Just finished “Bullshit Jobs” and it ends with advocating for a UBI, explicitly as a plausible first step towards fixing/dismantling capitalism.
Its a pretty solid argument, as long as you put the caveats of the goal to be to expand the benefits of society universally, not to consolidate the welfare state and reduce cost.
There are a lot of issues and technical details that one can imagine, and ultimately if the goal is to liberate all humans and save the world from capitalism, further steps would have to be taken. But a UBI does seem like a reasonable first step.
Though I guess the only would world the capitalist class would ever let a UBI happen is the world where we force them to, since even the $2000 one time payment basically is never going to happen.
So UBI as a advocating tool or a rhetorical device, but I don’t think it should be a goal in of itself. A UBI is the compromise position and leaves the Capital class in place. Something closer to Universal Equal Payments (working title) should be the goal.
Why did The New Deal happen? Was it capitalism seeing that workers were living undignified during a depression or was it the threat of socialists reaching the same levels of organisation we did in the 1910s in circumstances more conducive to revolution?
What was the effect of The New Deal? Did it create permanent prosperity for workers or did it give the barest thread of rights which were then passed around as a political football while being undermined for almost a century? Did the minimum wage enable a person to support their family on a single income as was intended or did it enable a pseudo-serf class that can’t afford to escape the poverty it enshrines? Did social security give a dignified life to the elderly or are SSI pensioners on the verge of starving while voting against their own interests because the republicans hold it hostage? Did temporary jobs programmes like the CCC, a good idea I’d like to see expanded into a full labour army, give us infrastructure that is still updated and safe to use today?
A moderate solution to a fundamental problem only serves to recuperate any radical resistance against it. UBI will enshrine the NEET consumer, the Disney Adult who has no incentive to challenge their alienation as long as their entertainment stream outpaces their existential dread. It will give democrats a half-baked win that lasts one term intact and then it will immediately become another “do we defund it or do we expand it by $5 over 50 years” issue. The Yang Gang will be a political force that competes against socialism to secure a small increase to their UBI. The actual barbarism of society will be masked by more superficial commodity ownership that’s used to demonstrate how good the poor have it, as you can’t be a socialist or in poverty if you own an iPhone.
UBI is a judas policy. Tack it on to a socialist programme, but replacing the structural changes we represent with one more welfare scheme won’t solve the issues it’s meant to address any more than existing welfare schemes do. The people pushing it are the ratfuckers who think you deserve healthcare* instead of healthcare.
:100-com:
The give away is the tiny amounts that people pushing it advocate for. $2000/month is the most common that I’ve seen. Make it $100,000/yr. Don’t start with “this will keep you alive, barely, but don’t expect to live anywhere nice” money. gtfo
$100k a year would be lovely but at that point you’re talking “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” territory because it’s such a massive reorganisation of society. That’d be a repeat of the Bernie-Yang division but on a larger scale at a much more critical point in history when libertarian techbro utopianism is the thing actively destroying society. Solidifying the amount of security and democratic participation a $100k income in 2021 provides you is the material goal there and that needs a larger project.
Money numbers mean nothing when they can just change what the number is actually worth.
I largely agree. The requirement that you either sell your labour or you die is perhaps the central tenet by which capitalist violence functions. In as much as a good version of a UBI (one you could comfortably live off) would take the boot off of our necks, I feel like it’s worth supporting. However, I feel like for that to happen, we’d already have to have won. Capitalists sure as hell aren’t going to give us the means not to be exploited by them!
The main reservation that I have about UBI is that it could further solidify support for the status quo within the imperial core and help to indefinitely perpetuate the developed world’s parasitic relationship to the underdeveloped world. It’s easier for me to imagine a future revolution in the imperial core than the introduction by transnational capital of a truly universal version of UBI that wouldn’t be predicated upon citizenship. However, idk if that’s even a very useful objection, because transforming the relationship between the individual and capital would no doubt also transform our political subjectivities in ways that are difficult to envisage.
Completely, which is why I think UBI is kind of a dead end by itself. It might be useful for getting some people on board with a left platform, but the only chance that it’ll happen in a way in a meaningful form is if a movement is built whose success has begun to shift the balance of power between capital and labour. Otherwise it’ll just be a subsidy that allows corporations to pay poverty wages, like any other benefit in a social democracy.
There’s literally no indication of any sort of healthcare being provided in the US anytime soon, in the middle of a global fucking pandemic.
To think that UBI would ever happen without things that aren’t happening now (and should be) - massive general strikes, violent demonstrations, riots - is ignoring reality.
The only good use for something like bitcoin, a decentralized currency that would be possible to give to any and everyone, outside of governments and borders. Obviously bitcoin itself is almost the opposite of the sort of currency that could provide a UBI, since its main use is to be hoarded and to speculate on. A true decentralized currency would be impossible to hoard, would be much more usable as a currency and hundreds of times more stable than bitcoin.
UBI is fine, UBI the way yang wanted to do it is a huckster scheme.
