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.
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?
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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