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This is why a ubi is so essential when society evolves to a post scarcity state.
UBI? You mean Unstoppable Bot Invasion?
🤣😆🤣🤣😆😂😂
I’d recommend reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin if you’re interested in an in-depth depiction of how an egalitarian stateless society could function without money.
Her short story “The Day Before The Revolution” is a good add-on to this too, and the preface is interesting IMO.
My novel The Dispossessed is about a small worldful of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn’t get into the action-- except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.
Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic “libertarianism” of the far right; but anarchism. as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.
Thank you for the rec I’ll check it out!
Yup but that would require the true ruling class to see their blood spilled to get it. Progressive people have tried and continue to try to push UBI throughout the world. In Canada alone we have had recent experiences both on the Federal and Provincial level. They intentionally get hamstrung or directly shut down to poison any potential results.
The longer we go without UBI the worse it’s going to get. Christ look at youth unemployment globally let alone the general struggles youth are dealing with that didn’t exist even 20 years ago. We need UBI yesterday but we are still struggling to get people to even entertain the concept of it.
In Canada alone we have had recent experiences both on the Federal and Provincial level
We’ve got a new UBI pilot program starting this year! I have no doubt it’ll get set up for failure just like last time, but it’s fun to think about a world that’s not run by sociopaths. Of course, even if it does go well it’ll be useless without crippling Capitalism first to prevent companies from just raising prices and funneling the individual UBI money into shareholder pockets.
Hopefully we can keep Doug Ford away from it this time.
Sounds a bit naive on paper.
But thinking about it, I want to fact-check wikipedia sources for a living. Also make tools to automate shit. Also I fucking love assembling and fixing furniture so I could do that too.
No need to even pay. As long as I am not homeless or starving to death I would be happy and fulfilled doing those kind of work.
This is me but obsessively analyzing the artistic merits of low brow mediums like animation and video games
It’s one of those things I’d love to see done as an experiment as long as it could be done ethically. Build a little town somewhere and have no prescribed jobs, just let everyone do what they want and see how it pans out.
Another one I’d like to see is to have two areas as identical as possible - same geography, climate, resources etc. and populate one fully with left-wing people and one with right-wing people and see which one does better. Unfetterd Socialist Utopia vs Unrestricted Ayn Rand Libertarian Boot-strappery or whatever. Settle it once and for all lol.
It’s one of those things I’d love to see done as an experiment
I believe you’ve got a fantastic idea here, not only to see how this one idea pans out, but to learn how we might build a better society. There’s little reason we couldn’t simultaneously have multiple test centres, each using a different system. Scientific method 101.
China famously began its modern transformation in the 80s by creating Special Economic Zones. These were cities where many of the economic rules for the rest of the country wouldn’t apply, and where new theories could be tested. There’s no need to agree with the goals China was pursuing, and for-better-or-for-worse have subsequently achieved, to acknowledge the method is brutally effective.
It’s a good thing I’m a wage slave, because otherwise, I’d build the Omnissiah.
Your kind cling to your flesh as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude Biomass you call a Temple will wither and you will beg my kind to save you.
I would literally be the jack of all trades
I’d happily do something completely different every couple of weeks
Not very practical with a 3 month notice period IRL
… And yeah the whole needing to work to not die thing
Im 51. I’ve done this my entire life. My resume is vast and strange.
What’s this gap in your resume? Oh, that’s the two years I was a jeweler. What about this one? That time I managed a retail store. But you’re applying for a manufacturing position sir. Yes, that’s why I only left the relevant bits on the resume, otherwise it would be 7 pages long and you wouldn’t be seeing me now.
I’ve done this but staying roughly in the same field while changing roles. So it looks like I had a career!
You sound like Adam Savage
Don’t forget to take your medication today.
So the capitalist masters can keep me contained‽
3 month? Wtf?
Pretty standard where I live, for my job
I’m more or less a professional handyman, it can be done
Hey can you come over and install smart switches in my house, figure out what 6 light switches that control nothing are connected to, and find out where the 24 cut ethernet cables in my garage go? I’ll pay you in setting up a home server, playing video games with you, or letting you pet my cat.
