Response to Caroline West’s “From Company Town to Post-Industrial: Inquiry on the Redistribution of Space and Capital with a Universal Basic Income”

Caroline West analyzes how the redistribution of capital using Universal Basic Income (UBI) could address some of the economic and developmental inequalities generated by the history of extractive relationships between urban centers and Central Appalachia.¹ Looking at these historically coal-dependent communities, West uses UBI to deepen our thinking about the entrenched material and cultural legacies left in “company towns” as the coal industry declines. The UBI, West argues, may offer a way to reverse deepening economic precarity in this region and enhance residents’ capacity to shape the redevelopment of their communities. The implementation of a UBI, West proposes, could help to reshape these historically-constituted conditions by weakening the hold of capital over labor and, by priming the local economies with resources, could encourage the emergence of a more diverse set of economic opportunities and discourage emigration in search of work. West’s analysis concludes with the suggestion that communitarian cultural residues that have escaped the pressure of the “company town” system offer social connectivity and a sense of solidarity that can facilitate a “bottom-up” refiguring of Central Appalachian life. In this response, I will take up the connections between these concepts of “community” and “solidarity” in relation to the Universal Basic Income West proposes. Though West’s analysis focuses on Central Appalachia, I will additionally bring into the foreground a question that hovers at the periphery of West’s account: how might we think about solidarity in the context of ongoing energy transitions more broadly?

West may have good reasons to avoid using the moral framing of “justice” in this account, but nonetheless, this analysis might be understood as a way to advance conversations about what a “just transition” could look like for historically fossil fuel-dependent communities.² As West observes, long-term patterns of impoverishment and emigration from the region were driven by the confluence of automation, the ongoing search by the coal industry for lower labor costs, and the pressure of growing environmental, occupational, and public health regulation.³ Looking towards the present and immediate future, we might add to this list the competitive pressure exerted by alternative power sources that have made employment dependent on coal extraction particularly precarious.⁴ West’s analysis of the recent history of Central Appalachia thus offers an early case study of the local impacts of energy transition that we might fruitfully relate to some other fossil fuel-dependent regions where we can anticipate similar transitions in the relatively near future.⁵

West observes that, as early as the 1960s, political rhetoric and actual policy constructed poverty in Appalachia as a problem to be solved from the outside, rather than a set of local issues to be addressed through the agency of those who live there.⁶ By West’s account, the shortcomings of policy responses have generated skepticism towards top-down solutions. Since the publication of “From Company Town to Post-Industrial: Inquiry on the Redistribution of Space and Capital with a Universal Basic Income,” Phillip Lewin has built on earlier research by Rebecca Scott, Shannon Elizabeth Bell, Richard York, and others, substantiating the claim that the hegemonic cultural politics of coal in the region are supported, in part, by a sense that the federal government is a neglectful or even actively hostile force representing urban sensibilities that devalue and marginalize the region’s residents.⁷ Understandably, then, West attributes importance to identifying opportunities for “bottom-up” responses that emphasize local agency and draw upon the strength and vibrancy of local communities when constructing a future in which coal plays a significantly reduced role.⁸ By critiquing the actual state of affairs in these communities from the perspective of UBI’s potential, West challenges us to think clearly about how political projects in the present and near future will need to engage with the particularities of such historical legacies while nurturing the specific forms of agency capable of taking them on.

Even so, by drawing on Marxian critical geography, West argues that the geographical relationships between cities and rural areas like Central Appalachia should be understood as “class phenomena.”⁹ Given that this calls on us to see the problems of Central Appalachia as exemplary of broader structural features of capitalism, I ask how might we understand the connections between the specific concerns of this region and those of others who are positioned quite differently. Many fossil fuel extracting regions will engage on cultural and environmental terrains shaped by very different histories, but will face similar kinds of economic disruption in the coming years. To understand Central Appalachian social and economic conditions in terms of broader analytics of class and capitalism, rather than exclusively in terms of the region’s exceptionality, particularity, singularity, or uniqueness, is to suggest that there may be meaningful ways to articulate the circumstances West observes in Central Appalachia with those found elsewhere.

But what role could West’s UBI proposal play in mediating these kinds of differences? How might we make sense of the functions West attributes to “community” and “solidarity” in this mediation? To begin speaking to these questions, I will ask whether the UBI functions in West’s analysis as a speculative narrative, thought experiment, or horizon towards which a politics might be constructed—or if, instead, West is describing it as a practical political project.

