marx does really effectively is to emphasise that our understanding of the world is shaped largely by our material conditions. There’s this belief—which has become increasingly popular, certainly in my lifetime—that we’ve got unconstrained agency, and our ability to pursue forms of life independent of material conditions is limitless. What Marx makes perfectly clear is that if we want to transform society, we need to transform the material conditions under which people live. Basic income is an extremely effective and transformative policy in that regard. By giving everybody social security, it really does change everything. By enabling people to satisfy their needs independently of sometimes quite exploitative forms of labor, it gives people the ability to plan different ways of living, move in and out of the marketplace, increase their bargaining power, and engage in economic activity that our communities need, but which isn’t currently supported by the market. So I think The German Ideology is really important in terms of its emphasis on changing material conditions. Our view of the world is shaped by material conditions. He talks about the need to ensure that people’s needs are satisfied, and that people aren’t rewarded arbitrarily according to their skills or their attributes as opposed to their fundamental shared human needs. That’s something that underpins basic income very clearly, that it’s a recognition of need rather than attribute. So that’s really important."