Your thoughts on UBI?

Your thoughts on UBI?

first step towards fully automated communism?

It's something that will certainly be necessary in the future whether it ends up being socialist or Keynesian.

Welfare to keep proles from rioting as automation edges out jobs.

It is a stop-gap measure intended to stem the disappearance of the consumer class that drives the market economy. It will not work for long. Having one basic income for proles will only create a baseline that every worker will inevitably fall to. Profits driven by the exploitation of labor will collide with the artificial wall that UBI creates and force the UBI downward until it becomes unsustainable.

When the state says "let us pay you not to have a revolution." UBI basically exists for city blacks in the US for this reason. Now it won't just be them - it'll be everybody.

kek as if

Inflation created by basic income could maybe crear pre-revolutionary situation but fighting for basic income for that is too much of gamble.

Am I the only one ITT who thinks that it's a bit jumping the gun to think that UBI is going to be necessary to maintain the consumer class when automation replaces industrial production?

I mean, late capitalism is pretty good at creating useless jobs to keep people busy.

Usually that involves a large-scale war, but nukes have made that an unprofitable venture. It will do the system no good to create things which go unused.

Its not revolution but it'd make my life dramatically better. Yes, it's bribing the proletariat not to overthrow the bourgeoisie - but goddamn it we could use some bribes these days.

plus us crazies could use the extra money to start stockpiling for the revolution

correction: fully automated consumerism

anyway, ubi is the kind of idea that system has when faced with people not participating in its circus
re the image - yeah, no shit, it's a centrist idea

I like the idea, but I'm afraid it might be our generation's New Deal. There's a growing left-wing dissent everywhere, and this dissent is slowly starting to move from a vague, nebulous discontentment with the status quo towards an organized articulation of class struggle, and historically this is a period when reforms that are still within the Liberal spectrum are made in order to alienate people from the more radical alternatives.

I don't think we should be against it, but we should from the get go remind people that in order to get and maintain things like UBI, they must consistently demand more.

It's not a "step" towards FALC. It is exactly what FALC will entail.

It's actually going to happen, isn't it? It really is inevitable. We are going to see it happen.

What would make us use UBI for the revolution if we don't use our current wages and benefits for that purpose?

That's overrating (or rather underrating) the masses. They won't listen to a few radical leftists, they didn't listen to them even when the left was fashionable. Under UBI the masses will become happy consumers to an even fuller extent. For the same reasons it's also naive to think that radical leftists can prevent the masses from supporting UBI.

It's welfare for the 21st century. It's yet another way for capitalism to keep surviving

i actually heard from a capitalist friend (meaning he has capital AND he works a streamlined job for burger porkies in europe - the worst of his kind!) that he actually supports UBI in order to raise consumption and thus profit levels on the long run.
he has no idea that it could as well overthrow the system he supports, but that's none of my business.

It honestly terrifies me.
I could see it leading to dystopia.

UBI doesn't seem like it would be sustainable for the same reason that capitalism is sustainable. In order for a market economy to grow, porkies always have to get more than they put into the economy. Meaning that on the global scale, proles will have to pay back all their wages and then some. The same issue persists with UBI. No matter how much taxation and redistribution is used to fund it, proles will have to spend more than they get for porky to keep making a profit. UBI stops immediate collapse in the face of full automation, but it doesn't solve the main crisis of capitalism.

This.

Also this

You can bet if it got passed it would pay less than current minimum wage. Meanwhile when society still collapses because UBI fails to keep capitalism working, politicians will say UBI was another failed experiment in communism and scare more proles away from the left.

How could UBI possibly overthrow the system? People won't become revolutionary just because more of them could afford an iPhone, or because we will continue to scream at them.

It's the exact same thing as a labor voucher under communism.

They have exactly two things in common: they can be used for exchange and they are distributed by the government.