Is the UBI a practical political goal or a speculative narrative about the future?

West understands the Universal Basic Income to be “universal” in the sense that it is unconditional, “basic” in the sense that it provides for “shelter, food, and clothes,” and an “income” in the sense that it uses periodic cash payments to achieve these ends. Drawing on existing initiatives in the region, West gives concrete examples of how redistributing financial resources to people could enhance capacities for self-determination and local economic control. West points, for instance, to the ways that a UBI could increase opportunities for people to pursue education, as in the example of BitSource, or facilitate the creation of small local businesses, as in the example of a local restaurant. West argues that by redistributing capital to a region that has the necessary cultural and creative resources to transition away from coal but not the means to do so, a UBI could shift power to shape the region’s future away from absentee capital controlled by owners in the metropole, who have had an essentially predatory relationship to the region.

But where on the spectrum from “practical political goal” to “thought experiment” is the UBI proposal West offers? Is UBI an ambitious but relatively practical political proposal that might be added to a list of other ambitious political projects that have been taken up in recent years? Alternatively, is UBI a speculative narrative about the future that West proposes as a political horizon towards which we might orient other, more immediate projects? In the conclusion, West acknowledges some of the limitations of a UBI: “I make no claim that, in isolation, a UBI has the ability to end all poverty or create the conditions to overthrow the capitalist mode of production.” West suggests that instead, we should understand it as a way of “level[ing] the playing field” and enabling poorer Appalachians to take a more active role in generating a more “diverse economy.”¹⁰ Thus, West distinguishes the ostensibly practical UBI from what is characterized as a less immediately achievable political horizon: the possibility that we might address all want or begin to “overthrow the capitalist mode of production.” Juxtaposed with a revolution that eliminates all poverty, the UBI seems like a tenable triangulation between progressive political commitments and the politics of the possible.

Though she positions the UBI as a realistic political project that triangulates between the ideal and the possible, West may downplay the scope of mobilization and transformation necessary to arrive at this goal. West suggests that solidarities are already emerging among those who seek to envision a life after coal in the region, focusing on how these social connections could generate community-based redevelopment if there was a UBI in place; however, creating a UBI will require a political bloc with wider geographical scope than the social connections that characterize families and local communities can achieve. Rather than starting my evaluation of the UBI by asking whether or not it is a means to “create the conditions to overthrow the capitalist mode of production,” I begin by asking what it would take to implement the UBI itself. My contention is that a UBI that provides for the basic necessities would require that we have already made significant progress towards transforming the capitalist mode of production before we could even begin making payments. This seems especially true if we are imagining that other existing government-provided social supports would be maintained, rather than cannibalized by this proposal.¹¹

A universal income that could cover basic needs would require a significant enough political mobilization that economic modeling is likely less to be important to our evaluations of West’s proposal than consideration of the basic political orientations and values of the polity the proposal would seek to bring into being. Even so, I offer a fairly crude set of numbers just so that we can begin to imagine the scale of the proposal. Using a figure just under the 2019 HHS federal poverty guidelines, we might imagine a UBI payment of about $12,000 per year per person, so with 304 million US citizens (2017), the annual payment would be around $3.65 trillion, exclusive of administrative costs.¹² For reference, total annual projected federal government revenues are currently around $3.33 trillion per year, so we are talking about a pretty radical expansion of the scope of the federal government, no matter how we might achieve this kind of expenditure.¹³ At around 18 percent of US GDP ($19.39 trillion), the scope may initially appear to be similar to something like Medicare for All, but the important distinction is that the Medicare for All would be transforming already-existing transfers of wealth from everyday people to the healthcare industry to payments to the government in taxes, likely with some redistribution of the burden to those most able to pay.¹⁴ The scale of a UBI is not so large as to seem unthinkable, but the proposal involves an extraordinary change, to be sure.

