Don’t want to watch a video to know which particular flavour of argument this is. But I’ll add my stock response anyway.
UBI is not one policy. The hard right want to use it to voucherise public services and punish single parents. Tech bros want to use it to giggify work. Social democrats want to use it to repair holes in the social safety net and reduce costs of administration. Democratic socialists want to use it to force employers to behave themselves. The far left has few advocates (that I know of) but it could be used as a (reformist) step towards “to each according to need”.
The devil is in the detail. The title of the video suggests that it is attacking one version of UBI, not the totality of policy options for which the label is used.
You should probably watch the video because it’s not about that. It’s about how any UBI “solution” will inherently be a concession from the ruling class that can and will be taken away or gutted, just like the NHS, unemployment benefits or whatevers other wellfare state measures have been tried in the past.
And he goes on to point out that as long as the current ruling class holds the political power, any such measures that depend on begging for them to change things and keep them good are bound to failure, cut corners or downright sabotage. His point is that it’s a futile effort without the working class also seizing political power.
TL;DR: Read Lenin and while at it read Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution too
So it’s not an argument against UBI at all. Just a statement of the bleeding obvious.
Articulating the obvious is extremely important.
Helps us plebs out there for sure.
I think that’s right. The UBI discourse frustrates me immensely because some proposals using that moniker are so obviously very dangerous, and there’s a tendency to naively advocate for it as if it were one single policy. The pro-social versions of it are very unlikely to be implemented in this real world that we live in.
That said, while the NHS has been under sustained attack for the last 50 years, it does still survive. And it survives because the middle classes fucking love it. The NHS and child benefit are the only two survivors from the postwar settlement and both still struggle on because it is politically impossible to abandon policies which benefit the middle classes, with their loud voices and sharp elbows. Universal benefits are much harder to dismantle than means-tested benefits.
Pessimism is warranted. But I don’t think dismissing UBI is anywhere near as useful as pointing out what makes for a UBI which benefits the masses and what is just a neoliberal’s wet dream.
And the specific reason I think it is vital for the discourse to encompass all these nuances is that the period of history we are currently living through echoes the one that ultimately delivered the NHS and thirty years of (mild) social democracy. If history does repeat itself, we need to make sure we implement policies that benefit everyone but the ultra-rich because those are the only policies which survive reform without revolution. And reform without revolution might be the best we can realistically hope for.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
