#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ARGENTINA #ANARCHISM #LIBRARY #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Argentina, ICL-CIT, FORA: organizacion-obrera #93 - UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME: CAPITALIST RESIGNATION (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 -Then, measures such as universal basic income would be necessary... ---- -Yes,

for two reasons. First, for a purely moral issue, so that inequity does not
increase disproportionately, but also, there is another reason, and that is that
for the wheel of the capitalist market to continue working, part of that
extraordinary income must be transferred from the owner of the technology to
workers. ---- Eduardo Levy Yeyati, interviewed in Infobae [1]on February 17, 2018
---- When traversing uncharted territory, keep track of your steps, chart your
direction, and move forward without distraction. Raise your head from time to
time and check, then correct or get back on track. In the meantime, it is always
important to recognize the terrain you are walking on. ---- In the here and now,
in the midst of a maelstrom of political and economic instabilities, with a
historic drop in wages and dizzying precariousness of working conditions,
substantive discussions and long-term perspectives seem to be inadequate.
However, they are more urgent than ever. It is precisely at times like this where
it is noted that the systemic injustice of a capitalist society and the political
conditions of the state are the real problem: the longer we take to take the bull
by the horns, the longer the suffering will be and the deeper the discomfort.

It would not be sensible to treat the local situation as if it were disconnected
from the history of capitalism. It is not an exceptional situation, but part of
the evolution of an economic system that does not conceive the social dimension
of benefit but rather as a by-product of individual benefit. At the same time,
and in the midst of the delirium of surrealist speeches that spring from politics
and the press, somewhat rusty words return, such as communism, liberalism, or
discussions about the State and anarchy itself, that word so loved by the
carcamanes of political power to scare the middle class into passive resignation,
decorated with the classic elegance of social repression. However, that word,
anarchy, also appears claimed as if it were a capitalist utopia,

Clearly, the confusion of a troubled river, in which anything can be said and
words no longer mean almost anything, ends up being functional to the madness
that the usual conservatives feed on, the Gatopardos who speak of revolution to
"change everything without nothing changes". The debate about the Universal Basic
Income [2]is a clear example of all this.

One of the objectives of the capitalist production system has always been the
full use of the factors of production. In liberal orthodox mythology, that would
be a point of balance to which the market tends, if it is allowed to operate
freely. The market, in this context, appears as an entity that has its own
nature, as if it were at times a conscious entity (when it is said that "the
market thinks, fears or reacts") and at others a physical entity ( which "tends
to balance").

Among the peculiarities that Keynes's model brought to the economic theory of
capitalism, one is the affirmation that there can be a point of equilibrium
without the full use of the factors of production. That equilibrium point, in a
tacit analogy with physics, would be the point at which the converging forces
cancel each other out, bringing the system to a certain rest. So that the
factors, then, are used completely, that is, for there to be "full employment" of
the factors of production, it is necessary for the State to intervene
compensating the forces of the market.

This discussion already seems to have been settled a long time ago than one might
believe. The need for a Universal Basic Income expresses a certain resignation to
the fact that a large part of the population has become expendable from the
productive point of view, and is only necessary from the point of view of
consumption. It is no longer simply a matter of a reserve army, impoverished
people as a threat to less poor people, so that they accept the poor working
conditions that are offered to them. Now it is a sector of society that will need
state assistance permanently.

That debate, about the relevance or not of a Universal Basic Income, how to
implement it, etc., is full of traps and multiple intentions. To muddy the court,
public communication resorts to strident threats and crossed accusations in which
no one is deprived of using names such as communist or neoliberal, with which a
deaf shout advances and it is seen that nothing is what is said.

