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.
$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.
