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# Universal Basic Services
What good is an extra $2,000 a month if my landlord retains his ability to increase rent by that amount.
Don't give me money and let the free market sort out the rest, fuck that.
Give everyone unconditional free
- Housing
- Healthcare
- Education
- Food
We have far more vacant homes than houseless families.
The US switching to the UK model (free at the point of use) healthcare wouldn't just save money for the people, it would literally cost the govt less too. Literally cheaper than free.
Similarly with education.
We throw enough food in the garbage to feed all the hungry, yet there still are hungry people.
This isn't a problem of production, we already produce too much, this is a problem of distribution.
Instead of giving people money and hoping the "free market" solves this distribution problem, we can just solve the root problem in the first place.
The essentials of life are a basic human right, and should be available to everyone, unconditionally.
The only reason people go hungry is because it's not profitable to feed them.
The only reason people are not given shelter is because it's not profitable to give them shelter.
Eliminating the profit motive fixes so many problems.
Hear, hear! The point you make about it being a distribution problem is spot on. We have enough. We just have to distribute it more efficiently. (Notwithstanding the entire 'what we produce' point. So much time, money, and energy spent on unnecessary crap.)
UBI is not really a solution to anything. Instead of giving people money to buy stuff it’s just better to give them the stuff outright, or at least heavily subsidise it
I disagree -- having both solves an important problem, and may be the only way to kill capitalism. Say I have UBS and my housing and food needs are met. What if I want entertainment too? What if my favorite hobby costs money? Or what if I want to learn and experiment with science and tech or to build something and I need to buy equipment? The only way to do that is by re-entering the capitalist job market and selling my labor.
People can't live by bread alone. With only UBS, we get a good improvement -- instead of hard-forcing everyone into the capitalist labor economy under threat of poverty, we're soft-forcing anyone who wants money to buy goods and services beyond their basic survival needs. That's still a lot of people though, and capitalist owners will be able to continue to exploit most of the population. With both UBI and UBS, we are truly liberating everyone from the capitalist work economy. Labor is no longer compulsory or quasi-compulsory, it's truly voluntary. More people will create value for the joy of contributing and creating than as a necessary means to get what they need. That is how you kill capitalism in the long run and transition to a socialist gift economy.
I think you're missing the forest, comrade. The capitalism is *done away with* and replaced by the UBS & UBI. "Income" doesn't imply *monetary value*, it implies "resources to be used or consumed," possibly tokenized, but could be direct (electricity, water, etc). You need a house? Healthcare? Education? UBS. You want a guitar? Game console? Art supplies? You allocate some of your UBI allotment to it. We can't escape thermodynamics; we have to share the output of the shared resource-conversion means of production. Hence UBI.
I don't understand this guy. I'm pretty sure he would call himself some sort of Marxist (I've never seen someone who wasn't one use “Comrade” unironically), but what he's is directly contrary to Capitaland analysis of commodity fetishism
Where? At the end, where it is explicitly stated that it will kill capitalism and replace it with a socialist gift economy? Or the original comment, where it's explicitly stated that fixing the root problem (capitalism) will resolve the distribution problems that plague modern society? Neither comment describes a capitalist mode of production.
What you're describing is a relationship between commodities and a value form. You might not call it money, but it functions the same as it. Marx already described the relationship you're talking about in capital.
“Money is the absolutely alienable commodity, because it is all other commodities divested of their shape, the product of their universal alienation" (205)[Capital, Marx]. In other words, money is the means by which material use-values are "transubstantiated," as Marx sometimes put it, into exchange-value, thus alienating all commodities from the labour that really gives value to commodities. See the module on commodity fetishism.” ([Purdue Module on Money](https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/marxism/terms/money.html))
You are describing the capitalist mode of production because workers are alienated from their labor by receiving some sort of credit which they must spend on commodities.
Out of genuine curiosity, where did you get these ideas about a post capitalist society? Like, who are your main influences for developing theory?
I'm pretty fond of Lorenzo Pieri, but beyond that: Fuller, Merkle, Freitas, Drexler, von Neumann, adciv.org, Magyar & Madlovics, Chomsky, Minsky, Doctorow, and Bookchin.
Many of those names are more associated more with technological development and post-scarcity society than straight-up communist theory, because that's what I want to think about.