Comedy, drama, movies from Argentina

Milei, an over-adapted psychopath turned into a performer of the electoral show,
once knew how to accuse Macri, a typical exponent of the Argentine prebendary
bourgeoisie, of being a socialist . To that same Macri with whom she later leaked
and who is attacked as a neoliberal by the nac & pop universe of the Kirchnerist
spectrum. This specter, from the ranks of the Pro, is accused of being a
communist , while Cristina Kirchner boasts of being a "great bourgeois [3]» in
response to similar accusations. The self-styled communists, on the other hand,
are also out there, in a big alliance with the Big Bourgeoisie. The Trotskyists,
on the other hand, between broken and badly sewn, reunite to obtain a
parliamentary presence with the FIT, a front with which they intend to fight
capitalism from within what they themselves denounce as the institutions,
vitiated from the beginning, of a false democracy. . Everyone plays their game
and plays their own role in the art comedy of political representation.

In the midst of all this nonsense, different sectors, apparently contrary to each
other, promote the discussion for universal income. Among them the Vatican,
invoking the most characteristic conception of community of the Catholic tradition:

"The UBI[universal basic income]can redefine relations in the labor
market[...]Policies like the UBI can also help people combine time spent on paid
work with time spent in the community.[4]»

This vision of community indirectly brings a sign of the real conflict. The false
dilemma about universal income is summed up in the discussion, yes or no, of its
implementation in any form. It is a false dilemma because the main discussion
about the implementation of a universal income is not yes or no, but when and
how. Everything indicates that it is an unavoidable step because it is the only
viable tool, until now, to maintain the continuity of capitalism threatened by
its own productivity. The figure with which this universal income is implemented
and the details of that implementation are not insignificant, but they are
secondary. In fact, the system of subsidies and social plans now already fulfills
that function to a great extent, and it has no chance of disappearing if it is
not mutating into some universal implementation of income. The massist fanfare of
converting plans into wages has as its horizon the duration of the increasingly
obsolete structures of a Fordist industrialism.

So the underlying discussion that is taking place is who gets the political
profit from starting up some IBU, and in what macroeconomic context would it be
inscribed, paying special attention to international relations that are
invigorated by a renewal of the conflict in two blocks and that today takes on a
threatening visibility with the war in Ukraine and the tension in Taiwan.

This underlying discussion connects with the sign launched from the Vatican and
indicates that there is something in the profound concept of society that is
under debate, although this debate is masked by the fireworks of representation.
When the papal speech refers to a community dimension of economic activity that
is disconnected from employment relations, an impasse opens. How big is that
community? Is it an empty rhetorical figuration or is it a model of peaceful
coexistence between a local pre-capitalist sociability and a hyper-productive
global capitalism?

When it is established that the popular economy is here to stay, a clear
indication is given that there is an underlying issue that is denser than the
discussion about who puts the signature on the universal income project. This
background implies economic and political tensions in the redefinition of social
relations in the face of the new production conditions of the capitalist system.

The core of the problem

 From the end of the 18th century, a profound economic transformation took place
in Western Europe and then spread throughout the world. It is what is usually
referred to as the Industrial Revolution , and consists of a profound
transformation of the production system by virtue of its own technological
inventions. That transformation inaugurated the new times of urban industry, that
is, of a manufacturing model in which the automatic mechanism, the machine,
enters the productive scene for the first time, replacing labor and multiplying
the productivity of the old workshops, impacting on the social relations of
manufacturing production flows.

Until then, the participation of mechanisms in the industry was very minor and,
in the case of very crude and not yet automatic mechanisms, the increase in
productivity did not manage to transform social relations so radically. To
illustrate the matter, it is enough to observe that the automated looms that
appeared in England at the end of the 18th century produced an infinitely more
transcendent transformation than the spinning wheel, the last technological
incorporation of the textile industry up to that moment, which appeared in Europe
possibly some 800 years before, and possibly some 2000 years after it was invented.

If the increase in productivity is systematically monopolized by a minority
sector of society, the consumption capacity is also systematically concentrated.
The productive activity depends on the commercialization of the product and for
that there needs to be a society with a certain consumption capacity. The core of
the current conflict is not different from the intrinsic conflict of capitalism:
by virtue of the concentration of wealth and the systematic increase in
productivity, capitalism destroys its own activity.

The universal basic income is a mechanism for the State to intervene in the
market in defense of capitalist accumulation, preserving capitalism from its
self-destructive tendency. This is what has always been expected of the modern
State: to guarantee the conditions for economic activity. The magic trick, in the
form of tacit implication, is to identify any economic activity with capitalism.

