The Green Party's Universal Basic Illusion

Scoop

14-07-2025

The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, long considered the progressive conscience of Parliament, has proposed an Income Guarantee, a universal, unconditional payment that would replace or simplify several parts of the welfare system. Framed as a liberating policy to reduce poverty, support unpaid labour, and prepare for a future where work may be scarcer, it has garnered enthusiastic support among progressives. But this proposal is not the radical solution it pretends to be.
Instead, it reflects a greenwashed attempt to stabilise capitalism by offering just enough relief to avoid revolt. Far from challenging the structural roots of inequality, private property, wage labour, and capitalist accumulation, the Green Party's UBI functions as a sedative, dulling the sharp edges of exploitation while entrenching the system that causes it. The Green Party's UBI is a reformist containment strategy, not a pathway to liberation. Its implementation would cushion the worst aspects of capitalist life, but in doing so, it would pacify resistance, entrench private ownership, and ultimately protect the interests of capital.
What the Greens Propose
In 2023, the Green Party unveiled a rebranded version of UBI called the Income Guarantee. This scheme offers:
A weekly payment of at least NZD $385 to all adults not in paid work, including students and carers.
Higher rates for single parents and families with children.
A restructuring of existing welfare benefits, replacing Jobseeker, Sole Parent Support, and Working for Families with a unified baseline payment.
A new agency (replacing ACC) to guarantee 80% of minimum wage for those unable to work due to illness or disability.
No work obligations, sanctions, or means-testing for this baseline.
The Greens frame this as a way to value unpaid work, decouple survival from employment, and support dignity in a time of rising precarity. They also claim that it simplifies bureaucracy and builds trust in people to use the payment in ways that work for their lives.
But while these ideas may seem empowering on paper, they carry deep contradictions, particularly when implemented within a capitalist framework.
Reforming the System That Creates Poverty
The first and most glaring issue with the Greens' Income Guarantee is that it leaves intact the very system that causes poverty and precarity in the first place. People are not poor because there is no universal income; they are poor because the means of production, land, housing, food, energy, are privately owned and controlled by a small class of capitalists.
By funnelling a state stipend into a market dominated by landlords, bosses, and corporate monopolies, the Greens' UBI model subsidises capital, not challenges it. The landlord still sets the rent. The supermarket still sets the price of bread. The corporation still determines wages and hours. A 'universal income' becomes a universal transfer of public money to private pockets.
This is not wealth redistribution, it's redistribution of dependency. The Greens imagine that by putting cash in your pocket, they are empowering you. But as long as that cash has to pass through the hands of property owners and profiteers, it simply recirculates back into the capitalist machine.
Flat Payments in an Unequal World
The Green Party's rhetoric of 'universality' masks a dangerous flattening of difference. By giving the same baseline income to all regardless of need, the policy shifts away from needs-based welfare to a market-mediated minimalism.
This sounds fair on the surface, but it has regressive implications. A wealthy investor and a single parent receive the same base rate. Meanwhile, tailored supports for disability, illness, or chronic hardship are pared back, replaced with a one-size-fits-all payment that ignores the complexity of human need.
While the Greens claim that specialised supports would still exist, the logic of simplification, driven by administrative efficiency and cost, risks future erosion of more expensive targeted benefits. This is not an idle concern. Across the world, UBI experiments have been used to justify welfare cutbacks, particularly under conservative governments that follow.
In the long run, a flat payment becomes an excuse to individualise poverty, treating everyone the same while leaving structural inequalities untouched.
UBI as Austerity in Disguise
UBI can become a tool of austerity, not generosity. By packaging welfare reform as 'universal empowerment,' the state absolves itself of responsibility for meeting complex needs. It shifts risk back onto the individual giving them a cash payment, but removing the broader safety net that once protected people from market volatility.
In practice, this leads to privatised hardship - disabled people navigating inaccessible housing markets on a flat income; sole parents forced to stretch meagre funds across rent, food, transport, and children's needs; sick workers unable to afford care once the specialised benefits disappear.
