Universal basic income revisited: COVID-19,biopolitical trade-offs,and the expropriation of digital academic labour

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the biopolitical trade-offs inherent to contemporary capitalism are cascading down to higher education. Based on insights derived from theories of digitalized capitalism, this article argues that the emergency shift of educational activities online has much potential to heighten the expropriation of digital academic labour. The net result is an intensification of the master process of digitally driven academic proletarianization. At the same time, the reopening of campuses in countries and regions with high infection rates demonstrably puts academics and others at risk. Both of these developments provide reasons, the article maintains, to support the introduction of universal basic income (UBI). After drawing the crucial distinction between UBI as an emergency response and UBI as an institutionally frame-breaking initiative, the latter – non-emergency UBI – is advocated as a solution to the increasingly binaristic choice between work and life in the neoliberal university and beyond.

Keywords

COVID-19 basic income biopolitics academic proletarianization digital labour

Introduction

The novel coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has thrown the scope for biopolitical trade-offs under contemporary capitalism into clear relief. Simply put, neoliberal governments are currently weighing up a “binaried choice between capitalism and life” (Rose, 2020: 4). In an effort to stave off or to mitigate recession, politicians in the United States and United Kingdom are prioritizing business interests over their responsibility to protect vulnerable members of the community, such as the elderly and the infirm (Micklethwait and Woolridge, 2020). The conservative former prime minister of Australia and appointee to the UK Board of Trade, Tony Abbott, recently warned against government overspending on virus control and income-support measures since it is simply too expensive – Abbott maintains – to protect older people from Covid-19 (ABC News, 2020). The implication is clear: it is acceptable to sacrifice vulnerable groups in the interests of reducing budget deficits and stimulating economic activity.

This health economistic utilitarianism is emblematic of a neoliberal “necropolitics” that is both blasé about preventable deaths and promotes “capital over human needs” (Giroux, 2020). Higher education is a key site for applying the resulting “crude biopolitical calculus” (Rose, 2020: 1). Under neoliberal managerialism, the wellbeing and safety of college and university-based educators is at risk of being traded off against the aim of educational administrators to prevent the flow of students, and associated revenue streams, from being further disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. My article argues, on the one hand, that the pandemic-induced rapid shift of educational activities online has immense potential to heighten the expropriation of digital academic labour. Here this term is stipulatively defined as labour, expended in colleges and universities, which is mediated by digital technologies (Allmer, 2018). On the other hand, I highlight a trade-off between the digitally driven exploitation of academics engaged in online teaching and ensuring their safety as higher education institutions in many countries wind back emergency measures and reopen their gates in order to shore up student enrolments. As Burns (2020) insightfully observes, the notion that digital technologies will protect those who work and study in colleges and universities from catching the novel coronavirus is premised upon techno-utopian thinking that merely papers over the cracks in the neoliberal pandemic response.

My primary purpose is to link this market-driven response, and its specific enactment within higher education, to calls to introduce universal basic income (UBI). These have grown more strident due to the toll that the pandemic is taking on employment across a range of sectors in the capitalist market-guided economies (Green et al., 2020; Prabhakar, 2020). UBI is an inflation-indexed and unconditional monthly payment – neither means-tested nor targeted – received by all citizens throughout their life-course. Of particular importance here is the distinction between emergency and non-emergency UBI (Ståhl and MacEachen, 2020). The former is a short-term measure designed to meet pandemic-induced income shortfalls through income support applied at the level of the entire community. By contrast, non-emergency UBI is explicitly non-contingent and lifelong (Wright, 2004).

As the locus for binaristic trade-offs of a biopolitical nature, I will argue, higher education provides additional reasons to introduce non-emergency UBI – that is, to widen the scope of UBI beyond a short-term response to the external shock caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The discussion is structured as follows. In the following section, two theories of digital capitalism that provide an explicitly compensatory rationale for introducing non-emergency UBI are outlined. The third section deals with the proletarianization of the academic labour force. Through this social process, I maintain, the use of digital technologies to shift teaching, learning and assessment online dovetails with how value is created and expropriated in a digitalized variety of capitalism that exploits knowledge creation. In the fourth section I circle back to non-emergency UBI as a solution to the binaried choice, at a time of Covid-19, between work and life in the neoliberal university and beyond. A brief conclusion rounds out the discussion.