This is not something that we are discovering now, but the main argument by which
the analysts, theorists and officials of capitalism itself promote the Universal
Basic Income. As a sample button, use the reference of Eduardo Levy Yeyati,
former economist of the Central Bank of the Duhalde government, and advisor to
the Chief of Cabinet of the Nation of the macrista government, who said in 2016
[5], when he promoted the IBU:

«If a machine can do for 5 pesos what I can do for 10, I have two options: either
I work for 5 pesos, that is, for half the income, or I leave my work to the
machine. This implies that, left to its own dynamics, technological progress
generates a poorly distributed abundance.»

Note, once again, that technological progress here means capitalism .

Social peace and subsidized capitalism

The understanding of the importance of financing the aggregate demand of the most
exploited sectors of society to "have the party in peace" cuts across all sectors
of political representation. An example of this is the perspective of the
Economic and Social Council in the direction of linking the universal allowance
per child with technological development strategies in the general framework of
directing local productive activity towards knowledge industries, that is, in the
development of technological-cultural services. In the words of Gustavo Béliz
[6], it is necessary to link the universal allowance per child with technological
knowledge, and " reformulate it and promote it as an embryo of a universal basic
income, which is also beginning to be discussed throughout the world».

As I write these lines, the political crisis self-inflicted by the Frente de
Todos ejected Gustavo Béliz from the government, who said goodbye with a warm
"God save them." Béliz's departure, directly linked to Sergio Massa's seizure of
power, raises a question regarding the immediate future of Argentina's relations
with the United States, given that both figures represent direct lines with that
country. What Sergio Massa does not have is Belize's relationship with the
Vatican, nor the same links with the Inter-American Development Bank.

As I continue writing these lines, Massa announces his "Bridge to Employment"
which is nothing more than a reallocation of social plans through a subsidy to
employers. In other words, instead of giving the plan to an unemployed worker, he
gives it to an employer, on the condition that he hire someone. Page 12 [7]sells
it like this:

«The program supposes benefits for the workers and benefits for the employers. In
the case of people who made the "bridge" to formal employment, they will be able
to maintain the "stability" of the plan for one year and, after that time, they
will have the possibility to decide whether to maintain the social program or opt
for formal work. (with the benefits that this implies, such as social work, ART,
retirement contributions, etc.). In the case of employers, they will be
guaranteed that the State will take care of part of the salary (the amount of the
plan) and, in turn, they will have bonuses for contributions and employer
contributions, since they will only have to pay the social work, the ART and the
contribution to the union. The latter is a difference with the original project
that Massa had presented in the Chamber of Deputies,

In the interview with Yeyati cited as the epigraph of this text, the economist
explains two models for the UBI:

"There are at least two. The most traditional, that of people like Milton
Friedman for example, proposes to pay the worker who earns little or nothing and
collect taxes from the one who works a lot. Friedman called this a "negative
income tax," in the sense that if you didn't earn anything, the tax was negative,
you got paid. It is a highly progressive tax. The other extreme is in the
so-called "supplementary salary" version, in a scenario in which we all work 20
hours instead of 40 and the remaining 20 are paid by the State. You can work less
and earn the same. It is the reduction of the working day but without losing income."

Massa's proposal seems to be close to the second model, with the peculiarity that
it does not mention the necessary reduction of the working day. It is a direct
subsidy to the business community.

Subsidizing capitalists in exchange for increased employment is a very similar
strategy to spillover. If those at the top do well, those at the bottom will also
benefit, they tell us. If this were so, we would all be dancing hand in hand,
because those above are taking it away with a shovel. But those of us below sink
into the well they leave.

With Béliz or without Béliz, be it Massa or Fernández, with Cristina or with
Macri, by the hand of Pérsico or Grabois, the universal basic income dresses
capitalism in sheep's clothing.

