Universal basic income

>Nevertheless, one immediately gets a sense of the boundaries to Hardt and Negri's analysis. In their social-economic analysis, the lack of concrete insight is concealed in the Deleuzian jargon of multitude, deterritorialization, and so forth. No wonder that the three "practical proposals with which the book ends appear anticlimactic. The authors propose to focus our political struggle on three global rights: the rights to global citizenship, a minimal income, and the reappropriation of the new means of production (i.e. access to and control over education, information and communication). It is a paradox that Hardt and Negri, the poets of mobility, variety, hybridization, and so on, call for three demands formulated in the terminology of universal human rights. The problem with these demands is that they fluctuate between formal emptiness and impossible radicalization. Let us take the right to global citizenship: theoretically, this right of course should be approved. However, if this demand is meant to be taken more seriously than a celebratory formal declaration in typical United Nations Style, then it would mean the abolition of state borders; under present conditions, such a step would trigger an invasion of cheap labor from India, China and Africa into the United States and Western Europe, which would result in a populist revolt against immigrants-a result of such violent proportions that figures like Haider would seem models of multicultural tolerance. The same is valid with regard to the other two demands: for instance, the universal (worldwide) right to minimal income-of course, why not? But how should one create the necessary social-economic and ideological conditions for such a shattering transformation? This critique is not only aimed at the secondary empirical details. The main problem with Empire is that the book falls short in its fundamental analysis of how (if at all) the present global, social-economic process will create the space needed for such radical measures: they fail to repeat, in today's conditions, Marx's line of argumentation that the prospect of the proletarian revolution emerges out of the inherent antagonisms of the capitalist mode of production. In this respect, Empire remains a pre-Marxist book. However, perhaps the solution is that it is not enough to return to Marx, to repeats Marx's analysis, but we must needs return to Lenin.
lacan.com/zizek-empire.htm

...

two can play that game

tbh it doesn't really make sense for zizek to be dustbinning Stalin 'stache Penn. Maybe normal Penn.

...

just replace it with something else entirely… idk what

getting real tired of your shit, comrade
:^)

Dubitrips speak the truth

It wouldn't be enough to fully live on, from what I could gather when they were discussing it in Switzerland, and of course it would be for well-established citizens only, not newly settled immigrants (which precludes a racist backlash), so really, why oppose it? We already know that the welfare state is in an advanced state of decay without possibility of renewal, so why not push for it? It might help those who are frequently or even permanently unemployed, and unlike current welfare, it's largely free of excessive requirements and so on, so it's a lot less stressful; or at least that's what trial recipients reported. I don't see the problem.
Oh, never mind.

It's the invisible hand of the market in a soft glove, so that nothing ever needs to change. UBI is just a way to keep us integrated into the system.

work in the traditional sense is already on its way out, but the system still needs consumers, it still needs people active on the market, hence UBI
and the ultimate point of UBI is that everything is privatized while the state gives you some additional money to invest in whichever competing service you want. so you have both a social support from the government and total competition on the free market
UBI is basically the government investing in human capital, i.e. you're just human capital to them.

Not to mention it's just another way of exploiting tax paying workers, indirectly attacking class consciousness.

I don't see how it's any different from a labor voucher.

its disgusting isn't it?

Ubi won't work because it would cut into bourgies profits
Profits are falling as it is and ubi would make it worse
Governments would probably just fund it with deficits anyway

...

Taxing workers increases the cost of labor power

thats why they will decrease the minimum wage and import illegals

This is why you don't do UBI as simple redistribution. You do it by creating a fund of ownership of major industries so that whatever profits they get by raising prices go back to the people, so that competition prevents a full elimination of the money through inflation. This, paired with price controls for essentials would effectively solve the problem.

lel

UBI is useless. The appropriate solution is to lower the workday, thus creating more jobs by raising the number of shifts in a day.

sounds like a good thing to me.

The workers can not carry any more. That is why consumption has slowed so drastically.

this

I like UBI.

Because once it completely falls flat on it's face after a few decades, I can see nothing that will save Capitalism after.

UBI is truly late stage capitalism.

The real danger is that it will integrate people into the market even more, that it will create a society where everybody will prefer their meaningless comfort over attacking or exiting the system.

Why should they attack the system if they're satisfied with the current one? If they can consume a satisfactory amount of goods and basically don't need to work, what's the point of overthrowing the system?