UBI and digitalized capitalism

Having undergone a resurgence of interest in recent years, UBI has been promoted by advocates of different disciplinary backgrounds and for a range of reasons – from the broadly humanist and emancipatory (Standing, 2017; Haagh, 2019) to the more explicitly economic (Van Parijs and Vanderborght, 2017). One line of economic argument concerns the impact of robotics and artificial intelligence on future generations of young people who face joblessness due to an ineluctable rise in technological unemployment. Many UBI supporters draw their impetus from futurological predictions of the following nature:

digitization will lead to an unprecedented upsurge in productivity and an unprecedented destruction of jobs, increasing both distributable income and the need for redistribution to an unprecedented extent. (Wehner, 2019: 29)

Now, future trends in the level of technological unemployment resulting from the process of digitalization are highly uncertain (Pol and Reveley, 2017). What is incontestable, however, is that digitalization is changing the nature and locus of productive (economic value-creating) labour. It is in this connection that I want to link non-emergency UBI to theories of how capitalism has been digitally transformed.

Scholars use a range of different terms to describe the new variety of capitalism: “informational capitalism” (Fuchs, 2010), “cognitive capitalism” (Moulier Boutang, 2011), “algorithmic capitalism” (Grindsted, 2016), and “computational capitalism” (Stiegler, 2019). Though they differ on certain points of detail, what unites them is the understanding that a deep-seated transformation has occurred in Western capitalism that goes beyond the Schumpeterian cycle of destruction through which innovation and technological change occurs (Schumpeter, 2006). The underlying proposition is that digital technologies have the capacity to fundamentally rewire the capitalist value-accumulative circuit. I will pick out the digital thread that runs like a leitmotif through two of these perspectives: a biopolitically-inflected variant of the thesis of cognitive capitalism, and a neo-Marxist theory of informational capitalism. Since “technologies, education, and work are part of a wider techno-social system” (Jandrić and Hayes, 2020: 176), I use this approach to describe the environing context in which digital labour is expropriated, and on that basis, to set forth a rationale for non-emergency UBI.

Cognitive capitalism

According to proponents of this theory, the development of digital technologies has transformed capitalism from an industrial to an intelligence and knowledge-based economic system (Moulier Boutang, 2011). In contrast with orthodox economic and sociological knowledge economy perspectives (Powell and Snellman, 2004), the cognitive capitalism thesis is that knowledge itself has become a key productive force and thus the primary means by which value is generated by labour and then expropriated by capital (Vercellone and Dughera, 2019). Simply stated, as a specifically digital paradigm of production, cognitive capitalism draws value from “collective brain activity mobilised in interconnected digital networks” (Moulier Boutang, 2011: 56). Digitalization enables the widespread emergence of collective intelligence through people connected by the internet (Peters and Reveley, 2015). This networked knowledge production is “a cooperative process” that channels “the intelligence of multitude on a global scale” (Vercellone and Giuliani, 2019: 150). Exploitation under cognitive capitalism thus involves:

appropriating the general intellect, the collective knowledge produced day and night with every single micro-decision of men, women and children that cybernetic machines record, process and feed back into the valorization cycle of capital. (Bueno, 2017: 75)

What results is a multitude of digitally networked citizen-labourers across society at large whose immaterial, cognitive labour is expended in the wider social factory.

Cognitive capitalism – like all varieties of capitalism – has crisis potentials. According to Fumagalli (2019a), the inherent instability of financialization demonstrated by the 2008 Great Recession is the catalyst that crystallized “bio-cognitive capitalism”. In this phase, human life itself – in its biological and subjective affective dimensions – becomes productive of value and is exploited across the lifespan, as “social knowledge” is generated “and then expropriated by the process of accumulation” (Fumagalli, 2019b: 70). A process of “hybridization” due to the intermingling of the digital with human subjectivity results in the multiplication of “forms of exploitation” (Fumagalli, 2019a: 90). Bio-cognitive capitalism is an inherently biopolitical system of production since its value-creating activities blend seamlessly with producing the exact types of persons – dynamic, responsibilized and digitally connected prosuming subjects – whose subjectivity is pressed into service in extracting value.