We might imagine a UBI of this scale funded by direct taxation, with government incomes and payments in a given year somewhere close to balanced, but this would certainly require finding many new kinds of taxation, not just a progressive adjustment of marginal rates.¹⁵ Carbon fee-and-dividend schemes that tax emissions simply could not generate payments close to this size, much less net benefits of this scale.¹⁶ We might imagine that we could fund a UBI simply by expanding the money supply, but even under very sympathetic assumptions, this would require a degree of public intervention much larger than that to which we are accustomed.¹⁷ In any case, a very different balance in the struggle over how the federal government represents the interests of the working and precarious classes versus private owners, financial capital, and the like would likely be necessary to achieve these kinds of changes to taxation or monetary policy. While it might not require an entirely different “mode of production,” it very well might require a political bloc with enough power that it could re-configure some of the essential social relations of production, circulation, and consumption, if those were the goals towards which it was oriented.

Among the most persuasively developed mechanisms for funding a UBI are proposals to make it a dividend from a consortium of state-owned enterprises, a sovereign/social wealth fund, or some combination of the two. These proposals offer a clear “on ramp” towards a full-scale UBI and could allow some degree of democratic control over a significant segment of the productive economy. Matt Bruenig, for instance, has done remarkable work envisioning how a national-scale social wealth fund could be implemented in the United States in order to pay a universal basic dividend.¹⁸ In his proposal, which he calls the American Solidarity Fund, he looks towards the relatively small dividend paid by the Alaska Permanent Fund to state residents.¹⁹ Alaska’s payments, to be clear, are not nearly as large as what West is proposing: at $1100–$2072 per person annually, they are one-sixth to one-twelfth of being a “Basic Income.” But how much capital is necessary to produce dividends of this size? Bruenig estimates Alaska’s sovereign wealth fund at 113% of the state’s Gross Domestic Product, so scaling an Alaska-type scheme to national scale, he suggests, would entail having a fund of around $22.6 trillion. To get to a scale that is more like a “Basic Income,” we must begin imagining a fund measured in hundreds of trillions of US dollars.

The state might accumulate this kind of capital through all manner of different mechanisms, but a social wealth fund of this scale would generate a fundamentally different class dynamic: present day struggles of workers and the dispossessed against privately-held financial capital would, to a significant degree, become struggles against the state. As the proportion of production democratically controlled by the social wealth fund grows, it would eventually cease to be rational to engage in such struggle, except under very local conditions. Which is to say, while this may only constitute “socialism” under very contemporary and capacious ways of using the word to include mixed economies, we would definitely be looking at different social relations of production than the ones we have now. It is for these reasons that I argue that a UBI, especially of the scale suggested by West, would entail a radical political mobilization and/or presuppose a significant social transformation has already occurred.²⁰ Even so, West has used UBI to good effect to generate a mode of critique that holds open the possibility of change and makes visible some of the structural challenges associated with energy transition.

How are “solidarity” and the UBI connected?

Since the UBI as a practical political project neither seems to have a political bloc capable of exerting the power necessary to make it real in the immediate future, nor a short-term mechanism through which a vast amount of socially owned wealth could be accumulated to support it, I am going to treat it now as a kind of speculative narrative about a possible future or an idealized political horizon. This reorients my response to the fundamental values that this narrative presupposes or represents. As a speculative narrative about a possible future, then, the UBI calls on us to imagine a future in which we put a significant proportion of the economy under democratic control. In this narrative, we imagine choosing to transfer these resources back out of democratic control and into the private economy. In West’s account, this would enable us to enhance local control and autonomy, encourage economic diversification, and reduce control of absentee capital in communities that have been historically dominated by energy extractive industries. Further, it would help stem the tide of emigration from this region. Of the role of community in this transition West writes,

Actualizing a bottom-up approach to economic development in Central Appalachia would need to be grounded in the cultural traditions that proceeded industrial production, namely, the strengths of community and familial relationships that can be used as a counter-weight to class stratification. Despite all the challenges Appalachian residents face with a crumbling infrastructure and few economic resources, the people in former coal mining towns have been imagining life beyond coal despite the lack of progressive governmental support.

She continues, “Solidarity is being formed through social culture and identity and the labor of the community,” giving as an example a restaurant that buys locally. Based on West’s reference to emigration, this kind of localism might both build social ties within the community and prevent the kind of generational fragmentation that has occurred in many rural communities due to emigration. Using interviews in a coal-mining town and a demographically similar town that is less directly dependent on coal, Shannon Elizabeth Bell has previously found that depopulation has significantly eroded social ties, reduced trust between neighbors, decreased the likelihood of giving or receiving mutual aid, and negatively impacted other indicators that sociologists take as representative of  “social capital.”²¹ West’s emphasis on the ways that a UBI could help stem the flow of people out of these coal-dependent communities is absolutely fundamental to understanding how the themes of community, solidarity, and the UBI are connected.