UBI may be universal, but its effects are not equal. It entrenches the neoliberal logic that you are responsible for surviving the system, even as the system remains rigged against you.
The Work Fetish in Reverse
A key selling point of the Green UBI is that it allows people to work less and to study, care for whanāu, volunteer, create art, or simply rest. This is undeniably attractive. For many, the dream of decoupling survival from employment is liberatory.
However, UBI doesn't abolish work, it just reorganises who gets to do less of it. The means of production still belong to someone else. People may reduce hours or leave exploitative jobs but they still must buy back access to life from those who own it. Without seizing control of land, housing, food systems, and workplaces, UBI only offers a slower treadmill, not a way off.
True liberation from work requires not just the absence of compulsion, but the presence of collective power to shape what, how, and why we produce. Under capitalism, UBI is not freedom from work it is still just freedom to consume what others profit from.
Automation and the Myth of Post-Work Capitalism
Another justification for UBI is the coming wave of automation. As jobs are replaced by AI and machines, we are told, we need a universal income to ensure people aren't left behind.
This argument is both outdated and naïve. Automation is not new it has always accompanied capitalism. And rather than freeing us from labour, it has consistently resulted in:
Job displacement for the many,
Wealth concentration for the few,
And a race to the bottom for those still working.
Without changing the ownership of technology and the surplus it generates, automation becomes a weapon against workers, not a liberation. UBI does not challenge this, it merely proposes a bribe to stay quiet while the rich get richer from robotic productivity.
If we want automation to free us, we must demand common ownership of its fruits, not a state-managed allowance.
Depoliticising the Class Struggle
UBI has a profoundly depoliticising function. By providing everyone a basic income, it suggests that class conflict can be solved through technocratic redistribution, rather than collective struggle. It individualises economic survival and replaces mutual aid with state-administered charity.
The Greens often present this as 'trusting people.' But in truth, it is a move away from politics altogether, away from strikes, occupations, assemblies, and direct action. It encourages people to become passive consumers of state policy rather than active agents of transformation.
This is no accident. UBI fits comfortably within the liberal logic of non-confrontational progressivism - small gains, managed well, with no need to question who owns what or why.
But anarcho-communists know that liberation is not granted it is seized. The abolition of wage labour, rent, and bosses does not come from a Treasury paper. It comes from resistance, solidarity, and revolt.
The Green Fetish for Policy Without Revolution
Ultimately, the Green Party's UBI is a reflection of their broader political project - a capitalism with a conscience. Their aim is to regulate, reform, and humanise the existing system not to overturn it.
This is the great tragedy of Green politics: it mobilises the language of justice to protect the architecture of oppression. They speak of liberation while fearing confrontation. They dream of balance sheets, not barricades.
The Income Guarantee is not a step toward socialism. It is a safety valve for capitalism, designed to prevent breakdown by making survival just bearable enough to forestall uprising.
As long as the Greens seek legitimacy in Parliament, they will remain managers of compromise, not agents of emancipation.
Toward a Real Alternative
Anarcho-communists do not oppose the idea of everyone having their needs met. But we reject the idea that this must come in the form of a wage or income. We do not want better access to markets we want a world without them.
Imagine a society where housing is free because it is collectively owned. Where food is grown and shared in community gardens, not bought. Where care work is respected and supported through mutual aid, not commodified. Where education, transport, and health are decommodified. Where people work not for profit, but for one another.
This is not utopia. It exists in fragments already in marae, solidarity kitchens, workers' co-ops, and mutual aid networks. These are the embryos of a post-capitalist future.
We don't need a basic income. We need basic expropriation. We need the end of property, not its pacification.
No Wages, No Compromise
The Green Party's UBI plan, however well-intentioned, is not a solution to poverty. It is a reformist illusion, an elegant attempt to stabilise a decaying system without addressing the violence at its core. It replaces welfare with technocracy, struggle with dependence, and solidarity with state charity.
We say: No wages. No landlords. No bosses. No income guarantees only freedom from all need for income at all.
We do not ask for a universal basic income.
We demand a universal reclaiming of life itself.