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.
Great comment, comrade.