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You are reading issue #11 of the fully automated luxury communism newsletter.

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Every two weeks this newsletter brings links, snippets and interesting facts about technology from a left perspective. It hopes to spark a greater discussion among the left about the opportunities and threats that tech brings.



This issue I will go into the universal basic income debate among the left, and how it intersects with technology-based mass unemployment and the potential for a post-work society.



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The universal basic income conundrum

"There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation. Yeah, I am not sure what else one would do. I think that is what would happen."

"Of course, we could plead for a more generous version, closer to anticapitalist or accelerationist proposals, like that of French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang. His UBI proposal amounts to €1,100 ($1,302) a month for each citizen and would be added to existing benefits. In France, it would cost €871 billion, or 35 percent of GDP. When the French socialist party’s think tank, Fondation Jean Jaurès, studied the budget impact of a €1000 monthly UBI, it estimated that it would cost as much as all current social spending — pensions, unemployment, social assistance, and so on — plus the budgets for either national education or health care. Suffice it to say, this version is unlikely to see the light of day."

A universal basic income is controversial among the left. A basic income proposes that everyone, without qualification, gets a certain amount of money per month from the state to guarantee their living standard. This in contrast to the current welfare state, which only hands out compensation based on need and behaviour, and which often builds an invasive bureaucracy dedicated to checking welfare claims and taking away benefits from the unworthy poor.Interesting about this is not only the pitched debate that has already taken place between left-basic incomers, and those leftists who oppose the measure, but also how a basic income relates to technological change. Luminaries of the tech world like Mark Zuckerberg now promote the measure to combat expected technological mass-unemployment and see it as the future of the welfare state.Or in the eloquent words of Elon Musk:Hence we get scenes like this, seen on the Twitter page of Richard Branson:This all puts the left in an odd position, on the one hand a basic income has an utopian ring to it and points to a post-work future, on the other hand our worst enemies are strong proponents of it and there are plenty of left-wing critiques to make of a basic income. So what is the left to do?In my opinion, a basic income is a problematic proposal, yet the left can salvage utopian elements from it.So what are the problems of a basic income? First and foremost, it costs disproportionately much: giving everyone a (left-wing) basic income would cost extreme amounts of money. Or as this great Jacobin article finds

And as they conclude:

"No existing economy can pay for a generous basic income without defunding everything else. We would either have to settle for the minimalist version — whose effects would be highly suspect — or we’d have to eliminate all other social expenditures, in effect creating Milton Friedman’s paradise. Faced with these facts, we should question UBI’s rationality; as Luke Martinelli put it: “an affordable UBI is inadequate, and an adequate UBI is unaffordable.”"

A second reason for why a basic income might not be entirely appropriate is that it is based on a view of automation that might not be accurate. In current public discourse there is the view that the wave of automation we will see because of advances in robotics and AI will lead to mass unemployment. Work in that view is a scarce resource, replacing some parts of work thus lead inherently to more unemployment. A more sophisticated version of this argument then says that new sectors like programming simply create less jobs than what sectors that are replaced provided, leading to an average decrease in work.



This is a possibility, yet people held similar fears in the past about automation waves, none of which resulted in permanent mass technological unemployment. Automation under capitalism is complex, and is based on economic and technological dynamics, not to mention class power. Yet capitalism is great at creating new work for people to do.



Capitalism hence constantly changes the sectors that are at its centre, and constantly creates new profit-making opportunities. This makes it so that it constantly creates new work. This process in the past staved off permanent technological mass-unemployment, and might do so again now. As socialists we might want to challenge this logic (do we really need that many people working in marketing and sales?), and argue for more free time, yet the major raison d'etre of a basic income might not actually come to pass in the first place.



Yet for all the criticism one can level at the basic income, what anti-basic income lefties often forget is the utopian potential the proposal holds, and why people are attracted to the idea in the first place. Young people in, at least, the Western world have found little meaning in their work, so-called bullshit jobs, and hunger for an at least partly post-work world. Besides that the welfare state has become more and more of a disciplination machine, with an ever growing bureaucracy dedicated to checking up on welfare claimants, depriving them of their basic dignity and cutting as many of them off from government compensation.