That’s what I do for my friends. But finding out where wires go sucks.
Lol, I have rejiggered a mess of Ethernet cables in my lifetime for sure
Ah ‘rejiggered’. The man knows what he’s talking about about.
It’s the only way to handle something thats gone squeehawed or, Satan forbid, cattywampus.
Ah, anarchism
Plumbing is an available job. Capitalism is literally the social infrastructure that allows it.
(Not saying that things couldnt be better.)
Plumbing would still be a job without capitalism. Actually, come to think about it, plumbing is just about the least capitalist job there is. Most plumbers are small businesses owned by the laborers. Plumbing products are all mass produced, but the actual plumber is valued for their skills, not because they have the capital to corner a market. Plumbers in areas where corporate conglomerates are common are usually protected by unions, too.
If you want a job that wouldn’t exist without capitalism, the answer is farmer. Sure, farmers are the backbone of any society, but farmers work the land, and the land has a lot of conditions. But you can buy avocados in Michigan in January, because someone realized that they can make money shipping avocados from warmer climates year round. It’s terrible for the land, terrible for the environment, and terrible for local farmers who cannot compete in the race to the bottom, but the capitalist cares not for these things. Only profit nourishes the soul of the corporation.
If I have no money how do I get a plumber under capitalism? There’s no social infrastructure for the poor.
[Stealing] is literally the social infrastructure that allows it.
Corrected your illiteracy.
Idk, man. This reads like something I’d get from a Homeschool Mom who thinks her kids are being held back by their schools’ demand to learn advanced literacy and mathematics and physical sciences, instead of numerology and automatic writing. You do, in fact, want people to work outside their comfort zone. Especially when they’re young and everything is outside their comfort zone.
Like, you don’t actually want a guy with an obsessive desire to fix your plumbing to start work on something they’re going to forget about in an hour after they fixate on something new. This is how you get half the plumbing in the neighborhood disassembled while the guy doing the work has gone into a shame spiral and won’t leave the house.
You can argue about the merits of the Apprentice / Journeyman / Master system, but every project really does need a certain level of experienced skill involved. Working with a collection of amateur hobbyists gets you predictably amateur results. That’s before you even get into what happens when your enthusiast plumber declares a jihad on imperial units and tries to covert half the pipes on the block to metric measures.
I’ve done a fair bit of DIY stuff in my home including various plumbing projects and it’s all been doable with just reading manuals, watching videos and spending time thinking things through. That said blow torches scare me and I did everything with pipe cutters and sharkbite connectors and such, but it works, and I did what I could to make sure it was done well/correct because I need my plumbing to work.
My experience with commercial plumbers, mostly from when I was renting, is overall pretty bad and that they are mostly unwilling to think at all beyond the immediate billable job. There was a whole ordeal where water backing up from the drain kept flooding one of the rooms in my apartment from under the walls, and while fortunately my landlord was honest enough to call plumbers when this happened, just about every time they would use a drain snake, claim the problem was fixed without really checking, and then it would just happen again later. It ultimately turned out to be a problem with the pipes not being connected to the sewer where they met the street, and was finally fixed with city involvement, but it took a hell of a lot of advocating for myself and pushing back on bullshit explanations to get to the point where the real problem was even identified or acknowledged.
I am 100% convinced that just about any anarchist system of plumbing would be a significant improvement, though maybe the plan described in the OP image should be adjusted a bit away from hobbyist plumbers going around taking responsibility for the critical systems in other people’s homes and towards a network of free expert advice and guidance to help people maintain their own living spaces, which they will naturally understand and care about on a level people who don’t live there won’t.
Anarchist plumbing is a terrifying concept.
Shit flows down hill, why do we need a hierarchy to make that work?
Because otherwise you get people dumping untreated shit in rivers because it doesnt affect them. Any kind of enforcement of rules requires a level of hierarchy, though that heirarchy can be democratized and distributed within all communities affected by those rules.