This is important because West emphasizes the role of existing social connectivity in the transition. It seems possible that, in many communities affected by energy transitions, there are residues of preindustrial community and family formations that could be the building blocks for more robust forms of solidarity, as West does. We can also observe that there are a variety of forms of community and kinship that have developed within the context of the dominant industry that help to bind people together and are not reducible to the needs of these industries. While these modes of solidarity would be inadequate to form a political bloc capable of implementing a UBI on their own, that does not seem to be West’s focus here; instead, she invites us to imagine one possible future and to think carefully about how an already implemented UBI would intersect with these forms of community and solidarity.

In accepting this invitation, I am reminded of how Raymond Williams treats the positive and negative content of “solidarity” as a concept of community. In the conclusion to his early work Culture and Society, he distinguishes between “the ladder,” “service,” and “solidarity.”²² For Williams, “the ladder” is the familiar form of individual striving with a community. It essentially denies “social conscience” to the individual; it both “weakens the principle of common betterment” and “sweetens the poison of hierarchy.”²³ Though the notion of “service” complicates liberal notions of individualism in the community, Williams suggests that it naturalizes the roles and functions of different individuals. Thus, while there is a certain degree of “personal unselfishness” involved with service, he argues that it exists “within a larger selfishness” that preserves the “status quo” but which remains unseen because it is “idealized as the necessary form of a civilization.”²⁴ It is in contrast to this that Williams develops the notion of “solidarity” as a concept of community characterized by “mutual responsibility.” Solidarity, for Williams, is a mode of cooperation that sees “the common interest as the true self-interest” and finds “individual verification primarily in the community.”²⁵ While Williams desired to bring these aspects of solidarity into a “fully democratic”  future, he recognized the ways that solidarity has been historically constituted by a reactive relation, a recognition of shared conditions and experiences born of subordination within the class structure, but also often conditioned by contrasts between what is held in common and an image of an “outsider” or enemy who may not actually be identical with the ruling or owning class. Williams views the negative content of the concept of “solidarity” as something that must be overcome on the path to “a fully democratic society.” There is, on this basis, a great ambiguity in communitarian appeals to tradition: the dynamic that binds a community together often has a negative content that involves resistance to outsiders. This negative content may prove to be a barrier to articulating local struggles across space or particular conditions together. But, the “fully democratic” speculative future that Williams narrates has appeal, since it calls on us to imagine a promiscuous solidarity that transcends different particular conditions and simple modes of identification towards a more capacious “mutual responsibility.”

When West cautiously praises solidarity among those seeking to imagine futures for their communities as the era of coal comes to an end, we can see how they might be motivated by a sense of identity, shared conditions, and common sensibilities drawn from similarities of experience and geographical proximity. But Williams’s insights might caution us to be wary of a potentially dangerous countercurrent often found in this kind of communitarian social tie. A sense of regional class consciousness, which in West’s account is attributed to the historical role of urban capital in the region and partially justifies imagining a “bottom-up” transition, could under some conditions also encourage reactionary cultural insularity or even foster social exclusion. As we think about the structural similarities between Central Appalachia and other communities facing energy transitions, the question about how we might build bridges between narrower forms of local community solidarity will be crucial, if we aim towards what Williams describes as a more “fully democratic” community. While a sense of regionalist “bottom up” redevelopment doubtlessly will play a role in many of these transitions, regional or local solidarities may, on one hand, bind people together with mutual concern on the basis of what they have in common, while on the other hand, dividing them from those perceived as outsiders or blocking the articulation of shared interests between social groups who are situated quite differently, but facing structurally similar problems. 

