What you think, is universal basic income (in the non-US politics specific) right?

That's retarded. Buy guns and give them to poor people.

I was being facetious obviously. That's what I've been arguing. Use the government bucks to quit your job and go train innawoods or print up leaflets or whatever.

It just severely reduces the logistical tedium of welfare w/o really changing material conditions.
Just an austerity measure by succdem gubbermints imo.
Reducing bureaucracy overall is a good thing since overcomplicating things is one of the main mechanisms of porky and revisionists to keep and gain control.
However ubi is far from enough to make succdem gubbermints even remotely viable as a good compromise for workers. They at least have to make insurances universal and basic too.

it's economically right wing, oppose it.
it's worse than bureaucratic state welfare.

you aren't getting a income you are getting rent that competes with passive income from capital, it's not tied to a specific amount of purchasing power, corporations set prices for goods, and with that most of the relevant dials to your existence will be relegated to some corporate department.

This is the path to neo-liberal concentration camps, 20 years down the line your UBI will buy you a bunk-bed and food-cubes in a "affordable shelter zone" that you are technically allowed to leave but practically can't afford to.

...

this seems like an insult (or maybe dog-breed) which is not a valid argument

but anyway, try cockshots video about it
youtube.com/watch?v=QGBQwZsp3T0

UBI is similar to free healthcare. It’s a good thing, but implementing it won’t solve the contradictions of capitalism.

paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/what-is-wrong-with-the-idea-of-basic-income/

And then the whole article is nothing but assumption, assumption, assumptions assuming assumptions.

Why do some of you guy take this guy seriously again? He starts off with saying how right wing UBI and them devolves into "muh higher taxes" and "the problem with free stuff is you run out of other peoples money!" Libertarian tear arguments.

YIKES

Attached: max_stirner.png (733x733, 507.37K)

I hate to point this out but he makes a lot of arguments based on really specific premises to argue against the general concept.

If there's UBI people won't be worrying where their next meal is coming from, so they'll be able to start thinking and organising.

If the government gives us another $12,000 per year, then landlords will know we have another $12,000 to spend per year. So they will jack up rents by about $12,000 per year because they can.

The other horrible thing about UBI is the justification for it. Most UBI proponents say that we will need UBI because of automation. This is bullshit, Cockshott touches on it here, . The real reason people are unemployed is because capitalism is effective demand deficient. UBI proponents shift the blame from capitalism to automation, which IMHO is the most dangerous part of these proposals.

What kind of simpleton-ass understanding of supply and demand is this? You guys are really starting to make me believe the Marxist don't understand economics meme.

Can a builder who makes a $10 mil supercar just say, fuck it, if they have $10 mil they got $50 mil, why not charge that instead? Because it's only what people are willing to spend.

Rents will keep going up for in demand locations stay flat or even decrease for low demand locations and UBI will free people to live in low cost low wage areas they might have otherwise forsaken to live in some higher wage big city trying to live as frugally as humanly possible so they can save something at all.

Let go of your spooks user.

You've clearly never heard of Ricardo's Law of Rent.
Which is totally different to housing. Car factories can make more cars, landlords can't make more land. That is the key reason why rents will rise with UBI.

Very low Autism Level post. Especially when it comes to renting finite but land instead of commodities.

How do you plan to fund UBI, then, if you don't want to set a higher tax for most of the population?

I'm not sure how really specific it is to place UBI in it's historical context, that of libertarian theory. Cockshott is arguing against UBI as it has been theorized and as a measure in the here and now (more specifically, neoliberal Britain) because that's the only context in which it makes any sense. I find his argument that it would be very hard to garner support for such a measure rather flimsy, but you should be suspicious still that the kind of people who are advocating it are epic venture capitalist types. Any kind of UBI you might find in a post-capitalist society would obviously have to function in a radically different way. If you accept a system of labour vouchers or any kind of phasing out or replacement of money, for example, it follows that the very concept of 'do nothing, get dosh' wouldn't make any sense.