Capitalism and cold war

In the cold war of the 21st century, the ideological masquerade is completely
devalued. Nobody believes it. It is not the fight of good against evil, but of
one against the other without it being very easy to distinguish which are one and
which are the other. It is not that there are two demons, but that there is only
one with two faces. Today there is an ongoing war that is nothing cold, just as
the Cold War of the last century had nothing cold.

This context opposes two competing models for economic control in Latin America
that distribute loyalties within local political sectors. The struggle for power
in the region is based on the support of blocks that manage support and form
alliances at the international level.

The hypertrophied local debate is not locked in great differences in
macroeconomic perspectives or antagonistic political projects. Rather, it is
discussed which of the blocks will end up occupying the strategic position of
regional hegemonies, thus obtaining the economic benefits that the region offers
in the world context, ranging from lithium to meat, including soybeans, wheat
and, who knows, the water. Things can be done well or they can be done badly, but
there are not twenty options.

All this talk about the crisis being paid for by the rich is bullshit because no
one in a position to make such a decision would do so, not even by mistake. No
one disputes, even remotely, a radical transformation of the economic system
capable of truly reversing the unfair concentration of cost in some and profit in
others, that is, the abolition of capitalism. No one. Any speech that speaks of
defending capitalism is also a joke, because there is no one who attacks it.

Any more or less improvised local economic development project is encrypted with
this key. The recomposition of the supportive relationship between State and
Company, with the figure of a universal income, is a conciliatory strategy so
that capitalist economic development obtains its first condition of possibility,
which is social peace. It is a third position of the 21st century in the face of
the old duality between a liberal democratic capitalism, focused on the company,
and a statist capitalism, focused on central planning and political regulation.
The IBU is a compromise solution that places the State as an accounting assistant
of the business world that, in addition to politically and symbolically
controlling the population in the peaceful acceptance of their economic condition,

Jobless Capitalism?

We live daily in the naturalization of the employment relationship as involuntary
members of a working class that depends to live on the remuneration that it
manages to obtain for its work. However, employment, as a general reference for
the economic activity of the working class, is gradually giving way to more
"fluid" forms of contracting. This precariousness that we see prospering slowly
but steadily (and not so slowly) implies the loss of rights. But what rights?

Workers have rights, yes. These rights are defined in labor legislation and
express what has been negotiated with the State in exchange for social peace.
Labor law is the price that the capitalists have had to pay so that the economic
system does not explode into the air, but it is the price that we pay for keeping
alive a system of plunder that reserves for us the worst role in the distribution
of costs and riches. If the capitalists have agreed to pay that price, it is
because what promised to be a social revolution ended up being a conciliation of
classes.

Currently, labor law collides with a productive matrix that enables a very large
disregard of labor compared to the last century. This makes it easier for
employers to evade the law and violates the set of rights that the State itself
has granted to the working class. And it is that the law is useless if there is
no force to enforce it. And, if such a force exists, what is the law for?

The working class delegated the struggle for its own demands to the State as a
consequence of various defeats in the confrontation, but also as a consequence of
having turned massively to the political path to channel the demands through
representation. Today we see how that path that the executioners of the workers'
struggle promised as the salvation of the people, ended up being the
subordination of the collective force under the leadership of political tutelage.

As a result we have an impossible trade unionism, obstructed by employers'
organizations that control the strongest unions in the industry. This corporate
unionism, flooded with its own interests, and alien to the class they claim to
represent, when it is not an accomplice in the degradation of labor law, is
powerless to face the new conditions of the productive system.

In the 20th century, workers were included in public institutions with labor law.
A large part of those included became structurally poor, and now, in the 21st
century, they promise to include us again with the Universal Basic Income. The
first inclusion lied to us with economic progress. This second inclusion lies to
us with mere survival, it promises us that we will be poor forever, but that we
will not die of hunger or cold or despair.

The common of communism

When the speech of the "Pope Peronist" points out a distance between the
composition of income and community economic activity, it opens a record on an
aspect of social life that distances itself from the individualistic model of
liberalism. This is the real territory where something more significant is played
out in the background.