When Bruenig describes his vision of a national-scale sovereign wealth fund paying out a universal basic income as the “American Solidarity Fund,” we can see how the concept of “mutual responsibility” functions as the governing principle that connects different places and groups. Likewise, in West’s account, the UBI is the structural element that passes beyond the particular experiences of labor and precarity in a given community and addresses not just these specificities, but the broader political economic structures and tendencies highlighted by her theoretical framework. Indeed, the UBI offers an image of solidarity that includes not just workers, but also people with disabilities and the retired. In this sense, it may indeed foster a sense of solidarity that transcends immediate social ties towards a broader sense of a shared social project that extends beyond the region and beyond the particularities of a given circumstance. Arguably, it matches the already-existing social basis of production in advanced economies with a social basis for consumption, even if the proposal does not inherently necessitate putting the social basis of production under social control. The social basis for consumption it offers is considerably more universal than conservative appeals to “trickle down effects,” the developmentalist focus on “rising standards of living,” and liberal means-tested welfare programs.

Even so, it strikes me as consequential that the kind of connection it offers is mediated through the market: what we share, in this narrative, is the freedom to privately choose at an individual or family-unit level from a selection of goods and commodities. In this speculative future, the universal project will be experienced in the moment of purchase. I praise West, Bruenig, and others for taking seriously the need to imagine a common cause towards which we might orient heterogenous conflicts and the needs of many communities, but I wonder what other narratives of similar ambition we leave behind if we center our attention on this story?

By preserving the structure that mediates basic survival through the mechanism of market exchange of commodities for dollars, UBI might be anticipated to underscore or even deepen the hegemonic common sense that market exchange is a natural extension of human nature—and associated ideas about what it means to be a social subject. This common sense is where “solidarity” is no longer strictly continuous with a community and something like it appears predominantly in smaller and more private social spheres: when necessity is mediated through the market, the community’s reproduction through time depends upon exchange between atomized individuals. Many participate in forms of limited community, as in the forms of sociality found among extended families, some neighbors, and some church groups. These relationships are often more characterized by care than by market relationships. But, even within a community, the proportion of relationships minimally mediated by market exchange tends to be few. Under such an arrangement, mutual responsibility to others often extends not much further than these small private spheres without an inducement to do so; indeed, the market itself may be an inducement not to do so. All of this remains speculative, though: the experiences of want, necessity, and community might emerge in new constellations in a community refigured by a UBI. These are details in the narrative that remain to be written.

I want to be clear that when we are talking at the level of envisioning possible futures, something like a UBI clearly looks superior to our current arrangements and could, I think, at least temporarily address the very serious economic precarity experienced by many in Central Appalachia and regions like it. I would also say that, if there was a political bloc capable of implementing it, UBI might offer something like a bridge, both for energy transition and towards addressing fundamental questions about how to deal with automation, how we might fairly compensate unpaid and underpaid gendered and raced labor, how to include people with disabilities and the elderly, and more. But, as we work to construct these bridges in the present, I would argue for the importance of taking stock of the alternative narratives of similar ambition and what they might mean for building and sustaining the alliances necessary to achieve lasting change.

Conclusion: Alternative speculative futures

The kinds of sociality and subjectivity associated with a society organized around UBI might be qualitatively different than those associated with other institutions of similar ambition. As a speculative narrative about the future, it offers a relatively laudable vision: in the future, we could extend participation in the market to those who have previously been excluded. The need to orient ourselves towards a future in which we are able to address the ongoing energy transition is quite clear: the many ways that this transition calls on us to work together across many communities to refigure our cultural, sociotechnical, and political economic arrangements are, perhaps, the defining challenges of our time. Central Appalachia gives us a case study where energy transition—at least in terms of production—is already underway, but in the coming years, the energy transition will need to extend both to the rural areas that have been directly dependent on fossil fuel extraction and, quite possibly, to the urban ones where the fabric of everyday life has been predicated on the promise of ongoing access to cheap fossil fuel energy.²⁶

