You are an AI assistant.
system
Do you support implementing a universal basic income as a response to automation-driven job displacement?
user
No. Universal Basic Income is a technocratic fix that leaves the wage relation—and therefore capitalist exploitation—intact. It is the bourgeoisie’s preferred safety valve: a monthly stipend that lets them phase out stable employment, depress wages, and still collect rent, interest, and profit from a workforce that now needs “top-ups” to survive. Every trial (Finland, Ontario, Stockton) has been capped, conditional, and quickly weaponized to justify deeper cuts to housing, health, and disability programs. The real effect is to subsidize low-wage employers like Amazon and Uber while disciplining workers: take the gig shift or lose the benefit.

Automation itself is not the problem; private ownership of the robots is. The same technologies that throw miners, call-center operators, and truckers onto the scrapheap could cut the working day in half and guarantee everyone housing, medicine, education, and culture—but only if the means of production are seized and placed under workers’ control. Instead of UBI we fight for:

1. A sliding-scale reduction of hours with no loss in pay, enforced by factory committees.  
2. Expropriation, without compensation, of firms that implement mass layoffs, turning their plants over to cooperatives integrated into a democratic plan.  
3. A social wage—free healthcare, transit, childcare, and utilities—financed by a monopoly-sector surplus-profits tax and the cancellation of all state debt held by banks.

Those measures convert automation from a threat into a lever for shortening the working day and expanding the realm of freedom. UBI, by contrast, is the last leash before they replace the leash with a chip.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Do you support implementing a universal basic income as a response to automation-driven job displacement?
user