A key problem in this accumulative regime is that it is difficult to corral the value-bearing digital objects, content, and goods created in the internet commons by prosumers – namely, those whose online activities seamlessly combine elements of the producer and the consumer (Ritzer, 2015). These items tend to bleed out the edges of propertarian regimes that seek to capture and channel them. The central challenge in cognitive capitalism is not only preventing value-generating activities escaping “from the rules of intellectual property rarefaction” (Vercellone and Giuliani, 2019: 162), but also diverting them to profit-seeking ends. What results is a social contradiction: despite know-how and cognitive labour becoming central to value-creation, for members of the professions it is subject to “devaluation” (Fumagalli, 2019b: 67). This happens as knowledge-intensive organizations of various types, including firms and universities, endeavour to privately capture and codify tacit knowledge, and to commodify knowledge thus codified within revenue-generating activities – ultimately ushering in, on a wider scale, the “exploitation of learning economies” (Fumagalli and Lucarelli, 2019: 129).

Since cognitive capitalism is premised upon drawing value from citizen-labourers and privately appropriating common goods, condition-less and life-long UBI is explicitly compensatory (Fumagalli, 2019b: 71). This rationale for UBI is distinct from insulating citizens from systemic shocks that undermine employment and income – though this too is important. The proposal is that funding for non-emergency UBI should be drawn from taxes on capital in all its forms – including a “Keynes tax” on all financial transactions made on the share market, a “Tobin tax” on all international financial transactions, a patent tax, and a digital bit tax on electronic commerce – complemented by state-based money creation (Monnier and Vercellone, 2014: 73).¹ What the academic literature on informational capitalism contributes, by way of justifying UBI funded this way, is a distinctive view of social media as a prime site where digital labour is exploited.

Informational capitalism

The term “informational capitalism” is used by scholars of different disciplinary stripes (Arvidsson and Colleoni, 2012; Cohen, 2019). I employ it here to signify the work of Christian Fuchs, and others following in his footsteps (Allmer, 2012; Rey, 2012). Though key members of this school of thought now prefer the descriptor “digital capitalism” (Fuchs, 2018; Fisher, 2015), the terminology matters little since what is notable about their approach remains consistent: using classic Marxian concepts and value-theoretic categories – especially the rate of exploitation – to analyse the dynamics of digital value creation and expropriation.

Similar to the theorists of cognitive capitalism, Fuchs (2019a: 62) identifies the primary contradiction in digitalized capitalism as the “antagonism between the digital commodity created by digital labour on the one side, and the digital commons on the other” (Fuchs, 2019a: 62). Though the broad capitalist dynamic is the same, the emphasis he places on social media as the powerhouse of the digital economy and as a site of capitalist exploitation is distinctive. Adducing as evidence the profitability of Facebook, the share of social media corporations more widely in the US economy, and the comparatively small percentage of wages outlaid by Facebook relative to its total revenue, Fuchs (2019a: 60) infers that the “social media economy is based on the exploitation of users’ unpaid digital labour.” The sine qua non of this labour is that it is productive of surplus value and, therefore, it is intensively exploited in the specifically Marxian sense. Corporate social media, in this view, is the prime site of internet-based capitalist exploitation. Digital labour on these platforms is intertwined with routines of everyday life, so that whenever

we post the latest updates on Facebook or tweet our views on fashion and sports, we are also generating revenue for social media firms that market our identities to advertisers who buy space on our Facebook page or Twitter feed to sell us products and services. (Mosco, 2015: 208)

The effects of this revenue-generating, uncompensated digital labour on the social rate of exploitation are pronounced.

The broader point is that the social rate of exploitation is indeterminate outside the commons-based digital context in which capitalism now operates (Hardt and Negri, 2009). Because wages paid are zero, and using wages as a surrogate for variable capital in the classical Marxian ratio (surplus value/variable capital), social media users’ rate of exploitation is potentially limitless (Fuchs, 2010: 191). Factoring digital labour expended on social media into total unpaid reproductive labour that supports the wider digital economy, Fuchs estimates that the actual rate of exploitation in the United States in 2015 to be approximately five times higher than is suggested by traditional estimates that focus on waged labour alone (Fuchs, 2018: 683). It is precisely for this reason that the author advocates basic income: to offset the exploitative effect of social media megaliths. For Fuchs, UBI is one of a suite of measures – including commons-based online platforms, peer-to-peer projects, and publicly owned social media – which enable “digital struggle” and together function to countervail monopolistic forms of “digital capital” (Fuchs, 2019b: 220).

Digitally driven academic proletarianization

The theories discussed in the preceding section explain how digital labour is exploited in general. They provide a complementary rationale for non-emergency UBI that goes beyond a social buffer to compensate for new ways that value is created and extracted, in the biopolitical interstices of daily life, under digitalized capitalism. To understand the Covid-19 pandemic’s effect on the expropriation of digital academic labour in particular, and to make the connection to basic income, this section identifies the broad contours of digital technology-induced change in the academic labour process (Woodcock, 2018).