The Vatican seems to be proposing both: economic liberalism for the rich and
communism (centralist and Christian) for the poor. As if humanity could be split
in two and equality written in stone that some are more equal than others; as if
communism were an administrative technique or a design resource for social
management.

If justice is giving everyone their due, what we are left with is a sort of
identity distribution. To each identity will correspond a thing or a quantity.
Each identity will have its place in the world. All that remains is to distribute
those places with inclusive policies and compensate for imbalances through a
judicial system, "administrator of justice." If you were born poor, your place is
poverty, and in compensation you will have the right to be decently subsidized by
the State. If you were born rich you will have to pay taxes, but you will be able
to do what you want in the world, and you will always have the right to
appropriate everything you know how to get.

This paranoid dystopia is unfortunately not delusional. In fact, it is not very
different from the current situation. It only changes the structural resignation
in exchange for a Universal Basic Income.

How to answer, then, such ignominy? Without a Universal Basic Income, what we are
left with is the same without even that miserable income. If what we are left
with is the screaming rebellion of Grabois, fate would simply be a violent
outburst in which the "blood on the street" [8]will be put not so much by the
declassed progressive lawyers, but by the unemployed workers, the poor and the
grassroots activists. There is nothing new there. If the slogan of the rebellion
is to obtain financing for structural poverty, it has no chance of transforming
anything.

These faked cries of rage express that what is community is said in the bourgeois
language. Nobody talks about revolution here. The maximum conquest is equivalent
to having the party in peace.

As a counterpart, we have the figure described by Yeyati, when he says "I have
two options: either I work for half my income, or I leave my job to the machine".
To transform society, not a word. That is not an option. It is an economic flat
earthism in which there is nothing outside of Capitalism, only giant tortoises
that support the world.

Contrary to these stagings of Gatopardismo unpunished, we must conceive of a
justice linked to the principle of equality, contrary to identity representation.
Communism is heir to this truth. What is common to communism does not appear in
the distribution of what is his to each, but in the real distribution of effort
and product. There cannot be communism and capitalism at the same time, because
the same thing cannot be distributed and not distributed at the same time. We are
discussing the distribution of wealth, not the part that falls to the poor; of
the distribution of the effort, not of the part that falls to the workers.

The common of communism is a reflection of equality. From all according to their
ability, to each according to their need. This imposes, from the outset, the
abolition of private property and, therefore, of income, in a broad sense.
Whenever there is appropriation of the product of the common effort, there will
be injustice. The core of the rebellion must be the abolition of property, and
not the increase of income. The increase in income will be a reflection of the
distribution of wealth based on need, and implies a reduction in the income of
the appropriators, the insatiable gobblers of everything who embrace unimaginable
fortunes at the expense of the hunger of others.

Property is an institution of law that enables the restriction of a necessary
use. It is the restriction that allows someone who does not need a good to
prohibit its use by someone who does need it. Otherwise, the use would be enabled
by necessity, or even by possession, but not by ownership. The right of property
comes into play when neither possession nor necessity do.

The relationship of communism with the abolition of property is necessary. And it
is not about distinguishing between private property or common property, because,
ultimately, the real effect is the same. A communist economy is one that advances
towards an egalitarian society by establishing that both distributions, that of
productive effort and that of product or wealth, are disconnected from each
other, in the sense that each refers to its own condition, namely, the ability
and need, respectively. There is no compensation: the meaning of the task is the
product.

Productive activity and, therefore, wealth, is eminently collective. The fact
that organized productive tasks always produce an additional benefit with respect
to the same disorganized tasks, makes common work always more productive than
individual work. In other words, the economic activity would justify by itself
the social fact.

Seen from another angle, it is impossible to conceive of a current task that does
not depend on capital, infrastructure and knowledge that are not created in the
same task or by the same workers, but rather correspond to the very history of
society and culture. , to previous generations of workers creating the resources
that are now available.

