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.
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.
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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.
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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.