There are numerous works by critical educational scholars who draw variously on theorists of both cognitive and informational capitalism to investigate this transformation (Ouellet and Martin, 2018; Malott, 2019). One treatment is especially comprehensive and bracing: the proletarianization thesis advanced by Richard Hall. Though academics are comparatively privileged, albeit variably along the lines of race and gender, in recent writings Hall maintains that they are increasingly subjugated to the dictates of capital at the level of their everyday working lives. Arguably, academic labour is being routinized, controlled, channelled and captured under a digitally driven master process of academic proletarianization (Hall, 2020).

Drawing on a rich vein of classical Marxian thought in a manner reminiscent of Fuchs, and with a nod to Gilles Deleuze, Hall (2018a: 174) argues that the Western university is becoming “a machine for the production of value”. Now, the specifics of Hall’s argument are less relevant to my article than its broad lineaments, which are as follows. On a wide scale, academic labour is increasingly entangled within “hegemonic webs” that incorporate universities into machinic assemblages comprising heterogeneous entities – including government departments, equity and insurance firms, high-powered consultancies, property developers, international accreditation agencies, and international publishers – the combination of which function “to leverage value from across a wider educational terrain” (Hall, 2018a: 150). What results is the subsumption of academic labour within a higher education sociotechnical system that commodifies and monetizes academic knowledge and the outputs of academic work. National boundaries are spanned since digital technologies function as “a pivot for international joint ventures” (Hall, 2018a: 151). In turn, these both reconfigure and expand international markets for online education and involve the use of platform technologies to capture value on a transnational scale (Hall, 2020).

Hall’s thesis concerning the fate of the public university in particular is consistent with the thesis of cognitive capitalism, especially variants that point to the transformation of the university into an “edu-factory” and thus a prime site of class conflict (Federici and Caffentzis, 2007). Under this capitalism, the harnessing of the general intellect to capital’s ends within higher education is augmented by digital technologies that are “violently recalibrating academic labour” (Hall and Bowles, 2016: 33). Though there are many facets to Hall’s analysis of how this recalibration results in proletarianization, in essence, its novelty inheres in the author’s emphasis upon academic labour as a form of abstract (value-producing) labour from which digitalization facilitates the extraction of “relative surplus value” (Hall, 2020: 128).

With regard to the preceding point, some terminological clarification is in order. In Marxian parlance the term relative surplus value refers to the intensification of work by means of technological innovation, which results in unpaid labour time increasing relative to paid labour time. Economy-wide, this can occur through wage goods becoming cheaper due to rising productivity in the sector that produces them, which allows living standards of workers to increase while they are simultaneously exploited more. Yet I do not see Hall’s use of the term as being so univocal – rather, the production of relative surplus value provides a shorthand (analogical) way of identifying what the digital reconfiguration of academic labour as value-producing labour entails: exploitation. Insofar as the exploitation of creative workers such as academics can be conceptualized in Marxist terms as the “the appropriation of intellectual rents instead of surplus value” (Buzgalin and Kolganov, 2013: 486), and since I regard Hall to be using the term relative surplus value analogically, the fact that he does not specify how this value is realized is insignificant. Based on the work of Buzgalin and Kolganov (2013), it is reasonable to believe that some of the value academics create takes the form of an intellectual rent captured by rent-seeking senior university managers. This is enough to establish that academics are exploited, which forms the main premise in the argument about academic proletarianization.²

For Hall, the exploitation of academic labour is driven by the neoliberal reconstruction of higher education in line with market norms and the resulting encroachment of the law of value (socially necessary labour time) upon even public sector higher educational institutions, which are being corporatized and thus behaving in a rivalrous, competitive manner. As a means of creating value that is realizable in educational markets, academic labour is prized by university administrators increasingly only to the extent that it has “the potential to generate new products through spin-outs, impact, knowledge transfer or knowledge exchange” (Hall, 2018a: 43). In this context, digital technologies provide the basis for both economizing on academic labour costs and establishing revenue streams based on creating “new forms of commodity capital through educational outputs” (Hall and Bowles, 2016: 38). In turn, academic work is both intensified and its intellectual content stripped back (Hall, 2018b: 99). Vostal (2016) argues that academics are increasingly time pressured, but the flipside of the coin is competitive pressure to reduce aggregate paid academic labour time relative to the value of commodified academic outputs in national and international educational service product markets (Hall, 2018a).