This is disingenuous, the general concept of UBI is so vague that it lacks enough detail to formulate a concise criticism. There are many different proposed implementation of UBI, some of which would lead to the zeroing out of the rate of profit in about a week, I'm assuming that those variants aren't likely to implemented.

If you want a general criticism, capitalism is based on extracting surplus from labour, from this follows that UBI can never cover all the cost of living, hence UBI will only be subsidising labour, to be able to work for lower pay to stay price competitive with automation, meaning you are slowing down the rate of technical advances, and are wasting people's time, needlessly. Capitalists become vampires draining the life from people.Consider that workers aren't in opposition to technology, worker are in opposition to privately owned technologies.

Also one has to compare the rate at money capital accumulation, where the capitalist class accumulates money faster then the working class, which increasingly is no longer capable of accumulating anything. Which means that this could lead to further increases in wealth inequality, which is bad because we want to minimize the amount of resources the capitalists divert into non-productive avenues.

On a ideological perspective socialists are seeking to abolish money and markets, while UBI is basically expanding it. We want to minimize economic activity that happens inside markets, and want to minimize the amount of political power finance can have, because finance is the principal driver of war.

Well um gee i dunno maybe tax the upper echelons of the population.

lul

forgot pic

Attached: tax accountant.png (648x467, 47.78K)

nope. Not the case boomer, your education in the 1950's was paid for by such taxes.

Yes land is finite obviously. So are the renters willing to pay at a given price. Many rentals sit unoccupied and accruing no rent til they find renter willing to pay at the price they are asking. Everyone getting 1000 dollars a month more does not equate people willing to spend 1000 dollars more a month on every possible residential rental location in a nation. If a rental can't even find a renter at the asking price before the income increase why would a landlord suddenly be able to find a renter by raising the price by 1000?

You gave no rationale for this statement.

Many, but far from most. As to why those sit vacant rather than renting at a lower value, it has to do with the bank's valuation models.

Property investors are allowed a maximum LVR before the bank considers foreclosing. Hypothetical scenario:
Property investor buys house for $500,000. They borrowed $350,000 and the bank would allow them to go to 80 % LVR. If the house rents for $400 per week, the bank accepts the valuation of $500,000. All is good for the investor.

However, suppose they can't find a tenant at $400 per week. They can either:
Keep it on the market at $400 per week
or lower it to $200 per week and get a tenant

If they lower it to $200 per week, then the bank will revalue the house at $350,000, which is beyond the investor's allowed LVR. So the bank will foreclose.

I didn't ask that bit thanks for the non-sequitr.

I said why would they raise their price by a 1000 if they can't find a renter at the listed price even if everyone got a 1000 dollar raise?

Do you understand now?

Attached: baby boomers.jpg (900x900, 187.43K)

you can't exploit machines, no labour - no profit, no profit - no capitalism.

machines can't be exploited because capitalists have to pay the full price of machines, while they can underpay for the labour power of workers. This is possible because worker reproduction precedes capitalism, and capitalism only has to pay for maintaining labour power.
To make this clear if capitalists could grow people in vats, then all profits would disappear, because now capitalists would produce workers like they produce machines, and had to pay full price, for labour. If you attempt to make exploitable machines by having self-replicating machines, you will put an evolutionary selection pressure for an anomaly in the machines, that no longueur hands over surplus to capitalists, but rather uses it to reproduce in higher quantity and or quality than other machine-replicators, with additional evolutionary bonus points for being able to reprogram other machines.

If your UBI were enough to live on, so you don't have to work then it will be rent that competes with passive income from capital, for the surplus produced by what ever people remain working. The lack of a reserve army of labour means that capitalist will loose the ability to underpay the remaining workers. Lets assume that not all tech workers, artisans, high-end services workers … can be wooed by high wages, but would rather spend their time working on their own projects. The capitalists would see their power waning, as well as loose the special labour supply that produces their personal projects and lifestyle and immediately reduce the UBI or raise cost of living until they can maximise exploitation of labour. There is another dimension to this, very few people are willing to fight wars and build weapons, meaning the military and arms production would also be affected, You might see UBI linked with a draft or have your technical expertise requisitioned. SERVICE GUARANTIES CITIZENSHIP !