Essentially under neoliberalism, both work and non-work have become processes which deprive people of their basic dignity and security, and a basic income, whatever difficulties it would encounter in practice, offers a hope for change.



Besides that we will most likely see some upheaval in relation to automation, particularly at a sectoral level. So the prospect of having to rely on the current welfare state when that happens is far from a positive prospect for many workers.



Leftists critical of a basic income should at least try to incorporate many of the reasons why a basic income is such a popular proposal in certain sections of the working class. Turning the welfare state away from the big brother for unemployed it has currently become is probably a great first start for this, for example by making certain types of unemployment compensation unconditional.



Alternative proposals, such as universal basic services, are also attractive. Here the state would essentially take certain sectors such as housing, food and education away from the private sector, and make them free. Which would allow citizens to access all essential services to live for free.



Or as Jonathan Portes, co-author of the report, stated:

“The role of the state is to ensure an equitable distribution of not just money, but opportunity to participate and contribute to society. For that to be meaningful, there are likely to be certain services everyone should be able to access.”

So a basic income might be problematic, but lets not kill the utopia that it presents with it.

Links

Here are some links with interesting news from the past two weeks.

By combining Horkheimer and Marcuse, Krahl notes how the strong presence of an authoritarian state and the “substitution of living labor with science and technology” are two essential components which allow capital to “delay its own end.” These two pillars provide support for capitalism to find a new, stabilized form at a time when its difficulties have intensified. In this way, Krahl reads the decisive role of the state, which expresses itself authoritatively through the role of machines, as a reactive tool of capital in the face of its contradictions.

By contrast, socialists generally want to shrink markets. In the words of Ellen Meiksins Wood, we want “the decommodification of as many spheres of life as possible and their democratization.” This means not replacing big business with small business — although that may prove a desirable short-term strategy to weaken capital — but replacing businesses big and small with publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives. It means not making markets more competitive but less dominant — less central to our survival and our flourishing and the organization of our common life.

Interesting article from Adrian Smith about Barcelona's left wing take on smart cities, an experiment to keep an eye on. Barcelona has been a pioneering Smart City. The Council’s business partners have been installing sensors and opening data platforms for years. Not everyone is comfortable with this technocratic turn. After Ada Colau was elected Mayor on a mandate of democratising the city and putting citizens centre-stage, digital policy has sought to go ‘beyond the Smart City’. Chief Technology Officer Francesca Bria is opening digital platforms to greater citizen participation and oversight. Worried that the city’s knowledge was being ceded to tech vendors, the Council now promotes technological sovereignty.

Quite great article, based on a report, with policy suggestions for dealing with automation. Including using automation to increase productivity (key in the UK), regulating tech giants and establishing collectively owned responses to it. Under these conditions, automation could emancipate or immiserate. Managed well, automation could build a future of shared economic plenty, the productivity gains of technological change allowing us all to live better and more freely. Managed poorly, automation could create a ‘paradox of plenty’, in which we produce more, yet the fruits are less equally shared, as the benefits of technological change flow to the owners of capital. Bye... This was issue #11 of the fully automated luxury communism newsletter.



This newsletter and my own thoughts are very much a work in progress, so any tips, comments, messages or corrections are very much welcomed. Please let me know at: fullyalc@gmail.com or via Twitter @AutomatedFully

Also feel free to share and subscribe to the newsletter, which you can do at the Also feel free to share and subscribe to the newsletter, which you can do at the this link Smart cities need thick data, not big data - The GuardianInteresting article from Adrian Smith about Barcelona's left wing take on smart cities, an experiment to keep an eye on. The spectre of automation? Three strategies to ensure automation works for the common good - LSEQuite great article, based on a report, with policy suggestions for dealing with automation. Including using automation to increase productivity (key in the UK), regulating tech giants and establishing collectively owned responses to it.