But wouldn't that hurt the people who are already employed since they'd be getting less hours?

Tbh UBI won't come without a fight. We're likely to see decades of mass unemployment and mega city slums with constant riots waged against corporate robot soldiers before it eventually is implemented. Even when it is implemented it will, like Keynsianism before it, constantly be under attack and under threat of being dismantled.

Why would it not come without a fight? Someone has to buy capitalists' goods. If most people are incapable of work due to automation of labor, UBI will be implemented to keep the economy going and prevent revolt, provided it happens before sufficient development of robot soldiers. If not, the rich will just exit society and use robot soldiers to kill everyone, and likely implement something equivalent to Communism for themselves. Either way, future children will live under something resembling Communism.

There's more to life than being a happy consumer. In fact, being a happy consumer is the opposite of what it means to be live, it's not a coincidence that one of the first use of zombies in movies was used as a metaphor for consumer society. You need a struggle of some sort in life, something that keeps you from mindlessly following along, from becoming just another part of the machine.

Okay, but why would that mean labor? The people who are incapable of labor under welfare capitalism will not be capable of socially useful labor under socialism.

Developing markets in Asia, South America, and Africa would likely sustain porkies in the West long enough for them to retire from society into massive death fortresses patrolled by terminators. By the time the developing world automates and markets there dry up they will likely have implemented communism amongst themselves. Or maybe we'll get lucky and they'll immediately turn on each other and let their selfishness destroy them once their income is pulled out from under them.

I'm not defending labor, I'm just saying any perfect society where any struggle becomes obsolete is going to turn us all into machines that just execute the code of the system. I know this might be scandalous on leftypol but I think an eternal civil war between different political communes or structures is the way to go. Communism will be meaningful only if it maintains the struggle with some external enemy.

Tell me about your father.

Tbh we can't really know what will happen when the majority of the population is allowed to live comfortably without working. This is literally a state of affairs that has never existed anywhere in human history.

people forgot that we should work so a future generation won't have to,otherwise really what is the point in advancing ever

is this really the best plan/outcome you can come up with?

Anything else is either meaningless (perfect society) or depressing (current hegemony). Civil war means we achieve political collectivity without it losing any of its vitality and passion. And when I say "civil war" I don't mean some constant military battles, I mean there being an antagonism between different forces where none of them has the role of an overlooking government that manages the whole of reality.

That's quite a fascist mentality you have there my dude.

So…You literally want Terminator to happen, but with porky instead of Skynet.

Not really, fascism is more than simply war (nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/), and war is not just physical damage - that is actually the most marginal and unsophisticated way to wage war, we currently have constant media wars for example (US elections being only the most obvious example).
You have tribes that are constantly in war with each other in order to prevent any one of them from forming a government structure and dominating the others, and nobody considers this to be fascism. In such a world fascism would at best be only one enemy group among others.

Capitalism only exists as a hegemonic system, it can't possibly exist as a civil war where there is radical antagonism between collectives - no common market or anything like that. And what has Terminator to do with it? Are you guys so brainwashed by the mainstream imagination that any kind of war is either a Hollywood film or fascism?

No, but it basically sees war as an end unto itself.

Isn't this just the same argument lolberts make regarding any minimum wage increase? It's not like porkies can just arbitarily raise prices regardless of how it affects their profit margins, the real economic value of commodites won't change with an increase in income.

Read that article on elements of fascism I've linked above. To see war as permanent is contradicted by fascist strive to dominate and to ultimately put an end to war. And war is not really an end unto itself, it is to prevent a hegemony from developing and to keep politics alive. And just to repeat, the last thing I have in mind is physical warfare since that is where politics ends. War can be waged, for example, on the terrain of urbanism and architecture, where one ideology combats antagonistic structures to organize collective life differently. But you need an enemy to keep you on your toes and inventing new forms, to keep you from becoming a finished society without any new thoughts or actions - which is where we are currently heading in our drive for final solutions and eradication of any conflict.

Raise the minimum wage. Reduce work hours per employee without a reduction in annual salary so that we can get NEETs working again and provide more leisure time for existing workers without a hit in worker pay. Make porky eat the added payroll expense.

