I am all for basic income, I think it’s a great thing, the “non-reformist reform” that leftists ought to embrace. But.
I’ve been hanging out mostly with techno-libertarian types for a good while now - all wonderful folks, yes, I mean you, y’all just great -
- and I increasingly cannot shake the impression that propping up empty talk of ~basic income~ to every instance of economic oppression and misery is a lot like the internet bolshevik staple of ~we won’t have this problem after the Revolution~. And meanwhile, in the here and now, it is very easy to use it to brush aside lesser, economically Bad suggestions, dismiss ongoing workers’ struggles as misguided, etc, etc.
Like, tell me I’m just being uncharitable and gloomy and ideologically obsessed here. But seeing one post after another ending with “maybe, some indeterminate time in the blissful future, We shall be able to dole out enough for everyone to survive on - after scrapping every current social program everywhere and attaining efficiency and getting rid of Crony Capitalism” - well, it’s enough to see a pattern. I don’t know what it means, but it’s vaguely alarming.
And also… there is never a roadmap or even the most vague sense of how to get from here to there. How to deal with elite resistance to redistribution and capital flight, how to square it with another professed (and likewise worthy) techno-libertarian goal of open borders, etc, etc. There’s rarely anything at all written on this. Again, this is why ~basic income~ alarmingly resembles a hand-wave more than a goal.
After? Who said “after”? The way I use it is as a perfect bargaining chip: You want to scrap the minimum wage? okay sure, as long as we get basic income as a replacement, not as a vague future speculation. Bust the regulatory capture of corporatism (HAVE I MENTIONED IT’S ILLEGAL TO HIRE ANYONE IN FINLAND FOR LESS THAN WHAT THE UNIONS AND BIG BUSINESSES HAVE AGREED AMONG EACH OTHER, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THE WORKER WOULD PREFER A LOWER WAGE TO UNEMPLOYMENT THIS IS A SOCDEM HATEBLOG AFTER ALL)? yeah, we could look at that once we have our UBI. Stop paying people welfare to get rid of incentive traps? a marvellous idea, only when accompanied with the basic income to replace the welfare.
It’s not like we need to attain magical future hypercapitalist efficiency to sustain it; in Finland all it would take is to stop playing the fucking musical chairs with the half a million different forms of welfare (all implications intended) and just give everyone a seat on the couch (THIS IS A SOCDEM HATEBLOG, REMEMBER) and the remaining need for adjustment of the national budget would be smaller than the cuts the current PM is doing. And it needs to be done alongside the other things, not left as a vague promise for the future, and that’s why we’re so noisy about it because it needs to be done RIGHT NOW before the sinking illfare state takes any more people with it. And in a staggeringly surprising display of competence from the normally witless cronyists in our government they’re actually preparing to test basic income soon™ and I’m just chewing through my teeth in anticipation of how they will fuck that one up because so far everything else the government has done has been a gigantic fuck-up (except deregulating the opening hours of grocery stores because even stopped clocks and so on…).
The Greens (basically the coalition of SWPL blues and the local equivalent of SV technolibertarian greys alike, which results in some weird things) have a roadmap. The Party Formerly Known as the Communist Party (after the Communist Party lost all its money speculating in the stock market) has a roadmap. The libertarian wing of the Crony Capitalist Party (because they were left without a political home after the Liberal Party joined the Redneck Party and had to choose the least disagreeable alternative) has a roadmap. Even the Redneck Party (which is nominally a liberal party and don’t ask me why because it hates free markets and gays, loves agricultural and regional subsidies and conservative values, and is like half controlled by a cult which forces women to be baby-making machines by banning contraception and stigmatizing singles, gays, trans people and anything else that stands between them and paperclipping the universe with white assigned-christian-at-birth babies (unsurprisingly, they tend to drop out of the cult just as fast as the cultmothers drop out more so no demographic takeover has happened in the last two centuries but they certainly have been trying)) wants it. Pretty much the only thing stopping it from happening is (aside from the question of how exactly the Popular Front of Judea is going to be named) the Social Bureaucratic Party (THIS IS WHY THIS IS A SOCIAL DEMOCRACY HATEBLOG) which loves equality and therefore is very invested in maintaining the means-tested welfare systems and redwashed rentiers establishing an ironclad class division between the middle class and the precariat.
So if basic income is the equivalent of “after the revolution”, we’re realistically at “red guards, stockpile weapons and ammo; Lenin is returning from exile and the german armies are keeping the state occupied” instead of “the revolutionary club of Berkeley celebrates its fiftieth year of talking enthusiastically about the imminent overthrow of the bourgeois devils”.
Basic income is no more subject to resistance to redistribution than the unholy mess we have now. It’s no more subject to capital flight. Those are completely orthogonal problems, all basic income would be is allocating the tax money the state already takes a lot better in ways which both the (actually value-creating instead of rentseeking) businesses and the (actually value-creating instead of rentseeking) workers would both find preferable, and it would also help those who can’t provide for themselves on the market far better than the bullshit we have now.
4 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #win-win is my superpower · 103 notes · source: multiheaded1793 · .permalink
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andrewhickeywriter reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:Yep. I’m a strong advocate of basic income, but it’s not a panacea, it needs to be introduced with other reforms, and...
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This. A lot of the proposed ways to alleviate the problems only bite someone else (or even the intended beneficiaries)...
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I think the issue, similar to the internet bolsheviks multi mentioned, is that the current choices involve unpleasant...
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