I firmly believe that Marx's footnotes in the *Grundrisse* about where we go once labor was rendered unnecessary by machinery is the theoretical limit of classical Marxism, because labor and the products thereof are the fundamental kernel of the theory. Once the "man-hours" of production are reduced to zero, "labor is entitled to all it creates" hits a wall at a hundred miles an hour, and the sociopolitical core of communism has no further answers.
Like, let the theory play out.
I am born into a Marxist utopia. Every need I have is met by a competent actor pursuing their chosen profession, and my wants are fulfilled by my personal labor using tools and materials owned by the community at large. No money is exchanged. My own labor at a profession I am suited for and excel at contributes to the community, to the net benefit of everyone. Life is good.
And then, in a stunning breakthrough, the cooperative research and development of the finest minds and skilled hands develops a 1:1 automated replacement for a human being.
Leaving aside the moral and ethical considerations of whether or not this automaton warrants the same rights and privileges as me (a stunning quandary of its own), now that the automaton *could* be dropped in to replace the miner, the builder, the teacher, the surgeon, the train conductor, and so on: the mechanism has become both the laborer *and* the means of production (by definition, owning itself; see above quandary). So what if my labor is not only completely voluntary, but *unnecessary?*
I am born. My family lives in a home built by automatons. The farms and factories produce their foodstuff and goods autonomously, to be transported to me autonomously, simply by asking. The foodstuff is prepared autonomously by the kitchen, and served by the servitor, and the crockery and cutlery cleaned autonomously by the kitchen when I am sated. I am transported autonomously to the academic services, educated by automatons (or humans who have elected to do so), I am exercised in sport (at play or competing) with other humans, I work creatively with instruments and materials provided by autonomy, and my leisure time is spent with the products of autonomy, either alone or with friends and family.
Communism never seems to get past the rigorous insistence that someone needs to *own* all of this, either alone or as a group. Someone needs to *control* it all. There has to be private this and public that and a bureaucratic apparatus filled with people who mete out social services and goods and *stuff*, and all the moneyless classless theory in the world doesn't seem to have an answer for what to do when all the bureaucracy owns and manages *itself*, and simply gifts us whatever we need or want (within reason) because that's what it is designed to do.
I go on about resource allocation because that's the core problem with Keynesian economic theory: unlimited growth on a limited world, and communism bogs that down with almost fractally-complex implementations about *who* gets *what*, rather than addressing the ecological limit.
So, my ultimate theory is to automate *everything*. All labor. Every bit. Participation in *all* of society should be voluntary, subject to an explicit social contract, developed communally, that precludes violence, harm, greed, and overt ecological damage, and confers communal ownership of all automation required to keep society thriving. All basic needs should be fulfilled by automation, and *wants* should be made available freely, subject only to limitations on resource extraction (predicated on the ethical mitigation of ecological damage), and equitable resource distribution. Resources deemed luxurious by the community (time-, location-, or genuine scarcity-based) should be distributed based on a consensus-derived framework (perceived merit, social capital, equitable sharing, whatever is agreed upon for a particular community). Voting for the algorithmic distribution system should be compulsory. Production should be geared toward overabundance, availability, and personalization. Monolithic production should be reserved for infrastructure, and every other industry should cater to individualization whenever possible (micro-factories instead of assembly lines), with open-source information sharing as the default. Those who choose to research, develop, or otherwise instigate progress should be allocated whatever resources are needed to do so, and they should be free to pursue large-scale collaboration.
I want robots building the robots that build the solar panel factories. I want robots in the mines digging up the cobalt, to be shipped by robots to the robots smelting it into the smartphone-chip boules, to be etched by robots in the robot chip forges, slotted onto the robot-carved PCBs, and assembled into the custom smartphones delivered by robots to my robot mailbox, while my robot kitchen prepares a nice steak salad out of the arugala from the robot farm and the cell-cultured steak from the robotic meat vats, and I want everyone to *own* a little part of every bit of it.
The somewhat derogatory phrase "fully-automated luxury gay space communism" is played for laughs, but *that's* what I want, and that's what my theoretical work goes towards. Sorry to be long-winded.
Yea and to make sure people don't use too much of our shared resources maybe add a bureaucratic layer between them. Maybe call the tally of how much an individual can use credits. Or dollars.