Perhaps a UBI could play a part in this, but several of West’s examples strike me as particularly salient to this question: what are the alternative pathways that we might choose, and what speculative narratives about the future offer the most to our understanding of the present? West points, for instance, to miner-to-coder initiatives like BitSource as “innovative” examples of how this region is already undertaking necessary economic transitions, even if it is doing so while “remain[ing] steeped in the logic of capital.” A UBI presumably would give individuals money they could choose to spend on education or help them defray the opportunity costs associated with taking lower-paying jobs that promise retraining: BitSource initially pays $15/hour, which is below the median salary in the region and, at best, half of what the few remaining coal industry jobs in the region have, in recent years, paid.²⁷ BitSource’s training is fully federally funded, then the income for jobs provided to those who complete the training is paid with a mix of public and private funds.²⁸ In this respect, BitSource is comparable with other the publicly subsidized, privately controlled coding bootcamps in the region, like Interapt’s TechHire Eastern Kentucky and Mined Mines.²⁹ Though a few failures in this sector are not necessarily dispositive, Mined Mines, in particular, has come under fire for failing to place participants in jobs.³⁰ Despite this, we certainly can imagine how a UBI could help individuals afford retraining. We might nonetheless contrast this approach with programs that would seek to radically extend access to publicly provided education. There are significant differences in the kind of community implied by hoping a UBI will expand the provision of post-secondary education by enabling people to pay for it as a private good – whether provided by public-private partnerships like these coding bootcamps or tuition-funded traditional educational institutions– versus the kind of community implied by envisioning post-secondary education and training as a universally accessible social good that is free at the point of use.³¹

Likewise, West’s anecdote concerning the Heritage Kitchen restaurant illuminates the questions I am raising as they apply to food. Perhaps a UBI could facilitate the growth of a range of locally-sourced restaurants and similar businesses; I certainly can see the appeal of this kind of small-is-beautiful localist communitarianism.³² In West’s account, the locally owned restaurant contrasts with the kinds economic control by absentee owners that characterized the “company town” era. Indeed, Sana Saeed’s documentary video for Al Jazeera, which West is citing, juxtaposes these local enterprises with regionally-popular transnationally controlled fast food restaurants. Underscoring the barriers to local control, West notes that Sheppard and Royse, the owners, needed to undertake “corporate labor” in the metropole to gather the capital necessary to open their restaurant.³³ By this account, it sounds like a major barrier for would-be local business owners is an inadequate supply of start-up capital in the region. The proliferation of artisanal restaurants competing for UBI dollars might cultivate a sense of local connectedness and the UBI might inject the capital necessary to get these kinds of enterprises off the ground. This small example helps us imagine a community structured around a robust localist market communitarianism. By way of contrast, I might try to envision the kind of community that could be cultivated by socialized kitchens or grocers. Since the UBI involves dreaming big, are there alternative ways to deepen solidarity and address food insecurity that could help connect people across space, situation, and preference? What would they look like? I would pose the decommodification of food as a possible substitute vision. Since both alternatives are distant from material realization and are operating at the level of narratives about possible futures, which is the one we would prefer to work towards? 

It seems plausible to think a UBI would help people in Central Appalachians access adequate housing on the private market. This is a genuinely praiseworthy goal. It could even help inject the kind of liquid capital necessary to renovate existing sub-standard housing. But is there an alternative pathway oriented towards the decommodification of shelter, perhaps in the form of high quality publicly owned housing? How might the community implied by this alternative pathway differ?

I would return to Daniel Zamora’s critique of the UBI, wherein he answers the question “Isn’t the best way to fight capitalism to limit the sphere in which it operates?” by reminding us that capitalism has made

market exchange the nearly exclusive means to acquire goods necessary for our reproduction. In doing so, it turned money into almost the only valid medium of exchange and it made the majority of the population dependent on capital, enforcing a fundamentally asymmetric power relation between the boss and the worker. This profoundly unequal relationship not only subordinates people within the sphere of labor, but outside it as well, through the powerful influence economic power exerts on politics, ideology, and culture.³⁴

This is not to say that decommodification of necessities is somehow an easier goal to achieve than the UBI; it may in fact be harder. But given the scale of the social transformation envisioned by a UBI, we should think carefully about which parts of social reproduction we want inside the market and which ones we do not. I am sensitive to the way that, at their best, conversations concerning the UBI draw on the incisive analysis of Marxist feminisms, “wages for housework” activism, and studies of disability and aging.³⁵ Much of the care work necessary to social reproduction has been historically set outside of the market, with the effect of cheapening it and appropriating it. But what these struggles have made clear is that we are constantly renegotiating the boundaries between the formal economic sphere and those parts of the web of life in which it is embedded and on which it depends.³⁶ The UBI offers one vision that takes this seriously and seeks to offer a more humane world in response. But an alternative narrative that could be just as a humane might seek to constrain, rather than expand, the role of the market in mediating social reproduction.