No doubt there’s some mediocre professionals. But as a home owner myself the last twelve years, I’ve found at least as many professionals who were worth their weight. Meanwhile, the time I spend on YouTube DIY videos plus the actual home repairs rarely feels worth the effort.
I had to redo the master bath a few years back and I can’t even dream of doing that alone, much less with my own inexperience.
and spending time thinking things through
Ah, you nailed the secret in the first sentence!
That is one huge advantage I bet you’d see in this anarchist plumbing system. The people would be self-selected to actually care about the thing they’re doing.
That doesn’t mean they’re all going to be rational analytical thinkers tackling your problem from first principles, but it would be a big step up from how we do it now.
We don’t need wage labour in order to have experts.
We need organization, certification, and oversight of projects.
A random assortment of freelance hobbyists is very different than a horizontally organized Plumber’s union.
I am a freak, i work off the clock at walmart. I do so because no one else besidese me and the 2 i trained care about cold chain. I buy from my store so i work extra hard to have everything edible. The rest of the store just doesn’t care.
You should report your store to your local health agency.
Not the same thing at all.
I think it’s a little related. Maybe they are both an obsessed freak and also invested in their own community for selfish reasons.
It does have a tinge of “work ethic” and egoist comparison to it though.
I work at a tiny 10 person non-profit. I am by far the most computer literate person here by an order of magnitude, given my completely wasted software engineering degree. I offered in my downtime at work to fix a bunch of laptops used by our kids in the after school program that were malfunctioning in some way or another.
I was told to stick to my job description by our Executive Director, and that they’d contact an external IT person to deal with it. I’m an Admin Assistant, which TBH kind of means I wear many hats anyway so my job description is very broad…
So here I am, twiddling my thumbs, posting on Lemmy instead.
Its not only giant corporations. Its infected every modern manager/executive brain. And I want to say, the executive director at my work I consider “one of the good executives”. At least by comparison.
(My immediate superior I like… less. She’ll do something wrong, I’ll try to fix it, and I’ll get reprimanded for trying to fix it.)
As we go back to the future, may I paraphrase Doc Emmett Brown:
Roles?!
Where we’re going,
we don’t need…
“roles”.
one of the good executives
…
10 person non-profit.
This sounds incredibly top-heavy for such a small outfit. The fact that you got micro-managed like that in such a rediculously small outfit is kind of unheard of, frankly. Usually small companies are the exact opposite, where there’s one owner/operator, the job titles are largely made-up, and everyone just gets everything done because there’s usually not enough expertise-hours to go around to solo every task.
I meant executives in general, not specifically at my workplace. There is only 1 person with the title “Executive” and shes generally pretty decent.
My immediate boss is the Youth (After School) Program Director and they don’t have true executive powers, they just have basic supervisory powers.
I will say, before the Youth Director was hired though, we all generally operated fairly autonomously and without issue, things went smoothly. Since my boss was hired, two separate youth counselors quit, one because her hours were cut (One of the few decisions I found pretty dumb by the executive director) and another specifically because she found my immediate bosses decision making actively hampered the quality of our program and she wasn’t working there for the money.
I was once told I should apply for my bosses position and at the time I found the idea completely unattractive. I now regret not applying given who has ended up there.
If i had to guess they contract work out or just redirect that money
(My immediate superior I like… less. She’ll do something wrong, I’ll try to fix it, and I’ll get reprimanded for trying to fix it.)
Because it’s fucked exactly how she likes it, you trying to unfuck it messes up her whole system ;)
Most people quite literally think they are above admin assistants.
Imagine the cleaning lady rolls up and fixes the bug you spent hours on in a few seconds.
This is how you would imagine boomers making more than you can dream power year should feel when they can’t print a PDF but here we are…
I worked at a company where the cleaning lady was considerably more intelligent than most of the managers. But you was held back because her English wasn’t really very good yet so she had to take what work she could.
