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.

  • PenisCunt [undecided]
    ·
    4 years ago

    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.

    • glimmer_twin [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      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?

    • Not_irony [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      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."