How can we force the bourgeoisie to develop the production forces with more haste? '
How can we force the bourgeoisie to develop the production forces with more haste...
Xavier Foster
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Levi Mitchell
Unironically fighting for higher minimum wage. Developing the productive forces only becomes attractive if the alternative is more expensive.
Liam Stewart
This. Reject UBI, fight for shorter workweek and higher minimum pay, pray to Cockshott
Christopher Howard
Eventually we're going to have a mass of unemployed people and the burden of having those policies linked to us though. Shouldn't UBI then kick in?
Owen Bell
Trade protectionism via Tariffs. If you want full auto luxury communism then you need to lock the borders down and prevent bourgeoisie elements from simply buying cheap third world labor and importing it. Ironically this is where Trump becomes a massive benefit to the cause of leftism, because he's promoting tariffs simply because he knows it will get him reelected.
Nolan Diaz
UBI is a good idea but only if it's combined with other policies such as a shorter workweek and not treated as some sort of panacea that will bring communism overnight.
Logan Nelson
UBI is not a good idea in any scenario.
Jason Miller
Has there ever been a US president who didn't support protectionism in one way or another? No matter how hard delusional libertarians shill for absolute laissez-faire, every au fait capitalist knows that government involvement in the economy is often required, for instance to protect national industries from global competition. Even Ronald "Free-Market Jesus" Reagan imposed tariffs on cars and electronics from Japan because he was afraid the Nips would take over.
Jaxson Taylor
Why not?
Jayden Long
No thanks
Andrew James
Because no lumpen will bite the hand that feeds it. It will take about three seconds before provisions are introduced that cut your UBI if you are a subversive. It is dis-empowering, unlike for example a job guarantee, which makes sure that people remain in a workplace where they can organize, which they can occupy, and so on.
Oliver Phillips
that's what Nick Land is trying to do
it won't work because of the TRPF
Jeremiah Ortiz
hey you, guy with access to the internet and a device to use. You are the bourgeoisie
William Adams
Isaiah White
Bruh reality is the opposite. It's squeaky wheel gets the grease every time.
motherjones.com
And how do you get paid to not kill people? By being known for killing people in the first place.
Cooper Davis
damn you single-handedly destroyed socialist theory and praxis, better pack it up guys
Jeremiah Martin
In case you didn't want to click through since the url didn't get it across:
Did This City Bring Down Its Murder Rate by Paying People Not to Kill?
Michael Phillips
It's incumbent on you to prove how they are not, and why it matters for worker empowerment. Just pointing out that it is the current year does not suffice. What has changed about workplaces that makes it impossible to organize and occupy them?
It got through, don't worry. Doesn't that prove my point though? Hand-outs have pacified people, made them compliant citizens. In this case the change was for the better, to be sure, but it still a case of using money incentives to normalize the situation, while leaving existing power structures in place.
Evan Green
I was going to get into a larger point on stereotypes and what not but don't want to get all FOX News/alt right. Just people on welfare are often the type to break the law, game the system, lie to officials. I think paid snitching is a way bigger problem than UBI could ever be and paid snitching has existed for decade. You get RICH off of paid snitching.
stltoday.com
businessinsider.com
Carson Morris
Most of them after 1945. FDR himself had to suspend earlier Tarriffs for the war effort, and succeeding Presidents gladly traded it away as pieces of a greater geopolitical puzzle against communism. Most famously, Nixon opened up China with trade splitting the communist bloc into a form that could be easily defended against.
The ultimate expression of this was the creation of the WTO in 1994, which was under Bill Clinton. But even by the end of Bush II's first term people realized that wasn't strong enough, and so the TPP was first formed. About ten years after that the TPP was finished, and presented to Congress in the lame duck session by Bush's successor, Barrack Obama. Then Trump won and ended it.
It goes to demonstrate how capitalists had bet everything on the 2016 election, why they seriously tried to push both Jeb and Hilary because they didn't want to take any risks with their new trade plan. Then it melted away. The capitalist class is now divided, between people who benefit from Trump's tariffs and trade plan and those whose businesses rely completely on global capitalism. One of them isn't going to live, and only one has an actual military behind it (Trump).
Caleb Harris
Quit it with the memes. Are you really incapable of realizing that the way labor is organized in the developed world changed over the course of a whole fucking century and that the bourgeoisie reshaped the productive process to their own benefit as a class? 19th-century LARPers like you are part of why the Left is stuck in a hole of its own making.
You can occupy an iron factory where workers are organized collectively and operate essential means of production, that makes sense. You don't occupy an Amazon plant or an UberEATS call-center where people barely even know each other for more than a couple of years and there is actually nothing to seize. I'm not saying that "strikes are outdated" or any bullshit like that, just that it makes no sense to approach the workplace in our post-Fordist era the same way we did 50 years ago.