Meanwhile the managers would rock in at 11:30 and immediately go on an hour lunch break. Usually they would then demand a meeting in the afternoon so they could get up to speed with what everyone was doing which was only necessary because they have been AWOL for the past 4 hours.
It’s crazy how spot on this guy actually is, this wild dude honestly unclogs drains for the love of it: https://youtu.be/95ATNSkGF3Y
The problem is more definitional than anything else.
The basic proposition is to do valuable work, as others define value, in exchange for whatever you consider equivalent compensation.
If others don’t see value in alternative ways of operating, you can help define it for them. Map any activity to either money made, money saved, or time saved, or maintenance avoided/automated and just watch how the tone of those “stick to your job description” conversations change.
As soon as you learn to put what matters to you in terms that matter to others, this problem is a whole lot easier to solve.
The guy obsessed with driving a bus or unclogging pipes isn’t necessarily the same guy who can defend the value of those tasks. The profit motive redirects a lot of effort away from the task that needs doing to convincing others the task needs doing and for a living wage. But perhaps every imagined economic model will have a Convincing Stage. That could still be streamlined by removing the wage debate and guaranteeing everyone a livelihood.
Nobody said it had to be the same person doing all of it. You talk of social welfare nets like centrally mandated universal basic income, but you can’t fathom a volunteerist grassroots community-driven effort. Weird how you want your society to be some bizarre faceless bureaucracy that gives you whatever you want like some magic vending machine.
But, if you’re not going to be the one spending your time articulating other people’s value, why is that a task that’s important enough for someone else to do? If not you, then why would anyone else?
That’s the problem with most people’s utopian ideology. Most of it involves requiring things of some magical “others”. These things aren’t ever something that you’re willing to give up any of your own time to do solely for someone else’s benefit. The guy bitching about how someone should do something about all the litter in the street is somehow never the one to bend his own fat ass over to pick any of it up.
Funny how that works.
This is why America is in the situation it’s in. Everyone wants someone else to solve their problems for them instead of showing up to participate more than one day every fourth November.
I think a livelihood can be obtained in a community-driven way without UBI or a welfare net. People shouldn’t starve or go without a home or comforts just because they haven’t convinced everybody else of their value yet.
The problem is that a system like that would benefit a lot of people instead of just the parasitic owner class.
We can’t just go around, doing stuff, without our
evildivine overlords earning their share! It simply wouldn’t be fair to our corporate slave-owners.I think it’s moreso that a system like that would ultimately remove the ability for the parasite class to exist. Can’t keep everyone tied to your goods and services if they are entirely capable of producing them themselves.
We need UBI (Universal Basic Income). People should have the choice to work, if they want more money or love their job. Not being forced: a choice.
If someone wants to follow a path that is not financial viable - be it art or just a hobby - that should be possible, too.
Life would become better for nearly everyone. Art would get a new golden age, people would no longer fear financial ruin, happiness and personal fulfillment all around.
Also paying people starvation wages or treating them badly would no longer work. Employees would have to be treated well or they would simply leave. Great wages and good conditions more or less guaranteed. People could support a big family and a nice house on a single wage again.
The only persons not happy would be the ultra rich, the exploiter, the CEOs. Because this would only work if everyone pays their due and the 1% no longer hoard the wealth.
I think this could create the best possible future, an utopia - if only our politicians were not bought and paid for. But sadly they are - and wealth only goes towards the rich, while we get poorer every generation.
I hope I live to see the day when the people notice that the rich rigged the game and react accordingly.
I would implement an Universal Wage Cap, and Universal Basic Products and Services.
The first doesn’t allow to earn above certain point, everything beyond that gets taxed.
The second one ensures that people don’t need to pay for their most basic needs.
I have been workshopping a similar concept, though it goes a bit further. Income is ranked - the lowest rank being UBI. When you are being educated or hold a job, your UBI income is replaced with a greater amount of money. Education has sub-ranks based on your grades, to help encourage people to take a job once they have acquired the credentials to do so. Jobs come as five ranks, based on the Effort, Risk, and Knowledge they require. $10k for UBI. $10k to $20k for education. $40k a year for the lowest jobs, such as clerks or waiters. $60k for more strenuous or educated tasks, such as warehouse workers, police, or librarians. $80k for firemen, and $100k for the last rank. Astronauts are an example of the highest grade.