As a NEET, I'm not opposed to working. I'm opposed to working for scraps. Even if I was employable, why should we be putting in 40+ hour work weeks when we have so much unallocated labour? Why work for peanuts when labour productivity is way up since the 1970s but wages have not kept pace with labour productivity at all since then?

the easier it is to be unemployed, the easier it is to strike. If you're going to starve to death if you get fired/go on strike, you're not gonna fight your boss

++good!

It is perfectly true that, considered as a whole, the working class spends, and must spend, its income upon necessaries. A general rise in the rate of wages would, therefore, produce a rise in the demand for, and consequently in the market prices of necessaries. The capitalists who produce these necessaries would be compensated for the risen wages by the rising market prices of their commodities. But how with the other capitalists who do not produce necessaries? And you must not fancy them a small body. If you consider that two-thirds of the national produce are consumed by one-fifth of the population — a member of the House of Commons stated it recently to be but one-seventh of the population — you will understand what an immense proportion of the national produce must be produced in the shape of luxuries, or be exchanged for luxuries, and what an immense amount of the necessaries themselves must be wasted upon flunkeys, horses, cats, and so forth, a waste we know from experience to become always much limited with the rising prices of necessaries.
Well, what would be the position of those capitalists who do not produce necessaries? For the fall in the rate of profit, consequent upon the general rise of wages, they could not compensate themselves by a rise in the price of their commodities, because the demand for those commodities would not have increased. Their income would have decreased, and from this decreased income they would have to pay more for the same amount of higher-priced necessaries. But this would not be all. As their income had diminished they would have less to spend upon luxuries, and therefore their mutual demand for their respective commodities would diminish. Consequent upon this diminished demand the prices of their commodities would fall. In these branches of industry, therefore, the rate of profit would fall, not only in simple proportion to the general rise in the rate of wages, but in the compound ratio of the general rise of wages, the rise in the prices of necessaries, and the fall in the prices of luxuries.
(cont..)

(cont..)

t. Karl marx

lump of labour fallacy

Holla Forums is that way ——–→

No it isn't, ma'm.

I tipped my fedora, typed, googled, opened the appropriate wikileaks article, and read.

I call fallacy on your fallacy.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvester_case

That's why you ensure there is plenty of government regulation for natural monopolies, and plenty of competition for unnatural ones.

You mean like Mount Etna's on Pompeii?

And the free market fixes it again.

Still won't account for technological unemployment. You'll end up with 40 people doing an hour a week each. And this won't pay enough for them to survive on, unless you're suggesting that each of them should get a full 40 hours wage? This would be a 40-fold increase in the companies wage expenses.

If labour productivity ended up being that good (you could produce the same amount we are now with far less man-hours), porky would be able to afford to increase wages by 3900%.

We are a long ways from that world at the moment. With the current size of the reserve labour force, 30 hour work weeks are entirely doable. Some say that 20 hour work weeks are possible.

You're making the assumption that production would not go up in order to meet increased demand. Also I don't know if you've been to a grocery store or Wal-Mart lately but it's completely packed with stuff sitting on the shelves that goes unsold. As things are right now, consumer demand is very weak because consumers don't have money to buy goods and services. And as a result there are way too many goods that go unsold. Same with the service sector. Are there not a lot of service workers who barely have any work to do? And when service workers are busy (ie. hospitals, banks) it's because porky is too cheap to hire more staff. And yet we wonder why unemployment is such a major problem. Even when we need staff, porky cuts so many corners to try to keep their payroll as slim as possible.

While I understand you mean conflict in an abstract terms,pointless conflict over economic ideologies and resources needs to end

its not going to be people doing the laboring, automation is happening and accelerating, is asking what happens when people have nothing to do because its automated, and "porky would be able to afford to increase wages by 3900%" we all know this will never be the case.

People gotta eat and pay bills. They need to get paid one way or another.

In Greece they can't pay their electricity bills.
So they get their electricity turned off.
But electrician comrades turn it back on illegally.

If you have solidarity and class consciousness you don't need UBI.
And if you have UBI you don't need solidarity and class consciousness.

Make it illegal to profit over X% the price of production of a product. Does it cost a company ¢5 to make a viagra pill? Not allowed to charge more than, say, ¢20 per pill then.

I find it bizarre how people accept telling companies they gotta bake cakes for gay people or can't dump their toxic waste in a river, yet telling a company they can't price gouge is somehow fascist or going too far.