is a ubi actually communism?

most advocates want to tell you it's not communist, because they don't want to scare you. yet, here i am, using explicitly marxist terms in describing it. i have different motives, clearly.

the answer is that it depends how you frame it; i'm explicitly framing it as a communist idea because i'm in favour of moving to communism, but that's not exactly necessary...

the idea, as it exists in the contemporary discourse, actually comes largely from milton friedman, a right-wing liberal economist known for doing horrible things in chile, amongst other things. the way he formulated the idea was as a negative income tax, so that you'd have a minimum level of income, no matter what. under friedman's scheme, if you made $15,000 last year and the minimum income was set at $40,000 then the government would send you a $25,000 check to make up the difference, whereas if you made $80,000 then you wouldn't receive the gai, you'd just pay taxes. while i think the minimum income idea is a more implementable concept than just sending everybody a check (and would probably help stave off friedman's fear of inflationary policies, which are probably legit in context), i don't really want to frame this in terms of marginal tax rates, or progressive taxation. it is worth being clear, though, that, in friedman's formulation of the concept, capitalism can carry on as it likes - it's just an unusually generous form of welfare designed to ensure that nobody gets left behind.

rather, i want to think about it as a step towards common ownership of the means of production, in what is almost more of a fordist concept. yes, detroit - that ford. he has an ism. really. you can look up the debate between fordism and taylorism, but the shift was essentially a starkly liberalizing approach to workers' economic rights, for the end net benefit of the capitalist class. capital is always selfish, but sometimes it can be enlightened in it's selfishness - marx' claims of short-sightedness do have counterexamples, and fordism is perhaps the major one. so, what ford did was realize that his workers were also his most likely customers, and he therefore boosted their wages high enough to ensure that they could buy the products they made.

why is that important? because what's being lost in this move towards automation is that nobody is going to circulate money in an economy that doesn't have any jobs, and capital is going to end up the big loser, in the end. there's the short-sightedness; capital will automate to save costs, and then lose all of it's customers in the process, because it is too driven by greed to work it out. so, we'll end up with computers everywhere, 70% unemployment and a large underclass of people that can't afford to interact with the computers that took their jobs. the insight that keynes developed from ford was that a functioning capitalist economy requires that you give workers enough money to buy the things being made, which led to these ideas of keynesian stimulus spending, namely that to get the economy running again in bad economic times, the government increases the money supply to get people to buy things by sending it to them directly. and, it has to be the government that does it.

but, if all of the jobs are being lost permanently, we're not talking about short term stimulus spending anymore. we're no longer kickstarting the economy. instead, we're now talking about structural spending programs designed to give consumers money to spend to keep businesses running - and citizens healthy and happy.

in the very short term, this should function like a basic keynesian spending program, with multiplier effects and the whole shebang. in the long run, though, the whole thing should fizzle out, as deflation sets in - and the system of monetary exchange should end up abolished altogether, as we slowly take over actual collective ownership of production, and exchange commodities based on need, rather than due to a desire for accumulation.

so, while what i'd actually advocate today looks more like a minimum income tax, i'd rather talk about it like it's a jump to full communism, and bring in these explicitly communist terms. 'cause that's what i want, and how i want to frame the debate.

in a fully communist society, you'd have something that is more like a maximum income than a minimum income. there's this kind of misconception that everybody gets the same thing in communism, and i'm not exactly sure where it comes from; no leftist that i've ever read has ever argued for that. communism generally argues for distribution based on need. so, somebody with eight kids would get more of everything than a single person, because they need more of it. but, the general philosophy would flip over; you'd be restricting wealth, rather than eliminating poverty.

i don't want to step away from the debate, though - this is absolutely a step towards communism, and we should embrace it and be excited about doing it.