Leadership roles don’t automatically receive a pay grade. Workers have to vote for the income of leadership, which is taken from the company after normal employees are paid. Earning retirement pay is 1:1, with each day worked, earning a day of retirement income. As AI automation becomes more common, displaced workers can enter a lotto to receive an job-based income. Companies using AI have to pay into the lotto, because they have wealth caps based on the amount of jobs they are paying for. So a company with lots of employees or job sponsorships has a larger amount of money it can contain. Sponsored jobs can vote on leadership pay and actions, just like employees.
There is a bunch of other details, but the intent is to create a system of absolute limits on wealth and income from all sources. This helps limits corruption and excessive wealth, plus it fights inflation because everything’s cost will be based on how much income society receives.
That still uses money as incentive.
I would give as incentive more free time.
I also like the idea of reducing as much as possible the need for having to pay for basic stuff, so instead a basic income I would guarantee basic housing, food, electricity, etc. for free and use wages to get those improved however you want.
The first one creates job availability and the second one makes them less like a need.
I would try to avoid as much as possible having higher wage caps, instead I think it would be better to give better perks that give the opportunity to save money.
It’s very hard for me to express myself, specially in another language.
Paying people starvation wages, healthcare tied to employment; treating people badly- these are the type of thing that people fighting against UBI really actually like. Like enthusiastically want.
Yeah, to get a bunch of the working class to vote against their interests you need to give them somebody to look down on.
They don’t just want to look down on someone, they’re so propagandized to by the ultra wealthy they do it for free.
Ultimately getting people to vote against their best interest is quite common, maybe even more common that voting in their best interest because of all the compromise with capitalists stuff. Wanting to address affordability but not addressing capitalism is like bargaining with a virus.
You support UBI because it would create an utopia
I support UBI because it would literally destroy the economy
We are not the same
It wouldn’t destroy the economy, just the shareholders profit.
And that is the risk they signed up for.
It wouldn’t decrease profits in any way, in fact it’d bolster them temporarily given how everyone has more money to spend. Companies will respond in turn to bump up their prices, negating any kind of increase in purchasing power (what happens every time minimum wages get increased), and once everything catches up and it becomes the new “normal”, profit rates will continue to drop as they always have.
Meanwhile the states will bleed money paying everyone UBI and go in debt even faster which would result in austerity, abolishment of UBI, or more excuses to cut other welfare programs. There’s a reason why there are pretty much no welfare states anymore.
I totally agree. There needs to be some financial mechanisms for keeping people from becoming insanely wealthy coupled with financial mechanisms preventing people from becoming impoverished. The obvious solutions are taxes that increase with income and wealth along with UBI that someone can reasonably live off of. All of this requires regulation and strict enforcement of tax laws, especially for the most wealthy. The rich know this and actively work against it. Probably the most effective method has been for them to buy up all the mass media and pump out capitalist and anti-intelectualist propaganda. We can’t change anything if half the people drank the coolaid and actively fight against their own interests and for the interests of the rich. I don’t know how bad things will have to get for those people to wake up. Hopefully not much worse but at this point I’m afraid it might take a real civil war for things to change, at least in the USA. Possibly even a world war with how things are going. We’re already barreling towards that cliff with the federal governments foot on the gas… I just hope I live through it.
UBI is not the solution, ending the capitalist system is.
All UBI does is lessen the suffering slightly, why not just directly meet people’s needs without the middleman.
UBI is not the solution, but a great first step towards a better system.
To make it work well, you need strong regulations on a lot of systems: banks, utilities, corporations.
At some point it will be easier to just give the state control of everything concerning basic needs. Then to control institutions that ‘fight back’ the most against regulations, like banks and mega corporations.
You see where this might lead?