If you are looking for a theory that contradicts what i have said, there are people that say that in consumer society consuming commodities is a type of labour, And people are given Bullshit jobs to be able to do their real jobs, which is consuming. I'm sceptical about this, i think that if this were true we would see commodities with negative prices.

I'm not american, can you elaborate? 'High earners' might mean the upper middle-class (which would require ridiculous increase in tax rates for UBI still) rather than the 1% which is what i was getting at. Taxing that portion of the population is a very daunting task when you consider that their massive influence and power weakens the enforcement of such taxes significantly. Not to mention you're not getting the capitalists to pay even more tax when their profit and growth rates are tanking. Remember that we might not ever get another post-WW2 boom period that enables such a tax, and if we do that probably would mean that WW3 happened and communism failed to assert itself as the global paradigm.

I was about to try to debate you seriously but then I got to

Dude, we are trying to debate real life not anime.

Attached: images(4).jpg (349x144, 9.31K)

What about self-replicating machines makes them exploitable? It seems like what makes people exploitable in the first place isn't the ability to pay one more than the other but rather their consciousness and material needs.

OK this is a somewhat arcane point, capitalists think or at least say that profit is generated by capital, rather then by exploiting workers. This is easily disproved in cases of somebody speculating with land, or financial stuff, neither the land nor the financial data in a banking computer can produce anything. But with actual production equipment it's not as obvious. For example consider a capitalist investing money in a newer production process that decreases production cost so capi can get super-profits because capi can underbid the competition. Now the capitalist is going to say look my newer machine capital stock increased my profits, so the profit must come from the machines, not the workers. The machines however are produced by labour as well. So now we can go look at the accounting of the capitalist, where the labour power is payed below it's value, while the machine is payed in full, meaning the machine can only give off the embodied labour, until it's worn out or made obsolete through technical change. The question that poses-itself now is how do workers differ from machines, and it's quite simple machines have to be produced and that production has to be payed for, while workers produce them self's (accountant point of view) and only the cost of reproducing the ability to do work has to be payed as wage. In that sense workers are truly universal robots. And the one and only "commodity" capitalists can buy that gives of surplus. You have brought up people's ability to use money or be consciousness, while that does separate people from machines nowadays, that might not remain that way in the future. And we could look at hypothetical machines that are capable of using money and having consciousness, and the capitalist still could not gain surplus from those as long as they are produced. Once these hypothetical machines were to be able to produce them self's because they can for example build a factory that produces them, then they would become exploitable, but also a new contradiction would arise, namely because the ability of the capitalist to extract surplus from those robots will compete with the ability of the robots to reproduce them self's. You might even see something like "robot population decline" happening as a result and we would see the falling rate of profit continue even in "robo capitalism".

I don't think it's particularly helpfull to look at consciousness as something mysterious, there might be problems determining what it is because it's conciseness attempting to look at it self, however that is not really a reason to think it's magic. And it's not particularly helpful to put your arguments into such a blindspot, you are leaving your self vulnerable to varying explanations of consciousness breaking your arguments. Consider political realities of objecting to exploitation on the basis of consciousness will produce a class interest of capitalists to label workers as less conscious, to justify continuing exploitation.

The argument has always been that capitalism has a shelf-life and there is nothing that can be done to keep it going beyond that. If you consider that exploitation is something for nothing, it is somewhat reasonable that UBI which also is something for nothing is being proposed as counter balance. But capitalism is not a equilibrium system, which is why this will not work. You have to move on to a system that is more in line with reality, you don't need exploitation, for a functioning economy, you can redirect the surplus to the society that produces it, and probably have an economy that functions even better.

It might be nice in the short term, particularly for those suffering the most under capitalism, but it's just a stopgap solution. After the revolution, something like that won't be necessary.

That is not what spooks are about, the justification is misinformed, on based on any value judgements.

Wut?