Henry Mitchell
But that's total nonsense. Certainly in the case of Amazon, you have storage areas and hubs with millions worth of goods that can be blocked. Beyond that, things like uber eats or other gig economy scams don't account for any significant percentage of workers yet, it's quite niche.
Anyway, the point at hand is that UBI is less empowering than work, because UBI does not foster solidarity and leaves you at the mercy of whomever's hand controls the purse-strings, without putting anyone in a position to seize (even temporarily) the MOP. Even if I were to grant that workplace organization is not as effective as it was, you have not made a single argument attacking the central point, namely that UBI is disempowering. I realize that whinging about supposedly troglodyte socialists is a favorite left-liberal pastime, but you offer no alternative except wishy-washy neophilia.
Daniel Anderson
It can, which is why I don't think strikes are outdated for example. But to assume workers can occupy and reclaim such a place is foolish. What for? To turn it into an Amazon coop?
Manufacturing jobs are declining and it's only a matter of time until they're almost completely swept away by automation. The "gig economy" is growing and shows no sign of stopping as the neo-liberal establishment continues to promote "self-employment" with great success.
No matter how hard you try to make that crypto-Puritan claim, work is not and never was "empowering".
The same could be said of a job: you're at the mercy of whoever sets your wages. We shouldn't throw what's left of workplace organizing through the window of course, but the Left seriously needs to think about organization beyond the workplace — be it only because the ranks of the unemployable surplus population is going to grow in the foreseeable future.
It is not disempowering because it reconfigures the relationship between proles and the job market. UBI means you cannot be threatened with the possibility of starvation by your employer. Though again, it shouldn't be treated as a miracle cure and needs to be part of a wider package including a shorter work week.
"Wah wah, people who don't jerk off to tired leftist phraseology are LIBERALS!!". Seriously, are you fucking 15?
Nathaniel Hernandez
Why don't you think they are developed enough already? Do you think that communism will appear in a flash as the result of dialectical reversal of quantity into quality? Do you think the expropriators are just gonna expropriate themselves?
Eli Mitchell
This is totally putting the cart before the horse. If you are at a point where you have the political power that can wrest from the bourgeoisie a UBI that is sufficient to put upward pressure on wages (as in, high enough not to need to work to live), or where you can start to reduce the workweek, you have already won. My entire point is that kind of political power is not currently in the hands of the proletariat, proles and lumpen alike. Any pitiful UBI that can be gotten under actually existing capitalism will not help us build political power, to the contrary, it will be another tool of discipline and control. And even if it will be enough to live off, be sure to read the small print.
Any energy spent agitating for UBI at this stage is just helping forge your own gilded collar, which is why it is so popular with the Silicon Valley crowd. You should read "The Second Machine Age" (which sees only upsides to it), or keep an eye on the "social credit"-system in China for a primer on what the regime of control will likely look like in practice: incentivization via good boy points for "beneficial" or "harmonious" activities and behavior. If you don't first achieve a radical democratization of society and an end to capitalism, the only thing being incentivized will be whatever capital desires, mediated through the preferences of the overclass. Likely it will take the form of making us all into constantly "self-improving" content creators and innovators. UBI contingent on proving you are pursuing education, get drug tested, don't commit crimes, provide your daily addition to the spectacle in whatever form, and so on.
Jackson Stewart
It has to start somewhere
Robert Long
aww guys the brainlet is trying to point to leftist hypocrisy despite not understanding leftist theory at all
Eli Watson
Unionize and drive up the price of labour.
Blake Robinson
There is a huge difference between the revolution "starting somewhere" and a government supporting isolationism with the excuse that it's somehow required to "build socialism".
Jason Walker
Imagine being stupid enough to actually believe this.
James Anderson
At the moment, there is literally zero power in the hands of the proles, and we have to organize them to make sure they do. Hence my point about how the Left of course shouldn't abandon the workplace but should really consider looking beyond it.
Asher Cruz
Except that the proles in advanced countries have consistently ended up defending capital, even more so for the professional and petty bourg class. UBI wont be any better though.
Liam Gray
What did he mean by this?
Hunter White
No argument there. But we should keep in mind that it will do little good to look just where people are, and not where levers for change are. Marx considered the proletariat revolutionary not for some moral reason, but because they could potentially exercise power (if class conscious and acting collectively), while they were at the time disempowered.
If you want a new revolutionary subject, it will have to be a group that is out of power but contains a potentiality for exercising political power, so to speak. I can't identify any such group at the moment, but they might be out there.
Matthew Edwards
Important question
Blake Gomez
Imaging being so stupid that the you believe the dregs of society don't actually believe this. When the revolution comes, you will be hanged alongside the factory owner.
Easton Barnes
Drive wages up, especially the minimum wage
Blake Perry
Hmm