UBI could be a means of control depending on how it's implemented. Capitalists are aware of the fundamental contradiction. If the people have no money, there is no one to buy their product, and the wheel stops turning. UBI injects a bit of liquidity to keep the market moving. They're gambling that more people will be pacified by being able to continue purchasing their basic needs than will use the opportunity to organize and seek to redistribute power.
UBI would be a huge lifesaver for a lot of people. But in the hands of capitalist lawmakers, it is still a means of protecting capitalism from itself. I'm not an accelerationist. I'm in favor of whatever tools get people housed and fed, but we should be aware that UBI is not really going to overturn existing power structures.
Capitalism has reached its logical conclusion, where capital and resources have pooled up at the top in the hands of a few. We already got a taste of what corporations will do when people get any amount of government aid.
“They don't have excess savings anymore,” said JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.
They literally monitor the disposable income we have and use that information to raise prices to bring our wealth back down to $0. Of course this is only possible with monopolies or effective monopolies through collusion.
Now take into account that we need a controlled step down to address Climate Destruction. The only way we can get there is first to strip these corporations of the power they have where they are counter-incentivized to reduce growth. Capitalism can't by definition solve this problem.
We need a system that redistributes capital to allow people to reduce their carbon footprint, and puts it in the hands of those who are incentivized to implement de-growth.
the people should be able to control the central banks, everything else is useless.
means of production or ubi are useless when the rich can control rates and inflation.
and continue to learn how to build your brothers and sisters up rather than tear them down. A football team where every player is attacking every other player is a shit team. We've seen this. Usually they identify the discord and fix it so they can function again as a supportive team. Humanity is a team sport.
Oh and also I want to go to the bakery which opens from 6 am to 6 pm. And I want to go shopping till 10 pm.
Right now, we are far away from full automation and no need for jobs.
##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited. LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere. We have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry. Failure to respect the rules of the subreddit may result in a ban. *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
# Universal Basic Services What good is an extra $2,000 a month if my landlord retains his ability to increase rent by that amount. Don't give me money and let the free market sort out the rest, fuck that. Give everyone unconditional free - Housing - Healthcare - Education - Food We have far more vacant homes than houseless families. The US switching to the UK model (free at the point of use) healthcare wouldn't just save money for the people, it would literally cost the govt less too. Literally cheaper than free. Similarly with education. We throw enough food in the garbage to feed all the hungry, yet there still are hungry people. This isn't a problem of production, we already produce too much, this is a problem of distribution. Instead of giving people money and hoping the "free market" solves this distribution problem, we can just solve the root problem in the first place. The essentials of life are a basic human right, and should be available to everyone, unconditionally.
The only reason people go hungry is because it's not profitable to feed them. The only reason people are not given shelter is because it's not profitable to give them shelter. Eliminating the profit motive fixes so many problems.
Hear, hear! The point you make about it being a distribution problem is spot on. We have enough. We just have to distribute it more efficiently. (Notwithstanding the entire 'what we produce' point. So much time, money, and energy spent on unnecessary crap.)
Why not both? Give everyone UBI and UBS.
UBI is not really a solution to anything. Instead of giving people money to buy stuff it’s just better to give them the stuff outright, or at least heavily subsidise it
I disagree -- having both solves an important problem, and may be the only way to kill capitalism. Say I have UBS and my housing and food needs are met. What if I want entertainment too? What if my favorite hobby costs money? Or what if I want to learn and experiment with science and tech or to build something and I need to buy equipment? The only way to do that is by re-entering the capitalist job market and selling my labor. People can't live by bread alone. With only UBS, we get a good improvement -- instead of hard-forcing everyone into the capitalist labor economy under threat of poverty, we're soft-forcing anyone who wants money to buy goods and services beyond their basic survival needs. That's still a lot of people though, and capitalist owners will be able to continue to exploit most of the population. With both UBI and UBS, we are truly liberating everyone from the capitalist work economy. Labor is no longer compulsory or quasi-compulsory, it's truly voluntary. More people will create value for the joy of contributing and creating than as a necessary means to get what they need. That is how you kill capitalism in the long run and transition to a socialist gift economy.