Digital technology is a prime labour-saving device. Since labour costs generally comprise the lion’s share of total variable costs within a university, digital technologies can be used to reduce the labour intensity of creating and delivering teaching materials. Online education allows for reducing direct labour costs, which offset attendant software and platform license fee costs, because of its inherent scalability and “reproducibility” (Allmer, 2018: 69). In the short term, switching to online teaching is not labour-saving since academic staff must learn new processes and expend time and effort to create online teaching and learning materials. In the longer term, however, labour-saving is accomplishable by using online teaching to reduce face-to-face teaching hours and, by implication, an institution’s academic staff numbers. Saving academic labour by digitally displacing it is not, however, tantamount to expropriating this labour. It is important, therefore, to augment Hall’s thesis – namely, that academic labour is becoming technologically subjugated to the imperatives of capital – by clarifying which forms of this labour are susceptible to being digitally expropriated.

Clearly, not all academic labour is expended online since academic work tends to blend both “digital and non-digital media” (Allmer, 2019: 608). By the same token, not everything that academics do online, in connection with their work either directly or indirectly, counts as digital labour that is expropriable in the sense of there being an unequal exchange that typifies exploitation – in the broad Marxian meaning of this term, that is. Teaching in the virtual classroom, for example, using Zoom or Webex, often simply represents the substitution of synchronous online teaching for synchronous in-person teaching. Similarly, communicating with students by means of email or messaging within learning platforms, while often time consuming, is not creating expropriable value in the way that communicating with them by means of social media does – since social media, as per the theory of informational capitalism, is inherently exploitative.

Certainly, the reliance of academics on social media as a means of communication and reputational signalling is one site where they are subject to exploitation. This is, however, practically indistinguishable from how citizen-labourers are exploited online through social media more widely. For academics, as for others, the extracted value is realized not by higher education institutions but rather by the social media megaliths. Zukerfeld (2017) helpfully pinpoints one specific type of digitally expropriable academic labour: the production of digital educational content – in all of its different forms (e-learning materials, recorded lectures, high quality videos, online workbooks, tests and so on) – that is storable and thus can be repackaged and repurposed. For academic staff in the neoliberal university, this process involves their tacit knowledge being codified and used to create information goods, which derive their value both from their knowledge content and potential to be used repeatedly without the involvement of the academic content creator. Higher education institutions can set these goods within a propertarian framework through the assertion of intellectual property rights (Zukerfeld, 2017).

As the cognitive capitalist argument concerning the exploitation of learning economies and the devaluation of professional knowledge suggests, the expropriation of digital academic labour need not occur in the direct and contemporaneous production of a monetizable educational service product. By way of illustration, Zukerfeld (2017) uses the historical example of deskilling under Taylorism: tacit knowledge possessed by skilled craft workers is transposed into a set of written procedures, but not immediately in the production of a material good. By analogy, academics still possess the knowledge used to create online educational content, but they neither control nor are they sufficiently compensated for its capture for value-seeking ends (Zukerfeld, 2017: 17). In sociological terms, losing control of the use of abstract knowledge is the sine qua non of the deprofessionalization of an occupation (Toren, 1975). For postsecondary educators, it is arguably a large step along the path to proletarianization (Randle and Brady, 1997).

Digital academic labour, pandemic biopolitics, and non-emergency UBI

It is now possible to connect the dots between academic proletarianization, the susceptibility of digital academic labour to being expropriated in the production of online educational content, and Covid-19 pandemic biopolitics. Given the level of volatility and uncertainty in the current crisis situation, this discussion is best framed as a preliminary analysis. With this caveat in mind, in this section I argue that pandemic-driven biopolitical trade-offs in higher education provide reasons to press for the introduction of non-emergency UBI.

The need to physically distance in order to contain the transmission of the novel coronavirus precipitated a rapid and large-scale shift to emergency online delivery right across the educational spectrum (Tesar, 2020). Beginning first at the epicentre of the pandemic in China (Sun et al., 2020), schools and universities around the world rapidly moved to online teaching as these institutions were closed to prevent the virus from spreading among staff and students. UNESCO’s Global Monitoring program indicates that, as at 6 June 2020, more than 1 billion learners (58.3% of the total enrolled) were affected, and country-wide closures occurred in 111 countries (UNESCO, 2020).