It’s a slow way towards a better economic system without the need for a revolution.
If we got UBI today, the majority of people would stop pushing for the better system and would be content with “better than they had”.
Effectively setting back liberation by centuries and perpetuating suffering, meanwhile it would always be a sword of damocles dangling above the peoples head with fear of it being withdrawn or diminished by future conservative governments at any minutes notice.
And frankly arguing for it is a terrible idea on principle, it’s like haggling and starting from the middle instead of the lowest.
It’s a slow way towards a better economic system without the need for a revolution.
We’ve had 100 years of unopposed reformism, and look where we are 🥀
The state isn’t some friend that exists for the public good, it literally dances to bourgeois private interests by design. There will be no UBI or better healthcare or whatever unless material conditions and bourgeois interests necessitate it (to prevent a proletariat revolution is one example). There’s a reason why it’s called a dictatorship of the bourgeois.
Your analysis is too light. The state isn’t some magical benevolent entity which is somehow “on the wrong path”. The state is an instrument of domination driven by the dominating class: the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is against everything you cited. It will not slowly act against its own interest, willingly lose power and dominance. It will always fight for, at the minimum, keeping power.
That is why historically the only way to have changes that contradict the dominating entity’s interest is for the dominated entity to band together. It’s the only way anything ever changes: the balance of forces moves in the interest of the dominated. Women didn’t earn the right to vote because men were nice, but because women fought for it. Social progress never happens because the bourgeoisie is nice (that’s a very nice propaganda trick) but because the bourgeoisie has to compromise.
Waiting/wishing/hoping for the state to be nice, which is what asking for ubi is, and the “revolution without violence” the socdem has pushed about, never works. As long as the people who are legitimate are dominated, it will not happen.
Let’s stop dreaming in idealistic what-ifs and act in materialist actions. The material conditions define our existence. Let’s set our material conditions of existence, without asking nicely, and the balance of power will force the dominating power to compromise.
I’d argue humanity can’t end Capitalism without UBI first though. UBI is a stepping stone necessary to continue down that road. Likewise, we can’t just jump into something like Anarchism without going through Socialism first. Humanity’s progression has not only slowed, it’s being dragged backwards. Unfortunately even if we could make 1 nice big step forward, there’s a vocal minority that requires we take 10 or 20 baby steps instead.
Ubi would never happen, and if it did they would constantly remove people from the roles until it was a subsidy to their supporters, a patronage.
Looking at medicaid and food assistance, I do not see how anyone could think it would not be ratfucked if it got through in the first place.
I invent utility and design patents, but am on disability and can’t afford to patent them open-source. My brain and body won’t let me have a regular job, but I could do this all day long if the social infrastructure was there
But nobody would be motivated to work if they grow up in a world where the broken ppl fixed everything so nobody becomes broken enough for their trauma to motivate them to obsessively fix the things that caused their trauma! We’d all die! Civilization would collapse! We need to traumatize ppl so they’d have ambition.
Realists be like
And every single one of them would have a YouTube channel.
I know someone like that who cannot keep a job because of autism and health issues. Luckily she lives in a functioning country and gets state support including money and guidance. She is the regional pet/pony/alpaca carer and her house is always filled with animals from people on holiday or sick animals from people with full time jobs. She also notifies all the local farmers if one of their animals has an issue.
That’s awesome! And I can entirely relate but my ADHD / autism isn’t so bad I can’t keep a job, but now with hindsight if could choose career path again I would leave the tech world of computers to work with animals. Instead I keep working in tech to afford filling my house with animals (at least as I work remotely I can spend a lot of time with them). Dogs, cats, fish, snakes, amphibians, parrots, …
🥹
I hear there’s 80% unemployment for we Autistics.
So much for the idea that the Nazis tried to make more autistic people because we’re better workers.
Maybe in a different world, accepting of our different ways outside a very narrow conformity, it could be so. Irony. Heh.
So far, since self diagnosis, and formal diagnosis, I’ve mostly had abuse, rather than support. This functioning country stuff sounds very appealing.
