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.
Yep. "Middle class" rephrased as a number, still pegged to nothing other than temporary social prestige.
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.
The most important thing is for people to be able to tell their employer "no". I dont see how that's possible without a ubi.
How can we expect a bourgeois state, operated purely in interest of “employers”, to allow a UBI that would allow workers to get a leg up against those employers?
It's funny to think that Andrew Yang didn't recognize the massive, massive blow he would have been doing to capitalism with even his shity, libertarian version of a UBI. How many people would have quit their jobs to work as advocates/activist for a better world? Yang just being like "I want to cut the welfare state."
UBI for imperial citizens is like the Alaskan Oil Dividend. It's distributing a share of the spoils in an effort to bribe you to overlook the exploitation of a place you never go to, anyway. Even if it's understood as a backdoor path to "the product of all belongs to all", unless the tax on profits is 100%, the exploitation isn't going away. Most proposals for UBI are better understood as National Profit-Sharing. I think de-commodification of essentials is a better line of effort than bulking customer base for privatized essentials. Don't give them a check to hand over to the landlord, just give them the damn house.
Well I dunno, the thing is, any UBI in the first world is gonna be paid for by the blood money extracted from imperial domination. I don’t see how you can use that as a stepping stone to socialism.
Is the working class of the US, or Australia, or the UK, wherever, having a stronger bargaining position against its own national bourgeoisie much of a boon when it’s built on the backs of existing systems of global exploitation?
A good point. A fair and just UBI would be actually universal, across the globe. Which means communism would have already have won for such a system to be possible in the first place
I used to be more against UBI but I am less so these days since it is an easy and practical solution to quickly implement and lessen inequality. I would just be wary of those who only focus on UBI, since as you say it still doesn't do anything about who owns the means of production and thus who controls the real power in society.
In a capitalist society, the Bourgoise will give the worker just enough to not start a revolution. That's why we got the 40h/week and then nothing changed anymore. Therefore, I have two hearts beating in my chest. One, that wants revolution and one that doesn't want to see people dying. UBI would change our society but the biggest winners will not be the workers but the landlors. If you have a UBI without any further regulations you would end up with living spaces that start at the UBI. I'm afraid UBI would strenghten capitalism instead of weakening it. I'm almost sure it wouldn't be a stepping stone to overcoming capitalism. However, it would make capitalism more liveable and maybe that is a good thing. I dont know.
Paul Mason's Postcapitalism made similar arguments by supporting a UBI tied into the early Green New Deals. By using UBI to make bullshit jobs obsolete it would remove some of the individual economic hurdles that force people to be car commuters. It's kind of funny in a dark kind of way, but the pandemic and lockdowns were the perfect opportunity to implement UBI and scale back our consumerist carbon society, and instead we let the media amplify a handful of Dark Money backed anti-lockdown, anti-mask events.
Building and strengthening worker co-ops would likely be an easier way to build class consciousness and solidarity among the working class. If enough people see worker co-ops as a viable and preferable alternative to tradition capitalist organization of the workplace then it has a chance. UBI, while it does in address the material needs of people, is ultimately a lifeline to capitalism because it maintains its power structure (owners and workers, etc.)
I also think it would be pretty quickly dismantled just like the New Deal. US capital interests hate lifelines for some reason.
There are definitely ways that the oligarchs could exploit it and make it a net negative, but if we retain some voter control of which projects are done, governmental ownership of the means of production, and provide a living wage I think that a federal job guarantee would be a more desirable policy at the moment.
UBI is a complicated question. In a near ideal world it would be the logical first step towards socialism, however in today's political climate, at least in western nations, even if it were implemented it would be as a compromise, and as such can only be a temporary solution, like the minimum wage was. At some point it's gonna get eroded in much the same way minimum wage is today.
It should be implemented alongside other sweeping changes, like a huge green new deal, nationalizing of key industries etc. but in reality if it ever gets implemented it's going to be the bare minimum to satisfy the criteria to call it that.
Hey @Not_irony you ever try to buy a single banana at a local bodega but end up buying the whole bunch because you can't figure out how to rip it off without looking awkward?
UBI will be immediately undermined by the very same socio-economic dynamics that undermined the New Deal and it'll happen even faster this time after the neolibs have had a half-century of practice destroying social democratic movements
The left needs to come to terms with a deeper but obscure horror of capitalism; the capitalists aren't solely motivated by profit, in many cases it is the preservation of their social status that inspires and consumes their politics and the despoilment of the working class elevates their status even if in the long run it threatens their rate of profits
This state of affairs is perhaps symptomatic of the future economic regime of capitalist democracies. In the slump, either under the pressure of the masses, or even without it, public investment financed by borrowing will be undertaken to prevent large-scale unemployment. But if attempts are made to apply this method in order to maintain the high level of employment reached in the subsequent boom, strong opposition by business leaders is likely to be encountered. As has already been argued, lasting full employment is not at all to their liking. The workers would 'get out of hand' and the 'captains of industry' would be anxious to 'teach them a lesson'. Moreover, the price increase in the upswing is to the disadvantage of small and big rentiers, and makes them 'boom-tired'.
- Kalecki, Political Aspects of Full Employment pg. 4
The capitalists as a class are comfortable with recessions and cuts if it disciplines the workers, and why shouldn't they be, the smart ones all have safety nets to fall back on
Im confident my CEO /owner would rather nuke his whole company then let his workers unionize