In the United States, by mid-March 2020, upwards of 1,100 colleges and universities cancelled face-to-face classes or moved solely to online learning across all 50 states (Smalley, 2020). Minorities have been adversely affected by the pressure to use digital tools to reconfigure teaching almost literally overnight (Stewart, 2020). Within the United Kingdom, reports abound of extremely fast transitions to online teaching as entire courses of study that were previously offered in face-to-face mode were digitally retrofitted so as to be offered remotely (Williams and Gabe, 2020). The UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC) estimate that 98% of tertiary education students were affected by the closure of the institution where they were enrolled in that region (IESALC, 2020: 9). The situation is similar in the Antipodean milieu. Beginning in February 2020, Australian universities almost completely shut their campuses down and entire “curriculums were moved online over a very short time” (Universities Australia, 2020: 6).

Clearly, the emergency online provision of education due to the Covid-19 pandemic has the potential to intensify the expropriation of digital academic labour – primarily through the extraction of digital content, and secondarily through increased recourse to social media as an educational communication instrument. Since early reports suggest that the use of social media to communicate with students during the crisis has been limited (Johnson et al., 2020), the realization of this potential hinges largely on the extent to which the emergency online measures are normalized (Murphy, 2020). According to Wotto (2020), the trend towards digitally enabled distance learning within the higher education sector was already occurring apace in North America and Western Europe. Yet in the absence of a crisis, Nichols (2020: 11) suggests, several factors resulted in universities tending to be more “supply-oriented rather than demand-oriented”. Prime among these are bureaucratic organizational structures that focus managers’ attention on internal administrative processes, and the favouring of a compliance approach based on slavishly meeting “academic and administrative standards” (Nichols, 2020: 11). Taking Nichols’ view to its logical conclusion, universities’ supply orientation is a key reason why the level of digital disruption in higher education did not accelerate faster prior to the pandemic.

Judging by recent statements by the OECD, the pandemic constitutes a watershed disruptive moment. One noteworthy report concludes that in order to “remain relevant”, especially in the context of student dissatisfaction with institutions being closed, “universities will need to reinvent their learning environments so that digitalisation expands” (OECD, 2020). Among the business establishment one prominent view, channelled by the Harvard Business Review, is that the Covid-19 crisis is what was needed to push institutions to adopt “a more digitally-driven, outcomes-focussed business model” (Gallagher and Palmer, 2020). Notwithstanding the unethicality of a crisis moment in which there is widespread human suffering being used by neoliberal reformers – following the well-established recipe of “disaster capitalism” (Klein, 2007) – to advance their higher education agenda, already there is some evidence of a shift in this direction. One study suggests that some universities in the United Kingdom responded to the pandemic by permanently moving up to 25% of their teaching portfolio into the online environment (Watermeyer et al., 2020). As the most comprehensive survey to date of academics in this national setting, the same study draws a striking conclusion:

The COVID-19 crisis appears…to have dually quickened the inevitability of technological change or authority of technological determinism and supercharged a sense of existential panic among academics—many of whom appear now snared in the headlights of digital disruption. (Watermeyer et al., 2020)

To the extent that the Covid-19 pandemic is sparking digitally disruptive change, an intensification of the proletarianization of academics is likely to be the net result.

Whether the higher education model that uses the campus experience as a student recruitment strategy will collapse due to increasing digitalization, thereby pushing academic proletarianization towards its maximal level, remains to be seen. Indeed, militating against this trend is an equally nefarious biopolitical development that is currently crystallizing. In the United States and the United Kingdom, there has been considerable pressure to bring students back onto campus so that in-person teaching and other regular on-campus activities can resume. In a now infamous op-ed piece penned in May 2020, the Catholic priest and President of the University of Notre Dame, Reverend John I. Jenkins, argued that reopening the campus was “worth the risk” – invoking “the good of society” and other such nostrums (Jenkins, 2020). Jenkins’ apparent lapse into consequentialist metaethical reasoning is anathema to Catholic social ethics, but this pales in comparison to the practical effects of throwing the gates open while community transmission of Covid-19 is still occurring. Empirically, the reopening of American colleges has been shown to increase the transmission of the virus not just on campuses but in surrounding areas (Andersen et al., 2020). It is therefore understandable that the “hybrid” model of learning – involving a mixture of online and face-to-face teaching – has been criticized for neglecting to protect staff, students, and the wider community from infection (Star, 2020). As a result, there have been calls for tenured academics to refuse to re-enter the classroom until the virus has been controlled (Aboulafia, 2020).