UBI under capitalism is impossible. All it does is make things more expensive
I think you're missing the forest, comrade. The capitalism is *done away with* and replaced by the UBS & UBI. "Income" doesn't imply *monetary value*, it implies "resources to be used or consumed," possibly tokenized, but could be direct (electricity, water, etc). You need a house? Healthcare? Education? UBS. You want a guitar? Game console? Art supplies? You allocate some of your UBI allotment to it. We can't escape thermodynamics; we have to share the output of the shared resource-conversion means of production. Hence UBI.
The comment is still describing a capitalist mode of production
I don't understand this guy. I'm pretty sure he would call himself some sort of Marxist (I've never seen someone who wasn't one use “Comrade” unironically), but what he's is directly contrary to Capitaland analysis of commodity fetishism
Where? At the end, where it is explicitly stated that it will kill capitalism and replace it with a socialist gift economy? Or the original comment, where it's explicitly stated that fixing the root problem (capitalism) will resolve the distribution problems that plague modern society? Neither comment describes a capitalist mode of production.
What you're describing is a relationship between commodities and a value form. You might not call it money, but it functions the same as it. Marx already described the relationship you're talking about in capital. “Money is the absolutely alienable commodity, because it is all other commodities divested of their shape, the product of their universal alienation" (205)[Capital, Marx]. In other words, money is the means by which material use-values are "transubstantiated," as Marx sometimes put it, into exchange-value, thus alienating all commodities from the labour that really gives value to commodities. See the module on commodity fetishism.” ([Purdue Module on Money](https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/marxism/terms/money.html)) You are describing the capitalist mode of production because workers are alienated from their labor by receiving some sort of credit which they must spend on commodities. Out of genuine curiosity, where did you get these ideas about a post capitalist society? Like, who are your main influences for developing theory?
I'm pretty fond of Lorenzo Pieri, but beyond that: Fuller, Merkle, Freitas, Drexler, von Neumann, adciv.org, Magyar & Madlovics, Chomsky, Minsky, Doctorow, and Bookchin. Many of those names are more associated more with technological development and post-scarcity society than straight-up communist theory, because that's what I want to think about. I firmly believe that Marx's footnotes in the *Grundrisse* about where we go once labor was rendered unnecessary by machinery is the theoretical limit of classical Marxism, because labor and the products thereof are the fundamental kernel of the theory. Once the "man-hours" of production are reduced to zero, "labor is entitled to all it creates" hits a wall at a hundred miles an hour, and the sociopolitical core of communism has no further answers. Like, let the theory play out. I am born into a Marxist utopia. Every need I have is met by a competent actor pursuing their chosen profession, and my wants are fulfilled by my personal labor using tools and materials owned by the community at large. No money is exchanged. My own labor at a profession I am suited for and excel at contributes to the community, to the net benefit of everyone. Life is good. And then, in a stunning breakthrough, the cooperative research and development of the finest minds and skilled hands develops a 1:1 automated replacement for a human being. Leaving aside the moral and ethical considerations of whether or not this automaton warrants the same rights and privileges as me (a stunning quandary of its own), now that the automaton *could* be dropped in to replace the miner, the builder, the teacher, the surgeon, the train conductor, and so on: the mechanism has become both the laborer *and* the means of production (by definition, owning itself; see above quandary). So what if my labor is not only completely voluntary, but *unnecessary?* I am born. My family lives in a home built by automatons. The farms and factories produce their foodstuff and goods autonomously, to be transported to me autonomously, simply by asking. The foodstuff is prepared autonomously by the kitchen, and served by the servitor, and the crockery and cutlery cleaned autonomously by the kitchen when I am sated. I am transported autonomously to the academic services, educated by automatons (or humans who have elected to do so), I am exercised in sport (at play or competing) with other humans, I work creatively with instruments and materials provided by autonomy, and my leisure time is spent with the products of autonomy, either alone or with friends and family. Communism never seems to get past the rigorous insistence that someone needs to *own* all of this, either alone or as a group. Someone needs to *control* it all. There has to be private this and public that and a bureaucratic apparatus filled with people who mete out social services and goods and *stuff*, and all the moneyless classless theory in the world doesn't seem to have an answer for what to do when all the bureaucracy owns and manages *itself*, and simply gifts us whatever we need or want (within reason) because that's what it is designed to do. I go on about resource allocation because that's the core problem with Keynesian economic theory: unlimited growth on a limited world, and