Louise Brown walks in the "March for Black Lives" after passing by the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston Thomson Reuters The Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) has announced its first official policy platform. The economic agenda: create a system of income distribution in which people receive regular payments on top of their existing income, no strings attached.

The August 1 announcement was delivered by the over-arching Movement for Black Lives (MBL), a network of more than 50 BLM affiliate groups, and it involves a system known as basic income.

Dorian T. Warren, political scientist and board chair of the Center for Community Change, explains in the policy brief that basic income could help rectify the vast income and wealth inequality that plagues the US, so long as it includes a "pro-rated additional amount" — still in the form of a basic income — to cover the cost of reparations.

"No other social or economic policy solution today would be of sufficient scale to eradicate the profound and systemic economic inequities afflicting Black communities," he says.

The radical policy idea was initially proposed in the 1960s and has seen a renewed surge of interest within the last year. Countries such as Finland, the Netherlands, Canada, and the US have announced plans to launch basic income experiments by late 2016 or early 2017.

As technologies such as artificial intelligence and automated robotics replace greater numbers of jobs in the coming decades, Warren goes on to argue, "it is likely that Black America and other populations that are already disadvantaged will bear the brunt of whatever economic insecurity and volatility results."

The current solutions to uplift poor Americans — welfare, food stamps, earned income tax credits — are inherently flawed, he says, because they ocus on the historically unjust system of work. Basic income ignores how much a person works or how much they get paid; it hands out the same amount of money to everyone.

The federal government hasn't heard a basic income proposal since Richard Nixon's plans died in the Senate in 1969. Today, the biggest experiment comes from Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's largest start-up accelerator. The company will provide 100 families of Oakland, California with monthly payments between $1,000 and $2,000 ahead of a larger five-year study involving thousands.

If the BLM movement has any hope of getting a basic income policy before the federal government, Y Combinator's experiment is poised to be its greatest ally.