Similarly, a mid-year survey by Universities UK indicated that 97% of universities planned to take a hybrid approach (Williams, 2020). Just over a month after the new academic year commenced, as at 6 October 2020, approximately 90 universities reported cases of Covid-19 (Mueller, 2020). The University and College Union (UCU) reports that staff are being bullied into face-to-face teaching, despite the health risks this presents (Fazackerley, 2020). In early October, the UCU threatened widespread industrial action in an attempt to push teaching back online. As one British academic reportedly put it, “management are willing to put our lives and health at risk” (McKie, 2020).

Here is an interim summary: in conjunction with the potential of the Covid-19 pandemic to accelerate the expropriation of digital academic labour, there is a biopolitical trade-off against the protection of life. If emergency online teaching is normalized, there will likely be a spike in the digital exploitation of academics. Conversely, the winding back of emergency measures threatens to expose academics, students, and indeed entire communities to Covid-19. Either way, how the pandemic-induced crisis is playing out in higher education supplies reasons for introducing non-emergency UBI.

Here it is necessary to distinguish more precisely between targeted welfare responses, emergency UBI, and non-emergency UBI. Emergency UBI is distinct from temporarily insulating members of specified social groups from periodic systemic shocks that undermine employment and income. Its universal application to all citizens is precisely what separates emergency UBI from targeted short-term income and employment guarantees provided in response to the Covid-19 pandemic – such as the Australian “Jobkeeper” payment – which apply only to certain categories of people. Arguably, emergency UBI is preferable to measures that simply provide a targeted short-term guarantee of continuity of employment and income. On this point Ståhl and MacEachen (2020) channel Karl Widerquist, the American political philosopher, who argues that as a pandemic response emergency UBI:

cushions people who are either underemployed or unemployed;

rewards essential workers who often work in dangerous conditions for low pay;

serves as an economic stimulus by shoring up consumer demand;

is administratively simpler than support schemes that require people to meet strict eligibility criteria.

Though this rationale is sound, there are at least three reasons for preferring non-emergency over emergency UBI. The first concerns the knock-on social effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Recent research on the United Kingdom suggests that the pandemic is both exacerbating extant inequalities and producing new bases of inequality with likely long-term consequences for the unequal distribution of life chances along the lines of race, class and gender (Blundell et al., 2020). Non-emergency UBI is one means of mitigating these inequalities in the long run.

It is the two further reasons for preferring non-emergency UBI that are supported by contemporary biopolitical tensions within higher education. The second reason, as noted previously, is to compensate for the extraction of value from citizens under digital capitalism. It is here that the exploitation of digital academic labour factors into the equation. Online teaching draws academics into the digital circuit of value creation – for which UBI serves a compensatory function. This insight facilitates the reframing of how academia is grasped by progressive welfare theory. Within the political economy of the welfare state, a field that developed in the 1970s (Gough, 1992), the term “social wage” was used to signify a welfare-oriented redistributive function that defrayed postsecondary educators’ role in increasing the wider social rate of exploitation due to upskilling future workers (Shaikh, 2003). Within Leftist political theory and discourse, however, the concept of the social wage has yielded to UBI as an investment in the socialization of society’s intellectual resources and simultaneous reward for value-producing activity by the bearers of those resources. Within this context, UBI signifies a shift from a primarily redistributive function to the reward of value-creating productive subjects – including academics whose digital labour is expropriated.

The third reason for emergency UBI stems from the contested biopolitics of designating persons as “essential” workers (Rose, 2020) – either directly by the state, or by default as work organizations press employees into unsafe workplace environments. As Blundell et al. (2020: 301) demonstrate in relation to the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, so-called “key workers” in healthcare, aged and social care, security, and even some in the retail and wholesale sectors “were urged to continue working despite the dangers posed by COVID-19”. Their loss of income was therefore not as great as those who lost their livelihoods, but there was a disproportionate effect on the death rate. In particular:

Rates of COVID-19 deaths among men were between 2 and 3.7 times higher in a number of key worker occupations – specifically care workers, taxi drivers, bus and coach drivers, and sales and retail assistants – than among the general population. (Blundell, 2020: 301)

This is precisely because of the infection risk that doing these jobs entails, which has been exacerbated in the care sector by shortages of personal protective equipment. My overriding point is this: compensating those who are exposed to greater risk is a well-established reward management principle, but it does nothing to challenge capitalism as a system that is predicated upon the sacrifice of the interests and physical wellbeing of particular social groups. In short, as a quid pro quo for engaging in risky work, non-emergency UBI does nothing to challenge capitalism as the source of biopolitical trade-offs – since it neither threatens the employment relation nor offsets digital exploitation across the lifespan.