"There was a time when a family of peasants could consider the wheat they grew
and the woolen garments woven at home as products of their own labor. Even then,
this belief was not entirely correct. There were roads and bridges built in
common, swamps drained by collective work and common pastures surrounded by
hedges that everyone bordered. An improvement in the ways of weaving or in the
way of dyeing fabrics benefited everyone; At that time, a peasant family could
not live except on the condition of finding support in the city, in the
municipality.» (Kropotkin, the conquest of bread)

The common dimension of economic activity is itself the social dimension of human
experience. It is not the sum of multiple individuals, but precisely a different
dimension, such as the volume that results from the meeting of two or more
planes. It is not that the plans no longer exist, but that there is also a volume
in which they are understood to be inscribed.

The common of human experience does not refer to a group of characteristics
shared by a group of people, but to the dimension in which the social fact
between them is possible. It is precisely for this reason that what is common to
communism is not an identity, but rather the universality of the human
existential condition in the collective dimension. That is why equality is a
principle: it does not result from anything, it is not an effect, but the site in
which the human is prior to any identity. There are no more equal than others.

Organization

When the urgency of the workers' organization is insisted again and again, it is
not a matter of romantically calling for a righteous legion capable of
confronting the troops of evil as such. It is about the most immediate sanity
that humanity has and has had. When a situation becomes critical, the spontaneous
reflection of the human being is association, solidarity. It is true that
selfishness also springs up in the face of crisis, but the results are always
worse for everyone.

The recovery of class-oriented and revolutionary unionism is as urgent as
reconfiguring the scope that we should give to these two concepts. Trade unionism
is urgent, but it cannot be limited to the reaction of employment against
flexibility, but must take the initiative in shaping the new economic relations
and must therefore look up to anarchic communism.

There is an epic, however, that we would do well to disable. What we need is not
the archaic romanticization of a combative aesthetic and a dogmatic radicalism.
Rather, we need a certain clarity in the ideas and tools that give the
organization of the working class the necessary power to take the initiative in
social organization in the face of new economic conditions.

The recovery of trade union activism must come hand in hand with the
investigation of new associative strategies that are up to the different
situations faced by the working class in the face of the current crisis of
productivity that world capitalism is going through. It is necessary for the
workers' organization to resume the trade union struggle together with the
reconfiguration of cooperativism in new vehicles of associativity without a boss
on a small and medium scale, together with the promotion of local community
production, opening gaps in economic activity at a distance from the activity
concentrated and large food and service companies.

The core meaning of the workers' organization is the defense of the interests of
the class. And the main interest of the working class is the abolition of class
society. All the paths that the working class can travel in defense of its
interests converge with the profound transformation of society in the direction
of anarchic communism. Just as at the beginning of the 19th century the
transformation of the productive matrix pushed the workers to transform their
organizations into the conformation of modern unionism, the new conditions will
also transform unionism in order to respond to the new times.

When we look at the situation, the immediate conditions and the daily news, the
historical dimension seems absurd. And when we look at history, with its times of
decades and centuries, everything seems vast and far away. But the devil lives in
the little things. When traversing uncharted territory, keep track of your steps,
chart your direction, and move forward without distraction. Raise your head from
time to time and check. Otherwise you will lose your way. Relentlessly.

[1]https://www.infobae.com/def/desarrollo/2018/02/17/ingreso-basico-universal-cobrar-solo-por-nacer/
[2] Universal income, universal salary, universal salary complement, or however
the fundamental idea of subsidizing from the State the most seriously plundered
sectors of society is mentioned.
[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U73EgU3k_O8
[4] Let's Dream Together, the path to a better future. Jorge Mario Bergoglio,
Austen Ivereigh - Plaza Janés, 2020 - p. 137
[5] TEDx talk, posted on YouTube on Nov 17, 2016 https://youtu.be/HNKeQ1MlAqA
[6] Perspectives on the fourth industrial revolution (2021):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acSMep001CU
[7]https://www.pagina12.com.ar/474859-como-sera-el-puente-al-empleo-la-iniciativa-para-transformar
[8] "We are willing to leave our blood in the street," said Juan Grabois at a
march demanding universal income, on July 20, 2022.

https://organizacion-obrera.fora.com.ar/2022/09/05/ingreso-basico-universal-la-resignacion-capitalista/
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