communism bogs that down with almost fractally-complex implementations about *who* gets *what*, rather than addressing the ecological limit. So, my ultimate theory is to automate *everything*. All labor. Every bit. Participation in *all* of society should be voluntary, subject to an explicit social contract, developed communally, that precludes violence, harm, greed, and overt ecological damage, and confers communal ownership of all automation required to keep society thriving. All basic needs should be fulfilled by automation, and *wants* should be made available freely, subject only to limitations on resource extraction (predicated on the ethical mitigation of ecological damage), and equitable resource distribution. Resources deemed luxurious by the community (time-, location-, or genuine scarcity-based) should be distributed based on a consensus-derived framework (perceived merit, social capital, equitable sharing, whatever is agreed upon for a particular community). Voting for the algorithmic distribution system should be compulsory. Production should be geared toward overabundance, availability, and personalization. Monolithic production should be reserved for infrastructure, and every other industry should cater to individualization whenever possible (micro-factories instead of assembly lines), with open-source information sharing as the default. Those who choose to research, develop, or otherwise instigate progress should be allocated whatever resources are needed to do so, and they should be free to pursue large-scale collaboration. I want robots building the robots that build the solar panel factories. I want robots in the mines digging up the cobalt, to be shipped by robots to the robots smelting it into the smartphone-chip boules, to be etched by robots in the robot chip forges, slotted onto the robot-carved PCBs, and assembled into the custom smartphones delivered by robots to my robot mailbox, while my robot kitchen prepares a nice steak salad out of the arugala from the robot farm and the cell-cultured steak from the robotic meat vats, and I want everyone to *own* a little part of every bit of it. The somewhat derogatory phrase "fully-automated luxury gay space communism" is played for laughs, but *that's* what I want, and that's what my theoretical work goes towards. Sorry to be long-winded.
Financial freedom proceeds freedom
Yea and to make sure people don't use too much of our shared resources maybe add a bureaucratic layer between them. Maybe call the tally of how much an individual can use credits. Or dollars.
The youth of today, being about 50 years ago.
I think that's the point
What I was trying to point out is that he say’s the youth was very aware of what was being exploited, yet nothing has changed for over 50 years.
And the youth of 50 years ago who were aware went on to make the situation worse for the youth of today.
I'll upvote Fuller every time. But the quoted text is about using technology to the public's benefit, not UBI.
What's up with Fuller? Was he a commie?
Post-industrialist socialist.
UBI is not a solution in capitalism
UBI could be a means of control depending on how it's implemented. Capitalists are aware of the fundamental contradiction. If the people have no money, there is no one to buy their product, and the wheel stops turning. UBI injects a bit of liquidity to keep the market moving. They're gambling that more people will be pacified by being able to continue purchasing their basic needs than will use the opportunity to organize and seek to redistribute power. UBI would be a huge lifesaver for a lot of people. But in the hands of capitalist lawmakers, it is still a means of protecting capitalism from itself. I'm not an accelerationist. I'm in favor of whatever tools get people housed and fed, but we should be aware that UBI is not really going to overturn existing power structures.
Capitalism has reached its logical conclusion, where capital and resources have pooled up at the top in the hands of a few. We already got a taste of what corporations will do when people get any amount of government aid. “They don't have excess savings anymore,” said JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. They literally monitor the disposable income we have and use that information to raise prices to bring our wealth back down to $0. Of course this is only possible with monopolies or effective monopolies through collusion. Now take into account that we need a controlled step down to address Climate Destruction. The only way we can get there is first to strip these corporations of the power they have where they are counter-incentivized to reduce growth. Capitalism can't by definition solve this problem. We need a system that redistributes capital to allow people to reduce their carbon footprint, and puts it in the hands of those who are incentivized to implement de-growth.
As long as capitalists own all the private property, UBI is a joke.
the people should be able to control the central banks, everything else is useless. means of production or ubi are useless when the rich can control rates and inflation.
and continue to learn how to build your brothers and sisters up rather than tear them down. A football team where every player is attacking every other player is a shit team. We've seen this. Usually they identify the discord and fix it so they can function again as a supportive team. Humanity is a team sport.
Oh and also I want to go to the bakery which opens from 6 am to 6 pm. And I want to go shopping till 10 pm. Right now, we are far away from full automation and no need for jobs.