Now, of course, academics and members of other such middle-class occupations are generally remunerated more highly than blue-collar workers whose physical labour is deemed “essential” (Rose, 2020). Those who can work from home have the added benefit of spending less time on the daily commute. Nevertheless, not only must the exploitation of digital academic labour be taken into consideration when weighing up the class-based effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, academics now themselves risk being physically sacrificed on the altar of commodified higher education. As the requirement to come back to campus ramps up, those who neither want to be exposed to the novel coronavirus nor transmit it to others are caught on the horns of a moral dilemma. As one American philosophy professor pointedly put it, faculty members must have:

the freedom to honor the requirements of their consciences while keeping their jobs. Many schools have not given faculty and staff the flexibility to work from home, or to work in conditions they find acceptable from a moral or safety perspective…. The refusal of institutions to do this creates an intractable moral conflict for their faculty and staff, who both need to make a living and to be able to live with themselves. (Fuller, 2020)

Non-emergency UBI fulfils these economically and morally necessary conditions of life.

In the view of those on the Left, guaranteed basic income must be set at a level sufficient to enable people to exit from work voluntarily (Wright, 2004). In practical terms, both by facilitating the decision to exit paid work and by enabling the possibility of exiting to be used as a tactic to press for greater health protective measures, this unconditional income enables those in risky work situations to protect themselves and others. In addition, by freeing people from the sacrifices the capitalist employment relation entails, there is an increased opportunity to engage in “non-commodified forms of socially productive activity” (Wright, 2004: 83). Of these, the most significant at present is giving care to the vulnerable, including children and those most at risk from Covid-19: the elderly and infirm.

Conclusion

Though higher education is only one piece of a larger picture, the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic in this sector supply reasons for supporting those on the Left who were actively promoting the case for UBI prior to the pandemic’s onset. For example, Mathers (2020) argues in favour of introducing UBI primarily because of the exploitation of digital labour. Since neoliberal governments are unlikely to be receptive to this or any other such argument, proposals for UBI are by their very nature a matter of collective struggle.³ Identifying universities as sites of digital labour is neither to deny that the pandemic is exacerbating the digital divide (d’Orville, 2020), nor to neglect the fact that online education can foster inclusivity by catering to the needs of the disabled, socially marginalized and geographically distanced (Allmer, 2019). Rather, it is to draw attention to how digital technologies are deeply implicated in the process of academic proletarianization.

As Agamben (2005) has taught us, governments and the powerful in organizations can prolong and exploit crisis situations for their own ends. The alacrity with which the shift to the online provision of education was enacted in many institutions in the early stages of the pandemic – albeit at the cost of much stress in the working lives of the academics involved – may simply provide university managers with yet another reason to conclude that “digital technologies will provide a long-term, corporately mediated solution to crises of funding” (Burns, 2020: 247). Disenchantment with neoliberal, economizing applications of these technologies is precisely one reason for coining the term “postdigital” (Malott, 2019). Rather than being a liberatory educational tool in the hands of academic produsers, in the context of a capitalist – cognitive and informational – paradigm, and given the attendant commodification of higher education, it is a monstrous technology that proletarianizes academics and leaches their knowledge and labour-time.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic threatens to heighten academic proletarianization by not only exacerbating digital exploitation but by forcing biopolitical choices between work and life, the techno-utopian dream is becoming a living nightmare. As Slavoj Žižek argued early in the piece, one way of awakening ourselves is to begin to “learn to think outside the coordinates of the stock market and profit” (Žižek, 2020: 90). To the extent that non-emergency UBI challenges prevailing socioeconomic institutional arrangements, and supporting reasoned arguments contribute to public pedagogy, this measure does just that.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

James Reveley

Notes

James Reveley is an Associate Professor of Management in the Faculty of Business and Law at the University of Wollongong. His research interests include social media and digital labour, disaster capitalism, the social construction of resilience, and subjective aspects of neoliberalism. His work has been published in a range of international journals including Thesis Eleven, Science and Society, Human Relations, Policy Futures in Education, Enterprise and Society, and Educational Philosophy and Theory. He is currently engaged in research concerning the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on how educational organizations manage risk.

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