@plyspomitox@chaos.social
A #UBI isn't The Solution either. Story time! In the 1960s, the Netherlands introduced a basic income system for people who had no other sources of income (no job, no social security, no pension). The minister who introduced it clearly stated that it should be easy to apply for and provide a comfortable income. "A vase of flowers on the table is part of life," as the minister said, so beneficiaries should be able to afford some luxuries too. And at the start, it really did work like that. A lot of people in the Netherlands were lifted out of poverty and were able to afford housing, utilities, food, clothes and even some luxuries. But over the decades, this bijstand as it was called, was increasingly undressed. Nowadays, people living off bijstand have dropped back below the poverty line, and are subject to intense surveillance that seems to have been taken straight out of 1984. An infamous anecdote is inspectors coming to check if you don't have an extra tooth brush in your bathroom which might indicate that someone else is "illegally" living with you. Or more recently, a woman who was fined thousands of euros because her parents regularly went grocery shopping for her, which was seen as an undeclared income.
When a UBI is introduced, it will definitely lift millions of people out of poverty, and provide millions more the opportunity to leave their exhausting bullshit underpaid jobs and chase their dreams. But everybody would still be at the mercy of the capitalist class. How long before the UBI will start to drop back towards poverty levels? How long before the first groups of people are denied their universal basic income? Five years? Two decades? Six decades? Whichever it is, the eventual demise of UBI into a Kafkaesque hellscape like the Dutch bijstand is now in't a question of if, but when it will happen.
Still, I'm an avid supporter of introducing UBI. But only as a temporary stop-gap. It will instantly provide so much relief ot so many people that it is worth it. But once it has been introduced, we cannot afford to sit back contemplating a job well done... We must continue dismantling the systems that would eventually destroy it.